#i found out more local industrial history

[wankstain-mcgee]

Me: hmm weird, I don't really have any special interests

Also me, definitely not for the first time, nor the last: it's 9am and I can't sleep, because I've been too busy thinking about trains and mines

[matan4il]

My grandparents were all Holocaust survivors. A large part of my family was murdered in that genocide. I chose to deal with the family trauma by becoming an educator on this subject. I give tours, lectures and workshops on the Holocaust, on antisemitism and on Jewish history.

Intellectually, I'm perfectly aware of how the massacre that Hamas perpetrated is NOT like what the Nazis did. More Jews were murdered over the course of just two days in Babi Yar (33,771 men, women and children), which is just one Nazi shooting pit out of almost two thousand, than during the entire Israeli-Arab conflict. Even after the carnage brought on by Hamas, this is still true. The Nazis were far more systematic (which eventually made them turn industrial) in carrying out the genocide of the Jews than Hamas has been. There's no comparison in terms of scale and industrialization.

And yet emotionally, I can't help but be hit by the similarities in terms of the immediate brutality of the murderers and the experiences of the Jewish victims. Because I am listening to the testimonies and some are so eerily similar to my research, I simply can't process how these are from recent days, not 80 years ago.

Jewish kids hiding from their would be murderers, scared to make a sound for fear of being discovered and killed.

Jewish families completely wiped out.

Jews asking themselves how did they survive and the person next to them did not.

Jewish people executed in droves, their bodies piled up.

Jews begging to be spared, to no avail.

Jewish women raped, most of them then killed.

Jewish babies executed in barbaric ways.

Jews being burned, some after being murdered, some while alive.

Jewish communities devastated. Take kibbutz Be'eri for example. It was founded before the State of Israel. Despite many terrorist attacks, it has continued to thrive in Israel's south. A small, close knit agricultural community. Over 100 people (at least) have been slaughtered there. Homes were destroyed. Everything the kibbutz's economy was based on was laid to waste, too. Be'eri has become synonymous with the worst of the carnage. IDK how they'll build their lives again after the war is over. IDK if they can. A community of almost 80 years, quite likely gone.

Foreign reporters who had been to kibbutz Kfar Azza all talked about the eerie silence and the stench of death rising from the bodies. Eerie silence is exactly how visitors to the sites of the shooting pits describe those places, while the allied soldiers who liberated the Nazi camps talked about the stench of death there.

Some of the reactions to this massacre also remind me of the Holocaust. Even though the Nazis, the murderers themselves, documented their extermination of Jews, there are those who deny the Holocaust happened, painting the Jews as liars. Similarly, even though Hamas documented themselves, and released the footage themselves, there are people going around denying the atrocities, painting the Jews as liars.

Then there's the justification of the mass murder of Jews by insinuating they brought it on themselves... Back in 1943, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, aware of the plight of Jews under the Nazis, told government officials in Allied-liberated North Africa that the number of local Jews in various professions “should be definitely limited” so as to “eliminate the specific and understandable complaints which the Germans bore towards the Jews in Germany.” Understandable complaints. Understandable complaints of Germans against Jews. Roosevelt, the liberal president, said that while Jews were being exterminated by the Germans. In the same manner, we're seeing people justifying the murder of Jews at the hands of Hamas, even though it's a known antisemitic terrorist organization which has repeatedly called for the murder of all Jews in the world. According to the Simon Wiesenthal Center, a reportedly Hamas affiliated Imam declared, "If the Zionist state were to move to the other end of the Mediterranean, our war would not be over, for the enemy is the Jew.

And while I stand by my statement that the scale is nothing alike, the carnage that took place in Israel IS the biggest massacre of Jews since the end of the Holocaust. Not even during Israel's Independence War and some of the massacres of Jews that happened during it (like the Kfar Etzion massacre) were this many Jews murdered during a single day.

Just like so many were silent back then as Jews were being both killed for being Jewish AND blamed for their own murder, many are silent now as well. Don't get me wrong, there are A LOT of amazing people who reached out to their Jewish friends, who showed they care, who took to the streets, who held vigils for the massacre's victims! Many heads of state also condemned this vicious attack. But I'm looking at Tumblr specifically, and it is FULL of posts justifying Hamas' slaughter of Jews. They're being reblogged everywhere, spread in every fandom. People who claim to stand for social justice feel absolutely no shame sharing such de-humanizing posts on their blogs. And what do we do? Are we calling them out? Do we make it clear that it is morally unacceptable to blame Jews for their own murder? Do we unfollow these bloggers, so that at least the dropping numbers send out the message that it is unacceptable to justify the massacre of innocent people?

TLDR:

This massacre is not like the Holocaust, but the cruel antisemitism that motivated it is the same. Let's not let antisemitism thrive here. Please do what you can (whatever that is) to stand for what's right.

(for all of my updates and ask replies regarding Israel, click here)

[art-that-fucks-you-up-tournament]

SET ONE FINAL - ROUND FOUR

"Hubble Deep Field" (1996 - Hubble Space Telescope) / "Can’t Help Myself" (2016 - Sun Yuan & Peng Yu)

HUBBLE DEEP FIELD: This photo is kind of only incidentally art, but it is one of my favorite photographs ever. It is the visual byproduct of scientific and technological advancement. Honestly, its not even the most visually impressive Hubble (or other deep space telescope) photo. But I don't think there is anything else in the entire world which can so clearly and deeply impart the existential, incomprehensible vastness of the universe. * This photo represents a section of the night sky with "nothing" in it. There are no stars and it is outside of the plane of the Milky Way. From our view on Earth, it is less than a square inch across. Before this image, we knew of other galaxies, and their abundance was absolutely hypothesized, but no one really knew what to expect when examining such a small, seemingly empty part of the night sky. This is what they found. A tiny fraction of the night sky revealed to be teeming with thousands of galaxies, light reaching us from billions of lightyears away. To extrapolate and imagine that the entirety of the night sky is full of this, a vast blanket hidden behind our local stars. At the time, hundreds of billions of galaxies were estimated to exist. Today that estimation has risen to 2 trillion. 2 trillion potential Milky Ways. 2 trillion of the 100 billion stars that exist in our galaxy, there ever growing and evolving and expanding. I look at this image and just feel so utterly and completely small. How can you look at this and not feel atomic. There is so much of everything, and even still there is darkness, space, filled with so much light and possibilities. It represents both our loneliness as a planet, our isolation, and our connection to the universe, that there is no way we are alone, that we keep reaching out and trying to learn and understand our existence. (if you are interested in some more of the science of this, I'd recommend this Forbes article. I think its a good summary of the history and science, and provides a lot of jumping off points for further research) *disclaimer - there are and continue to be images taken with the same and improved techniques to explore space outside of the galaxy. This was, to the best of my knowledge, the first long exposure of dark space. (travelingsmithy)

CAN'T HELP MYSELF: easily one of the installment pieces of all fucking time. the way that the robot originally began as a smooth, precise sort of machine, efficient and quick, but slowly decomposed into jerkier and messier movements because of its own inability to "help itself" since it needs to clean all of its spill or it can't stop is so so visceral and kind of makes me want to tear my hair out. the way the artists capture human movement and desperation in the robot is incredible. to me it kind of appeals to a sick human desire to watch something outside of ourselves suffer, but also the human ability to connect with anything, even a machine. it's so easy to see ourselves in something mechanical!! we are looking for ourselves in everything!!! that's so fucked up and cool!!! (fromjannah)

(The Hubble Space Telescope took this photo in 1996, and it was the first picture ever taken of deep space. "Hubble Deep Field" was originally imaged by the Wide Field and Planetary Camera 2, a camera initially installed upon the Hubble Telescope

"Can't Help Myself" is a Kuka industrial robot made of stainless steel and rubber mopping up cellulose ether in coloured water made by two Chinese artists, Sun Yuan & Peng Yu. This installation was displayed in Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York but was removed from display.)

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Twinkfrump Linkdump

I'm touring my new, nationally bestselling novel The Bezzle! Catch me in CHICAGO (Apr 17), Torino (Apr 21) Marin County (Apr 27), Winnipeg (May 2), Calgary (May 3), Vancouver (May 4), and beyond!

Welcome to the seventeenth Pluralistic linkdump, a collection of all the miscellany that didn't make it into the week's newsletter, cunningly wrought together in a single edition that ranges from the first ISP to AI nonsense to labor organizing victories to the obituary of a brilliant scientist you should know a lot more about! Here's the other 16 dumps:

https://pluralistic.net/tag/linkdump/

If you're reading this (and you are!), it was delivered to you by an internet service provider. Today, the ISP industry is calcified, controlled by a handful of telcos and cable companies. But the idea of an "ISP" didn't come out of a giant telecommunications firm – it was created, in living memory, by excellent nerds who are still around.

Depending on how you reckon, The Little Garden was either the first or the second ISP in America. It was named after a Palo Alto Chinese restaurant frequented by its founders. To get a sense of that founding, read these excellent recollections by Tom Jennings, whose contributions include the seminal zine Homocore, the seminal networking protocol Fidonet, and the seminal third-party PC ROM, whence came Dell, Gateway, Compaq, and every other "PC clone" company.

The first installment describes how an informal co-op to network a few friends turned into a business almost by accident, with thousands of dollars flowing in and out of Jennings' bank account:

https://www.sensitiveresearch.com/Archive/TLG/TLG.html

And it describes how that ISP set a standard for neutrality, boldly declaring that "TLGnet exercises no control whatsoever over the content of the information." They introduced an idea of radical transparency, documenting their router configurations and other technical details and making them available to the public. They hired unskilled punk and queer kids from their communities and trained them to operate the network equipment they'd invented, customized or improvised.

In part two, Jennings talks about the evolution of TLG's radical business-plan: to offer unrestricted service, encouraging their customers to resell that service to people in their communities, having no lock-in, unbundling extra services including installation charges – the whole anti-enshittification enchilada:

https://www.sensitiveresearch.com/Archive/TLG/

I love Jennings and his work. I even gave him a little cameo in Picks and Shovels, the third Martin Hench novel, which will be out next winter. He's as lyrical a writer about technology as you could ask for, and he's also a brilliant engineer and thinker.

The Little Garden's founders and early power-users have all fleshed out Jennings' account of the birth of ISPs. Writing on his blog, David "DSHR" Rosenthal rounds up other histories from the likes of EFF co-founder John Gilmore and Tim Pozar:

https://blog.dshr.org/2024/04/the-little-garden.html

Rosenthal describes some of the more exotic shenanigans TLG got up to in order to do end-runs around the Bell system's onerous policies, hacking in the purest sense of the word, for example, by daisy-chaining together modems in regions with free local calling and then making "permanent local calls," with the modems staying online 24/7.

Enshittification came to the ISP business early and hit it hard. The cartel that controls your access to the internet today is a billion light-years away from the principled technologists who invented the industry with an ethos of care, access and fairness. Today's ISPs are bitterly opposed to Net Neutrality, the straightforward proposition that if you request some data, your ISP should send it to you as quickly and reliably as it can.

Instead, ISPs want to offer "slow-lanes" where they will relegate the whole internet, except for those companies that bribe the ISP to be delivered at normal speed. ISPs have a laughably transparent way of describing this: they say that they're allowing services to pay for "fast lanes" with priority access. This is the same as the giant grocery store that charges you extra unless you surrender your privacy with a "loyalty card" – and then says that they're offering a "discount" for loyal customers, rather than charging a premium to customers who don't want to be spied on.

The American business lobby loves this arrangement, and hates Net Neutrality. Having monopolized every sector of our economy, they are extremely fond of "winner take all" dynamics, and that's what a non-neutral ISP delivers: the biggest services with the deepest pockets get the most reliable delivery, which means that smaller services don't just have to be better than the big guys, they also have to be able to outbid them for "priority carriage."

If everything you get from your ISP is slow and janky, except for the dominant services, then the dominant services can skimp on quality and pocket the difference. That's the goal of every monopolist – not just to be too big to fail, but also too big to care.

Under the Trump administration, FCC chair Ajit Pai dismantled the Net Neutrality rule, colluding with American big business to rig the process. They accepted millions of obviously fake anti-Net Neutrality comments (one million identical comments from @pornhub.com addresses, comments from dead people, comments from sitting US Senators who support Net Neutrality) and declared open season on American internet users:

https://ag.ny.gov/press-release/2021/attorney-general-james-issues-report-detailing-millions-fake-comments-revealing

Now, Biden's FCC is set to reinstate Net Neutrality – but with a "compromise" that will make mobile internet (which nearly all of use sometimes, and the poorest of us are reliant on) a swamp of anticompetitive practices:

https://cyberlaw.stanford.edu/blog/2024/04/harmful-5g-fast-lanes-are-coming-fcc-needs-stop-them

Under the proposed rule, mobile carriers will be able to put traffic to and from apps in the slow lane, and then extort bribes from preferred apps for normal speed and delivery. They'll rely on parts of the 5G standard to pull off this trick.

The ISP cartel and the FCC insist that this is fine because web traffic won't be degraded, but of course, every service is hellbent on pushing you into using apps instead of the web. That's because the web is an open platform, which means you can install ad- and privacy-blockers. More than half of web users have installed a blocker, making it the largest boycott in human history:

https://doc.searls.com/2023/11/11/how-is-the-worlds-biggest-boycott-doing/

But reverse-engineering and modding an app is a legal minefield. Just removing the encryption from an app can trigger criminal penalties under Section 1201 of the DMCA, carrying a five-year prison sentence and a $500k fine. An app is just a web-page skinned in enough IP that it's a felony to mod it.

Apps are enshittification's vanguard, and the fact that the FCC has found a way to make them even worse is perversely impressive. They're voting on this on April 25, and they have until April 24 to fix this. They should. They really should:

https://docs.fcc.gov/public/attachments/DOC-401676A1.pdf

In a just world, cheating ripoff ISPs would the top tech policy story. The operational practices of ISPs effect every single one us. We literally can't talk about tech policy without ISPs in the middle. But Net Neutrality is an also-ran in tech policy discourse, while AI – ugh ugh ugh – is the thing none of us can shut up about.

This, despite the fact that the most consequential AI applications sum up to serving as a kind of moral crumple-zone for shitty business practices. The point of AI isn't to replace customer service and other low-paid workers who have taken to demanding higher wages and better conditions – it's to fire those workers and replace them with chatbots that can't do their jobs. An AI salesdroid can't sell your boss a bot that can replace you, but they don't need to. They only have to convince your boss that the bot can do your job, even if it can't.

SF writer Karl Schroeder is one of the rare sf practitioners who grapples seriously with the future, a "strategic foresight" guy who somehow skirts the bullshit that is the field's hallmark:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/03/07/the-gernsback-continuum/#wheres-my-jetpack

Writing on his blog, Schroeder describes the AI debates roiling the Association of Professional Futurists, and how it's sucking him into being an unwilling participant in the AI hype cycle:

https://kschroeder.substack.com/p/dragged-into-the-ai-hype-cycle

Schroeder's piece is a thoughtful meditation on the relationship of SF's thought-experiments and parables about AI to the promises of AI hucksters, who promise that a) "general artificial intelligence" is just around the corner and that b) it will be worth trillions of dollars.

Schroeder – like other sf writers including Ted Chiang and Charlie Stross (and me) – comes to the conclusion that AI panic isn't about AI, it's about power. The artificial life-form devouring the planet and murdering our species is the limited liability corporation, and its substrate isn't silicon, it's us, human bodies:

What’s lying underneath all our anxieties about AGI is an anxiety that has nothing to do with Artificial Intelligence. Instead, it’s a manifestation of our growing awareness that our world is being stolen from under us. Last year’s estimate put the amount of wealth currently being transferred from the people who made it to an idle billionaire class at $5.2 trillion. Artificial General Intelligence whose environment is the server farms and sweatshops of this class is frightening only because of its capacity to accelerate this greatest of all heists.

After all, the business-case for AI is so very thin that the industry can only survive on a torrent of hype and nonsense – like claims that Amazon's "Grab and Go" stores used "AI" to monitor shoppers and automatically bill them for their purchases. In reality, the stores used thousands of low-paid Indian workers to monitor cameras and manually charge your card. This happens so often that Indian technologists joke that "AI" stands for "absent Indians":

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/29/pay-no-attention/#to-the-little-man-behind-the-curtain

Isn't it funny how all the really promising AI applications are in domains that most of us aren't qualified to assess? Like the claim that Google's AI was producing millions of novel materials that will shortly revolutionize all forms of production, from construction to electronics to medical implants:

https://deepmind.google/discover/blog/millions-of-new-materials-discovered-with-deep-learning/

That's what Google's press-release claimed, anyway. But when two groups of experts actually pulled a representative sample of these "new materials" from the Deep Mind database, they found that none of these materials qualified as "credible, useful and novel":

https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.chemmater.4c00643

Writing about the researchers' findings for 404 Media, Jason Koebler cites Berkeley researchers who concluded that "no new materials have been discovered":

https://www.404media.co/google-says-it-discovered-millions-of-new-materials-with-ai-human-researchers/

The researchers say that AI data-mining for new materials is promising, but falls well short of Google's claim to be so transformative that it constitutes the "equivalent to nearly 800 years’ worth of knowledge" and "an order-of-magnitude expansion in stable materials known to humanity."

AI hype keeps the bubble inflating, and for so long as it keeps blowing up, all those investors who've sunk their money into AI can tell themselves that they're rich. This is the essence of "a bezzle": "The magic interval when a confidence trickster knows he has the money he has appropriated but the victim does not yet understand that he has lost it":

https://pluralistic.net/2023/03/09/autocomplete-worshippers/#the-real-ai-was-the-corporations-that-we-fought-along-the-way

Among the best debezzlers of AI are the Princeton Center for Information Technology Policy's Arvind Narayanan and Sayash Kapoor, who edit the "AI Snake Oil" blog. Now, they've sold a book with the same title:

https://www.aisnakeoil.com/p/ai-snake-oil-is-now-available-to

Obviously, books move a lot more slowly than blogs, and so Narayanan and Kapoor say their book will focus on the timeless elements of identifying and understanding AI snake oil:

In the book, we explain the crucial differences between types of AI, why people, companies, and governments are falling for AI snake oil, why AI can’t fix social media, and why we should be far more worried about what people will do with AI than about anything AI will do on its own. While generative AI is what drives press, predictive AI used in criminal justice, finance, healthcare, and other domains remains far more consequential in people’s lives. We discuss in depth how predictive AI can go wrong. We also warn of the dangers of a world where AI continues to be controlled by largely unaccountable big tech companies.

The book's out in September and it's up for pre-order now:

https://bookshop.org/p/books/ai-snake-oil-what-artificial-intelligence-can-do-what-it-can-t-and-how-to-tell-the-difference-arvind-narayanan/21324674

One of the weirder and worst side-effects of the AI hype bubble is that it has revived the belief that it's somehow possible for giant platforms to monitor all their users' speech and remove "harmful" speech. We've tried this for years, and when humans do it, it always ends with disfavored groups being censored, while dedicated trolls, harassers and monsters evade punishment:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/08/07/como-is-infosec/

AI hype has led policy-makers to believe that we can deputize online services to spy on all their customers and block the bad ones without falling into this trap. Canada is on the verge of adopting Bill C-63, a "harmful content" regulation modeled on examples from the UK and Australia.

Writing on his blog, Canadian lawyer/activist/journalist Dimitri Lascaris describes the dire speech implications for C-63:

https://dimitrilascaris.org/2024/04/08/trudeaus-online-harms-bill-threatens-free-speech/

It's an excellent legal breakdown of the bill's provisions, but also a excellent analysis of how those provisions are likely to play out in the lives of Canadians, especially those advocating against genocide and taking other positions the that oppose the agenda of the government of the day.

Even if you like the Trudeau government and its policies, these powers will accrue to every Canadian government, including the presumptive (and inevitably, totally unhinged) near-future Conservative majority government of Pierre Poilievre.

It's been ten years since Martin Gilens and Benjamin I Page published their paper that concluded that governments make policies that are popular among elites, no matter how unpopular they are among the public:

https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/perspectives-on-politics/article/testing-theories-of-american-politics-elites-interest-groups-and-average-citizens/62327F513959D0A304D4893B382B992B

Now, this is obviously depressing, but when you see it in action, it's kind of wild. The Biden administration has declared war on junk fees, from "resort fees" charged by hotels to the dozens of line-items added to your plane ticket, rental car, or even your rent check. In response, Republican politicians are climbing to their rear haunches and, using their actual human mouths, defending junk fees:

https://prospect.org/politics/2024-04-12-republicans-objectively-pro-junk-fee/

Congressional Republicans are hell-bent on destroying the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau's $8 cap on credit-card late-fees. Trump's presumptive running-mate Tim Scott is making this a campaign plank: "Vote for me and I will protect your credit-card company's right to screw you on fees!" He boasts about the lobbyists who asked him to take this position: champions of the public interest from the Consumer Bankers Association to the US Chamber of Commerce.

Banks stand to lose $10b/year from this rule (which means Americans stand to gain $10b/year from this rule). What's more, Scott's attempt to kill the rule is doomed to fail – there's just no procedural way it will fly. As David Dayen writes, "Not only does this vote put Republicans on the spot over junk fees, it’s a doomed vote, completely initiated by their own possible VP nominee."

This is an hilarious own-goal, one that only brings attention to a largely ignored – but extremely good – aspect of the Biden administration. As Adam Green of Bold Progressives told Dayen, "What’s been missing is opponents smoking themselves out and raising the volume of this fight so the public knows who is on their side."

The CFPB is a major bright spot in the Biden administration's record. They're doing all kind of innovative things, like making it easy for you to figure out which bank will give you the best deal and then letting you transfer your account and all its associated data, records and payments with a single click:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/21/let-my-dollars-go/#personal-financial-data-rights

And now, CFPB chair Rohit Chopra has given a speech laying out the agency's plan to outlaw data-brokers:

https://www.consumerfinance.gov/about-us/newsroom/prepared-remarks-of-cfpb-director-rohit-chopra-at-the-white-house-on-data-protection-and-national-security/

Yes, this is some good news! There is, in fact, good news in the world, bright spots amidst all the misery and terror. One of those bright spots? Labor.

Unions are back, baby. Not only do the vast majority of Americans favor unions, not only are new shops being unionized at rates not seen in generations, but also the largest unions are undergoing revolutions, with control being wrestled away from corrupt union bosses and given to the rank-and-file.

Many of us have heard about the high-profile victories to take back the UAW and Teamsters, but I hadn't heard about the internal struggles at the United Food and Commercial Workers, not until I read Hamilton Nolan's gripping account for In These Times:

https://inthesetimes.com/article/revolt-aisle-5-ufcw-grocery-workers-union

Nolan profiles Faye Guenther, president of UFCW Local 3000 and her successful and effective fight to bring a militant spirit back to the union, which represents a million grocery workers. Nolan describes the fight as "every bit as dramatic as any episode of Game of Thrones," and he's not wrong. This is an inspiring tale of working people taking power away from scumbag monopoly bosses and sellout fatcat leaders – and, in so doing, creating a institution that gets better wages, better working conditions, and a better economy, by helping to block giant grocery mergers like Kroger/Albertsons.

I like to end these linkdumps on an up note, so it feels weird to be closing out with an obituary, but I'd argue that any celebration of the long life and many accomplishments of my friend and mentor Anne Innis Dagg is an "up note."

I last wrote about Anne in 2020, on the release of a documentary about her work, "The Woman Who Loved Giraffes":

https://pluralistic.net/2020/02/19/pluralist-19-feb-2020/#annedagg

As you might have guessed from the title of that doc, Anne was a biologist. She was the first woman scientist to do field-work on giraffes, and that work was so brilliant and fascinating that it kicked off the modern field of giraffology, which remains a woman-dominated specialty thanks to her tireless mentoring and support for the scientists that followed her.

Anne was also the world's most fearsome slayer of junk-science "evolutionary psychology," in which "scientists" invent unfalsifiable just-so stories that prove that some odious human characteristic is actually "natural" because it can be found somewhere in the animal kingdom (i.e., "Darling, please, it's not my fault that I'm fucking my grad students, it's the bonobos!").

Anne wrote a classic – and sadly out of print – book about this that I absolutely adore, not least for having one of the best titles I've ever encountered: "Love of Shopping" Is Not a Gene:

https://memex.craphound.com/2009/11/04/love-of-shopping-is-not-a-gene-exposing-junk-science-and-ideology-in-darwinian-psychology/

Anne was my advisor at the University of Waterloo, an institution that denied her tenure for fifty years, despite a brilliant academic career that rivaled that of her storied father, Harold Innis ("the thinking person's Marshall McLuhan"). The fact that Waterloo never recognized Anne is doubly shameful when you consider that she was awarded the Order of Canada:

https://nationalpost.com/news/canada/queen-of-giraffes-among-new-order-of-canada-recipients-with-global-influence

Anne lived a brilliant live, struggling through adversity, never compromising on her principles, inspiring a vast number of students and colleagues. She lived to ninety one, and died earlier this month. Her ashes will be spread "on the breeding grounds of her beloved giraffes" in South Africa this summer:

https://obituaries.therecord.com/obituary/anne-innis-dagg-1089534658

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/2024/04/13/goulash/#material-misstatement

Image: Valeva1010 https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Hungarian_Goulash_Recipe.png

CC BY-SA 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/deed.en

[nevesmose]

Nostraman Nature Sucks: An Attempted Lore Post

Ave dominus nox Night Lords fans. I thought I'd take some time to go through the various NL stories I have to hand and see what I could find out about the animals that lived on Nostramo. Might come in useful for something, who knows?

Sharks and Whales

As a child, on several coastal journeys with his father, he had witnessed the eyeless barrasal sharks that would group together to hunt the great whales of the open ocean. (Night Lords Trilogy)

His voice filters into something savage and predatory, as hungry as the eyeless white sharks of Nostramo’s blackest depths. (The Long Night)

Not a big surprise since they talk about them fairly often and have the Space Sharks as a successor chapter but Nostramo does have sharks. Pretty gnarly-sounding sharks if I'm honest.

I didn't know what "barrasal" meant, so I looked it up and only found one thread on r/40klore that had the same quote in it as above. Hmm.

Assuming it's not a typo or a more straightforward reference to something I'm just not getting, I'd venture a guess that barrasal, understood here to mean of or relating to "barras" like with "abyssal" could be connected to the French Revolutionary leader Paul Barras who is mostly remembered for supporting Napoleon's rise to power before being overthrown by him.

So maybe the older barrasal sharks will make use of younger ones as temporary hunting partners only to be inevitably betrayed and consumed by them. Sounds about right I think.

As for the whales, where do I even begin? I would imagine they're "whales" in name only like in Dishonored:

This does imply the possible existence of a whaling industry at some stage in Nostramo's history, though.

Crows

Jago reached into his pockets, offering a handful of breadcrumbs. Come, he said to the crows. Food for tonight. Flesh, flesh, flesh, they called back. He laughed as several of the black birds landed on his shoulders and outstretched arm. (Prince Of Crows)

‘Yes. I’ve seen them in books. Is a crow a type of bird?’ ‘Black of feather and dark of eye. It feeds on the bodies of the dead, and sings in a raw, croaking caw.’ (TLN)

Breaking news - legion that keeps referring to crows in shocking has crows on its homeworld scandal. "This is outrageous," said local Nostraman cutpurse and skin disease enthusiast Verxaglryn Quickstabber, "here we are trying to make a good name for Nostramo as a respectable hellhole, a place you'd be proud to exile your worst enemy to, and yet we're surrounded by some of the most intelligent and curious birds in existence. I was shanking someone in a back alley the other night and suddenly I saw a crow learning how to use rudimentary tools! Not on my watch, I said to the rapidly cooling body, and I threw my shiv at it. But it just flew away." At this point Mr Quickstabber was obliged to end the interview due to having been eviscerated by the Night Haunter.

I know their communication with Sevatar is happening in a dream but I really like the idea of the crows adapting to Nostramo by developing some kind of psychic hive mind that's also able to be understood by human psykers.

Crag Cougars

A beast of my home world. When next you see one of the Atramentar, look to their shoulder guards. The roaring lions on their pauldrons are what we called crag cougars on Nostramo. It was considered a mark of wealth for gang bosses to be able to leave the cities and hunt such creatures. (NLT)

Every single one of them is Scar from the Lion King, isn't it? An interesting hint about Nostramo's geography though, of which more later.

Rats

Groundcars whisked by, headlights brighter than deep-hive rats’ eyes, the occupants snug and safe behind armoured glass. (Konrad Curze: The Night Haunter)

No surprises here either. Where there's people there's rats after all.

Something with tusks?

The older Astartes grinned, wolf-like and keen, as the Atramentar either side of the Exalted’s throne growled through their tusked helms. (NLT)

This isn't that conclusive because a lot of Chaos Terminators have tusks no matter what legion they are, but Nostramo being Nostramo they probably belonged to a species of giant carnivorous mammoth that ate babies and sprayed acid from its trunk.

Cows? On My Sunless World?

‘They are still of standard human stock, and not to be mourned. What does it matter if the cattle fear the herdsman?’ hissed Krukesh the Pale. (KC:TNH)

This one's a real reach on my part as it's very likely just a turn of phrase, but I noticed it because wouldn't it be slightly more typical to use a sheep metaphor here? Plus it supports the existence of Nostraman cowboys/ranchers/vaqueros which is fun.

No bats?

His helmet bore a new, spread batwing crest in blatant imitation of Sevatar’s own. (A Safe and Shadowed Place)

A sole space was neat: a circle around an iron lectern fashioned in the form of a bat’s outflung wings, which carried a heavy book bound in human skin. (KC:TNH)

Although they appear a lot in the VIII legion's iconography and artwork, oddly enough I wasn't actually able to find a direct reference to Nostramo itself having bats. Let's cover my ass by saying this aspect might therefore have been brought in by the legion's Terran component instead.

Some Nostraman geography

The Hill Folk lived away from the cities, eking out an existence in the mountains. (NLT)

What's worse than living in a Nostraman city? Living on a Nostraman hill, apparently. This seems to just be an idea of ADB's that doesn't come up again but I've always found it quite interesting. Were the Hill Folk as scummy as the City Folk, just with more of a down-home Dukes of Hazzard vibe? Seems likely.

This also supports the idea of Nostramo not being completely urbanised like some Hive Worlds are. In my view its continents might have had a geographical layout a bit like Italy or Scotland where the cities are mainly on the flatter coasts with a more sparsely populated hilly/mountainous interior.

What else? (This part is just me making stuff up so feel free to ignore it. I'm not ADB, I'm not even ADB's hat.)

If the rest of Nostramo's marine life is anything like the sharks and whales then it's fucking terrifying. I would imagine, because it's funny, that a lot of Nostraman food features disgusting industrially-processed fish in some way or another. Like the food in Dishonored but even worse.

Is something wrong, dearest offworld husband? You haven't touched your stale bread, whalemeat and jellied eels.

Since all life on Nostramo seems to be comically carnivorous and aggressive, it would make sense in a 40K kind of way for there to be giant predatory penguins living at one or both of its poles. A bit like the monstrous blind albino penguins HP Lovecraft wrote about.

Last known infrared pict-capture of an early Nostraman settler attempting communication with a juvenile specimen of the native penguin species. There were no survivors.

[soleminisanction]

@mzminola I saw your tags on this post:

#you all have so many names #is this because of DC eating Fawcett, or a tiff with Marvel Comics, or several reasons??? #everything I learn about the Shazam Fawcett City fam makes me more interested

And immediately got excited because I happen to know this story and I think it's fun. It's one of the more interesting nuances of comics industry skullduggery out there.

See, Captain Marvel was the most popular superhero of the 1940s, at least based on raw comic book sales; he even outsold Superman, and he was the first comic book superhero to get adapted into a film serial. And National Comics, the company that would eventually become DC, hated that, so they sued for copyright infringement on the grounds that the Cap was a blatant Superman rip-off, and they eventually won, forcing Fawcett to stop publishing Captain Marvel and his family in 1953.

Then in the 60s, when Marvel Comics came along, somebody there eventually noticed that the trademark to the name "Captain Marvel" was up for grabs, so they jumped on that with their Captain in 1967. Between Mar-Vell and his family, Monica Rambaeu, Noh-Varr and Carol Danvers, Marvel's never let that trademark slip out of their grasp in the decades since.

So when DC acquired the rights to use the original Captain Marvel and his crew, first through a license with Fawcett in 1972 and then essentially absorbing the smaller company entirety in 1992, they found themselves in the awkward legal position where they couldn't publish Cap's books under the name "Captain Marvel." They could call him that in the book, because they owned the rights to the character, but they couldn't use his name as the trademark for the series, or in any of their advertisements, and when they tried to edge around it by calling him, "Shazam! The Original Captain Marvel" they got a cease and desist.

Of course people who weren't familiar with any of this drama found it confusing that this was one of the only books in the line-up that wasn't named for its hero. So DC spent a long time through the 90s and early 00s going through different names for Captain Marvel (and to a lesser extent Mary and Junior) trying to find a name that would let people know that this was the same Very Popular Character as in the old days without tripping into Marvel's trademark lawyers.

---

Meanwhile!! Back in the 50s, over the the U.K., the small press that had been importing the Captain Marvel comics decided that, when their supply was suddenly cut off by the lawsuit, they'd recruit a local artist to just help them keep going by changing the name to a thinly veiled expy called Marvelman.

Marvelman was then revived in the 80s by Alan Moore as Miracleman, which was basically his first jaunt into the metatextual explorations of superhero comics that he'd become famous for. When he left that run it was taken over by Neil Gaiman, through whom a debate over the rights to Miracleman would eventually become central to a protracted lawsuit with Todd McFarlane over work Gaiman did on the Spawn comics.

You could probably write a pretty compelling history of the superhero comics industry just by following the trademark and copyright drama of Captain Marvel. I'm a little surprised somebody hasn't done it already tbh.

[sunflowervoltwentyeight]

Hello! Happy 28th! Very excited to share my March 2023 fic rec! All of the fics below are so amazing. In no particular order, enjoy!!! 

Golden by shaylea (128k)

Harry is fully dressed when Louis returns to the room. He’s slumped on the edge of the bed, fingers twining awkwardly around the edge of his pink flounces. “Can I come?” he blurts when Louis opens the bathroom door. Louis freezes. “What?” “North. With you,” Harry clarifies. “If you’re going north, could I come too?”

On a rainy night in Auckland in the middle of his world tour, popstar Harry Styles loses his ability to carry on. Instead of continuing to Sydney and the rest of his tour, he seeks sanctuary with Louis Tomlinson, a man with a macadamia nut farm and a mysterious past.

I’ll Fly Away by @juliusschmidt (122k)

Harry and Louis grew up together in Lake County, Harry with his mom and stepdad in a tiny cottage on Edward’s Lake and Louis in his family’s farmhouse a few minutes down the road. But after high school, Louis stuck around and Harry did not; Harry went to Chicago where he found a boyfriend and couple of college degrees. Six years later, Harry ends up back in Edwardsville for the summer and he and Louis fall into old patterns and discover new ones.

ft. One Direction, the local boyband; Horan’s Bar and Grill; families, most especially children and babies; Officer Liam Payne; many local festivals and fireworks displays; and Anne Cox, PFLAG President.

Mine Would Be You by @crinkle-eyed-boo (114k)

Louis blinks his eyes open, his eyelids fluttering as the room swims around him. He takes several gulps of beer once he confirms that he’s definitely not hallucinating, that the very first portrait Harry Styles ever painted of him is hanging on that wall.

Louis stares at the wall, his heart jackrabbiting in his chest as he realizes that there’s not just one painting of him, there’s five, the portraits lined up like they’re some sort of storyboard depicting the rise and fall of his deepest love. His greatest heartache. A pain that cut him so deep that he left the fucking country, severing all ties with his life in New York, now suddenly surrounding him as if he’d never left.

Fucking shit motherfucker fuck.

Louis returns to New York City five years after he left it – and the love of his life – behind. He didn't intend to see Harry again, but fate has a funny way of pulling them together, whether they like it or not. After making a begrudging truce, they both start to wonder: Would it be so bad if history repeated itself?

You’ve Got My Devotion (Hate You Sometimes) by lucythegoosey / @harryrainbows (95k)

Harry was in the biggest boy band in the world. He was also one half of the best (or worst, depends on who you ask) kept secret relationship in the music industry.

Now, almost five years on, after One Direction has broken up, and Harry and Louis' relationship has as well, a video threatens to put everything at risk.

One determined Irishman, a massive publicity stunt and two begrudging exes are all it takes to bring One Direction back to life and maybe, just maybe, Harry and Louis' mangled love life too.

Or: Harry and Louis are forced to fake-date after an old video from when they were dating emerges.

Wild Love by purpledaisy / @harrydaisy (130k)

“Good,” Julia says, clearly pleased to have them both uncomfortable and unable to look at each other. “Now, I only have one more question before you can go. What are you planning to do when this experiment ruins your friendship?”

“We said we’d stay friends no matter what,” Harry says smoothly, his chin lifting in defense.

“That was our one thing going into it,” Louis agrees. “Stay friends no matter what.”

Julia raises a perfectly manicured brow, “That’s all fine and good. But I hope you realize your emotions aren’t going to realize this is an experiment in the end. If one of you falls for the other and finds out those feelings are not reciprocated, you’re not going to be able to laugh it off as a social experiment. I’m not saying you shouldn’t do this, I’m just hoping you’ve considered all of the possible outcomes.”

- AU: Two best friends try to date each other for forty days. It's supposed to be fun until emotions make it complicated.

Part one of Wild Love

Never Slows Down by purpledaisy / @harrydaisy (28k)

“Maybe we should just have one place instead,” he says. “Just move in together.” It’s heavier out loud, the first time either one of them has made an outright mention of it.

Harry keeps his back turned, the running water of the sink the only sound. Louis wants to say something stupid, something like, “Just kidding,” or, “Wait, no, that’s not what I meant,” but he doesn’t. Now, out loud, lingering, he doesn’t want to change the words he’s just said or the implication.

It must only be a few seconds but it feels like a lifetime before Harry turns off the water and turns to face him again. He swallows and shrugs, “Uh, yeah, maybe.” He meets Louis’s eyes only briefly before checking his watch. “We should go soon,” he says turning to leave the kitchen. “I’ll grab you a jacket.”

Part two of Wild Love

Being of the Jealous Kind by zita17 / @louisandtheaquarian (24k)

A-list actor Louis Tomlinson and his partner fashion photographer Harry Styles weather the storm that is Louis’ fake relationship with his costar in the lead up to this year’s Academy Awards.

Featuring a fluffy teenage meet-cute, an angsty wine drunk Harry melting down over pap pics, Louis habitually overusing the word “baby,” and cameos by a vintage Umbro sweatshirt, the peace ring, and one hell of a Larry hug.

Or the justice for To Be So Lonely fic. Based on the lyrics to TBSL and a prompt where “Louis has to fake date some celebrity, while his boyfriend Harry sits at home.”

Starry Haze, Crystal Ball by you_explode (10k)

Freedom. Harry’s not sure what exactly it means anymore. For him, for Louis. Personally. Professionally. Musically. There are so many layers to it, and it feels like as he gets older, the thicker those layers become.

Non-AU. A brief look at 2020 and the journey Harry and Louis are on with their careers and closet. Inspired by the Devil card.

Drifting, Weightless by dinosaursmate (45k)

“We’ve been asked to do a gig,” Niall said slowly. “Harry and Liam are completely up for it, I am too.” “Alright. What’s the catch?” Louis asked with suspicion. “It’s, um…” Niall cleared his throat. “So, Juliana was contacted by this themed cruise company, and they want us to do a four-day One Direction cruise.” The words hung in the air as Louis’ right eyebrow slowly crept up and he fixed Niall with a stare. “Absolutely not.” Louis rolled his eyes. “You’re essentially asking me to go on a working holiday with my ex. Stranded on a boat in the ocean for four days.” “Cruise ships are huge! You don’t have to see him in your down time.” --- Harry and Louis are exes with benefits until they're not, and the Mediterranean Sea might just be the perfect place to work through some unresolved issues.

[stagred]

　　ALASTOR'S SCRAPBOOK, a collection of clippings and recordings. To be added to in the future.

　　The following items can be found in a heavy, leather - bound crate at the foot of Alastor's bed in the Hazbin Hotel. It it sealed with several padlocks and chains.

　　1921. A newspaper clipping. " Breakout talent in the local radio industry! Shreveport's local radio station, KFXZ, debuted a new voice yesterday morning with Alastor Bouchard, 18. Listeners were excited for a new voice, even with the grim nature of the broadcast, as young Bouchard reported on the discovery of Frances Brooklyn, a young girl who had been thought missing for some time and had been found brutally murdered after she washed up on the Sabine River. Bouchard went on to report on the day's weather predictions and read a few write - ins from long time listeners. KFXZ technicians have already reported quite a few letters and calls requesting more of the young star. Here's hoping! We wish you the best of luck out there, Alastor! "

　　1924. A newspaper clipping. " Alastor's Morning Report and friends at KFXZ have made local history for the third year in a row! St. Mary of the Pines teamed up with the radio station to host a massive potluck, including the introduction of Bouchard's ' Hunter Stew, ' which earned rave reviews. 　　' It's hardly difficult, ' Bouchard explained on yesterday's show. ' In fact, there's hardly a recipe! I started with a slightly watered down version of my grandmother's gumbo recipe, and all of our guests were invited to add something new to the pot! ' According to Bouchard, Hunter Stew is a long standing tradition around the world, sometimes called ' perpetual stew. ' The soup is served, but the pot is never emptied, and all of those eating continue to contribute new ingredients. 　　With any luck, Bouchard's stew will last St. Mary of the Pines for weeks or even months to come. You can stop by after mass to take a bowl home to your family, even if you aren't a churchgoer. ' All we ask is that you contribute something to the pot, even just a handful of salt or pepper, ' said Bouchard, before excusing himself to add more pork loin to the pot. "

　　1928. A recording saved on a thick record, slightly distorted. " Good morning, Shreveport. This is your host, Alastor Bouchard, and I'm afraid I have grave news to start us off today. Local police, hours ago, pulled a fourth and final body from a manmade grave in the woods near the western side of town. The only shared features between these four bodies are as follows : the bodies were stripped entirely nude, and had undergone serious physical pain and strife before their death. At the moment, none of these bodies have been identified, but we do know that three of them are female, and one is male. We at KFXZ will keep you updated as the story progresses. The weather today… " The recording is unintelligible from here.

　　1928. A recording that appears to be from a few days after the previous recording, saved on a thick record. " I'm sorry to interrupt, dear listeners, but I have just been handed a report from local police regarding the four bodies found in the woods on Tuesday. As of now, police have identified the bodies of Rose Olivier, 19, and Henry LeBoeuf, 27. Rose had been missing for three weeks prior to her discovery, after she failed to return home from a study session after school with friends. Henry was last seen about a month and a half ago, though his disappearance was not reported until two weeks ago, as he was known to have a transitory history. Police are urging any families in the area with missing loved ones to please come by the station to potentially identify the other two victims. 　　The remaining victims are described as such : the first, female, aged 15 to 25, appears to have been wearing red lipstick and dark makeup, blonde shoulder length hair, white, with freckles on her shoulders and nose. The second, female, aged 30 to 40, with painted blue nails, black hair, of tanned complexion, missing one of her back molars. Again, those descriptions are as follows : the first, female -- " The recording cuts off abruptly there.

　　Date unknown. Found in the home of Alastor Bouchard, marked as evidence by Shreveport police. Recorded on home - installed radio equipment. The quality of this record is questionable and the sounds are difficult to decipher. It appears to capture a male voice singing ' Love Me or Leave Me ' by Ruth Etting. Something is shuffling rather aggressively in the background of this music. About halfway through the song, a distant voice seems to shout something, but it is not possible to distinguish what. The male voice stops singing, and a ruckus occurs. The male voice is heard yelling and swearing several times, while the other distant voice appears to sob. It goes quiet, and then footsteps approach, before the record is suddenly ended. 　　The record resumes, seemingly after a period of time has passed. There is no dialogue, discernible or otherwise, but rather a cacophony of electrical whirring. Every so often, this sound will pause and a male sounding voice will make noises of effort and discomfort, before the sound resumes. This continues until the record can no longer capture audio.

　　1930. Property of KFXZ, marked as evidence by Shreveport police. This recording contains a thirty minute segment between radio host Alastor Bouchard and seven different people : Maria LaBoeuf, Maxwell Olivier, James Michael Landry, Daniel Brooklyn, Amelia Chamberlain, Travis Dubois, and Sean Chambers. All seven intervewees are family or close friends of identified victims of what Bouchard calls ' the Shreveport Slaughter. ' He questions them about losing their loved ones, how it felt, and what they might say to the person or persons who have done this. He also asks if they believe police are doing an adequate job in the hunt for the killer, to which all seven agree is incorrect. Police would attempt to pull this segment from airing, but would be unsuccessful. Bouchard signs off the morbid segment with, " We at KFXZ stand proudly in solidarity with these grieving families, and I personally would like to request a greater effort from local police to find this monster stalking our streets. Good night. "

　　Date unknown, paper is partially torn. The part that is still readable is as such : " -- Bouchard potluck dinner that was so popular has been cancelled this year due to police concerns regarding public safety. The Shreveport Slaughter continues to haunt the dreams of our citizens, though Bouchard protested this decision, claiming the community needed to come together in this time of fear. In lieu of the potluck, Bouchard and other KFXZ staff have announced that they will be going door to door to pass out packed meals from the Bouchard family kitchen -- "

　　1933. A recording from KFXZ reporter Everette Pellé, which airs when ' Alastor's Morning Report ' would normally air. " Good morning, Shreveport. I apologize for the absence of Mister Bouchard, but I have frightening news to report in his absence. Last night, Alastor did not return home from his evening trip to Mari's Diner. Employees claim that, despite his attendance every night, he was absent and never arrived. Neighbors were questioned, but also could not recall seeing or hearing Alastor return to his townhome. Police attempted to speak to Mister Bouchard this morning, but nobody was home. The woods are currently being searched, for fear that Alastor's recent reports on the local crime wave may have made him a target, and citizens are encouraged to come and volunteer to find our beloved host. This morning's broadcast will be replaced with some of Alastor's favorite tracks, and we will update you with any new information that arises. Thank you, and God bless. "

　　1933. Four days after the initial KFXZ report on Alastor's status as a missing person. An entire sheet of newspaper, complete with detailed drawings : the Bouchard home kitchen, and a portrait of Alastor. The headline reads, HOUSE OF HORRORS! WOMAN'S HEAD, BODY PARTS FOUND IN BOUCHARD ICEBOX; BODY COUNT STILL CLIMBING. The article is as follows. 　　" The body of Alastor Germain Bouchard, 30, was discovered last night around 11 p.m. Bouchard, a Shreveport local celebrity, had been missing for five days, and police feared that his recent aggressive reporting on the serial murder dubbed The Shreveport Slaughter had drawn the killer's attention. After extensive searching by police and local volunteers, Bouchard was found dead, face down in a bog in the same woods where several other victims of the Slaughter had been discovered. He had been shot once through the back of the head after local hunter, Lionel Davison, mistook him for an animal. Davison made the horrific discovery that Bouchard was in the process of burying a body. 　　Davison claims that he waited so long to tell his account out of fear that he would be considered a suspect. Though police did initially take him in for questioning, he has since been released due to further discovery within the Bouchard home. The home was locked tight, and seemed normal when viewed from the windows outside, but upon entry, police found a horrific sight. 　　The house smelled of cooking meat, likely due to the pot of stew on the stove that had nearly evaporated in Bouchard's leave. It appeared to contain human fingers, three differently colored eyeballs, and a human tongue. Within the icebox, police found the head of an as yet unidentified woman, as well as several plates of what appeared to be human organs, an entire adult male arm wrapped in butcher's paper, and slabs of meat with human skin still attached to them. Bouchard's kitchen tools were covered in blood, and he appeared to have been preparing for another door - to - door meal delivery. 　　The backyard had been entirely dug up, and police have discovered twenty - seven human bodies in various states of decay and dismemberment. Many of the bodies still intact are missing limbs and large cuts of meat. Neighbors were informed of the implications of these discoveries and advised to throw out any food they may still have from the Bouchard home. Police report that many of these neighbors became physically ill, and one even fell faint. 　　Alastor Bouchard has been officially named as the sole killer behind the mass killing spree known as the Shreveport Slaughter. It is believed he used his influence at KFXZ to lure in his victims, before he would torture them for several days, slaughter them, and use their bodies to prepare food which he proceeded to serve to members of our community. 　　IF YOU OR SOMEONE YOU KNOW IS IN POSSESSION OF FOOD PREPARED BY BOUCHARD, DELIVER IT TO YOUR NEAREST POLICE STATION AS SOON AS POSSIBLE. "

[the-badger-mole]

The Godmother of Grunge

If any time in the history of the US something really, truly innovative and cool took off, you will never go broke if you bet on a black person having had a hand (elbow, shoulder and foot) in it.

This is Tina Bell

(I know. Take a moment, drink in the awesome)

Tina Marie Bell was born in Seattle, WA in 1957. Like most black singers, she got her start as part of her church choir, where she honed her talent and her love of music. As she got older, her love of performing found her participating in her school's theater club, cheerleading, and eventually majoring in Drama at Washington State University.

After graduating college, Tina landed a spot with the Langston Hughes Performing Arts Institute, in the late 1970s. As she was preparing for a performance of her rendition of C'est Si Bon (a song which was performed by another black queen, Eartha Kitt). In order to make sure her French was strong enough for the song, she worked with a tutor named Tommy Martin- the man who would later become her bandmate and her husband.

In 1983, the pair would go on to form Bam Bam, with bassist, Scott Ledgerwood and drummer, Matt Cameron (who later went on to perform with Soundgarden and Pearl Jam). Bell was, of course, the lead singer, and her dynamic voice and unparalleled stage presence soon made her a staple in the Seattle music scene in the early 80s. Her ability to mix the smooth sultry sounds of her gospel and R&B background and the jarring sounds of punk garnered Bell and her band a lot of fans, including their roadie, Kurt Cobain. In 1984, one year before the band Green River would be credited with introducing a "new sound" to the Seattle music scene, Bam Bam recorded and released their first and, unfortunately only EP Villains (also wear white). Four years after that, Nirvana would release their debut album Bleach and the new musical genre, grunge, would be introduced to the rest of the world.

Why don't more people know about Tina Bell? C'mon...you know why more people don't know about Tina Bell. As a black woman moving in the largely white space of punk rock, Tina faced racism even as she became a star in the underground punk scene. At one particularly memorable show, bassist Ledgerwood recalls how a couple of skin heads came to harass Tina, shouting racial slurs and other verbal abuse at her. Tina stopped her set, whipped her microphone around and knocked both of them in the head (I WISH I COULD FIND A RECORDING OF THAT!!!!! I WOULD KILL!!!!!) before composing herself and delivering a fiery performance that I'm sure the people lucky enough to be in the audience that night still dream about.

The racism was latent as well as blatant. The industry didn't know what to do with a black woman who wasn't hip hop, r&b or pop. She drew comparisons to acts like Tina Turner (because they're both named Tina? 🤔) The inability of the public at large to accept the wild, otherworldly concept of a black woman singing rock music (even though black women also pioneered rock music) kept the band's star from rising much beyond the Seattle, in spite of their local popularity. Tina Bell quit the band in 1990, just as grunge, the musical genre she helped birth, was taking off. She moved from Seattle to Las Vegas, where in a turn that is all too common among talented artists, she fell into a cycle of alcoholism and depression. She died on October 10, 2012 at the tragically young age of 55, alone and literally written out of the history of the genre she had such a heavy hand in shaping.

Fortunately, that's not where her story ends. Through the efforts of fellow Seattle musician, Om Johari, Tina's son TJ Martin (who himself is an Academy Award winning filmmaker), and ex-bandmate, Scott Ledgerwood, Tina Bell is being restored to her rightful place as in history as the Godmother of Grunge.

Hear her music here, here, and here (my favorite)

[mahounomanga]

Kurumi-tic Miracle

In the early days of the genre, it was relatively common for magical girls to have more open-ended power sets. Rather than having one or a few set applications, their magic could do just about anything. Since the turn of the millennium, most magical girls have powers designed for a specific task, such as fighting evil, but today I want to take a look at a character from the early 2000s whose powers can do anything she puts her mind to.

Kurumi-tic Miracle is a 2003 manga by Chitose Yagami. It stars a run-of-the-mill schoolgirl named Kurumi Nanami, who lives with her grandfather in the oddities shop he owns, together with her pet hamster, Momo. One day, while helping clean the shop, Kurumi discovers a mysterious magic stone that affixes itself to her wrist in the form of a bracelet. With this magic bracelet, any wish she makes will instantaneously come true. Initially she uses this power to pursue her crush, Naoki, but as the two gets closer, it becomes clear the magic stone has a bit of a history, and the potential to cause problems.

Kurumi-tic Miracle was serialized in Ciao magazine from the February 2003 issue to the April 2003 issue: a three chapter run. These chapters were compiled into a single tankobon volume on June 21, 2003 by Shogakukan under their Flower Comics imprint, along with a couple of Yagami's older one-shots. A digital re-release, also by Shogakukan, was made available on July 10, 2015. Official translations were released in Indonesian and Chinese, but not English. However, a fan translation by the group Da Gurlz Translationz is available for all five chapters, including both one-shots, and can be found on various unofficial manga sites.

The series was created by Chitose Yagami, a shoujo manga author who debuted in 2001 with Magical Project, a one-shot which was later included in volume 1 of Manga Mitaina Koi Shitai! a.k.a. Fall in Love Like a Comic, one of her more popular works which was even officially printed in English by Viz under their Shojo Beat imprint. Much of Yagami's work contains elements of romantic comedy, middle/high school slice of life, magic and the paranormal, and working in the entertainment industry, be it modeling, music, or manga. She is still active to this day, both professionally and on social media. Her most recent manga, a BL series titled Shoujo Manga no Hero ni naritai no ni Heroine Atsukaisareru Ore., began serialization in 2021 and is still ongoing. None of her works would get career-definingly popular, but Kurumi-tic Miracle was successful enough to land her her first autograph session, so that's cool. It seems she didn't do much adapting of existing work, save for contributing to a shoujo Inazuma Eleven anthology in 2011. That same year, her manga Oresama Kingdom (Kings of My Love) got picked up for a direct to video anime adaptation, running for 14 episodes of 11 minutes apiece until 2013. This was the only manga of hers to get an anime adaptation, and it got a Nintendo DS game too, also in 2011. This was the second video game based on a Chitose Yagami manga, the first being Kiss x Kiss for the GBA in 2004.

Speaking of video games, this came up a lot in my research so I just want to point out that this series is unrelated to the 1997 Playstation game Kurumi Miracle, in which a young witch whose name is also Kurumi goes to an island to hone her magic by helping the local townsfolk.

Because Kurumi-tic Miracle is so short, it's difficult to recap the plot without giving spoilers, so if you'd like to go into the series blind, I advise you to do so before reading the rest of this post.

The manga starts off as a pretty straight forward slice-of-life romcom with magical hijinks, but the more we learn about the love interest Naoki, the clearer it becomes that something is amiss. He has a rather distinctive ring, and he seems very interested in Kurumi's bracelet. It turns out there is another magic stone, and the person who controls it wants them both to himself. The plot reveal is that this person is not Naoki, but his little brother, Satoru, who found the other stone by chance and became corrupted by its' power. He has bequeathed unto Naoki a fraction of that power for the purposes of collecting the other stone.

The magic systems in Kurumi-tic Miracle are really interesting to me. Because the scope of what they can do is so broad, the characters are limited only by their imagination, which gives us a stark contrast in how Kurumi and Satoru use their powers, despite those powers deriving from the same source. Kurumi's magic tends to be cuter, more harmless, and at times downright childish. Satoru's magic is scarier, emblematic of his ruthless attitude, and representative of a genuinely serious threat.

To pad out the tankobon release, two of Chitose Yagami's one-shots were included. The first, 2003's Dokitto Boys X Love (just Boys X Love in the fanslation), is sort of a comedy-of-errors in which a teenage girl accidentally switches bodies with her favorite male idol, and the two have to stick together as she learns his routine. It's not especially groundbreaking, but it's cute. The second is titled Otokomae!? Jajauma Musume, which I thiiink roughly translates to Boyish Selfish Girl. The fanslation uses the title I Love Tomboy. It was originally published in 2001 and according to Weblio was Yagami's second ever manga after Magical Project. It's a romantic comedy in which a tomboy attempts to become more feminine to win over her bully... which sucks. It sucks so bad. This one-shot is infuriatingly gender essentialist and sexist. A lot of effort goes into categorizing what separates girls from boys, all of it very stereotypical, and even though the resolution is that the protagonist is more comfortable being herself, the message is lost in all the steps it takes to get there. She does have some personal struggles with wondering if she's really a boy after all, and there's a plot twist that the elder sister figures who helped her throughout were actually crossdressers the whole time, so I'm sure you could read some queer subtext into this if you wanted to, but that is VERY clearly not what was intended. I hate it.

Taken on its' own, Kurumi-tic Miracle strikes me as a diamond in the rough. Most of the flaws I can point to in the main story could easily be alleviated if it were given more room to breathe. Three chapters just wasn't enough for me to get fully invested in these characters or their world. Despite this, the core concept shines through. This manga had some genuinely intriguing ideas about its' magic systems and how they can be applied for creative problem solving at a time when that modality of magic was becoming increasingly rare, despite the magical girl genre as a whole reaching market saturation at around this time. It's short and cute, even if it's not particularly substantial. It's very of a type, but if this is a type you tend to enjoy, I highly recommend checking it out.

[funbirdnest]

Atlantis - Below the surface chapter 2

Eichi: It's called Project-ATLANTIS.

Also known as PA. It's a colonization project that ES, which now has its sights set on national domination, put into motion after SS.

Tori: Colonization?

Eichi: Yuzuru, Tori... What do you suppose SS is in the first place?

Yuzuru: It is a historic annual idol festival with a long-standing tradition—It is the largest, most important festival in the idol industry.

... Is how I would answer—But I doubt that you'll be satisfied with such a generic textbook response, correct?

Eichi: Yes. I'm not asking for a formal definition of SS, but rather about its impact on the industry.

Yuzuru: Can you give him an answer, Bocchama?

Tori: Eep! D-Don't put me on the spot like that?! Rather, you should be concerned with demonstrating your worth in front of your master!

Hmm. The SS that was held a few days ago was unprecedentedly large-scale, wasn't it?

It spanned the whole country, and we were able to get local and underground idols to actively participate. Thanks to that, the total number of participating idols was higher than ever before.

But, as a result, almost no local idols made it past the qualifying rounds. The final round was completely monopolized by ES, or more accurately, by Yumenosaki.

Yuzuru: Yes. Some local idols made brief appearances in collaboration with Mikejima-sama. But they were the exception.

Eichi: That's right... SS was held with the pretense of an energizing collaboration with local idols all across the country.

In reality, however, it turned out to be more of a farce that only served to flaunt the strength and authority of ES, which in many ways has become the center of the country.

Ultimately, you can say that was ES's intent all along.

The local idols were mere foils—nothing more than casualties positioned to highlight our—the "main idols'"—brilliance.

Naturally, the local idols found this dissatisfying.

The most radical among them have formed what one might call an anti-ES organization, and are now rioting across the country.

Project-ATLANTIS is one measure with which to pacify these hostile anti-ES forces gathered in such places.

Yuzuru: This is quite the belated response.

Eichi: It's certainly better than doing nothing.

When ES was first established, it was falsely advertised as a "utopia for all idols." For that reason, those who did not directly benefit became quite dissatisfied.

ES was supposed to be an ideal world where "all idols" are able to shine. Then, if we really are idols, why can't we shine?

Yuzuru: It's a natural question and a natural complaint.

Eichi: Fufu. In my opinion, people just navely put their faith in ES' exaggerated advertising

Anyway, if this was the Sengoku period, it would be standard practice to suppress such criminal forces with military power.

Tori: I-Isn't it kind of mean to call them criminals...?

Eichi: I consider it an appropiate expression. ES is a nation, and the forces that oppose it are nothing more than bandits and pirates.

However, although ES continues to make strides like Oda Nobunaga, we still haven't conquered the entire country like Tokugawa Ieyasu (*).

Yuzuru: I think that's a good analogy.

Eichi: Thank you. Right now, ES is in the era of Oda Nobunaga. More precisely, around the time that the anti-Nobunaga network (**) was established.

Yuzuru: I see. That makes it easy to understand.

Tori: Er, I'm sorry, but I don't really get it.

Eichi: You studied history in school, right?

Fools learn from experience; wise men learn from history. Be sure to take your studies seriously while you still have the chance, Tori.

Because, once you grow up, you'll have no choice but to learn things on your own.

Tori: Yeah~ I know this is gonna sound like an excuse... but I haven't been able to study much at school lately.

Eichi: Is something happening at Yumenosaki?

I entrusted all matters over there to Mao, my successor. I don't think it's appropriate for graduates to intervene, so I've generally been staying away.

Yuzuru: Fufu. At present, Yumenosaki Academy is holding an election to determine the next student council president.

Bocchama is running for the student council presidency as well, of course.

Combined with idol work, this is too many irons in the fire. As such, this is a very busy point in time.

Eichi: The student council elections? Huh, this is the first time they've been properly carried out.

We—or rather, mainly Keito—created a model for the student council and then passed it down to Mao, who inherited it.

Tori: As the new president, Isara said that we should actually hold an election.

He said, "I could appoint you, but I don't have much authority, so it'd seem really forced."

If I win the election properly, then I'll be able to attain that kind of authority.

Eichi: That sounds really modern. And it feels like a natural progression.

I like Mao's way of thinking. He understands the limitations of his position—I mean that in a good way.

(*) Eichi is referring to the reunification of Japan at the end of the Sengoku Period (1467-1600). Oda Nobunaga was a feudal lord who raised war against different clans during one of the most tumultous eras of conflict in Japan. Oda set the stage for the reunification of Japan, which was achieved later by Hideyoshi and Ieyasu—the latter becoming the ruler during the beginning of a peaceful period in Japan that lasted until the arrival of Perry and the US Navy.

(**) At the end of the Sengoku era, a group of forces led by Shogun Yoshiaki Ashikaga formed an alliance to rebel against Nobunaga and his allies. The conflict ended with the defeat of the anti-Nobunaga alliance and the expulsion of Yoshiaki from Kyoto.

[quillpokebiology]

Geography of Galar

Galar is my home region, and I wanna talk about it more since there's actually multiple cultural regions of Galar. And, at some parts, even different languages! So, here's some stuff about Galar!

Languages

Just getting this out of the way. The most common language spoken in Galarian is, well, Galarian. But there are actually many different 'subcategories' of Galarian. For example, the Galarian I'm speaking is Hammerlock Galarian. But some parts will speak Lean (a language that isn't that common and is spoken and originated in the Glimwood Tangle area), while others might speak other forms of old Galarian. Keep in mind that the languages aren't as common as they used to be because the Hammerlocke kingdom colonized a lot of places. So you won't be completely lost if you visit these places and don't speak the local language.

Southern Galar

Also called Dùaicha by locals, which doesn't really have a direct translation, but it has the old Galarian words for 'country', 'white', and 'field'. Southern Galar is mostly a farming part of Galar, where people have strong accents. The history is pretty neat, as it was once inhabited by different tribes and clans before the people of Hammerlock came and forced them away from their culture. As a lot of history passed, and Hammerlock's kingdom soon died out, the people of Southern Galar were able to gain their cultures back, but of course, there were reproductions, as a lot of their history was lost. While they mostly speak Hammerlock Galarian there, words will sometimes be different.

The people that live in the Crown Tundra tend to have heavier accents (basically the stereotypical Galarian accent you hear all the time), and tend to speak Hammerlock Galarian less.

Central Southern Galar

The place I grew up! Central Southern Galar contains the 1st (first) Wild Area, Turtfield, and the 3rd most populated city in Galar, Motostoke.

The history of Motostoke is rather interesting, being founded in the 1st century and controlled by the old Hammerlock kings. But as time went on and technology started to improve, Motostoke became one of the first industrialized cities in the world!

The Wild Area tends to be different. For one, there's barely any towns there, with some houses and cottages scattered about. And since it's not near most people, they tend to speak old Souther Galarian there (which I would speak with my parents and the other people in the area I lived in). In ancient times, multiple tribes and clans lived in the area, living side-by-side with the Pokemon around them. But the people of the old clans went away for various reasons (colonization, slowly failing economies, disputes, wars, etc).

Turtfield is the second most well-known city in Central Galar 1, purely because one of the gym leaders lives there. The history is still pretty neat, with the artwork depicting the Darkest Day. It's also one of the oldest towns in Galar, still having a lot of culture involved with it.

Central Galar

Hammerlocke

One of the most well-known cities in Galar, which I find interesting since it's not even the capital (Wyndon is). Being one of an old kingdom, descendants from old Hammerlocke are known as Hammerlockians Anyways, Hammerlocke is located in the center of Galar, but I wanna mention it because a lot of stuff has happened here. I can't explain the entire history of it, because I'm most likely not qualified to do that.

But Hammerlocke was a super power in the Galar region, and it managed to colonize a lot of stuff, and is one of the reasons Hammerlocke Galarian is spoken all throughout Galar, spoken in Unova, and a commonly learned second language around the world. They had a monarchy and were run by kings and a couple of queens.

Other than the colonization, Hammerlocke was also known as 'The Dragon Hunters.'' They hunted a lot of dragon types in Galar to extinction, and even as Pokemon started co existing with humans, there was still a lot of stigma around having Dragin types in or near the city, and having one could get you seriously in trouble. Hammerlock actually designed their buildings like that to scare off dragon types. There also one of the reasons Flapple and Appletun look the way they do; they had to evolve to look friendlier to NOT get killed by them!

But now, Hammerlocke is one of the safest places to own a Dragon type in Galar. The wide and expansive area of it as well as the stigma of the area disappearing had led Hammerlocke to almost completely get rid of that stigma entirely (I also like to put that on the popularity of the gym leader here. Ngl, I might've had a crush on him when I was younger).

Central Galar is also home to the second Wild Area. Even fewer people live there compared to the first Wild Area since it holds a lot more dangerous Pokemon.

West-Central Galar

West-Central Galar holds the Leantír and the Creuilg area.

Leantír is the term that refers to the entire Glimwood Tangle area. The word Lea is a Galarian suffix for woodlands or a clearing. Tír is just Southern Galarian for land. The people who reside in this area are known as the Lean people. A cool thing about them is that they are one of the few groups that managed to avoid the colonization of Hammerlocke, purely because the people in Hammerlocke thought that Glimwood Tangle was too dangerous since of the Pokemon there. Because of this, the culture was able to grow free from colonization, and their language has been preserved throughout the years.

There was some stuff that happened though. Like how a guy found Indeedee 7,000 years ago in Glimwood Tangle and took them out to breed them. But another thing that isn't well known is that Leantír use to spread a lot farther than it does now, reaching all the way down to the Stow-on-Side area, and even a bit of Hammerlocke! But Hammerlocke cut down their trees and got rid of their dangerous Pokemon fairly quickly. The Pokemon of the forest than became more wary of people from Hammerlocke, and they ended up attacking any human that wasn't from deeper in the forest, which is why Hammerlocke never went that far.

Creulig is a combination of the old Galarian word for rock and blood (referring to the red-like color of the canyons). One of the largest towns there (Stow-on-side) holds a gym challenge there. It's also the only desert on Mainland Galar.

There were civilizations here in the ancient past, which were realized when old artifacts were found here. But little is known about that civilization, as the history of it only started being documented when newer people moved in.

East-Central Galar

East-Central Galar holds the Nixalba area, which got its name from a forgotten language. "Nix" means snow, while "alba" means white.

The history of the area is really cool (no pun intended), with the Circhester town being around for thousands of years. Originally, Circhester was made in 60 AD, where the first settlers there used the hot springs in the area as a spa area and built their town around it. It became a really popular tourist spot, with the added gym challenge making it even more popular.

The places around it (like Spikemuth and route 8) used to be a lot colder, but climate change and global warming have made it the way it is today. Route 8 has faced a lot of weathering and erosion, which is what gives it its more rocky appearance. But ancient people of the Nixalba area lived there, giving it the ruins it has. In the Hulbury area, people have used that place as a fishing port for hundreds of years.

Northern Galar

Other than the Wyndon district, Northern Galar is inhabited much because of the large mountains making it hard for people to live there. Mostly hikers, researchers, and explorers head there.

However, the history of Wyndon is really interesting. The main city itself was founded in 43 CE when the Hammerlocke kingdom was making its way around Galar. Most of the ancient tribes that lived there were wiped out, and not much is known about the tribes that resided here (which is sad).

The Isle of Armor

The Isle of Armor is a subregion of Galar. Back then, a lot of immigrants from Kanto, Johto, Hoenn, and Sinnoh came here, and the culture here reflects that. This place is very popular for trainers coming here to get stronger because of the famous dojo they have here.

So yeah, that's the Galar region! Have fun with this information!

Ooc stuff

Honestly, I know this probably isn't accurate to irl UK, but I think it would just be boring to restate UK history. Plus, I don't want the world building to be EXACTLY like it is irl. For one, the game doesn't mention much colonization, and I like that idea. But it would make sense that Galar would have some colonization (it's literally the UK), But I also like the idea of different languages being more common, since it sucks that irl UK has a bunch of dying languages because of colonization. So instead, I made them have colonization, but the languages would stay semi-alive, where you would meet a lot more people that would speak them.

The Isle of Armor was based on The Isle of Man, which mostly has a Celtic history. But from what we see in the game, it has a lot of East Asian inspiration, and I wanted to reflect that here.

I purposely made the places seem bigger than they were since it's stupid to only imagine one small town in the entirety of an area. Plus, we only really see that stuff in the game because it's all we need to see. We can assume there's more people and towns there.

The old clans and tribes are supposed to be old Celtic tribes, but I couldn't think of a name to give them in the Pokemon world...

[acquired-stardust]

Game Spotlight #7: Snatcher (1994)

Acquired Stardust's next game spotlight is here! This time Ash takes a look back at the first title in Hideo Kojima's portfolio that one would probably call a 'Kojima game' in the Sega CD port of Konami's Snatcher, a traditional Japanese-style adventure game, with an examination of some of the history and culture around its American release!

Popular wisdom recalls that the ESRB was founded in 1994 in response to the moral panic surrounding the earlier 1992 release of Mortal Kombat, but this collective memory is missing a few details - namely that it wasn't Mortal Kombat alone that created the panic. It was a trio of games, all released in 1992, that caused the mainstream American culture to pay attention to the medium, which had begun to enter its edgy teenage phase, and it did not like what it saw.

Sega CD classic Night Trap was one of the most prominent releases in the then-popular Full Motion Video field, essentially an interactive campy d-tier horror movie that tasked players with protecting the residents of a house besieged by bumbling, uncoordinated creepers with the timely use of trap doors via security camera operation. It was vaguely sort of voyeuristic in the way that likely titillated the senses of teenagers in 1994 before widespread access to the internet, but otherwise mostly unremarkable and had little redeeming qualities. Konami's own Lethal Enforcers was the third game in the trio, a fairly standard arcade shooter featuring a realistic revolver-type handgun for players to use as a controller along with Mortal Kombat style digitized actors for its visuals.

Long before Columbine at the end of the decade, these three games were singled out as essentially the harbinger of the doom of a generation of American youths, allegedly promoting violence and sexual assault against women, prompting a series of US senate hearings the following year best summed up by Democratic senator from Wisconsin Herb Kohl's stern warning on the industry needing to reign itself in: "If you don't do something about it, we will".

It's certainly true that the video game industry had begun to experiment with new, different and edgier games that would increase in their edginess in the years to come (Duke Nukem for example was released a mere 3 years after the senate hearings), but it was abundantly clear to anyone who was paying attention (and indeed anyone with a brain) that this was largely a shallow echo of the ongoing satanic panic which had the country collectively clutching its pearls since the 1980s. Night Trap was certainly not endorsing sexual violence against women (and its content was far more tame than was asserted even by the standards of 1993), and Lethal Enforcers was simply a very standard arcade shooter following the digitized graphical trend with a realistic (though brightly-colored) peripheral. However, the industry responded to the hearings in relatively short order with the creation of the ESRB (that's the Entertainment Software Ratings Board) in September of 1994, meant to advise consumers on the content of the video games they were buying in an effort to help police the perceived wild moral decay corrupting America's youth. It was somehow in this climate that Konami decided that it was time to bring Hideo Kojima's PC-88 adventure game Snatcher (originally released in Japan in 1988) to the west for the first time with an upgraded port.

While the video game scene in America had begun to show signs of maturing into its teenage years, Japan had at this point a well known pop culture machine churning out plenty of violent and sexual content (not without its own local controversy I might add), and was no stranger to content not meant for children. Typically when an American thinks of Japanese adventure games they think of Capcom's popular later Ace Attorney series, and might consider Snatcher the direct predecessor of it, but the genre has a very long history on Japanese PCs with a large number of games, often of a pornographic nature, released. It's a chapter of gaming history that is poorly preserved, particularly in the west (where it is often unknown that Enix, famous for its Dragon Quest series, started with releases of erotic adventure games in 1983), but is an important link between the two games.

Particularly foundational for the Japanese adventure game genre was 1983's Portopia Serial Murders, a game by future Dragon Quest creator Yuuji Horii, responsible for popularizing the interface and style of virtually every game in the genre to follow. Of particular note it was a young Hideo Kojima, future creator of the Metal Gear franchise, who took heavy inspiration from Portopia, seeing the adventure game genre and their cinematic nature as his pathway into doing the next best thing to what he'd always wanted to do: creating movies. And so Snatcher was born.

Snatcher is set in the fictional Neo Kobe city, a cyberpunk dystopia heavily inspired by Blade Runner, and while the video game industry may have been maturing into its teenage years, it is incredibly striking how adult Snatcher immediately comes across. Opening with a fully-voiced narration about a catastrophic Russian biohazard that killed 80% of the populace preceding the appearance of what are essentially Blade Runner's replicants (the titular snatchers), main character Gillian Seed bids farewell to the wife he recently underwent a separation with and sets off to join Neo Kobe's JUNKERs, a special police force tasked with hunting down and eliminating snatchers.

Snatcher stands head and shoulders above its contemporaries in not just the content of its story but the sophistication with which it is told. It boggles the mind that Sonic the Hedgehog 3 and Donkey Kong Country, incredible games in their own right, are some of the big mainstream releases of 1994 while this was also on store shelves. Immediately obvious through its incredible opening cinematic is a hallmark of creator/writer/director Hideo Kojima's titles all the way to the present day: they are incredibly dense and feature an almost overwhelming level of worldbuilding. Arriving at JUNKER headquarters only hammers the point home, with the player able to research a number of in-world historical topics that play out across multiple lengthy encyclopedia entries. While it is not necessary to fully explore these (the player does receive a few answers to later characters' questions in two entries), it goes a very long way to making the world feel very real which is an effect that the game achieves very well out of the gate with its flawed protagonist picking up the pieces and attempting to rebuild his life after a failed marriage with or without his former wife, itself a very realistic struggle that many can relate to. Another hallmark of Hideo Kojima titles is present in the form of abundant easter eggs and meta humor, with just one example of such easter eggs being that the player can use a phone obtained early in the game to call one Taeko Hayasaka (then a spokeswoman for Konami) as well as the localization director Jeremy Blaustein and receive some special dialogue.

Playing out across three acts, the player follows Gillian's investigation into the snatcher crisis gripping Neo Kobe city which threatens to spill over into the world at large all while grappling with his own amnesia stemming from a mysterious incident before the start of the game. It's worth noting that another hallmark of Kojima video games was present in the original 1988 release of Snatcher in the form of deadlines cutting his project into dramatically shorter form, where a planned six acts was cut to a mere two. Ending on a severe cliffhanger up until this generation of ports where the final third act was added in an attempt to wrap up the ongoing storyline as best as possible, the third act was somewhat controversial at the time due to its linearity in comparison with the rest of the game which is rather open in its accommodation of player sidetracking.

Though toned down in its Sega CD port to the west, Snatcher features a very surprising level of gore and sexuality (all while somehow only achieving a rating of T for teen from the ESRB) that can catch people even today unprepared for it. A clearly defiant Konami takes several shots in-game at the then-current moral panic around video games and the senate hearings that resulted in the creation of the ESRB, and it's hard to deny that had the game received more contemporary attention that it probably would've been hugely controversial in the mainstream for its violence and sexual content (much of which is based around the absurdity of being able to investigate people you meet, leading to everyone from JUNKER chief Cunningham to daughter of fellow JUNKER Katrina thinking you're an unhinged lunatic). The game does have a reputation for allowing the player to behave in a creepy manner towards female characters, itself an oft-criticized element of Hideo Kojima's works, and while that is true in some respects I found it of particular note that Gillian is able to 'investigate' every single character in the game regardless of gender (much to their dismay) and that not only is this never actually required to progress in the game, there are instances where being creepy towards female characters can result in the player being actively punished. Just because Gillian can doesn't mean that he should - a good lesson to all you people struggling with self-control out there.

All the things one typically associates with a Hideo Kojima title are present in Snatcher, including heavy inspiration from cinema, self-referential elements such as Gillian partnering with a very familiar robot sidekick appropriately named Metal Gear, to dense narratives told with an astounding level of worldbuilding and flavor, all through the style of using familiar concepts such as a setting very inspired by Blade Runner to get its foot in the door before making a hard left turn into original wonderful sci-fi insanity that culminates in what can only be described as 'a very Hideo Kojima' third act, and if you're familiar with his work you likely know exactly what that means.

The graphics and storytelling are excellent, featuring some incredible writing and localization for the time. Thanks to the Sega CD's disc-based nature the game boasts very good quality music and even a shocking level of voice work which is also similarly surprisingly high quality for a release from 1994 (though there are a few lines which fall flat), as many wouldn't consider the golden age of English voiceover dubs to start for another several years. Extremely ahead of its time in a year when we were still playing as giant gorillas jumping on crocodiles, the incredibly intricate story of Gillian Seed won't be something I forget and has held up remarkably well, serving as a great early example of the depth of experiences that gaming would come to host, particularly in the indie game scene which produces experiences often very relatable and impactful to players with a similar 'art from the artist' vibe.

In a time where the industry was beginning to reflect the sensibilities of a teenager, Snatcher largely feels very adult and manages to impress with its content and sophistication even to the present day. Hideo Kojima's freshman effort laid the groundwork for an incredible portfolio of titles and is worth experiencing for anyone who are fans of Japanese-style adventure games, visual novels, cyberpunk, or just plain good stuff.

A gem hidden among the stones, Snatcher is undoubtedly stardust.

--Ash

[racefortheironthrone]

Was looking at old photograph taken circa early 1880s of the same area where Johannesburg now stands and there's obsoletely nothing beyond plant life there (unlike even nearby Pretoria the local Sotho-Tswana peoples didn't have any settlements in present-day Johannesburg prior to the gold mining) and then a photograph taken circa late 1880 and it like million tents are there (maybe that's an exaggeration). Made me wonder about the last "overnight city" was founded in recent history?

This is a fascinating question!

It's true that the "boom town" phenomena occurs in the case of gold rushes - like California in 1849, West Australia in 1851, the Klondike in 1896 - or the construction of railroads or highways or the development of new factory towns or the like.

I would say that the most recent example of this phenomenon is the "new cities" built in China as speculative real estate developments premised around the need for affordable housing for manufacturing workforces, especially during the 2005-2011 housing bubble. In some years, these developments hit big and you get brand-new megacities out of nowhere.

In the past couple of years, with the slowdown in the Chinese economy and particular problems in the real estate sector, the fascinating phenomena of "ghost cities" (originally observed in 2006) where there are massive empty developments in various stages of construction just lying vacant has become more prominent, as developers run out of money or credit, or find it hard to attract industry and residents in a time of COVID lockdowns and the relative decline of Chinese manufacturing as a basis for urbanization.

[allisian]

K/DA Lore pt.4

We've finally made it to the last member of the KDA lineup! It's now Akali's turn to be explained and honestly I don't have much lore for her. I think a lot of energy went into all the other ladies I'm running out of creative juice!! Last one to go I've got this....

Akali was born into a martial arts dojo named the Kinkou, raised by her father "Grandmaster Shen" whose own father immigrated to South Korea (Seoul) from Japan in the 1940's to start up the dojo. She became a fluent ninja to connect to her cultural roots but also expressed interest in the growing trend of rap and street performances in the Hongdae neighborhood and found a love for hip hop and rap. When she wasn't in school or training with her father Akali would perform on the streets combining her rapping with ninjutsu becoming a local legend in Hongdae. However, the locals themselves did not take kindly to Akali or her family due to Korea's mistrust of the Japanese. One day Akali was approached while on the streets by a couple of teenage boys who harassed her. They cornered her in an alleyway and tried to attack her when she fought back and single-handedly fended off the 3 males. That wasn't all because she also freestyle rapped a diss track afterward that was filmed by a passerby and uploaded to YouTube. Akali grew more and more into a rebellious punk and would practice her lyrics on street corners. Eventually, those same bullies would find her again and challenge her to a rap battle which gave her viral infamy online. Akali knew she wanted to pursue being an artist she yearned for her independence. She'd stray from her father's dojo to find work at a sushi restaurant to raise funds for her dreams. Sadly it is a pretty competitive industry and Akali wasn't mainstream enough to sign with a label to her dismay. So imagine how surprised Akali was to serve celebrity popstar Ahri and the diva Evelynn one day at her work. The gumiho herself had discovered Akali on social media and had come to scout her talent. Akali then became the youngest and the final member to join KDA.

Koreans tend to be hostile towards the Japanese because of the taboo history involving WW2. Hence the awkward upbringing Akali faced while in Korea.

Akali had moved to Korea with her father at the age of two but he still taught her how to speak Japanese and English.

Shen wasn't keen on Akali moving away and joining KDA because she was his little girl and it hurt to see his daughter grow up but her was still supportive none the less and they parted amicably. (ofc Akali keeps in touch with him)

Akali working at a sushi place is a reference to her Sashimi skin. (it's all connected.)

Art by me

I do have an Akali playlist but I didn't make it with pre KDA in mind...

(Edit links to the other KDA girls)

Ahri

Evelynn

Kai'sa

[wickedsrest-rp]

Name: Cassius Hawthorne Species: Vampire Occupation: History Teacher Age: 206 Years Old (Looks about 34) Played By: Caitlyn Face Claim: Jamie Campbell Bower

“I’ve seen history repeated dozens of times over the years I have lived; we are truly destined to repeat it.”

Cassius was born into a family of nine in 1817 in London, England, twenty years before Queen Victoria took the throne. Being the middle child of three boys and six girls, Cassius could get away with quite a bit. An unruly child, Cassius constantly sneaked out to explore London’s streets with his oldest brother, stealing fruit from the local market to feed their little sisters when their parents couldn’t provide enough for the entire family. Around the time of the hungry 40s, when England experienced famine, Cassius lost his mother and three sisters to sickness. After losing them, he began working hard through the start of the industrial revolution in various factories to get by and provide for his family the best he could. In 1843, however, he decided to move to America, a land that was said to be full of opportunity. 

It was in New York that he found his passion for writing. It was a club of individuals who shared their poetry where he found himself, for the first time, writing poetry about his family that he left behind, that he lost. It was a man that went by Richard that truly captured his interest, growing close enough that they moved in together. His roommate was strange, but he never really paid it any mind. He worked the night shift at the sanitarium, never going outside during the day, even drawing the curtains when the sun shone too brightly. Richard saved him years later when Cassius contracted Tuberculosis, or “consumption” as they called it then. Refusing to let his friend enter the same place he worked, Richard revealed himself to be a vampire, turning Cassius before the consumption took him as it took so many others during that time. It took decades of learning from Richard about how to control his thirst and conceal himself from humans. At this time, the two became inseparable. They moved around the country when they stayed in place for too long, keeping to the same jobs they had in New York—Richard, a nurse, and Cassius, a high school teacher.

In 1980, the charade finally ended. Richard told Cassius it was time for him to live independently and find his own path. Crushed, the younger vampire moved back to New York, continuing the act on his own. It was in the 80s that he found the goth scene, the appreciation for the macabre in music and writing being something he was instantly drawn to. As the years went on, the more he dove into the lifestyle, going to goth clubs and losing himself in the music scene. When the vampire craze in the 2010s happened, it was almost too perfect. A man dressed all in black listening to gothic music and reading vampire novels was almost too cliche, and he realized it. He blended right in, almost too cliched for anyone to suspect that he was the real deal. It was in 2015 he moved for the millionth time, this time to a coastal town in Maine, taking up the mantle of history teacher once again, looking for the man that turned him.

Character Facts:

Personality: Intelligent, arrogant, charming, loner, calculating, artistic

In his free time, Cassius writes poetry and is often found around town writing in his journal.

His favorite grading spot is the local coffee shop, often covered in a jacket and hat, even in warm weather.