#on that; on the material itself. and how to argue and back up our points

[inkykeiji]

No fr, I saw Hazbin fans on TT who ACTUALLY THOUGHT Alastor's last name was "Altruist". Like. They didn't comprehend it was a word he was mockingly attaching to his name after his performance in the finale.

oh my good god. once again i say, the media literacy (and possibly literacy, period) is buried beneath the ground like...that’s actually concerning. unless they were young teenagers who just didn’t know what the word meant,, tho idk if young teenagers should necessarily be watching hazbin but that’s a different conversation for a different time.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Reality-Based Communities

I'm on a 20+ city book tour for my new novel PICKS AND SHOVELS. Catch me in CHICAGO with PETER SAGAL next WEDNESDAY (Apr 2), and in BLOOMINGTON next FRIDAY (Apr 4). More tour dates here.

Remember the Global War on Terror? I know, it's been a minute. But there was a time when we were all meant to take terrorism – real terrorism, the knocking-down-buildings kind, not the being-mean-to-Teslas kind – seriously.

Back in the early oughts, I remember picking up a copy of the Financial Times in an airport lounge and flipping through it, and coming across an "advice to corporate management" column in which the question was, "Should I take out terrorism insurance for my business?" The columnist's answer: "The actual risk to your business of a terrorism-related disruption rounds to zero. However: a) your shareholders don't understand this, an b) your insurance company does. That means that you can buy a very large amount of terrorism insurance for a very small amount of money, making this a cheap price to pay to mollify your easily frightened investors."

I never forgot that little piece of writing. It was a powerful reminder that successful large-scale enterprises must attend to the world as it is, not as ideology dictates that it should be. This was – and is – a deeply heterodox position among the ideological defenders of capitalism, who continue to uphold Milton Friedman's maxim that:

Truly important and significant hypotheses will be found to have "assumptions" that are wildly inaccurate descriptive representations of reality, and, in general, the more significant the theory, the more unrealistic the assumptions (in this sense)

https://pluralistic.net/2025/02/17/caliper-ai/#racism-machine

These ideologues – who often cross over from boardrooms into governments – are with the GW Bush official who dismissed a journalist as a member of the "reality-based community":

When we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors…and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reality-based_community

But ultimately, someone has to make investments and plans that take accord of the world as it is, the adversaries they face, the real and material emergencies unfolding around them. When the Pentagon announces that henceforth the climate emergency will take a prime place in its threat assessments and budgets, that's not "the military going woke" – it's the military joining the reality-based community:

https://www.defensenews.com/opinion/commentary/2021/10/26/the-pentagon-has-to-include-climate-risk-in-all-of-its-plans-and-budgets/

This explains the radical shear between the Wall Street Journal's editorial page – in which you'll learn that governments can't solve any problems and markets solve all problems (including the problem of governments) – and the news reporting within, in which the critical role of the state in regulating and fueling markets is acknowledged.

The tension between the right's ideologues in boardrooms and governments and the operational people in charge of keeping the machines running has only escalated since the War on Terror days. There's an important sense in which leftists – as materialists – are playing the same game as these operational managers of capitalism. Take Thomas Piketty, the socialist economist whose blockbuster 2013 book Capital in the 21st Century argued that rising inequality threatened capitalism itself:

https://memex.craphound.com/2014/06/24/thomas-pikettys-capital-in-the-21st-century/

By analyzing three centuries' worth of capital flows, Piketty showed that when inequality reached a certain tipping point, the result was societal upheaval that continued until so much capital had been destroyed that inequality was reduced (because everyone had been pauperized). Piketty appealed to capitalism's technocrats to institute redistributive programs. His point was that building hospitals and schools was ultimately cheaper than paying for the guard-labor you'd need to keep people from building guillotines outside the gates of your walled estate.

The rise and rise of surveillance tech, and its successors, such as lethal drones and offshore gulags, can be seen as a tacit acknowledgment of Piketty's thesis. By lowering the cost of guard labor, it might possible to stabilize a society with higher levels of inequality, by identifying and neutralizing the people who are radicalized by the system's unfairness before you get an outbreak of guillotines:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/08/13/better-to-have-loved/#less-lethals

But reality is stubborn. Capitalism's defenders can insist that society will continue to function while wages stagnate and greedflation stokes the cost of living crisis, but ultimately, the military can't afford to have a fighting force that's in hock to payday lender usurers who are tormenting their families with arm-breaker collection calls:

https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2025/03/payday-loan-apps-cost-new-yorkers-500-million-plus-new-study-estimates.html

As Stein's Law – a bedrock of finance – has it, "anything that can't go on forever eventually stops." The ideologues of capitalism can insist that Luigi Mangione is a monster and an aberration, an armed freeloader who wants something for nothing. But privately, their own security forces are telling them otherwise.

Writing for The American Prospect, Daniel Boguslaw reports on a leaked intelligence dossier from the Connecticut regional intelligence center – a "fusion center" created as part of the War on Terror – wherein we learn that the American people sees Mangione as a modern Robin Hood:

https://prospect.org/justice/2025-03-27-intelligence-dossier-compares-luigi-mangione-robin-hood/

Many view Thompson as a symbolic representation of both as reports of insurance companies denying life sustaining medication coverage circulate online. It is not an unfair comparison to equate the current reaction toward Mangione to the reactions to Robin Hood, citizens may see Mangione’s alleged actions as an attack against a system designed to work against them.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1hM3IZbnzk_cMk7evX2Urnwh5zxhRHpD5/view

The Connecticut fusion center isn't the only part of capitalism's operational wing that's taking notice of this. Today, Ken Klippenstein reports on an FBI threat assessment about the "heightened threat to CEOs":

https://www.kenklippenstein.com/p/fbi-becomes-rent-a-cops-for-ceos

The report comes from the FBI's counter-terrorism wing, which (Klippenstein notes) is in the business of rooting out "pre-crime" – identifying people who haven't committed a crime and neutralizing them. As Klippenstein writes, Trump AG Pam Bondi and FBI Director Kash Patel have both vowed to treat anti-Tesla protests as acts of terror. That's the view from the top, but back on the front lines of the Connecticut fusion center, things are more reality-based:

[The public] may view the ensuing manhunt and subsequent arrest of Mangione as NYPD, and largely policing as a whole, as a tool that is willing to expend massive resources to protect the wealthy, while the average citizen is left to their own means for personal security.

Any good investor knows that anything that can't go on forever eventually stops. The only question is: will that halt is a controlled braking action, or a collision with reality's brick wall?

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/2025/03/27/use-your-mentality/#face-up-to-reality

Image: Lee Haywood (modified) https://www.flickr.com/photos/leehaywood/4659575229/

CC BY-SA 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/

[utilitycaster]

I can't find the tags where someone said this so apologies for not crediting but they were to the effect of "EXU Divergence is very good and we don't need to compare it to Campaign 3 to point that out" and the thing is, I agree. Speaking only for myself I think my intent is, admittedly, to some extent less about pointing out how good EXU Divergence is and rather using the contrast to back up the point that Bells Hells were often self-absorbed, utterly uninterested and even scornful of any meaningful collective action until maybe the epilogues, and indecisive in a way that felt as though it should have been lethal but somehow wasn't; and that a story where every choice has a terrible clarity and potentially dire consequences is instantly compelling whereas no amount of screen time can save a story where this isn't true.

But also: I think, as many have, and EXU Divergence underscores this, that the attitude the PCs had towards the gods in Campaign 3 not only fails to be backed up by C3 itself but also fails to be backed up literally anywhere else. It's not a subversion; it's an aberration. The ending of Campaign 3 and the beginning of Divergence serve as fairly obvious parallels; the gods becoming mortal and unable to speak to followers (who, in the case of clerics, do still have all their powers, as we see with Lieve'tel and Deanna) vs. the gods departing the material plane. We see how this does not end the fight between Prime and Betrayer nor does it stop their followers from trying to take over (and indeed, we know that the lower Rifenmist peninsula does still ultimately fall, in the long term, to the Strife Emperor loyalist Iron Authority). We also see very directly what faith means to people who cannot under any circumstances be defined as the privileged few; for all I have no taste for trauma Olympics, it is difficult to look at Garen, under tyranny and forced labor for a century, powerless but for a hammer and sheer force of will, express a sense of hope and faith and argue that Bells Hells are simply following the logical path of someone who has suffered. We see the gods expressly state that mortals must care for each other, something which Deanna echoes in one of the strongest scenes in the Campaign 3 finale. We see a gift given without expectation of devotion nor worship nor even understanding, just in gratitude of someone fulfilling a tenet to its utmost. Which is refreshing after a campaign where multiple characters resented gods simply for not favoring them, without ever putting in effort towards this relationship.

I've seen the phrase "in a vacuum" pop up a few times in terms of defense of Campaign 3 in terms of "in a vacuum, I am happy with it", and while I happen to think it fails on many levels even within that airless confine, the fact is, this all is unavoidably part of one canonical overarching narrative. To look at how the gods are portrayed in every single other work - yes, even Downfall, and frankly, even Campaign 3 itself - and to come to the conclusion that Bells Hells acted with the desire for a better and more just world, and not simply a world that favored them more, is, frankly, to ignore every word that did not come from the lips of three or four ignorant people over the course of a decades-long story.

EXU Divergence is very good. I think it would be very good even if it were not coming out during our current political situation, or if it had come out following a radically different and better-executed Campaign 3; that is to say, it would succeed in a vacuum. But I don't think that's a valuable way to assess fictional works, and I think it's a disservice not to consider the canonical Exandria-set Critical Role works in conversation with each other. You can praise Divergence on its own terms, and indeed, you should, but it helps to show specifically how it succeeds (in terms of consequence, in terms of characterization, in terms of worldbuilding consistency) by pointing to how something else has failed.

[hangesbestgirl]

ᴘᴀꜱꜱɪᴏɴ ʟᴇꜱꜱᴏɴꜱ

ᴛᴇᴀᴄʜᴇʀ ᴀꜱꜱɪꜱᴛᴀɴᴛ ʜᴀɴɢᴇ x ꜱᴛᴜᴅᴇɴᴛ ʀᴇᴀᴅᴇʀ

cw: cursing, alot of arguing, angry sex, make our session, hange being a munch (ofc), reader receiving, kinda public sex.

a/n: i had way too much fun doing this and it is rushed and not edited but its content (practicing smut pls spare me) <3

ᴍɪɴᴏʀꜱ & ᴍᴇɴ ᴅɴɪ (18+)

˚⟡. ˚⟡. ˚⟡.

College was always something you looked forward to when it came to the amount of stories you heard from your family or even friends who were slightly older than you. The amount of parties you would be going to, drinking, smoking, everything was included in this package that was labelled college.

It wasn’t true in the slightest.

You found that out as fast as possible, while you were out partying with Jean and Sasha, drinking as much as your body could take so you could get the same experience that everyone bragged about. The constant texts you would get from them begging you to skip your lectures which you did the majority of the time.

It never made a difference. You still attended the labs with perfect attendance, the lectures were just too exhausting to sit through, you’d rather be smoking or hanging out with your friends when the notes and material was online.

It didn’t until your third year.

With the stupidest lab and the stupidest TA.

Hange Zoe was assigned as your primary teacher’s assistant for your Biochemistry lab and sometimes the lecture, the same lecture you would skip to enjoy yourself a little more.

You both couldn’t stand each other.

They were the pure definition of looks are deceiving.

And from the first day, you both were at each other’s throats. Every lab was an argument, every lab resulted in some email complaining just to be denied your claims, every lab resulted in an unfair grade that you always contested and it eventually figured itself out.

You felt like they did it to get a rise out of you at this point.

They were the worst person in the world for you. The very person that made you question your major multiple times because of how harsh they were against you when it came to them being in charge of your lab.

“What the fuck is this, Hange?!” You screamed at them while slamming the very paper that they put a red zero on the front of it, on their desk while they were grading others. They didn’t have a reaction to it, they just stared up at you like you were stupid or something.

They set their pen down and let out a sigh of annoyance while they peered over at the paper, you could’ve sworn that for one minute, a small smile appeared on their face before they wiped it away completely turning their attention back to you.

“Do you need help reading the grade or something? Maybe need it a little bigger?” Hange snatched your paper up, opening the drawer in their desk to pull out a thick red marker to put the biggest zero on the front page, holding it up to point at the very grade that angered you. “It says a zero, sweetheart.”

Their pet-names were so mocking.

They threw the paper back on their desk in front of you while you stared down at them in disbelief while they broke the gaze between you two to continue grading the papers in front of them, their own attempt to ignore your outburst.

“I know what it says, unless you give me some sort of explanation why it is that way I’m not leaving. I did everything you whined at me about.” The experiment itself was annoying and useless since it was just a simple case study, the analysis of carbohydrates which explaining it bored you enough.

They didn’t respond. They ignored you like they always did.

“What kind of TA are you? You can’t even grade lab reports correctly.” Just when they were about to pick up their pen to continue writing grades and explanations on the papers which were lacking on your they paused and stared up at you with a blank reaction.

One push of their glasses and they snatched the paper back up without a single word back or any argument.

You had some hope.

“Go.” They blankly said, setting your paper back in their stacks of papers.

You should’ve questioned them more.

˚⟡. ˚⟡. ˚⟡.

The pettiest teacher’s assistant you could have ever encountered ruined your life in an instant.

You were officially on academic probation.

Your eyes constantly scanning the email over and over again to make sure this wasn’t an illusion. You were so upset, so angry that you could hardly feel anything at the moment of reading it. To see the Dean’s name and attached was your midterm grades to express concern, all you could feel was your heart sinking and the fingers on your keyboard halting for a second.

“I’m going to fucking kill them.” You could feel yourself physically shaking at the sight of the email of your nightmares, the words were bolded in a red font and even worse, when you saw exactly what class caused the sudden surprise made your blood boil.

The Biochemistry Lab.

“How did you even manage that?”

Armin asked in a tone of disbelief while were trying to contain yourself from slamming your laptop and running over to the very lab you knew their office was in. He peered over your shoulder and you could tell he was rereading it over and over again like you were.

“How come you and Hange are always at each other’s throats when it comes to this lab?”

Great fucking question.

But he wasn’t helping, you could feel your hands start to shake more until you gave into the feeling and slammed your laptop shut, abruptly dragging your chair back and grabbing the remaining amount of your stuff to start racing over towards the lab. You couldn’t even think about explaining to anyone how you were feeling at the moment.

You were beyond frustrated with them and it got to the point where it felt purposeful. The closer you got the lab, the more the anger started to grow and all you wanted to do was wipe their stupid smile they always had on their face and somehow destroy the ego they always seemed to have around you.

The door was right in front of you, you didn’t waste any time to grab the doorknob. The door creaked loudly as a result catching their attention but also the attention of the two students standing right in front of them with papers in their hands.

The two students in front of them were thankfully your friends, Jean and Connie. But when they saw you burst into the room with your stuff practically falling out of your hands, they gave a look of concern before looking back over at Hange who also had an annoyed look on their face from your entrance.

“Great, the trio is complete now. Y/N, I don’t have time for your concerns. Come back later, I am helping other students right now.” They held their hand up to wave you off while they were writing on the papers you were assuming were Jean and Connie’s. But you didn’t want to get sent off that easily and started walking towards their desk.

“Hey Y/N, maybe-“

Connie started but Jean quickly elbowed his arm to get him to stop him from stopping your outrage.

“You fucking failed me? What is going on in your mind that you think that was okay? An email before you decided to submit the grades would’ve been much appreciated.”

You peered down at what they were writing, it was the exact same lab that you got a zero on and when Hange circled the numbers one hundred in red and when you saw it was Connie and Jean’s name, the same people you worked with on the same experiment, you wanted to blow up.

They set their pen down, reaching up towards their face to pull off their glasses to start rubbing the bridge of their nose to show their annoyance. They slid their glasses back on and stared up at you with disbelief and annoyance all in one.

“Do you ever stop complaining?” They spat towards you. You could see and feel Jean and Connie shift a little from the sudden argument forming between you.

“Not when my TA is purposely giving me horrible grades for no reason with no explanation on either of my reports.” You spat back, getting closer to their desk to look down at them with pure disgust.

They looked up at you for a second, studying your reaction and the way your eyebrows furrowed in annoyance before the same smile you hated the most started to form on their face. A small laugh of disbelief escaped their lips before they spoke again.

“No explanations? Maybe if you would come to the lectures then you would know what is expected of this lab work.”

And there it was, the reason that they were probably purposely failing you or being strict on your work no matter if it was the same as your partners or not.

“This is what this is about? Me not going to the lectures where you bore me to death?”

You watched their eyebrows furrow, a small laugh if disbelief slipping out of their lips They pushed their chair back and slowly started to make their way out of the chair, setting both of their hands on too of their desk as they leaned over to respond to your sourness with something equivalent.

“Or maybe, you aren’t as smart as you think you are, sweetheart.”

You were baffled on what they were saying but how close they got to your face enough for you to move back slightly. Just them being this close caused you to get a hint of their cologne along with the cigarettes they probably smoked before hand.

And you didn’t mind it.

“You are unbelievable and a complete asshole, Hange.”

You turned your head to get the reactions of your friends but when you didn’t see them and heard the door shut behind you, you felt helpless. You felt crazy when it came to being in the presence of this egotistical asshole.

“What? Can’t form your own opinion without your party friends?” They let out another small laugh.

Hange started to move away from your proximity to gather the papers they had already sitting on their desk, you watched them pull one out which had the signature zero they drew on the front just to piss you off more you assumed.

“Leave.” They tossed the paper towards you direction causing it to fall on the floor in front of you.

“Fuck you, do you get off on this or something?”

“And if I do?”

You took a step back to start putting you laptop in your bag to gather yourself somehow while trying to thing of every email you could write to get Hange fired and even better, away from you.

“A little advice, learn how to shut your pretty mouth. Maybe your looks would shine that way.”

“Excuse me?” You scoffed

One thing you hated the most was there was nothing negative you could say about their looks, their attitude ruined it but they were an attractive person. Even though their nicknames were mocking and they way they would subtly call you pretty, it did kind of get to you because of how attractive they were.

So the only resort you had when they called you pretty for the last time was to point it out.

“Is that what this is? You find me attractive and rather than admitting it you go out of your way to torture me in this lab?”

For once, you saw Hange panic and turn their face away from your view as they started to gather the remaining amount of their stuff to try to leave.

“Don’t flatter yourself.”

Once they took a step away from their desk to walk around it and past you, you grabbed their arm which caused them to look down at you like you were crazy.

“Then say it. Say I’m not attractive.”

They paused, setting their stuff down on one of the lab tables next to them. The first thing they did was grab ahold of the hand that was on their arm to pull it off of them, the second thing was they leaned down to get slightly close to your face while the grip on your hand tightened.

You thought you would be disgusted, repulsed by the interaction. But when you caught yourself looking down at their lips when they spoke, you were fucked.

“You are attractive, you ruin it with your attitude.”

It felt like you both were in this position for the longest time, you could feel their grip start to loosen on your hand and all you could do was analyze their face, once you caught their eyes flickering between your lips and your gaze.

It was obvious.

“What are you trying to do?” You asked in a low tone while keeping an eye on where their eyes were going, you wanted to see if they wanted this too.

“I should ask you the same thing, Y/N.”

They said your name with no mocking tone.

You didn’t know what you wanted to do but when you kept looking at their lips you couldn’t wipe away the thought of kissing them. But you tried to get your mind to think about leaving, leaving and just forgetting about the lab. Dropping the class, anything.

When they finally released your hand fully from their grip, you had your chance to leave. But you were stuck like your legs weren’t going to allow you to leave, maybe you wanted to get one last word in.

“Fuck you, Hange.”

They slowly started to move themselves so that they were in front of you. You didn’t allow yourself to lose their gaze for a second until they started to get closer than they have been before, their nose was practically brushing against yours and you could feel their hand start to slowly creep up against your waist.

“Fuck you too, Y/N.”

The moment their lips hit yours, it was filled with a certain need and desperation. Your hands had a mind of their own when they started becoming tangled in the back of their hair while the other rested on the collar of their lab coat to keep them close just in case they regretted starting it.

You could feel their smile forming against your lips while their hands trailed over towards your waist, hooking one of their fingers onto your belt loop to tug you close enough so that there was no space between the two of you.

You were melting in their touch, in the feeling of their soft and desperate lips.

A small sound behind you caused you to break away from the kiss for a second but Hange didn’t have the same worry as you as their kisses continued next to your lips before starting to trail down your neck which caused you shiver at the feeling of their lips.

Once you saw two shadows outside of the door facing the other way, you realized that Connie and Jean were waiting for you to come out.

“Hange..”

You tried to get their attention and tried to keep yourself aware of what and who was outside but when they continue kissing around certain parts of you neck, it felt like you becoming drunk with desire. You could feel them trying to push you in a certain direction so you slowly started to step back.

The kisses, the sucking, there were even some bites against your neck and it all felt too good.

With one sudden movement, Hange grabbed under your thighs to lift you up and set you up on one of the lab tables which allowed you to snap out of the feeling earlier and bring your attention back over towards the door.

“They are still here.” You tried to tell them.

But the feeling was back as soon as their lips landed on yours, the series of desperate kisses continuing as the feeling of their hands on your thighs slowly started to travel towards your shirt. Button after button, the more your chest started to pour out.

They broke away from the kiss for a second, they didn’t even bother to look you in the eye. Instead their attention was more on the lace bra you decided to wear as they finished unbuttoning your shirt completely.

“You think that’s going to stop me? They can watch for all I care.”

Their tone was different.

You allowed one of your hands to trail over towards their face as you leaned in this time for the kiss that you were already craving not even a minute after they just kissed you.

You didn’t care at this point.

You live once.

The heated kiss continued, the longer it was the more desperate and hungry it was. Hange’s hands were immediately coming down to start unbuttoning your pants in the sloppiest way possible while you were bringing both of your hands down to slid their lab coat off of their shoulders.

It was messy, they pulled their hands away quickly to allow the coat slide off their arms while you lifted yourself up to allow your pants to fall down below you. The two of you were smiling in between the kiss that never broke, the sound of your heavy breathing filling the area between you.

Their rough hands hit your bare thigh and you couldn’t help but let out a satisfied moan against their lips. You let one of your hands escape form their body and immediately latched onto the end of the lab table to keep yourself stable as the melting feeling started to come back the higher Hange’s hand go towards your inner thigh.

Two of their fingers started to trace small shapes along your inner thigh to try to get you to open and you did with no complaint. You wanted this more than anything, you needed this for yourself.

After the kiss that felt like forever finally broke, your heavy breaths escaped your mouth while Hange started to press their lips against the skin on your neck again. But instead of what they did earlier, the kisses started to get lower and lower.

“Please, hurry..” You wanted them now, for the sake of not getting caught but also how impatient you were becoming from the amount of foreplay that has been going on.

Once you said those words, the feeling of their fingers trailing against your inner thigh suddenly disappeared which caused you to look down at them in confusion before the feeling switched over towards the very heat that has been growing ever since this whole interaction started.

You could feel a chill come up on your spine when the very two fingers started moving in the very spot that you have been craving someone to find for so long. You couldn’t hold in your breathy moans and even worse, you could feel the grip you once had on the table start to loosen enough that you abruptly moved it behind you for support.

The sounds you made caused Hange’s smile to grow and you could tell by feelings against your chest and the very spots they were kissing down towards the very area where their fingers were. Once their lips were absent from your chest and your abdomen, it caused you to look down at them as they started to take off their glasses.

“What are you doing?” You struggled to say in between the motions.

One push.

And you were on the lab table completely on your back and without any view of what Hange was trying to do until you felt a sudden breeze of cold air hitting you which caused you to slightly sit up to see that your panties were gone and in between their fingers.

“Maybe say something.” You spat.

They just glared over at you.

“Maybe take my advice and shut up. Don’t act like you won’t enjoy this.”

They tossed their glasses on the side of the table, their rough hands coming back to your thigh as they started to kneel down in front of you which caused you to let out a small scoff of disbelief.

They gave you an annoyed look after you scoffed.

The TA.

The egotistical TA was down on your knees in front of you.

The heat of their breath started to become apparent against the skin of your inner thigh and their lips finally connected to start slowly kissing down and the closer they got, the hotter you would feel.

“I didn’t take you for someone who was so willing to get on their knees.” You teased.

They didn’t respond like you wanted them to, the kissing continued and you watched one of their hands drag over towards the source of the heat from earlier, their finger slightly swiping across the sensitive spot before they spoke.

“I didn’t take you for someone who would be so easy to put in this position. It was not a challenge to get you to spread your legs either.” You rolled your eyes at their response but they weren’t wrong gin the slightest.

Before you could even respond, the sudden overwhelming pleasure and the warmth against your clit caused you to immediately lean your head back. The moans were escaping your mouth and your mind was spiraling as Hange’s tongue started doing wonders against you.

You didn’t care about volume.

You didn’t care up until you felt Hange’s hand cover your mouth to muffle your moans. They didn’t have to tell you, but when their hand push against your mouth to muffle you out more, you imagined them cursing at you to be quiet.

“Fuck..” You managed to get out between their fingers, you could feel them practically melting into you by the way their hand started to relax against your mouth.

There was no time, you could feel some parts in your stomach start to tighten and the first thing you did was grab the back of Hange’s head to practically push them in deeper, your hips moving on their own. Your mind was somewhere else that you didn’t even realize that you were suffocating Hange until the tightening sudden loosened.

It felt like you were brand new.

You loosened your grip on Hange’s hair causing them to slowly pull back, the sound of their breaths becoming apparent. You didn’t bother to look over at them until they finally got up and off of their knees to grab ahold of your face, forcing you to look over at them.

“That was fast. Was I really that good?” Their ego was back in an instant and the smile you hated so much returned but for once, you weren’t even bothered by it. But their timing did annoy you slightly.

You ripped your face away from their hand, a laugh came out of their mouth. But once you fully got a look of them, they looked relieved and even worse, they seem cockier than before.

“Fuck you.” You managed to get out while trying to catch your breath and process the whole interaction.

A new look for Hange, a hungry one.

“Is that you asking to go again? I wasn’t done with you, anyway.”

˚⟡. ˚⟡. ˚⟡.

[sunflowersandscreams]

re: that post I just reblogged. adansey being gagged by the red string of fate

"And another thing," Gansey says, waving his hands in front of his face, fingers spread wide to communicate his sheer and genuine alarm. "It is frighteningly common how often people will just- read things off the internet! And believe them! I mean, have people never heard of cross-referencing? Or common sense? If I have to hear someone say 'isn't Wales a city in England' one more time I'm going to do something- indecent, I swear-"

"I would pay to see Gansey do something indecent," Ronan mutters, head resting on his hand propped up by his elbow.

Adam doesn't say anything. He likes listening to Gansey's voice, even as the words get repetitive and he goes down the trail of one of his frequent rants. The illiteracy and lack of responsible reading of some of his Aglionby peers is a common frustration, one that comes up in history when Gansey argues with some idiot about historical truth or accuracy, and one that comes up when they talk about Owain Glyndŵr.

Ronan swears that Gansey must be half in love with him, that he must have another red thread tying him to some decrepit body somewhere, but if he does Adam hasn't seen it- though he supposes he wouldn't. He can only see the strings tying him to Gansey, as Ronan can only see the strings tying him to whoever is unlucky enough to be his fated partner.

"Indecency!" Gansey latches onto the word like a madman sticking pins in a corkboard. Adam wonders if their string of fate is strong enough to use as red yarn to wind around their complicated conspiracy board or if it would shimmer and go opaque, like it does when there's an obstacle in between them. "That's their problem- there are no decent men left in the world, and none even close to decent in our school-"

Ronan sighs and gets up, Gansey slightly too distracted with his raving lunatic rambling to notice. "Shout when he runs out of steam." He slouches off to his room and shuts the door.

Gansey's head jerks up. "Where did Ronan go?"

"His room," Adam says. He tracks the way Gansey's brows furrow and his lip purse together in displeasure. It's poised and proper, yet a little petty, petulant, even.

"Speaking of no decency," Gansey says darkly. He has an affinity for dramatics, Adam thinks, fond if mildly irritated as Gansey starts talking senselessly and relentlessly again. At this point he's just talking for the sake of talking, which is not something Adam partakes in. He prefers to use his words wisely.

There's a thump from Ronan's room and muffled, frenetic music. Adam stares down at the calculus equations he's trying to do, the numbers refusing to make sense with Gansey's ceaseless words making Adam's brain fuzz.

He bites his tongue. He'll have to do something about this.

Adam starts gathering up their string. It's short because they're close by right now, but it lengthens as Adam lays it over itself to make a thick band of ephemeral, bright red material, unworldly and just on the normal side of magical. When he has a hunk of string that suits him, he stands.

"Adam, what on earth are you doing?" Gansey asks, staring at his hands. "I didn’t even know one could do that."

"I am occasionally an innovator," Adam says articulately, coming to stand directly in front of Gansey.

"Of course you are," Gansey responds, not automatically but instantly. "Adam, you're one of the brightest- mmph."

Adam had gotten sick of Gansey's talking a while ago, but he especially has no patience for it now that it's about him. "Sometimes my innovations are even useful." He brings the thick gathering of string around Gansey's mouth, making sure it stays tightly between his lips, pressing down lightly on his tongue so that he can't speak. Adam ties a knot that he's not sure is real and might be mostly made of wishful thinking, then steps back around to see how his work is faring.

"A'tha," Gansey fumbles, still trying to talk through the gag. Adam can hear him breathing wetly. "Ahw?"

"Gansey," Adam says, and makes sure every word is precisely pronounced. "Shut up for a while, okay?"

Gansey huffs, unable to speak. He grabs onto Adam's shirt collar before Adam can pull away and settles for looking at him with his stupid, liquid brown eyes, those eyes that say so much without ever putting a sound to it. Those eyes that draw Adam in again and make him smooth a hand over Gansey's cheek reassuringly, that make him press his thumb to the delicate hollow behind his hear. The eyes that have always been a window to Gansey's soul, even when neither of them can say anything aloud.

Even without words, Adam can still tell what Gansey means.

[tavyliasin]

Fanfiction and Profit

Hello loves~ I’ve seen this pop up now and then, about fanfiction and commissions, profit and whether we can pay someone to write the fic we want to read. Unfortunately, I have to be the bearer of bad news:

You absolutely, unequivocally, cannot and should not pay or be paid for fanfiction.

Why not? Well, let’s go over this topic with a look at what fan works are, how we can use them, and where these rules came from.

Why can’t we profit from our hard work? Is this fair?

There are a lot of reasons, and I want to start off with saying this is not about whether it is fair or right, it is a simple statement of the rules by which our hobby, our passion, is permitted to live and thrive. The law does not consider fanfiction to be transformative enough to be legal to profit from, and you will find that AO3 itself explicitly does not allow payment, commissions, or any direct payment sites to be linked on the platform.

I’ll say that one again - it is fully against AO3’s Terms and Conditions to advertise any paid work on the website. You will be warned by moderators if you’re found doing this, and may risk entirely losing your account.

It’s essentially legally complex. The only reason we are allowed to write and share fanfiction at all is because it is non profit. We can’t be sued for making money from someone else’s intellectual properties if we’re not making any money from it.

Why are fan art, songs, and other mediums allowed to profit when we can’t?

This is another piece of nuance for you, which not everyone will agree with. Art is considered to be more transformative, and is generally viewed differently as a medium.

But I will also say here we can look at it purely from a business angle, the legal side that the IP rights holder will be viewing it from too: Fan art can often attract people in to a fandom, to find out who this interesting character is or what the source of the art was. It adds profit to the original creator by bringing new fans to the table.

Fanfiction, on the other hand, is almost exclusively read by people who have already consumed the original media and are looking for new stories. I would argue it is exceptionally rare for someone to read fic before they’ve engaged with the source material. Fic often relies on the reader knowing the characters and stories already, so we can shorthand the exposition and everyone understands what’s going on and why.

When did this become the rule?

The “Elders” of fanfiction will give you a thousand yard stare with this one, because it largely comes back to JRR Tolkien’s estate and Anne Rice. Both were very unhappy with fanfiction existing at all, and are the reason why you might well still see disclaimers at the top of some fics mentioning that all characters, worlds, etc belong to the original rights holders and the work is one of fanfiction that the author does not profit from in any way. Tolkien’s estate and Anne Rice both set legal challenges against fanfic writers, threatening the entire hobby and setting legal precedents at the end of it for what we can and cannot do. What we can do? Write transformative works, based on existing IPs, and share them for free with no profit or money exchanged at any point.

But what about exchanges?

You can offer to exchange fic for fic, or swap art and fanfic. This isn’t getting paid because you aren’t profiting from it, but if you want to encourage someone and be encouraged in return, that is a potential way to do it. So an artist might draw a scene, character or pairing that you love, whilst you write a fic for them. It’s swapping a gift for a gift in that way, and although you could assign monetary value to commissioned art, you aren’t actually exchanging money. It might seem like a bit of a loophole, but it is one that rights holders shouldn’t be able to be upset by really. I can’t see myself how a legal challenge could be raised for damages on that basis, so it should be safe. If you’re not an artist yourself but do want to see something specific from a writer, you could offer to commission art on their behalf in exchange for the fic. It’s imperfect, but in the end you’re supporting both an artist and a writer in that exchange, even if the writer is only gaining a product instead of money, as long as they're not selling it on again.

What if I want to commission someone to write something I want to read?

Well, unfortunately, if you want them to write fanfiction, that’s not possible. You may find some writers are willing to take on prompts, though! Tumblr can be a good one for that, as writers sometimes specify that their ask boxes are open for fic prompts that they might consider writing. You can also try approaching a writer who has written in a style you like and as if they would be willing to write a piece based on your idea or pairing, though you should double check what pairings and topics they’re comfortable writing first.

Isn’t there anything I can do with my writing skills?

Plenty of things! You can use fanfiction as a way to warm up into writing skills in general. Get some practice, feedback, and validation to know you’re on the right track. It’s a wonderful low pressure way to get a feel for fiction writing in general and work out what kinds of stories you’d like to tell.

In some cases, you might be able to take a fanfic you have written and rewrite it to become something original - this might need a lot of work in changing enough names and details for it to become removed from the IP that it was initially based on, but this is certainly something people have done in the past. Most famously, 50 Shades of Grey (my opinions of which are astronomically low for so many reasons, but this is not the place for those) began life as a Twilight fanfiction. 

Writing original fiction will always have its own unique challenges, and is a different experience to fic. For one thing, you need to establish your setting and characters because your readers don’t know them yet. Another that many find tough is going through the writing process without any feedback from beta readers or getting kudos from published chapters. Then, of course, publishing is its own beast… But if you want to profit from writing, then you need to either have a paid role as a writer on a specific IP project, or you need to write your own works and look at getting them published (the main 3 options would be self pub, indie publishers, or trad pub - they all have their pros and cons for different things, so it’s something to do proper research on before committing to any one path).

I found someone offering paid fic, what should I do?

I recommend gently warning them. Not everyone is aware of the risks, so giving them a kind heads up is probably the best bet. You can even direct them to this post if you like, to save re-explaining it all. If they don’t listen, then unfortunately you may need to report their account to AO3 so the moderators there can give them a more formal warning that might be taken more seriously. I have no doubt that the AO3 mods will be able to explain it more clearly and concisely than I can, too.

I have taken payment for fic in the past, what should I do?

First, I'm not here to blame you. Not everyone knows the rules or history - that's why I'm here to share the explanation for anyone who didn't know~ But what you need to do now is immediately stop any offers to take commissions for fanfiction. Scrub your AO3 of any links to payment sites, and remove any reference to "commission" or "paid work" in your writing wherever it is shared. Clean everything up so you are safe from any legal repercussions, and you may need to refund any incomplete commissions. Take a look at the other ways you might be able to earn from your writing, or options for exchanges you might be happy with for writing something bespoke for someone else. We can't change what has already been done, but we can move forward when we know better so we can do better.

Conclusion? Where are we with fic and profit?

The bottom line is the same as the top - for the safety of our fandom communities, we must never accept or offer payment for fanfiction. Doing so not only risks the individual author, but the entire community as a whole. We might not agree with it, and that’s not the conversation I’m here to have, but this is the way things are. It’s not something that can be changed, so we should respect the playground we are in and take care not to end up having the whole place torn down. Fanfic writing is a hobby, and one that brings us a whole lot of community, joy, creativity, and a way to extend the love of a franchise far beyond the ending of the canon content. We get to create and play with all kinds of toys in the toybox in whatever ways we like - that’s special, and I feel we should respect and protect that.

So, we’ll end it here - go, have fun writing, build your skills and style, find and delight your readers, just keep in mind everything that got us here and everything in the future that we want to preserve~

[hearsayhorizons]

Holism’s introduction and the confirmation that there are more ships/intelligences on ART’s level with their own idiosyncrasies and quirks has a real possibility of opening up that coven/school house fertile field of fanfiction that makes people grab other series and hold on tight (not that we weren’t doing that already with this one).

Perihelion’s secret function is in confirming lost colonies and providing initial response for the purposes of safeguarding “”assets”” from predation.

Based on its interactions (attempted interactions) with SecUnit, Holism’s function/special interest is to provide infrastructure after Perihilion’s crew has argued/forged their way into securing long-term protection for those people. 

Perihelion is a secret agent ship and befriended Murderbot, who watches thrillers and other media. Holism the infrastructure/”look at this neat thing!” ship is probably going to find a receptive contact in Three, who seems most comfortable with nonfiction and educational materials (some other good poster pointed out that Three’s interests are tied to its introduction to freedom and choice via Murderbot 2.0’s autobiographical files; I want to put a pin in that for later).

This establishes a thematic setup I want to play with. I was going to fiction this up, but I have weather-related migraines and it is WEATHER lately.

My contribution is [namepending]. Once you have safety, once you have infrastructure, you look at connections and community. And you know what would be a great way to jumpstart an ambassadorial program or knowledge exchange? A university where everyone is doing something new, going somewhere new, where you might have interactions that last a few years and still mean a lot to you later, OR they might help define how you choose to live forever—there’s no knowing, even in real life, how experiences as a young OR older person going to school will influence you.

Why does that student wear something no one else does? Why do those hand gestures stand out? That’s an unusual set of facial features. But no one, literally no one, is going to look at a batch of shaky college students and assume they’re all from a/a variety of colonies 40+ years out of contact with the wider world.

So yeah, I know ART is already the Magic School Bus with weaponized pathfinders, but I posit that our next/a great fanfiction point is... [pending], much more a school bus. Maybe ferrying back and forth between colonies to keep the info exchange open too, but I think the university would be SO useful to give colonists a knowledge base without overwhelming them or forcing them to assimilate into other cultures.

Now, I imagine that just like Amena has to do some learning modules before she can join the University, there’d be sims and modules for incoming students or people going between colonies. And just like System Collapse chapter 8, you hit them where it works—right in the media. So this [pending] has a huge collection of, and is interested in, games.

As a side note, part of me thinks a fully mechanical system like ART would be a bit better able to perceive/use games without a SecUnit filter than media; sure, there’s music and mechanics meant to emotionally motivate the player, but non-visual novels non-dating-sims (eg: “game games”) have goals, mechanisms, more hard input than media.

Remember my pin from earlier re: Three’s interest tied to its path to freedom? I posit a SecUnit (either one of the two freed at the end of System Collapse, or someone else if there’s...)

Actually, if I’m already spitballing fanfic bullshit and ComfortUnits presumably have resources for interacting on a more emotional basis with clients, the CU. I want that construct on [pending]. The odds of that happening are miniscule unless it was maybe at a wit’s end, didn’t know what to do with itself like other units after having its freedom foisted on it.

Yeah, so, it has access to surreptitious funds secured by Tllacey. Maybe IDs. It doesn't have weapons and I get the vibe that no one would be looking as hard for a rogue CU, so I don't imagine it's hacking or has to hack anything. Maybe it can't, since it isn't a security system.

But it IS probably meant to be fluent in current events, folklore, random shit random clients care about. Ergo the Ganaka pit bit.

It searches for SecUnit activity in the news. Oh, or maybe info on ART, maybe it picked something up during its last scene. Murderbot does have a whole aside in SC panicking about the news and what info about the kidnapping could mean for the University’s colony-saving scheme, but that doesn’t go anywhere given the timeframes. So, maybe there is something there, some way to pull the ComfortUnit back in.

It finds the University. It finds, or [pending] finds it, and [pending]’s whole schtick is orientating confused people. It introduces CU to some sims, some games, maye interactions in reality or through games with young people.

I posited in previous posts that SecUnit probably wouldn’t be super into games because the ability to passively exist alongside an atmosphere presented by a story or music is the appeal of its media; it is an actor DOING things during its day job. But CU has presumably been always acted-upon in its day job. So now it has a risk-free method to DO things. Maybe it prefers solo games, or it participates in group games where its identity as a CU comes up only as far as it is comfortable.

I’m sure my [pending] would be thrilled to have a contact/friend who can both communicate comfortably with newcomers while also relating really hard to them. Plus, I feel like the CU construct just sort of gets set loose and abandoned by Murderbot and the narrative. Sometimes those loose ends happen, but I kind of see a way we could work it back in now that we know there are more ships and they want filters/friends/units.

Now I just gotta find a name for [pending].

I do think I have the first few lines of the fic, though:

The shuttle came within range of the bigger ship annotated in the smart glass: Perihelion.

This is you. I transmitted an image of a young human and what the news broadcast identified as another human.

Oh, fuck off.

[talenlee]

Story Pile: Shoresy, Seasons 2-3

I keep having this relationship with the work of Jared Keeso where something in the greater work catches my attention and the curiosity eventually overwhelms me, pulling me back in. It’s how Letterkenny got me for five seasons of watching and then how I finally found myself rewatching, then watching the remaining seasons, of Shoresy, the hockey sports dramedy set in the Northern Ontario Senior Hockey Organisation, or NOSHO. Known as ‘Senior Whaleshit Hockey,’ as in, it’s stuff people care about enough to watch but not enough to really bother going and playing. Core to the story is this place people are, and this thing they love, and the challenges that follow where making it and caring about it aren’t really enough.

Content and Spoiler Warning: Shoresy is made up – at the moment – of three six-episode seasons, meaning there’s very little room for discussing any kind of status quo that isn’t a spoiler of some variety. Plus, to talk about the second and third season I necessarily have to mention the events of the first season. Also, content-wise, I’ll get more specific later, but a big part of how Shoresy tells jokes is to forward the way hockey players talk to one another, and while you and I may know full well you can make cut-down comedy that doesn’t involve misgendering jokes, or gay jokes, or fat jokes, that’s not how this show does it. There’s a lot of that.

The story Shoresy tells in season two is a tragic arc of what was once a team of complete losers being able to turn around, become a team of winners, and then the tension that comes from being able to attain a kind of perfection. The idea of the chance of a type of perfection, a type of approachable excellence, in the terms of a sporting team, is one of those things that sports lets you do. After all, nobody is perfect, nobody can be perfect, but it is possible for us to create, in the magic circle of a game, a situation in which the big complicated systems of our lives and our interactions with one another turn into something simple enough that we can point to (for example) a perfect game, a perfect season, a perfect record. The game gives us something impossible then lets us hold onto it, as long as we and other people all value that game.

If season two is about perfection and how you can make it attainable with games, season three is about the limits of that circle. It’s about the way that for all that the game is an illusion, a fiction made and maintained by lines on the ice and the lines on the ref’s shirt, and for all that the game itself does not claim to care about the world outside of its boundaries, there is absolutely a material limit to what people can do. Reality creeps in, the ways that injuries and age and financial concerns and real life stressors all can take a grip on our minds and bodies and shake us.

It’s really stirring stuff, with both comedy of the ridiculous – funny, rapid fire, extremely sarcastic people shooting at one another in awkward ways – and these long, well constructed montages that show sequences not of the glory of the win, but of the being in the spaces. In season 3, there’s even this combination of the two, where a comedy montage is split across multiple episodes before the explanation for what happened becomes the core of an entire episode, explaining hints that have been left on the show all throughout.

There’s a deep and loving care given to explaining hockey through showing it, and showing characters arguing about it. You don’t need to know everything about it, you don’t need to be able to explain the rules yourself, but the way the rules are explained by the way the story chooses to present information creates wonderful ways that hockey explains the story as the story explains hockey.

What I don’t love about Shoresy is so much of what it uses to tell its jokes. Fat jokes, your mom jokes, that whole family of insults. It’s a bummer, too, because of course, these are jokes that can be perfectly funny — there’s word play at work, there’s a reference field, but then the joke once it’s deployed, is about some woman who’s not even in the conversation. Or the joke is about the idea of men loving men. Or the joke is about a guy who is large but also very athletic, and therefore… what? There’s some inherent evil to being big and fat?

This is a bummer, because there are times the chirps are about what people do and what they say and those jokes in so many cases are really funny. Hell, the fat jokes and the your mom jokes and the gay jokes are also pretty funny, because the writers of this show are really good at making this specific kind of joke! Making those jokes, however, after the initial ‘hah hah, I can’t believe he said that’ or ‘oh that was well set up and resolved’ and all that, there’s the grubby feeling of yeah but what was the joke about?

What’s more, they’re insincere jokes! One of the recurrent ideas in the story is that once the game is over, once the hockey is done, all those jokes and the separation of the hockey teams and the rivalry is done too, it’s left on the ice and you become friends with the people you were, a few minutes ago, taunting and teasing. Which means it doesn’t matter but also, it still shows you what you were choosing to make jokes about. That cruelty becomes part of the game, but that cruelty, as with so many of those things, lingers outside the game.

It sucks! And there’s the added amplification of Shoresy’s adopted family, an invented multi-racial big mess of adopted foster kids, which means he has conversations with them that are just as mean, just as prone to poke at one another, but ‘done with love,’ and in that space, we get to hear how Shoresy, a very offline person who does not know about respectful ways to refer to people of non-obvious genders? And look, there’s ‘you don’t know the language to use here, so you’re saying things in a good spirit but in an uncomfortable way,’ and there’s ‘you’re making jokes at the expense of someone whose gender you were confused by, like you’re sharing an uncomfortable story.’

Where Shoresy is about hockey, it feels peerless. When it starts to examine the world outside of Hockey, when it talks about the way Shoresy the character talks about and interacts with the world, it cracks. Because part of the point of Hockey is that what happens in Hockey is Hockey. What happens outside of Hockey, that’s it, the Hockey’s over, so you don’t need to worry about it.

But where Huizinga tells you there’s a magic circle and Caillois says the game has to be isolated from the real world, CLR James will tell you that those are all fictions held to by people who want the ability to draw lines around things in the world, to be able to say that here and now these things don’t count. It presents itself as a scrabbling love letter to the people with nothing making something out of lines on the ice, and never wants to consider that it’s still coming from the kind of position that can attack people for their weight, their gender, their race and their orientations.

Enjoyed the show, but it comes with a big, asterisk. Some of what Shoresy is doing is different because it’s from a very different cultural space than me; some of it is different because it’s doing asshole stuff. And it’s a shame it can’t find a way to do its cutdowns and its jokes and its teasing without going to the same, basic, weak space.

Check it out on PRESS.exe to see it with images and links!

[invinciblerodent]

The PC, lying on their back by the campfire and staring up at the stars: Souls existing separately from physical bodies, and people being able to be resurrected or reborn implies that the material body, and other, immaterial substances that make up a person, also exist separately. That would mean that Cartesian dualism is pretty much the accepted truth of our particular plane of existence. But, that sort of leaves me to question whether calling the illithid mind-flayers is correct nomenclature, I mean... they primarily consume brain tissue: that's a part of the material body, rather than strictly the mind, which would be an immaterial substance. Physically ingesting something immaterial, and using it to generate calories that sustain their real, living bodies, that would require for their digestive tracts to generate matter from nothing, which is... a pretty profound violation of the laws of physics. Although that kind of doesn't matter, I guess, since magic also exists on our plane, and that alone already violates the laws of physics. Unless I guess we consider the Weave and the outer planes to be sort of a halfway point between material and immaterial itself, but that's a whole separate thing. Of course, one might argue that illithid also require "psychic energy" to live, but then the question is, just how esoteric is that really? How strictly is it tied to the victims themselves? Because if psychic energy is to be considered another part of the immaterial minds of creatures that exist in the material plane, we run into the problem of the illithid sort of... spontaneously generating material from the immaterial yet again, and that doesn't feel like it should be possible. But, if we approach it as primarily a source of nutrients, it more or less has to be something material, like something relating to the electric conductivity of the brain itself, which then means that it... kind of no longer adds up to being part of the immaterial mind? ... so I guess what I'm getting at is that maybe, it'd be more accurate to call them brain-flayers. Technically. Because it's... it's the brains, that they eat. Mostly.

Gale, visibly vibrating with carnal lust: .... so I was thinking of a spring wedding

[lemonhemlock]

The posts you reblogged about the fantasy elements of ASOIAF and it's comparisons with other fantasy books is so timely because I've been meaning to send you an ask about this very topic. I think a lot of the disconnect between people who unironically stan house targ and see them as the heroes, saviors, having this magical bloodline that makes them better lol vs. the rest of the fandom that clearly....does not is because of the series itself and how it is viewed within the genre.

So, I do believe that this is obviously a fantasy series and has been marketed as such, but what Martin ended up actually producing in the five books he published is basically a grimdark, edgy historical fiction series with some magical/low fantasy elements. I fundamentally see ASOIAF as a historical fiction work in the realm of The Accursed Kings, or even Phillippa Gregory if we want to get low brow lol, just WAY more gritty and with fantasy/magical elements thrown in as plot devices to spice the story up and to also prop up the greater socio-political and human family drama that is the true center of the story.

I know people say that the magical elements i.e. Bran's importance, the fight against the others, prophecy, etc. will be ramped up and gain more importance in the last two books....but Martin hasn't written them? So I'm not gonna judge this series based on unwritten material and the fandom's headcanons as to how or why this magic will be supposedly important. Martin's most magical figure, Bran, has some of the least chapters and hasn't had a chapter in two decades lmao. Fire and Blood, outside of dragon riding and some witchy characters, is pretty much historical fiction as well with very few and sparse magic to speak of.

I don't mind this at all, because I find the historical fiction and human drama vastly more interesting and have always been neutral at best re fantasy as a genre. But anyway, I think this is why there is such a gap between the subsections of the fandom because some are purely analyzing this as a magical series where it's really historical fiction with low magic/fantasy elements.

I kind of agree with some of your points, but I tend to look at it a little differently. I do agree about it generally being low fantasy, with plans to pump up the fantastical elements in the last two books. And, honestly, I sympathize with your take on just having five books published and being unable to judge a series based on plans that haven't seen the light of day yet. I think that's a reason for these heated debates, namely that we've been left in a pretty awkward point in the plot - the magical elements are ramping up, but still haven't been placed at the very fore, the majority of the Westerosi population either don't believe magic exists (anymore) or that it's pretty irrelevant to their daily lives etc,

...which in turn makes the political machinations stand out, more than they do in many other fantasy works.

On the whole, though, I would argue against calling it historical fiction, as the narrative takes place in a realm that doesn't exist, with a climate that would be impossible on planet Earth, with unexplainably stagnant technology.

I also don't really interpret ASOIAF as grimdark. Again, it's a tempting assessment to make based on the awkward point we are in the narrative now, but I don't think the progression of the series is going to be Nolan's-Batman-gritty. I think that we're fully in deconstruction mode right now, but that the ultimate goal is to pick the pieces back up together and build something better and more hopeful, get to the core of what makes these tropes so transcendent and appealing in the storytelling canon. What does a good king actually mean anyway? Why do we yearn for chivalry and courtly romance? Why do we keep coming back to these kinds of stories, why are we so attracted to the medieval aesthetic that makes all of this possible? What does it truly mean to be a hero? How can we genuinely help our fellow man? How does hope prevail when we are faced with the horrors of this world and the otherworld? Essentially, what does it mean to be human, which is the best and highest theme one can explore through the medium of writing.

[writingsofwesteros]

https://www.tumblr.com/writingsofwesteros/759772742497304576/httpswwwtumblrcomwritingsofwesteros759731643?source=share

"The power of three will set us free?" Nora mused, reading the words aloud. "Is that- is that Mom's signature?" Helaena pointed to the familiar handwriting, signed, 'Alicent Hightower.' "Why would Mom keep this room from us?" Daella whispered. "That door closed on itself," Helaena told them. "This...this isn't just the storm, it's- something's strange." "Come on, guys," Nora began to rummage around in the boxes of things. "Let's not spiral, okay? She pulled a small cauldron from a box, sighing, "Okay, we can spiral now." "This is why I hate storms," Daella held Silverwing tighter. The trio hovered over the heavy book again as Helaena flipped through the pages. "These- these are spells," Helaena read the titles aloud. "Invisibility spell, vanquishing spell, love spell-" "So Mom was a witch?" Nora finally said the words aloud. "Look," Daella pointed. "Is that-" "Those are our names." Helaena whispered. "That's-" "Impossible." Nora finished, as the three of them looked at their names signed in this Book of Shadows, in their handwriting.

Cloaked by their invisibility magic, the brothers circled them, the mouthwatering scent of the girls alone making their mouths water. "Easy, Aegon," Aemond rasped, himself loosing his restraint as he saw Aegon leaning in and deeply inhaling Helaena's hair. "Gods, how can you expect me to hold back?" Aegon replied hungrily over the girls arguing back and forth. "

Aemond ran a finger along Nora's neck, which she felt as nothing but a chilling breeze. "Fuck, they're so soft- so warm." Aemond growled. "Easy, brother," Aegon repeated Aemond's warning with a smirk.

"Make sure those cameras are up and running before they figure out a way out of the attic," Aemond told him. He wanted to see every inch of them, all the time. How swimmingly their plan was going, after so long. Just hearing his sisters hesitantly read aloud the contents of the book made his demonic blood thrum with power and lust.

Aegon easily disappeared from the room; the cameras were in the walls half hidden by their magic. Of course, it was not long before he grew distracted as he moved into what he presumed was Helaena's room from all the bug motifs.

A smirk tugged on his lips as her underwear draw was half open. What a tease, he thought to himself whilst finding a black, lace pair and bringing the material to his face. Fuck, he was keeping that.

Aemond only smirked as his sisters crowded the book;Nora's voice continued.

[elodieunderglass]

Sure no worries! You make some good points!

Now for 1)

“HaikuBot doesn’t write poetry”

short response: how sure of that are you?

You’re right that it’s far more accurate to say “HaikuBot is a data-driven tool that participates in the poetry landscape.” This will, however, collapse back into “robot that writes poetry.”

This excellent and pithy tweet, above, is not talking about autonomous planetary rovers (which are actual robots) writing poetry. They’re talking about (any data-driven tool or AI referred to as, collectively, “robots”) writing poetry.

“Robots writing poetry” is now in the vernacular, and we all know what it means; though because the “robots” aren’t even actual robots to begin with, we’ve ended up here.

In the original response I wrote:

HaikuBot reframes things as art to show how things can be framed as art

And proceeded to talk about the existing state of discourse around “robots writing poetry”. We’ve accepted that “robots” just means something different now. You’re wondering about the definition of “writing.” Watch out for the definition of “poetry.”

HaikuBot is a piece of programming that is in itself performance art. The bot specifically is a type of net art. In 2014, Susan Orlean wrote in The New Yorker:

A recurring theme in net art is appropriating something familiar and setting it in a new framework that makes it surprising. It’s especially surprising if you think that a machine is doing the decontextualizing unintentionally, and ending up with something that seems poignant or meaningful.

HaikuBot is a piece of net art that provides a frame around material and says “this is art”, which is genuinely legitimate performance art. HaikuBot is, further, a piece of art that produces found poetry.

It doesn’t actually matter if HaikuBot writes anything. Found poetry is a form of poetry that doesn’t involve writing either. Or rather, we often say found poetry is “written” because that’s the verb for making poetry, but you don’t “write” to make it - you arrange/frame/obscure/assemble words that already exist. It’s usually defined as taking a piece of text, making a change to it, presenting it with a changed intention, and framing it as poetry. It is not generative - it’s framed. The thing that is generated is the new intention, and the reaction in the reader.

HaikuBot takes pieces of text, adds line breaks (making a change), presents it with a changed intention, and frames the result as poetry. That is following the steps of found poetry. Readers react, as you see above. The fact that it only takes text that it’s been explicitly “invited” to sample, and always keeps the response connected to the original context, actually makes it more polite than human found poets.

In order to get a definition of “found poetry” that includes all extant found poetry, but excludes the found-poetry-producing net art HaikuBot, you start getting back into the “do robots have souls” and “do you need to have a soul to make poetry” clutter that I said I didn’t want to bother with. You look at it and you feel something; that’s a sufficient working definition of poetry, good enough for government work.

I don’t think, when “robots writing poetry” encompasses a state of discourse, that it’s a valuable use of our time to worry about the definitions of “robots” “writing” and “poetry”, or to ask if robots really CAN do it or if their work is any GOOD, or whether it only becomes poetry when a human touches it, or where the soul is. I don’t see the value. The horse has bolted and is rearranging the deckchairs on the Titanic. I think it’s useful to say “given that data-driven tools and AI are in the poetry landscape, we are going to legally require them to abide by the same responsible innovation frameworks as other tools.”

For a charming contrast in the field of found poetry and whimsical bots, consider horse_ebooks. (The Susan Orlean quote above was talking about horse_ebooks.) I’d argue that one of the most powerful and resonant pieces of found poetry ever produced is the 2012 tweet, “everything happens so much.”

Horse_ebooks was a former spambot account that was purchased by a net artist to make performance poetry. The poet, Jacob Bakkila, reframed random pieces of text he found online and tweeted them - pretending to be a broken bot, but actually posting found poetry, in a piece of larger performance art. He believes the original sentence was something like “everything happens so much faster when you are retired”. As with his other tweets, he chopped it up and posted it. When Horse_ebooks was unmasked (deliberately, as part of its performance) as a human poet rather than a bot, the internet - remember this? - was outraged and betrayed.

“Everything happens so much” is fundamental to found poetry. Once upon a time, people liked it better when they thought it was snipped and framed blindly by a broken bot. It was perceived that it felt more spiritually meaningful, had more soul, if it was a robot accidentally spitting out profundity, rather than a human poet doing it with deliberate intention and calculation.

As culture changes rapidly, these contexts are being rapidly forgotten.

Also, why is it important to set up a situation in which “that friend” who says “you’re a poet and don’t even know it” is always wrong? Is the friend always wrong?

2) why this post?

So there is the little bot, adding its line breaks - and thousands of people react with joy and pleasure. The notes on this post, and the Elijah Wood Mardi Gras Pope Meme, are part of that point.

I am framing this post, and the joy and pleasure, with my hands. See it? See how much we love it

We love it. They don’t have to be good! We like pet robots writing poems! We quite like inventing our own pet poem-writing machines.

Let’s not pretend we don’t love pet poem-writing machines. Look at them. They’re great.

You write that the post with HaikuBot seemed charming and happy and “delightful and whimsical,” and everyone loved it, and then BAM! suddenly it wasn’t! because … someone pointed out … how much everyone enjoys the delightful and whimsical poem-writing machine. This felt like “a brick wall.”

Everyone was saying “aah look how cute the poem-writing machine is! It makes us so happy!” And someone framed that with their hands and said, “look at how much people like this poem-writing machine. Look at how it makes us so happy. Let’s not lose sight of this.”

It’s too bad that this sent people into Frenzy Mode, but I’m not their mom.

Still, I see the value in stepping back when you’re having fun, and pointing out that you’re having it. These things are so quickly lost.

From a 2022 article about horse_ebooks:

For many fans, the reveal (that the bot was a performing human) ruined everything… The fact of this disappointment betrays a funny optimism, circa the early 2010s, about the power and promise of passing human intelligence through a machine in order to distill or expand it.

Contexts change. Let’s not lose sight.

Why this post? Let’s just step back together and frame it again. Frame the Elijah Wood Pope Meme, the number of notes, and the people playing with a bot.

See what I see? See what I said?

We love them. Look at them. They’re great.

DO YOU KNOW WHAT I JUST REALIZED

YOU KNOW THE HAIKU BOT???

OFC YOU DO

YOU KNOW THAT MESSAGE HE PUTS AT THE END OF EVERY POST????

"Beep boop! I look for accidental haiku posts. Sometimes I mess up."

YEAH???????

WELL THATS A HAIKU TOO

Beep boop! I look for

accidental haiku posts.

Sometimes I mess up.

NOW YOU LOOK ME IN THE EYE AND TELL ME THATS NOT THE CUTEST THNIG YOUVE EVER HEARD

[fromcydonia]

I mean if you actually want to talk about criticisms, we could talk about how poll after poll shows that an overwhelming majority of Israelis support the bombing of Gaza, even if they don’t support Netanyahu specifically. We can talk about how every Zionist on tumblr and Twitter is still spreading lies about UNRWA 6 months after they were debunked. But i also know that you won’t be willing to reckon with anyway of that, and unless you do, your thoughts are worthless on “xenophobia” directed at Israelis

did you block me and then came to my blog? lol

anyway, about the polls - here is one from 5 days ago:

you can translate yourself if you dont believe me but it says - are you in favor or against the current hostage deal? (that also brings the end of the war, this is what hamas asked in the deal)

64% are in favor, 21% dont know and 15% are against.

now lets talk about the war. 1200+ israelis died on 7.10, people were raped, burned to death, places were looted, people were beheaded, 200+ were kidnapped, even civilians from gaza invaded israel, kidnapped, looted, and lyched people. you can even watch videos of hostages entering gaza and civilians celebrate around them (in some cases, aroud their bodies)

and this is all from organization that only killed and kidnapped israelis before, and promised to do that again until all jews are gone from israel. do you really think people wont support a war against them? and i know you are talking about bombing gaza from above, and civilians casualties are horrible but first of all, i never see hamas say how many of the casualties are their members? and second, hamas put civilians in danger by using civilians places to store weapons, to have bases, to hold hostages (even force (?) civilians to hold hostages), they have tunnles underneath houses and even put mines in some of the houses (after the owners leave i guess)

so why would israel put in danger their own soldiers only because hamas uses their civlians to lure and kill soldiers? why do you think israelis would want to end a war while hamas is still a threat? i will tell you why, to return our hostages back, because we value life and we care for our own, and this is what you see in the picture above.

i wont lie, i argued with israelis before about things like killing babies and starving 2 million people - them saying those things is beyond bad. but first of all, you will find many palestinians that would say the same about us (doesnt make it better of course). second, many israelis dont support this kind of thing, and to say that we do, is to say we are all evil and that to kill us is the only option (dare i say, final solution?) for palestinians. third, because i see israelis as human beings, and know our history, i can understand why some say those fucked up things, just like i can understand why palestinians would say the same. we are all humans, we have trauma, we hate, we fear and it makes us say things we dont even realize what they really mean.

ok, second point, about unrwa.

first of all, twitter is full of stupid and racist people, and as i said in your post, there are stupid and racist people all around the world and they really like twitter. israelis are no different. second, what lies about unrwa? unrwa itself said they fired 9 people because they took part of 7.10, and this is not including the workers that already were killed. there are videos of unrwa workers on 7.10, one israeli hostage (a kis, i think 10 years old) said he were held by unrwa teacher, the idf found tunnels of hamas underneath unrwa buildings, israeli hostages said they were moved through humanitarian corridors that only unrwa supposed to use. and, lastly, unrwa is known to use pretty fucked up education materials. here is a video from 3 years ago:

so, im now asking you, do you want those children to study it's ok to die if it's because you kille jews? that death is the best thing that can happen? from what it seems, unrwa is trying to ready children to be fighters. unrwa is posioning those kids minds in order to ensure the palestinians will be forever at war, that they will keep dying because someone decided to teach them to choose war instead of peace. how can you support unrwa and say you care about paleatinians?

so yeah, i think you are xenopohic because you clearly prefer seeing israelis as monsters while you dont know what you are talking about or lie to yourself or others. if you want this war to end, you should start seeing both sides as human beings, you should understand there isnt a good side. both done evil things, both have innocent people, and both are victims of evil regimes. no side is going to just disappear, so you gotta pick, do you see us as humans, or docyou choose to support a war the palestinians cant win?

[imspardagus]

One in four has…

From a purely financial point of view, The Guardian is a valuable resource because it is still free to read on-line. However, a purely financial viewpoint is, I believe, essentially artificial, particularly when you factor in human mortality and blood pressure. I mean, to take just one example, the dog shit that you pick up on your shoe on the way into town passes the test for “free from a purely financial point of view” but in, I would argue, no other material respect.

Am I likening The Guardian to dog shit? Well, no, if you understand that any analogy is prone to be false when pressed too far. But I do think there is a valid point to be made.

Several times in the course of any one visit to The Guardian’s website, I am invited to contribute to its output of “quality journalism”. I’ll come to its “independence” later.

The thing is that, with but a few honourable exceptions, what The Guardian provides falls quite a way short of quality journalism. I don’t know whether the journalists or the editors are more to blame. Does The Guardian actually have editors? It is a fair question when you read the articles, but I suppose it is also fair to say that a good reporter should not need to be reminded about such basics as avoiding repetition and using grammar. The repetition thing may have to do with a requirement to write a certain minimum number of words. Charles Dickens knew a thing or two about that, according to his detractors, but, difficult as it may be for us as readers of today, used as we are to thousand page tomes of terrible tawdry tedium, his wordiness served his literary, not his financial, purpose. What no-one can accuse Dickens of is careless repetition, of whole sentences and occasionally paragraphs regurgitated with no apparent reason or awareness as if copy and paste has been applied when cut and paste, or just cut, was in order.

Vocabulary is my next beef. I don’t expect my journalism to stay rooted in a stilted past. The purpose of language is to communicate not confound. But there are certain standards that meaning depends on. The use of “gender” to serve as a substitute for the word “sex” is a case in point. This misuse comes, as so much corruption does, from the so-called United States of America. One assumes that it derives from the same pathetic primness as gave rise one hundred and fifty years ago to the covering up of piano legs. But it has repercussions for the informed discussion of very serious issues. Sex is properly about biological form and function. Gender is properly about behaviour. Put simply, sex is the distinction of male and female and gender is the distinction of masculinity and femininity. The two are not synonyms.

I should, for clarity, explain that I am not here advocating a binary view of sex or gender. I know, as science knows, that there are more than two sexes, even in humans, just as I know that gender is a spectrum that owes more to imposed cultural expectations than to any objective considerations. But as with all matters of science, the issue of sex is one of biological fact not opinion, fixed at the level of the chromosome. Gender, on the other hand, rests on how one feels and behaves and it is capable of shifting across time. It is no less important for all that. Gender may itself be informed by biological influences. Both must be respected and understood and arguments that fail to observe their importance serve only to set back any hopes of resolution (both for those of us with dysphoria and for those of us who have the good fortune to have a settled sense of contentment with our identity).

But there is another trend that a good journalist, a “quality” journalist, should avoid and that is the adoption of dubious, contrived or simply misused vocabulary. Sadly many otherwise worthy contributors to The Guardian seem convinced that their credibility rests on peppering their pieces with loaded contemporary linguistic fabrications. It seems unfair to pick on any one individual when the sin is shared between so many but sadly one recent example stood out for me. Perhaps because I have a great respect for Zoe Williams so that my disappointment was greater. But perhaps also because her article deserved better. There was so much to agree with in what she wrote but the jarring deployment of “manosphere” (twice) and “manfluencer” (ouch!) and the now customary misuse of the word “misogyny” demeaned an otherwise worthy writer and her piece. She is better than that.

Then there is the grammar. The title of this piece provides the introduction to this bit of my rant. It is a basic rule of English (and I would hazard a guess, most developed languages) that the verb agrees with the subject. A singular subject takes a singular verb. A plural subject takes a plural verb. 

This seems simple though, of course, being English, there are complications. However the usage I am about to decry is not one of the complications. It is absolutely, unarguably clear. And yet it is something that almost every journalist gets wrong. Even the “quality” ones.

If you are using the expression “one in [two, three, four, however many]” the subject is the one. “One in four people” is simply a reconfiguration of “One person, out of every four people, …”.  I therefore repeat, for emphasis only, the subject is “one person”. It is not “four people”. And “one person” is a singular subject. “Count’em, Jim. One…”. Singular subject takes singular verb. So “One person in four people has (does, owns, whatever)” Yet time and again The Guardian releases articles which flout this simple rule, attaching a plural verb to the singular phrase. It is ignorant and wrong. And any journalist worthy of the name and any editor or sub-editor worth his or her salary should know this. It is, quite simply, inconsistent with a claim to “quality” journalism.

I said I would come on to independence. I could just say I lied. But I will simply refer here to the number of articles that are clearly puffs for books or productions or fashion fakery. It is also hard not to be aware of the number of times that “opinion” pieces suddenly coalesce around a particular viewpoint that happens to be precious to a particular elite. And despite the quotation “comment is free … but facts are sacred”, most opinion pieces are no longer opened to reply. Comment, it appears, is not so much free as unwelcome. Independent, but not as we know it, Jim. (Jim is doing a lot of heavy lifting here, I appreciate).

Don’t get me wrong, I love The Guardian, just as I love the BBC. But that love does not entitle The Guardian to demand my concurrence in its self-flattering assessment of itself. Its standards, certain shooting stars (Carole Cadwalladr, to name but three) and solid old-timers apart, have declined and are declining. It ditched Deborah Orr. It ditched Suzanne Moore. Instead it gives us people who, to quote the play “Inherit the Wind” “never pushed a noun against a verb except to blow something up”. People whose vapid, censorious mouthings and heavy handed attempts to write comically cannot be read with anything other than irritation.

Do better, Guardian. Then I will be proud to support you.

Iain M Spardagus

[free-and-to-none-accountable]

Posted on September 30, 2022 by Jay Bettencourt

In an uproarious interview with Vice published in 2013, the philosopher Slavoj Zizek describes a dynamic all too familiar to many workers today. He says, today “a typical boss no longer wants to be a boss.” He goes on to describe how, in the postmodern workplace, workers are forced to pretend their employers are their friends. You have to be overly polite, give the boss a hug, “exchange vulgarities,” and so on. The whole time both parties act like this is a relationship of friends and equals. 

Management sometimes goes to absurd lengths to keep up this illusion. They will go out for after work drinks or parties with workers, engage socially during off time, invite workers to funerals and weddings, and even try to position themselves as on the side of workers, really. I cannot tell you how many times I have heard my manager say, “I’m on your side guys. I asked the owner for a wage increase but he said no and there’s nothing else I can do.” 

This game wears you down fast, especially if you work a low-wage job. Management or HR expects you to maintain a good, polite mood and passion for your job while making your life materially miserable. Some even deploy a line like, “this is a very chill workplace, I try not to be too hard on you guys” as if it were a benefit like decent healthcare or ample vacation time, which are usually missing. All the while, consumer price inflation leaps ahead, wages stagnate, and working conditions steadily decline. 

On the flip side, this dynamic can lead to some workers trying to overperform to impress the boss or play into favoritism to secure preferred treatment and respite. Management’s intrusion into the off-hours social lives of their workforce can also act as a form of social surveillance and conditioning on the workers – you can’t talk frankly or even safely vent about your issues if your management is there. Or, if you do, management can easily use that to bribe, isolate, or otherwise retaliate against workers. They threaten to stop being nice.

When you dispense with the niceties and pull back the curtain, the whole sham reveals itself as a classic divide-and-conquer strategy. Employers set up pay structures and work conditions that pit workers against each other in productivity competitions. But to keep workers from cutting each other’s throats, management’s “door is always open” for workers to vent to a friendly ear if they want. Management wants workers to have good social relations only with them. Snitching and ratting out are encouraged, every worker is expected to be a teacher’s pet, and the only way to get any relief from poor working conditions is to play into a manager’s favoritism. 

The late Mark Fisher touches on this form of working class isolation in his hard-hitting 2009 book Capitalist Realism. Like Zizek, he hones in on the postmodern workplace and argues that this pervasive structurelessness serves to both alienate workers from each other and break our will to fight. He illustrates this with a point about discipline; during the earlier parts of the 20th Century, workers were regularly subjected to rigid discipline directly from capital, the state, or their agents. Today, workers are socially conditioned to have a “good work ethic,” practice “self-discipline,” and “hustle” to increase labor productivity instead of withstanding discipline meted out by the employer. Management hardly has to intervene.

Furthermore, Fisher argues that this state of affairs conditions working class resistance to capitalism into useless individualized channels like consumer activism. Without knowledge of a class structure (and capitalists pretending to be Just Like Us), there is no clear target to force into giving us what we want. And thus, the problems of capitalism feel as though they have no beginning and no end, intractable as the movement of the planets around the sun.

Unfortunately, Fisher does not offer us much in the way of practical advice for moving forward. Luckily, the IWW is full of battle-hardened class warriors who have learned many hard lessons over the years. In my personal experience, the “nice employer” has proved one of the toughest barriers to getting a union drive off the ground. I generally see management organizing after-work socials, happy hours, and events much more than workers themselves. In my own workplace, managers join workers for game nights and often accompany workers on outdoor activities like biking or camping. It seems they will do anything to make workers forget that the labor relationship is anything besides fundamentally economic in nature.

Management’s deep tendrils in workers social lives tends to make workers reluctant to take actions that may jeopardize their friendships. Organizers must know who is close to whom in the workplace in order to avoid this trap and prevent management from turning workplace leaders and other workers against an organizing effort early on. In our Organizer Training 101, we teach new Wobblies this, what we call Social Mapping, as one of the very first steps in a budding union drive. 

In that section, trainees learn that the workplace is already organized. Only, it is organized by management with the capitalist’s interests in mind – usually for maximum labor productivity and profit extraction. I see management’s efforts to infiltrate and structure (or isolate) workers’ social lives as a deliberate way they organize the workplace. It is the organizer’s job to clearly see that and start to break management’s structure down. But organizers must know the lay of the land first if we are to make effective strides toward collective action. 

Once the organizers are armed with a good understanding of the social structure and who the leaders are in the workplace, they can start building relationships and pulling workers away from management toward the nascent union with Agitation and Education, or even before that starting to “socialize the workplace;” i.e. developing relationships with coworkers outside of management’s view. This step may be increasingly necessary to counteract the growing alienation and isolation of the modern workplace and getting workers to care about each other and be a bit more involved in each other’s lives. This is the raw material that class consciousness and class conflict is built on, but it can take time and effort to grow. 

While Fisher is a bit nihilistic about our prospects, Zizek goes on to say in his interview, “the first step toward liberation is to force [the boss] to really behave like a boss.” He is a bit glib, but his point is a good one. In today’s muddy waters where class organization has been suppressed almost to nil and everyone is forced to act as if they are an “independent contractor” who works for the passion of it, even drawing the lines clearly seems like a radical step. But it is a necessary one that can cut through the confusing fog of modern existence and lay the groundwork for a brighter, revolutionary future free of capitalist exploitation. As the old labor saying goes, “united we fight, divided we beg.” I, for one, am sick of begging.

We must be able to bring our coworkers together to see past management’s superficial niceness in order to fight for that future. I teach new Wobblies in Organizer Trainings that one of the most important and powerful parts of Agitation and Education is helping our coworkers slice through the propaganda to see the world for how it really is. In this case, management’s politeness comprises a small tactic in a much larger strategy on the part of Capital to delude workers and maintain labor peace. We must help our coworkers stand firm for ourselves, together, against management. We can’t be afraid of not being nice –in fact, we can use it as a weapon just like they do.

Furthermore, in many workplaces management remains the sole puppetmaster of workers’ social lives. Modern management theory seems to have recognized the fractured state of the working class and seeks to prevent our organization by relentlessly trying to mediate, filter, and prescribe workers’ social lives. I think this is a key to building an effective organizing committee; sometimes even before having one-on-ones, IWW organizers must build up some on-the-job social life to pull workers away from management. Meet up for coffee and chit-chat. Have small group events with no managers. Having a stake in each other’s lives is a crucial building block toward effective one-on-ones and toward the trust necessary for taking collective action. 

Slow, steady building will pay off in the long run. Take the time to build some friendships and other long-term relationships in the workplace. Agitate and Educate coworkers effectively. Over time, we can build strong worker committees that can finally drop the curtain of politeness, make clear demands, and take collective action to materially improve all our lives. Just don’t fall for the bait.

Jay Bettencourt is an Organizer Trainer with the IWW. Read more about the history of the IWW Organizer Training program here.

Contact the IWW today if you want to start organizing at your job.

[anarchistfrogposting]

is anarchy often posited as something we’d need to transition to by starting with less “radical” alternatives to capitalism like social democracy? or is the general goal a swift revolutionary change? i’m aware that revolution versus reform seems like a huge point of contention in most leftist communities but i’d love to know your thoughts on what you think is feasible and/or acceptable when it comes to how we get to anarchy !

To get one thing out of the way, maybe never I feel, has any political model been criticised more immediately and heavily than anarchists of social democracy. It’s not diametrically opposed to anarchism per se, but I think as one of the dominant leftist movements throughout socialist and communist history, I think early anarchist theorists found it rather abrasive. The argument stands that if you want to abolish a state, you cannot ever use the state apparatus to do it. You can (and I say this with intense caution) use the state apparatus to help you, maybe. But you can never abolish the state through the state, as it fundamentally and above all else, exists to keep itself running.

I think a big part what you’re asking is whether there’s a similar perspective shared between Marxism and Anarchism regarding the utilisation of a socialist transition state to achieve the endpoint communist society. This is, like you said actually a very contentious debate, even between closely related strands anarchist theory; even between two people of the exact same self ascribed ideology.

I think it’s important to recognise that the passion for debate and ideological diversity of anarchists is a fundamental part of what it means to be an anarchist. There is no such thing as an anarchist orthodoxy (although some might disagree ;) ) and critiquing your own understanding of your theory and constructing your own theory is a fundamental part of being an anarchist.

But for starters, anarchists believe in a thing called spontaneous revolution. The material conditions of society become such that the working class rises up in a drastic revolution that overturns the state, and that this process occurs spontaneously- I.e. was not designed to occur at that time and place, simply encouraged.

The debate centres around what happens after the revolution. What and where is society afterwards, and what is our ultimate goal?

I would personally argue that anarchism post revolution is only really adjacent to socialism.

Bringing it back to the fact that anarchism is first and foremost a lens of sociopolitical and philosophical analysis, what happens after the revolution is simply just a continual process of eliminating old hierarchies and stamping out new ones; it’s a continual process of renewal and development. There is no end, and there never will be. Some Anarchists who share that view even suggest that the revolution never ends; that the initial uprising and the post-uprising society are both aspects of the same revolution, but that the initial part of that revolution just happened very quickly. I think it was Lenin (?) that said that political change happens very slowly all over the course of decades, then all of a sudden in the space of a week. I don’t personally have an opinion either way.

The legwork- the heft- of the effort will have been done before the revolution. It has to be; the ends of revolution are to place power in the hands of the working class anarchist praxis pre-revolution intends on letting that power be returned to the people as opposed to sitting in an (unstable) vacuum. Anarchism has to create the structures that society falls back on after the revolution.

Baring this in mind, I would argue that in a way, the anarchist socialist transition state is in some long stretch of the definition the society pre-revolution. those structures and systems that are fallen back on after the uprising happens will be in a greater part fully formed pre-revolution, and the seeds of the fall of statehood have already been planted; the transition has already occurred.

Apologies if this is written in a convoluted fashion; I’m a little baked. Thank you for your curiosity!