#prime double zero

[megamanrecut]

Mega Man Recut, Season 3: A Mega Star is Born, Part 3

Mega Man had a third nightmare that night.

Though totally obscured by shadow, the figure seemed to be watching him smugly from across the field of flames. "You're curious about me, aren't you?" the shadow taunted. "Just accept your defeat, and I'll stop bothering you."

Still unable to move, Mega Man glared back. "What are you talking about? Who are you?"

The shadow chuckled. "Isn't it obvious?"

As though a dim light had appeared, reluctantly pushing away the shadow, the figure slowly began to come into focus, a band of light sliding across a visor—

(Read more on Ao3 or Fanfiction.net)

[reasonsforhope]

"The amount of electricity generated by the UK’s gas and coal power plants fell by 20% last year, with consumption of fossil fuels at its lowest level since 1957.

Not since Harold Macmillan was the UK prime minister and the Beatles’ John Lennon and Paul McCartney met for the first time has the UK used less coal and gas.

The UK’s gas power plants last year generated 31% of the UK’s electricity, or 98 terawatt hours (TWh), according to a report by the industry journal Carbon Brief, while the UK’s last remaining coal plant produced enough electricity to meet just 1% of the UK’s power demand or 4TWh.

Fossil fuels were squeezed out of the electricity system by a surge in renewable energy generation combined with higher electricity imports from France and Norway and a long-term trend of falling demand.

Higher power imports last year were driven by an increase in nuclear power from France and hydropower from Norway in 2023. This marked a reversal from 2022 when a string of nuclear outages in France helped make the UK a net exporter of electricity for the first time.

Carbon Brief found that gas and coal power plants made up just over a third of the UK’s electricity supplies in 2023, while renewable energy provided the single largest source of power to the grid at a record 42%.

It was the third year this decade that renewable energy sources, including wind, solar, hydro and biomass power, outperformed fossil fuels [in the UK], according to the analysis. Renewables and Britain’s nuclear reactors, which generated 13% of electricity supplies last year, helped low-carbon electricity make up 55% of the UK’s electricity in 2023.

[Note: "Third year this decade" refers to the UK specifically, not global; there are several countries that already run on 100% renewable energy, and more above 90% renewable. Also, though, there have only been four years this decade so far! So three out of four is pretty good!]

Dan McGrail, the chief executive of RenewableUK, said the data shows “the central role that wind, solar and other clean power sources are consistently playing in Britain’s energy transition”.

“We’re working closely with the government to accelerate the pace at which we build new projects and new supply chains in the face of intense global competition, as everyone is trying to replicate our success,” McGrail said.

Electricity from fossil fuels was two-thirds lower in 2023 compared with its peak in 2008, according to Carbon Brief. It found that coal has dropped by 97% and gas by 43% in the last 15 years.

Coal power is expected to fall further in 2024 after the planned shutdown of Britain’s last remaining coal plant in September. The Ratcliffe on Soar coal plant, owned by the German utility Uniper, is scheduled to shut before next winter after generating power for over 55 years.

Renewable energy has increased sixfold since 2008 as the UK has constructed more wind and solar farms, and the large Drax coal plant has converted some of its generating units to burn biomass pellets.

Electricity demand has tumbled by 22% since its peak in 2005, according to the data, as part of a long-term trend driven by more energy efficient homes and appliances as well as a decline in the UK’s manufacturing sector.

Demand for electricity is expected to double as the UK aims to cut emissions to net zero by 2050 because the plan relies heavily on replacing fossil fuel transport and heating with electric alternatives.

In recent weeks [aka at the end of 2023], offshore wind developers have given the green light to another four large windfarms in UK waters, including the world’s largest offshore windfarm at Hornsea 3, which will be built off the North Yorkshire coast by Denmark’s Ørsted."

-via The Guardian, January 2, 2024

[rottingparts]

Cool okay! May I request some general romantic head cannons for Bay! Optimus, Ironhide and Ratchet ? Thank you so much ! :)

(SO SORRY THIS TOOK SO LONG! My internet is fucked, but only on my computer, so i'm struggling atm.)

OF COURSE!! My favorites.... I mean I totally love them all equally :) I wrote them with a Human!Reader (that's all i write but i just wanted to calrify)!

Optimus Prime:

My love... probably the most normal of them honestly

Isn't like super duper outwardly romantic when others are around. He isn't too fond of PDA. BUT he still shows affection in lowkey ways.

Like, he will gently nudge you if you seem anxious or off in general, to get your attention and when you let him know you're ok he gives you a slight nod and continues on with his conversation.

It's really no secret, because him crouching down and his giant hand descending from his side and nudging you is not very subtle.

He is way more protective over you than any other human. Will not let anything harm you. And if something does, nothing will get in his way to help/save you.

LOVES (when it's just the two of you) for you to gently hold his face in your tiny (compared to him) hands! Double points if you gently bonk your forehead against his.

If you are not feeling it, having a bad day, what have you, he will take you for a ride to calm down. his voice is so soothing! Sometimes he'll even talk to you until you fall asleep if that is what you need.

You two became an 'item' mostly because you had made offhanded comment to Cade about Optimus being attractive in a way and Cade shut that shit down immediately but Optimus heard. It was too late, Cade has to deal with this now...

Literally so sweet! Will kill for you!

Ironhide:

Oh my... definitely the least normal (in an endearing way).

Doesn't mind/completely understand PDA honestly. Like, you wanna grab him and nuzzle his face? Please do. He will be forever grateful.

He definitely wants to show you off, he is so proud of you!! He also needs everyone to know you are taken :)

Like he will do little things to make sure the others know he is with you, like bringing you towards him when someone gets a little too close.

Wants you close to him at all times, so he knows you're safe.

If anyone threatens you in any capacity (even if its sarcasm from a close friend) his arm is around you, guarding you, while he points a gun at the one threatening you. It takes a minute to calm him down.

If you are like visibly upset/anxious/not having it, he is very vocal about pulling you out of the situation. Has zero problems taking you away in the middle of a conversation.

Will literally go into alt mode and just... drive away with you. Your friends don't like that too much.

Ironhide definitely was weird about his feelings at first. Him liking a human? No thank you. Definitely tried to push the feelings away, until getting tired and telling you how he felt.

When you lit up and said you felt the same? Oh he was over the moon!

Very protective and secretly very sweet! Will also kill for you!

Ratchet:

My sweet cinnamon bun....

Will literally die for your hugs!! Please just wrap your arms around his neck when he bends down and hug him so tight!

Doesn't mind PDA (in a sense of like hugging and being sweet) but does get very flustered!!

Call him any pet name (honey, dear, etc.) and he will combust. If he could blush, he definitely would. Really wanna make him weak in the knees? Call him 'My love.'

Ratchet would worry about you constantly honestly. Waaay more than anyone else.

I mean, you're just a human! You're squishy and small. There is a lot to worry about!

He realized he liked you because he was so worried for you, then he grew even more worried!

He accidently confessed his feelings for you when rambling about how worried he had been for you, and when you go wide eyed he is retracting everything and ready to run away.

When you reassure him and tell him you like him too? He is even more likely to combust.

Is always wanting to check in on you, and learns very quickly what upsets you and what soothes you. he is very attentive.

So fucking sweet and will die for you!!

[vroomvroomcircuit]

A never-ending Worry

(A/N): Ikea gave me a big anxiety attack the other day. Here we are now.

Summary: Reader discovers her own anxiety together with Max through several instances.

Pairing: Max Verstappen x reader

Wordcount: 2k

🏎Masterlist🏎 _____________________ Anxiety is a peculiar thing, especially when you suffer from it. It is for (Y/N) at least.

Ever since her first anxiety attack at the ripe age of 16 years, (Y/n) started to worry. About everything. All the damn time. Her head is running the whole time, thinking about different scenarios that could happen. Like her best friend once said:

“The possibility of a baby killing you is slim, but never zero.”

Maybe the possibilities for any of the “what ifs” really happening is low, but she will be prepared if it does happen. It’s an odd sense of safety she can find refuge in, especially in a world of unpredictability.

This is where the peculiarity comes into play. She does not have the knowledge or vocabulary to describe it all.

But (Y/N) never really talked about her constant worries coupled with a never ending feeling of nervousness. Never spoke of this feeling of waiting for the other shoe to drop. Everyone feels like that, right?

“Hey Schatje? How many pairs of underwear have you packed for us?” Max called out for (Y/N) as he unpacked their suitcases, that his girlfriend herself packed for the two a couple of days before the trip even started.

A bit befuddled by his question, (Y/N) walks from the kitchen of the rental apartment, where she just finished putting away the groceries they got from their first run to the supermarket, to the bedroom.

“10 pairs for each of us. Do you think it won’t be enough? We can still go out and get some more tomorrow.” Max halts his movements for a second to check if her serious tone matches her face.

It does.

His girlfriend really means what she said.

“No, they will definitely suffice. You do know that we are here for only four days, right?” Max smiles at her. Maybe she just got something mixed up.

“Yes, of course. I planned our activities. It would be bad if I didn’t know about the length of our vacation.” She laughs to herself while moving to help Max unpacking. “Why are you asking?”

“Oh, nothing particular. Just checking.” Ok so. It is a thing for many women to overpack, especially regarding their underwear. “Can you explain your thoughts on the number to me? Why did you decide to pack 20 pairs of underpants in total?”

(Y/N) throws him a look. “Well, we need at least four, one for each day. Then I doubled that number, because something could have gone wrong on our car ride here or will on our way back, making us stay on vacation longer. Then eight felt like it’s not enough. Adding to the extra days, an accident could happen that makes you need an extra pair a day, right? And nine is an odd number that is not even a prime number, so I rounded up to ten. Completely logical.”

Well, it’s logical to her at least. Max was partially amazed by her train of thoughts and worries. He just let it be like that. After all, it’s just over packing and he loves how prepared she is in any given situation.

Prepared (Y/N) is. Always.

“Man, it is so hot, my fingers are sticky with sweat.” Daniel complaints. It’s a race weekend in Singapore and the Aussie is right. It is hot.

(Y/N), who walks with Daniel around the paddock while she waits for Max to get out of a meeting, starts to rummage in her backpack. The back she carries with her all the time. It’s close to iconic.

“Here is some hand disinfectant. It makes you feel a bit less sticky.”

Daniel smiles thankfully while taking the little bottle from the female’s hands. “Thank you. I just need to remember to put on some lotion, I don’t want my hands to dry out.”

As soon as he finishes his sentence, she replaces the disinfectant with another small bottle. “Don’t worry, I got you girl.” She winks at the Aussie.

“Oh wow, do you have everything important with you? Can you flee the country with that backpack spontaneously?” Daniel jokes, but it goes over her head.

“Yes, pretty much. I got a small first aid kit, my laptop and all needed chargers for my electronics. Oh, and my passport and IDs of course. Ah, and some small knick-knacks and snacks. Gotta be prepared for the worst case scenario, right?” Her seriousness unsettles something in the driver. But he kind of lets it go, just nodding to her statement. She is right, at least a bit, after all.

“Do you get more nervous when you get into the car? Or is your level of nervousness on the same level?

(Y/N) and Max cuddle in bed back in the safety of their home in Monaco. While asking the question in the wariness of the night, she traces the same shapes over and over again in her partner’s skin. It gives her an odd feeling of safety, the repetition.

Max has a confused look on his face. “What do you mean?” “Well, does your level of feeling nervous rise from the usual one before or during a race?” It sounds plausible to her. But it doesn’t for him.

Max sits up, leaning his upper body against the headboard to have a better look at his girlfriend. “Yes, it does rise, because my usual level of nervousness is zero like for everyone else. Of course I feel different from that, when I get into the car that can bring me over the finish line as a winner. I don’t get the question.”

(Y/N) blinks at him with a frown. “Not- no, not everyone’s level is zero. It’s really just for you that low.” Of course Max is always cool as a cucumber. He only gets this feeling in extreme situations.

“Oh Schtaje. It’s really not. Most people don’t feel nervous often. Do you?” He pulled her close to him, enveloping her completely.

“Not always. Right now, I’m not. But that is, because I’m with you. I know that together we can solve anything.” Max senses that (Y/N) doesn’t want to continue the conversation. He lets it be another time, partially to not make her feel completely uncomfortable in a peaceful moment, partially because he wants to do some research.

Her conversation with her boyfriend sparked something inside (Y/N). Hearing that not everyone is feeling the same way she does, it’s a lot to take in. So she started to do some reading of her own.

Many people on the internet describe the same moments she has: Constant nervousness, the need of being prepared at all times or she’ll break out in a sweat, plus the endless worrying.

And the sudden bursts of intense panic. These moments, where an all consuming fear grips her whole body into a chokehold. That makes her breaths become heavier and her thoughts even faster.

Reading about similar experiences to hers, it makes (Y/N) feel less alone. But one word stood out to her.

Anxiety.

She heard of it and has seen the portrayals on TV. But those are not what she feels. Or is it?

Everything and nothing make sense at the same time.

“Do you want to drive?” Max offers as they get ready to go out for dinner at a restaurant that is a tad too far away to be considered walkable distance. He regularly lets her drive, it’s a bit of emancipation. Why shouldn’t she drive when she has a license for that?

(Y/N) shakes her head no. “I don’t like today’s thoughts. I also feel extra nervous right now, I couldn’t find the menu of the restaurant online.” Max nods, understanding what kind of thoughts she is talking about - intrusive thoughts.

He also appreciates her openness with him about those feelings. “It’s ok, Schatje. I love driving for you, it’s my favorite kind of ride. We will also find something for you, we can order some dishes and share them until you decide which one you want.” He gives her a reassuring kiss on the cheek, hoping to ease up her worries.

During the drive, she holds his hand on the control stick. “It’s good to have you back. Last night I woke up in a panic and thought something must have happened to you on your flight and that this was the reason I had this huge anxiety attack. I couldn’t sleep until you texted me this morning when you landed at the airport.”

His heart grows heavy at that confession. He hasn’t known the extent of her anxious feelings. Max didn’t know how much they overshadowed her in her daily life.

(Y/N) herself never realized how much she has been hindered in her routines by her own thoughts and worries.

“It wasn’t the first time this happened. But it was the worst it has been so far. I thought you died. I waited for my phone to ring or the police to stand at the door, getting notified that you died in a plane crash. I already planned the next steps I had to take from there in my head.” (Y/N) doesn’t dare to look at her boyfriend after this admission.

It is weird to say something out loud, that she used to bury deep inside of her. This kind of vulnerability, it makes her want to crawl back into that hole again.

Over the last couple of weeks she realized that those spiraling thoughts are not here to make her feel safe. That the need of over preparedness is not necessary. That her anxious feelings are not some signs of something bad.

These thoughts are false friends, waiting for your demise, your downfall, to be able to say “I told you so”.

But where to go from here, from the realization of something going gravely wrong, to getting a grip of the situation. To make it all go away?

Max squeezes her hand before putting a kiss on it without taking his eyes off the road. “I’m here for you. I want to hear all those thoughts. As silly as they may sound out loud. I can help you in differentiating if they are necessary, needed, thoughts or if they are the product of overthinking. I want to help you. I want you to not feel anxious all the time. I want to help you through the anxiety attacks. We can get counseling - for only you or together. Just, let me be here for you during every step you take.”

His pleading brings tears to (Y/N)’s eyes. She didn’t know how noticeable her anxiety issues were to outsiders. She doesn’t know what it feels like for Max, seeing her in her most anxious states.

“Yes”, she answers him, “I want you to be here with me. I don’t know if I can do it on my own.” “You don’t need to find out. I’ll be there, for better or for worse.”

Turns out, Max’ deadpan and brutal honesty is exactly what (Y/N) needs.

The evening, where he was away for a race and she had to stay behind, because of her own work schedule. (Y/N) called him in the middle of a not very pretty anxiety attack. “I have this doctor’s appointment. It’s a check-up for my physical health. And what if I-I’m deathly sick and we are catching onto that only now?”

“This is a dumb thought.”

The female halts in her movements. Is it a dumb thought?

“I mean, yes. I regularly go out to donate blood. But maybe they haven’t caught something important accidentally.”

“That is stupid and unlikely.”

She stops again. “You are right. I actually have nothing to worry about.”

The road to having less anxiety is a twisted one, paved by setbacks and a small gap between succeeding and failing. But with Max as a passenger princess on that path (Y/N) knows she got it.

She will be ok, eventually.

[wizard-miss]

my list of top ten numbers.

1. seven. first really exciting prime. also its a magic number.

2. seventy-seven. thats two sevens. very enticing. three sevens is too much but two us excellent.

3. thirteen. this is a quality prime number. feels really exciting. also i like the connotation with unluckiness.

4. two hundred fifty-six. incredibly good power of two. it feels beautifully round in an odd way.

5. three. the first number that actually feels odd. it is also quite pretty.

6. thirty-two. another solid power of two. not quite as strong as two hundred fifty-six but still exemplary.

7. one hundred fourty-four. i dont much care about twelve, but twelve squared has a grip on me. its quite an elegant number. it also has a really fun name. gross is a good name for a number.

8. zero. need i even explain? its zero. so many fun things about zero. so many fun things you can do with zero. its such an important number.

9. one. this number is nearly as illustrious as zero. one and zero are like sisters. these two make an incredible duo.

10. two. i love powers of two. i love doubling things. its like a steady rock in between all these other numbers. offering support and being solid. very important number.

honourable mention: eight. its the vriska number.

[old-school-butch]

What do they think Hamas wants? What do they think Israel is supposed to do? Do they seriously think Israel is supposed to be like sure here you go we are all going to leave Israel and you can have everything? Do they think that would bring about peace? I’m serious. Like really do they think there is anything Israel could do that would stop any of this? Do they think Israel should’ve done nothing and this situation would’ve just disappeared? Americans are the dumbest fucking people on the planet. Hamas wants compliance or death, that’s how terrorism works, that’s war.

Whoever is running the information warfare at Hamas is truly brilliant. The ideology of Islamists has been run through some kind of autotuner so it sounds like it came from a chapter in Pedagogy of the Oppressed and Western liberals are eating it up. While liberals are still catching up on which river and which sea the chant refers to, they still don't grasp that the end goal here is the elimination of the state of Israel entirely. And while 20% of Israelis are Arab Muslims, there are zero Jews in Gaza. The PR people are saying Zionist these days instead of Jews, so maybe it doesn't sound too bad when they say Kill All Zionists but that's just the English translation. Zionism is the creation of a Jewish state. Hamas will call it the 'Zionist entity' because they don't recognize it as a state. They don't recognize it because all states should be Muslim. Israel is occupying territory that should be Muslim. When they say 'end the occupation' it sounds like a call for liberation of an oppressed people, instead of the desire to destroy Israel, kill or expel the Jews and create a Muslim state in its place.

Yemen's Houthi rebels (who are currently attacking Israel) have a slogan "God is the Greatest, Death to America, Death to Israel, A Curse Upon the Jews, Victory to Islam" and I think it says a lot that they take the time to double down on how much they hate Jews/Israel instead of a single 'Houthis are great!' thrown into their own slogan.

The Islamists have noted the 'anti-colonial' rhetoric in Western universities and capitalized on it by positioning Israel as a proxy for the West and thus a scapegoat for the West's sins of imperialism. It does rely on some very old anti-Semitic tricks - because Jews assimilate fairly well (because they don't have an evangelical aspect to the faith) they are both within a culture and othered from the culture - the perfect scapegoat. Many liberals shrugged when the Nazis marching in Charlottesville chanted "Jews will not replace us" but the suspicion that Jews control the media, capitalism, also socialism, Hollywood (and any other center of power you can imagine) runs very deep in Western cultural anxiety. Imagining Israel as a prowerful villian is all too easy when you're primed to believe that.

A wild example of this is how Westerners view Israel as a colonialist power rather than a gathering point for religious refugees. The reality that Jews originated from the land of JUDEA should not be hard to grasp, but is conveniently ignored. The fact that they've negotiated with colonial powers like Britain and the UN is viewed as a sign of political power, even though the main goal of those colonial powers was to prevent Jewish refugees from flooding their own countries. And the memory that the post WW2 boost in political heft came at the price of the Holocaust in Europe, seems to have been lost. The reality that most Israelis are Jewish refugees expelled from Muslim countries, is conveniently ignored. There are enough white faces and dual citizens in Israel for guilty Westerners to find a convenient scapegoat to do all that decolonizing and let themselves be destroyed for our sins. Not that anyone is thinking that hard about it, it just feels right, because it's safe and convenient to accept blame and then shift it to someone else - no matter how many land acknowledgements they crank out.

I guess Westerners think colonizing is something only white people do, and they are blissfully unaware of the size and scope of the Arab Islamic Empires of the past. And also apparently unaware that Islamists explicitly say they want to recreate that empire. Zionists want a single state - and I have a lot of issues with the idea of a religious state at all, but no one can accuse Jews of ever having or wanting to create an Empire. Israel might be criticized for not having a more liberal democractic state, but Hamas isn't even trying to create one. It wants a single Muslim state occupying their entire region, where Jews are killed or expelled and Islamists can consolidate regional power - that's their goal. But the slogan is 'end the occupation' which sounds way nicer than 'end the occupation of land of Israel by Jews so we can make an Islamic state in its place and kill all the Jews who don't run away fast enough.'

Maybe it's that most Westerners don't live in a theocracy, and have no sense of just how controlling and energetic theocratic societies can be, that they can't grasp the idea of global jihad and what that really means. "The Caliphate is the answer" is written in Arabic on protest signs, flying under the radar of English-speakers and certainly not seen as hate speech, but when people tell you they want to establish a global world order under Islamic rule, and are actively coordinating their efforts between states and regions - you should believe them. Moderation is apostasy, punishable by death. Anyone negotiating with Israel faces opposition from more radical Islamists ready to take their place. This is why Islamists spend most of their time attacking more moderate Islamic states and leaders. And by 'moderate' I mean the Taliban, which can barely set up a state in Afghanistan - because it means diverting resources from expanding and conquering other areas. A group called ISIS-K is trying to overturn the Taliban to bring back the glory days of the Khorason, an entity so sprawling it would involve invading China, Pakistan, Iran, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan and Tajikistan, which would undoubtedly spark a global conflict. That doesn't phase them. Hamas can barely control the Palestinian Islamic Jihad, which rejects any peace accords with Israel including the Oslo accord. Dying as a martyr is the highest achivement - eternal war is not a problem. The Islamic world is failing to contain radical movements it created and supported for its own interests.

The Palestinians are a good microcosm of this. When Israel declared independence in 1948, the region was invaded by its neighbors. The war ended with Jordan occupying the West Bank and Egypt occupying Gaza and normally the people living there would have been absorbed into these countries, or created a self-governed state. Instead Palestinians, as a group, were created as a stateless people. They didn't want to form a state within the boundaries determined by the war, but instead remain as refugees from a war and promised the 'right of return' i.e. that Israel would be returned to them. Importantly, the war didn't have a declared end. It's still happening, which is how they are still refugees 75 years later. And they live in 'refugee camps', otherwise known as buildings and towns, but it's all temporary in this narrative. Does no one wonder why the pro-Palestinian rallies call for a ceasefire and not for peace? Peace is not desired, just a pause in fighting until they can regroup and try again.

A separate reality was created where the 1948 war is still happening, Israel is not real, it's a 'Zionist entity' occupying the land and that refugees includes everyone displaced by the 'ongoing' war, and all their descendants are refugees too because they have nowhere to live - because where they are living is just temporary. And ‘all they want is to go home’ (but not their current home for 3 generations, the home back in Israel ofc). In this world, they all have to right to live in the region that the zionist entity is occupying, where their duty is to establish a Muslim state. The purpose of this fiction is to create a perpetual problem for Israel, a stateless population whose entire existence is focused on them eventually overthrowing Israel. But it's had unexpected effects.

Palestinian refugees have been more than willing to bring violence to any country that has taken them in as immigrants. Their nationalists have a long list of assassinations of anyone who supports a peace treaty with Israel, including the King of Jordan, the former prime minister of Lebanon, Robert F Kennedy and more. They've also started a civil war in Jordan until they were expelled to Lebanon, where they hijacked a series of international flights and started a civil war there that lasted for 15 years. Palestinians living as refugees in Kuwait aided Saddam Hussein's invading army until they were expelled when his regime fell. These are the reasons none of Israel's neighbor's will accept any more Palestinian refugees, but the Islamist problem remains for any country in its path. What I have found most disturbing among feminists on Tumblr, however, is the complete wilful ignorance about Islamist ideology and its relationship to women. You think you’re ok with the Quran? Read it. There aren't many religions founded by a conqueror who wanted to rule the world. Read what it says about conquest, murder, torture, raping and enslaving non-Muslim women. Arab slave traders castrated men and bred female slaves who were kept as captive wives. Using sexual violence as a tool of war and as a reward for Islamic fighters is long documented and continues today. The birth rate in Gaza is about 5 children per woman and frequently exhorted to be higher. Why? Arafat said it most clearly ‘the womb of the Palestinian woman is the weapon that will defeat Israel.' Population and fertility are part of the political landscape and Islamist strategy. It's how Lebanon went from being a Christian majority country to a Muslim majority country today. There is no reason whatsoever that feminists - who have not shied away from criticizing the sexism of Christianity or Judaism - should mince words when it comes to criticizing Islam in the strongest possible terms. Islamists - who combine Islam with a goal for global dominance - should ring every alarm bell we have.

[pkmndaisuki]

Terapagos is Not Friendly:

A Theory Before Indigo Disk is Released

So far, both the anime and Pokemon's social media have shown off Terapagos as this cute little turtle.

Definitely a friend-shaped, marketable plushie-looking thing, and it's shown to look out for Liko. Not much has been shown of its Terastal form, though. But in-game thus far, I don't think it's trying to help anyone.

If anything, it may be using humans to help itself.

Take this entry in the Scarlet/Violet book by Heath, a historian who led an expidition to The Great Crater of Paldea, a.k.a. Area Zero. He got separated from his exploration party, found unconscious, and with cryptic notes he apparently wrote but has no memory of.

Note what's drawn on the page most prominently: hexagons. The key shape associated with Terapagos.

Hexagons are brought up not only by Heath in the pages dedicated to Terapagos (seen here in the original manuscript his descendant Briar carries)...

...but also by the missing professor (Sada/Turo) in their notes in the research stations of Area Zero.

And in both Heath's expedition and the professor's studies, someone died. Heath mentioned in the chapter "Monsters of Area Zero" (the chapter Arven shows off in the climax of the story) that one of the crew was attacked by a Paradox Pokemon and was "mortally wounded". A similar phrasing is used by the AI professor about their deceased creator, saying, quote, "[their] physical body received grievous injuries" to describe the incident with the hostile Koraidon/Miraidon at Research Station 4.

The professor's story is incredibly tragic, in that they started out research out of curiosity with a team, a spouse, and while there had a son. And in one of the journals, the professor wants to live in, quote, "a paradise we three," likely themselves, their spouse, and Arven, "can live happily together forever." But by the end, they'd pushed everyone away and thought they could only rely on themselves, leading to the creation of an artificial double.

Both Heath and the late professor have had some kind of subconcious pull towards Area Zero, and witnessed Terapagos firsthand. Heath however was lucky that he and his team left before things could get any worse. And now, Heath's descendant, Briar, is drawn to Area Zero, wanting to study and find Terapagos too.

She's obsessed to the point of dressing like the cover of the book, same emblems on her jacket, and wearing bright scarlet/violet, as well as crystalline earrings shaped like the Tera symbol. She mentions several times that she hopes to recieve permission to enter Area Zero. And I don't think it'll end well for her. Not thinking that she or anyone else is gonna die, but she'll likely be in some life-threatening situation the player will have to drag her out of.

And going back to the anime, it wouldn't be the first time a legendary is shown as sympathetic there but not in their games. Take Darkrai - in the games it's known to plunge people into eternal nightmares and the only way to stave them off is with Cresselia's help to counter it. The Explorers Mystery Dungeon games go even further to show it as a sinister character, being the prime antagonist of the postgame.

Meanwhile, in the movie Rise of Darkrai, it's turned into a tragic figure, a defender and a hero. With it even getting revived from a heroic sacrifice and gets to live peacefully near people. A far cry from its games counterpart.

So I think that we players will first meet Terapagos as an enemy, a threat we have to take on in its full Terastal form, in order to save the day. Similar to the threat Rose releasing Eternatus posed in Sword and Shield, maybe, or how Cyrus unleashed Dialga/Palkia. Maybe Briar, in her obsession, will be the one to unleash Terapagos, and Terapagos will in turn try use her for its own ends, leading the player to save her from an unfortunate fate?

I don't know for certain. But with all that's led up to Indigo Disk, I don't trust Terapagos any further than I could throw it.

[prokopetz]

Do you have any recommendations for TTRPGs that emulate JRPGs well, or have a very JRPG-like setting? I find the unself-conscious mixing of fantasy, sci-fi, and steampunk elements that's commonplace in JRPGs very appealing, as well as the inventive combat and advancement mechanics (for reference I am playing the first Trails in the Sky game right now and I am enjoying it very much).

You've got several distinct questions there, though you may not realise it, and I'm going to tackle them in order.

First, with respect to emulating JRPGs and JRPG-like settings at the tabletop, it's hard to go wrong with, well, actual tabletop JRPGs. While English localisations of Japanese tabletop roleplaying games are admittedly thin on the ground, there are a few of them out there, including official translations of Double Cross, Golden Sky Stories, Ryuutama – Natural Fantasy Roleplay, Shinobigami, and Tenra Bansho Zero, as well as the odd partial fan-translation, of which Meikyuu Kingdom and Nechronica are probably the most notable. (No direct links to the latter two because fan-translation is technically piracy, though I'm sure you can chase them down on your own if sufficiently inclined!) There are a lot of cultural assumptions about what an RPG is and how it ought to work that aren't going to come across in an Anglophone author's attempt at genre emulation, so you'd be well served to go straight to the source.

(I vaguely recall that there are also a couple of Japanese indie RPG authors self-publishing their works in English via itch.io, though it’s late and names escape me at the moment – if anyone reading this can point us in the right direction, please do!)

Second, with respect to emulating the steampunk science-fantasy settings that Western fandoms often associate with JRPGs (though they're far from universal within the genre – their apparent prevalence is more a reflection of what gets localised than of the genre as a whole), the above-cited Tenra Bansho Zero will give you that in spades, though it's also one of the most rules-heavy entries on that list. If you have a specific desire to play in a game where the party consists of a cursed samurai, a child mecha pilot, a Shinto MiB, an oni Jedi knight, and Robocop, that it'll do.

If you'd prefer something less crunch-heavy, or more American-style in its game design approach, you might alternatively have a look at Anima Prime. It's not a localised title, but its lighter and more familiar approach may be an easier sell for your group than dropping Tenra Bansho Zero's seven hundred page rulebook on them. Aesthetically, it sits somewhere near the RWBY-meets-Final Fantasy XIII intersection.

Finally, with respect to emulating the combat of The Legend of Heroes: Trails in the Sky specifically, that’s a tough one – I don’t think any Japanese tabletop RPGs with proper grid-based tactical combat have workable English localisations at the moment, even taking fan-translations into account. In terms of non-localised games, I’d probably go with something like Valor; it’s basically an anime-themed Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition clone, but then, most games that focus tightly on grid-based tactical combat are to varying degrees these days – D&D4E is extremely good at what it does, the protestations of certain vocal grognards who don’t approve of what it does notwithstanding.

[alligator-with-a-top-hat]

Gonna meditate on Ridley’s importance to the Metroid series, edited from comments I made on a video about him. After some thought, it’s clear to me that every appearance of his after the first ties him strongly to the theme of each individual game. Analysis under the cut, in in-game chronological order.

Zero Mission's whole premise is being a new spin on a familiar story, showing us things we never thought about in the NES game. Zero Mission's cutscenes show him commanding the Pirate Mothership and deliberately tracking Samus down. His robotic double, Mecha Ridley, is the new final boss stopping her escape from Pirate patrols. It's an organized, calculating side to the Pirates never seen before in the 2D games. The game is about insight into the past, and we gain insight through Ridley.

Prime is about respecting our history and the dangers of wasteful exploitation. Ridley is the face of the Pirates on Tallon IV as they discover and abuse Phazon, and his opening salvo in his boss battle is to bomb the Artifact Temple. However, the Phazon hurts the Pirates as much as it hurts their enemies, and the boss battle ends with the statues of the ancient Chozo blowing Ridley away in violent, laser-y retribution. The game is about destructive exploitation, and Ridley shows what happens to those who go too far for power.

Corruption is about the corruption of the body and spirit by violence, as represented by toxic Phazon. At the beginning, Ridley is his crafty old self, hounding Samus on Norion and forcing her into a boss fight he knows she cannot escape on her own when he knocks her into the generator shaft. But at the end of the game, he reappears, corrupted by Phazon, as an animalistic guardian of the leviathan seed on the Pirate Homeworld, little better than a guard dog. It parallels Samus' own journey as she is corrupted by Phazon, put on a leash by the Federation, and forced to kill those like her. The game is about corruption, and Ridley shows the end of those taken by the corruption.

Samus Returns is like Zero Mission in that it is about shedding new light on an old story, but it goes deeper than that. Samus sparing the Metroid hatchling is the single most important decision in the series, so it's no surprise that the remake should have Ridley -- whose most famous moment in the manga was making the opposite decision in regards to Samus -- appear to try and tear them apart. His appearance also foreshadows his role in Super Metroid, and putting aside the change in tone from the original Metroid II, his appearance gives Samus and the baby Metroid a chance to develop their bond in a way that had mostly been told, not shown. The game is about Samus' moment of mercy, and Ridley is there to see if she can really do it.

Super Metroid is about Samus and the baby Metroid's bond. Samus throws her plans away to recapture the baby Metroid, and in the end it sacrifices its life to save her. Lo and behold, Ridley is the one who separates them, and when she kills him, she finds only the broken Metroid capsule, a tantalizing clue that brings her no closer to the baby Metroid. The game is about what matters to Samus, and Ridley is the one who takes it all from her.

Other M is a game about nothing. Samus does not impact the plot in any significant way because other people sideline her and handle the plot for her. Ironically, Ridley still fits this theme -- he appears as a cloned baby to annoy and distract Samus, has a boss battle that makes no sense in context, and finally is eaten by a poorly foreshadowed Queen Metroid and never comes up again. The game is stupid and Ridley is handled stupidly.

Fusion is about identity and the past. Everything is flipped upside down when Samus is infected by an X parasite, loses everything, and discovers that the monster trying to kill her is, essentially, her. The power of the Metroids, her eternal enemy, becomes the key to her success and survival. In an important scene, the Federation, which Samus has trusted since her Zero Mission, is revealed to have recreated the Metroids. Immediately after this upsetting revelation about an entity she has worked for for years, who does she encounter in the Federation's facility? That's right, Ridley, who has even been possessed by an X parasite as if to mock her situation.

It's not all bad, though. Fusion is the game where Samus finishes Ridley for good (seeing as he doesn’t return for Dread), and fittingly enough she finally comes to terms with part of her past when she reconnects with ADAM. It's a game about the past. Ridley is that past, and Samus finally puts him behind her.

Ridley is so special not just because of his cunning nature and terrifying brutality, but also because of how neatly he fits into the puzzle of Samus' life. He’s a relentless phantom that embodies the violence she cannot escape. He represents everything Samus must overcome to finally find that "true peace in space" from the NEStroid end screen.

Thanks guys 👋

[acurlygirlamy1]

"Be a lady they said. Your skirt is too short. Your shirt is too low. Your pants are too tight. Don’t show so much skin. Don’t show your thighs. Don’t show your breasts. Don’t show your midriff. Don’t show your cleavage. Don’t show your underwear. Don’t show your shoulders. Cover up. Leave something to the imagination. Dress modestly. Don’t be a temptress. Men can’t control themselves.

Men have needs. You look frumpy. Loosen up. Show some skin. Look sexy. Look hot. Don’t be so provocative. You’re asking for it. Wear black. Wear heels. You’re too dressed up. You’re too dressed down. Don’t wear those sweatpants; you look like you’ve let yourself go.

Be a lady they said. Don’t be too fat. Don’t be too thin. Don’t be too large. Don’t be too small. Eat up. Slim down. Stop eating so much. Don’t eat too fast. Order a salad. Don’t eat carbs. Skip dessert. You need to lose weight. Fit into that dress. Go on a diet. Watch what you eat. Eat celery. Chew gum. Drink lots of water. You have to fit into those jeans. God, you look like a skeleton. Why don’t you just eat? You look emaciated. You look sick. Eat a burger. Men like women with some meat on their bones. Be small. Be light. Be little. Be petite. Be feminine. Be a size zero. Be a double zero. Be nothing. Be less than nothing.

Be a lady they said. Remove your body hair. Shave your legs. Shave your armpits. Shave your bikini line. Wax your face. Wax your arms. Wax your eyebrows. Get rid of your mustache. Bleach this. Bleach that. Lighten your skin. Tan your skin. Eradicate your scars. Cover your stretch marks. Tighten your abs. Plump your lips. Botox your wrinkles. Lift your face. Tuck your tummy. Thin your thighs. Tone your calves. Perk up your boobs. Look natural. Be yourself. Be genuine. Be confident. You’re trying too hard. You look overdone. Men don’t like girls who try too hard.

Be a lady they said. Wear makeup. Prime your face. Conceal your blemishes. Contour your nose. Highlight your cheekbones. Line your lids. Fill in your brows. Lengthen your lashes. Color your lips. Powder, blush, bronze, highlight. Your hair is too short. Your hair is too long. Your ends are split. Highlight your hair. Your roots are showing. Dye your hair. Not blue, that looks unnatural. You’re going grey. You look so old. Look young. Look youthful. Look ageless. Don’t get old. Women don’t get old. Old is ugly. Men don’t like ugly.

Be a lady they said. Save yourself. Be pure. Be virginal. Don’t talk about sex. Don’t flirt. Don’t be a skank. Don’t be a whore. Don’t sleep around. Don’t lose your dignity. Don’t have sex with too many men. Don’t give yourself away. Men don’t like sluts. Don’t be a prude. Don’t be so up tight. Have a little fun. Smile more. Pleasure men. Be experienced. Be sexual. Be innocent. Be dirty. Be virginal. Be sexy. Be the cool girl. Don’t be like the other girls.

Be a lady they said. Don’t talk too loud. Don’t talk too much. Don’t take up space. Don’t sit like that. Don’t stand like that. Don’t be intimidating. Why are you so miserable? Don’t be a bitch. Don’t be so bossy. Don’t be assertive. Don’t overact. Don’t be so emotional. Don’t cry. Don’t yell. Don’t swear. Be passive. Be obedient. Endure the pain. Be pleasing. Don’t complain. Let him down easy. Boost his ego. Make him fall for you. Men want what they can’t have. Don’t give yourself away. Make him work for it. Men love the chase. Fold his clothes. Cook his dinner. Keep him happy. That’s a woman’s job. You’ll make a good wife some day. Take his last name. You hyphenated your name? Crazy feminist. Give him children. You don’t want children? You will some day. You’ll change your mind.

Be a lady they said. Don’t get raped. Protect yourself. Don’t drink too much. Don’t walk alone. Don’t go out too late. Don’t dress like that. Don’t show too much. Don’t get drunk. Don’t leave your drink. Have a buddy. Walk where it is well lit. Stay in the safe neighborhoods. Tell someone where you’re going. Bring pepper spray. Buy a rape whistle. Hold your keys like a weapon. Take a self-defense course. Check your trunk. Lock your doors. Don’t go out alone. Don’t make eye contact. Don’t bat your eyelashes. Don’t look easy. Don’t attract attention. Don’t work late. Don’t crack dirty jokes. Don’t smile at strangers. Don’t go out at night. Don’t trust anyone. Don’t say yes. Don’t say no.

Just “be a lady” they said."

Author- Camille Rainville who has a blog called Writings of a Furious Woman. ❤

https://writingsofafuriouswoman.wordpress.com/2017/12/09/be-a-lady-they-said/

[mostlysignssomeportents]

How Amazon transformed the EU into a planned economy

Amazon is a perfect parable of enshittification, the process by which platforms first offer subsidies to end users until they’re locked in, then make life good for business customers at users’ expense, until they’re locked in, then claw back all the value they can for themselves, leaving just enough behind to keep the lock-in going.

In a new report for SOMO, Margarida Silva describes how the end-stage enshittification of Amazon is playing out in the EU, with Amazon repeating its US playbook of gouging the small businesses who have no choice but to use the platform in order to reach its locked-in customers, making European customers and European sellers poorer:

https://www.somo.nl/amazons-european-chokehold/

The mechanism for this isn’t a mystery. Amazon boasts about it! They call it their flywheel: first, customers are lured into the platform with low prices, especially through Prime, which requires pre-payment for a year’s shipping, which virtually guarantees that customers will start their shopping on Amazon. Because customers now start their buying on Amazon, sellers have to be there. The increased range of goods for sale on Amazon lures in more buyers, who lure in more sellers, with both sides holding each other hostage:

https://vimeo.com/739486256/00a0a7379a

This flywheel creates a vicious cycle, starving local retail so that customers can’t get what they need from brick-and-mortar shops, which funnels sellers into offering their goods for sale on Amazon. The less choice customers and sellers have about where they shop, the more Amazon can abuse both to pad its own bottom line.

There are 800,000 EU-based sellers on Amazon, and they have seen the junk-fees that Amazon charges them skyrocket, to the point where they have to raise prices or lose money on each sale. Amazon uses both tacit and explicit “Most Favored Nation” deals to hide these price-hikes. Under an MFN deal, sellers must not allow their goods to be sold at a lower price than Amazon’s — so when they raise prices to cover Amazon’s increasing fees, they raise them everywhere:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/25/greedflation/

It’s not hard to understand why Amazon would raise its fees: the company has an effective e-commerce monopoly. Like Ozymandias, they have run out of worlds to conquer, and so their growth has to come from squeezing suppliers and/or raising prices, not from bringing in new customers. This is likewise true of mobile companies like Apple and Google, who have run out of people who are so excited about incremental mobile hardware gains that they’ll buy a new phone every year, which means that growth has to come from squeezing app vendors:

https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/202x/2023/06/09/Pixel-4-to-7

This is likewise true of the streaming companies, which is why Netflix is cracking down on “password sharing”:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/02/nonbinary-families/#red-envelopes

It’s true of the movie studios, which is why they want to zero out their wage bills by replacing writers with automatic plausible sentence generators that will write stupid movies that they think we’ll still pay to see because there won’t be anything else:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/05/06/people-are-not-disposable/#union-strong

It’s certainly true of Uber, which is why they’ve double the cost of a taxi ride and halved the wages they pay drivers:

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

Monopolies “grow” by making their customers and suppliers worse off. But they have to be careful about this: if it’s obvious that you’re using your market power to screw buyers, you can get in trouble with competition regulators. That’s because the only part of antitrust law that the neoliberal project left intact is “consumer welfare” — the idea that monopolies should only face enforcement when they raise prices and/or lower quality:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/10/10/play-fair/#bedoya

This focus on price-hikes has given monopolists a free hand to squeeze suppliers and workers, because a monopolist — from Walmart to Amazon — can claim that squeezing your workers and suppliers is necessary to enhancing consumer welfare. The less you pay to produce a product, the cheaper you can price it.

When a company has a lot of seller power, we call it a monopolist. When it has a lot of buying power, we call it a monopsonist. No one ever made a bestselling, family-destroying board game called “Monopsony” so most people haven’t heard of the concept. But monopsony is every bit as dangerous as monopoly, and monopsonists find it far easier to acquire market power than monopolists. Few suppliers can afford to have even 10% of their sales disappear overnight, so a buyer who accounts for 10% of your sales can demand deep discounts and other favorable terms.

Amazon is a monopolist, but it’s also a very powerful and ruthless monopsonist. For example, its audiobook division, Audible, has a 90+% market-share, and it used that market-power to steal at least $100m from audiobook creators, in a scandal dubbed Audiblegate:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/09/07/audible-exclusive/#audiblegate

For Europe’s 800k sellers who rely on Amazon to reach their customers, the monoposony conditions are blatant and shameless. Take listing fees: Amazon’s “flywheel” pitch claims that as the company grows, it achieves “economies of scale” that can lower its cost basis. But Amazon’s listing fees haven’t changed, even as the company experienced explosive growth in the EU (remember, sellers whose Amazon fees exceed their margins have to pass those fees onto buyers, and also raise their prices everywhere else to satisfy the Most Favored Nation requirement).

Amazon books the revenues from these fees — and other junk-fees it extracts from sellers — in Luxembourg, an EU member nation that provides a tax haven to multinational businesses that want to maintain the fiction that they operate their businesses out of the tiny kingdom. There is sharp competition in the EU to offer the most servile, corrupt environment for multinationals, and Luxembourg is a leader, along with Cyprus, Malta and, of course, Ireland:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/05/15/finnegans-snooze/#dirty-old-town

But at least listing fees haven’t gone up, unlike other fees, which have climbed sharply. Amazon falsely claimed that its additional revenues from fees were the result of growth by independent sellers, which Amazon pegged at 65%. Later, the company admitted that the true growth figure was 22%. Meanwhile, fees are up 85%.

The true growth figure might be lower still. Amazon refuses to show the math behind its growth figures, or even say which sellers and sales are included in the figure.

The SOMO report cites research by Juozas Kaziukėnas of the e-commerce research firm Marketplace Pulse, who finds that sellers are now giving 50% of their gross revenues to Amazon, an increase of 10% over the past five years across the whole EU. However, different EU (and ex-EU) countries have experienced much steeper increases in fees — in the UK, fees have nearly doubled (up 98%), and in France, fees more than doubled (up 115%).

Many of these increases come from the Fulfilment By Amazon (FBA) program, which is promoted as an optional service, but which is really obligatory — careful research shows that sellers who warehouse, pack and ship their own goods get banished to the depths of search results, even if they have ratings, costs and times that are competitive with FBA. This is especially true of the “buy box” that lands at the top of most searches. The company refuses to disclose how buy box positioning is determined, but 90% of products in the buy box pay for FBA.

Amazon has used excuseflation to hike its FBA prices, blaming higher energy prices for price hikes that predated the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and blaming covid for price hikes that predated the pandemic.

Italy’s competition authority did yeoman service in uncovering the sleaze of FBA, publishing an investigation that showed that Prime and buy box made the notionally “optional” FBA into a must-have for merchants, meaning that Amazon could jack up FBA prices without losing business.

Another notable source of gouging came in response to the UK and France adopting digital services taxes, which were meant to make up for the tax-base erosion enabled by Luxembourg’s flouting of EU tax law. Amazon passed these taxes straight through to its merchants, without seeing a comparable decrease in the number of sellers using its platforms — an unmistakable sign of market power. If you can raise prices without losing customers, then, by definition, your customers have nowhere else to go.

I’ve previously written about how Amazon’s $31b/year “advertising” market isn’t really advertising — rather, it’s a payola scheme that auctions off the top of a search-listing to the merchant with the most to spend:

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

This is how you get a simple search like “cat beds” returning results whose first screen is 100% ads, and whose next five screens are 50% ads, many of them for dog products:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/interactive/2022/amazon-shopping-ads/

Auctioning off search results means that every time you search for something you want, you have to wade through screen after screen of listings for products whose vendors spent more on advertising, leaving less to spend on making quality goods.

This is as true in the EU as it is in the USA. The SOMO report shows that European merchants are required to spend ever-larger sums to show up in results for the exact products they sell, leaving them with a choice between making less money, raising prices, or skimping on quality.

But even the “winners” of Amazon’s gladiatorial combat among vendors can still lose. Amazon uses an automated product removal process that can delete some or all of a merchant’s products, without warning or explanation, and no one at Amazon will explain what a merchant did wrong. That remains true even if a vendor pays for Amazon’s “marketplace consultant” service — ask these paid Virgils why you’ve been cast into Amazon’s pit, and they’ll shrug their shoulders (and bill you for it).

And even if you can navigate the junk fees, the Kafka-as-a-service removals, the war of all sellers against all sellers for search primacy…you still lose. Merchants told SOMO that a product that survives Amazon’s gauntlet is likely to be cloned by Amazon and sold as an Amazon Basic or other house-brand product. Amazon doesn’t charge itself 50% junk fees, so it can always underprice the vendors it knocks off, and give its own products permanent top-of-search placement.

Amazon founder Jeff Bezos once testified under oath before Congress that this doesn’t happen — and then refused to return to Congress when multiple vendors showed evidence that he’d lied:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2021/10/18/amazon-congress-letter-third-party-data/

He definitely lied:

https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/amazon-india-rigging/

Amazon has faced investigations and enforcement in the EU over this, and settled a claim with a promise to “not use non-public seller data to compete with sellers,” but given the company’s record of broken promises on this score and the difficulty of catching them cheating, it’s pretty naive to think they’ll stick to this.

The report quotes Thomas Höppner, a lawyer who has represented small businesses that Amazon screwed over. Höppner says the problem is that the EU evaluates Amazon’s bad deeds on a “case-by-case” basis, missing the big picture: “By the time one identified problem was seemingly solved, Amazon had long made amendments elsewhere with the same effect. We require a more holistic approach that considers the entire Amazon ecosystem and the various interdependencies within.”

But the EU’s enforcement approach is about to change significantly. The EU just passed the Digital Markets Act (DMA), which imposes a bunch of obligations on Amazon:

allowing sellers to offer their products on other marketplaces at different prices (Article 5.3),

not obliging business users to pay for one of its services in order to use its platform (Article 5.8),

limiting the way Amazon uses non-public seller data to compete with them (Article 6.2)

preventing Amazon from giving top billing in search results to its own products or sellers that have acquired extra Amazon services (Article 6.5)

The report concludes with a suite of recommendations for improving EU enforcement. First, they argue for a return to traditional competition law, abandoning the “consumer welfare standard” that is so friendly to monopsonies and their abuses of suppliers and workers.

They call for a probe into Amazon’s Most Favored Nation deals (“fair pricing policy”), the practice of sponsoring search results, and spiraling fees. They want the EU to adequately fund DMA enforcement, with “measures to prevent regulatory capture.” And they want Amazon to publish clear explanations for how search results, buy box placement, and other practices hidden behind a veil of secrecy.

Amazon will doubtless claim that disclosing how those systems work will make it easier for spammers and scammers to game their way to the top of search results. We should be skeptical of this claim — content moderation is the last domain where anyone takes the bankrupt idea of security through obscurity seriously:

https://doctorow.medium.com/como-is-infosec-307f87004563

Finally, the report calls for breaking up Amazon, forcing it to choose between being a platform seller or a platform user, calling this the only way to “prevent the conflicts of interest between its role as a platform intermediary, seller, and service provider.”

The technical term for this measure is “structural separation” — a rule that bans platform companies from competing with their business customers. This is the principle at work in the US bipartisan AMERICA Act, which would force Google and Meta to spin off the parts of their ad-tech business that put them in a conflict of interest. Right now, Googbook represents both publishers and advertisers, while operating the marketplace where ad sales take place, and they take 51% out of every ad dollar:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/05/save-news-we-must-shatter-ad-tech

Structural separation hasn’t really been applied in the US for a generation, but it’s gained currency in recent years, for the obvious reason that the referee can’t also own one of the teams. I was in Germany last week speaking to regulators and politicians, and they espoused skepticism that the EU would embrace structural separation anytime soon.

But they were wrong! Today, the European Commission announced plans to force Google and Meta to sell off their conflict-of-interest ad-tech lines of business, mirroring the provisions of the US AMERICA Act:

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/06/google-may-soon-be-ordered-to-break-up-its-lucrative-ad-business-eu-warns/

Structural separation really is the policy we should be demanding. It’s amazing that lawyers who would never argue a case in front of a judge who was married to the plaintiff will turn around and defend the idea that Amazon can fairly operate a marketplace where they compete with other sellers.

With Amazon dominating online sales, and with in-person retail cratering, Amazon’s decisions have the power to determine the outcome of whole swathes of Europe’s economy. This is the “planned economy” that the EU claims it detests and seeks to prevent — but it’s an economy planned by distant autocrats in a Seattle boardroom, for the purpose of extracting the surpluses needed to launch an endless procession of penis-rockets.

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

https://pluralistic.net/2023/06/14/flywheel-shyster-and-flywheel/#unfulfilled-by-amazon

[Image ID: A desert ruin. In the foreground is a huge Amazon box, with an EU flag in place of its shipping label. Atop the box are the feet and partial legs of an Oxymandias figure.]

Image: Rama (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Gladiator_with_sword-Louis_Ernest_Meissonnier-MG_1216-IMG_1223-white.jpg

CC BY-SA 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/fr/deed.en

[reasonsforhope]

"India’s announcement that it aims to reach net zero emissions by 2070 and to meet fifty percent of its electricity requirements from renewable energy sources by 2030 is a hugely significant moment for the global fight against climate change. India is pioneering a new model of economic development that could avoid the carbon-intensive approaches that many countries have pursued in the past – and provide a blueprint for other developing economies.

The scale of transformation in India is stunning. Its economic growth has been among the highest in the world over the past two decades, lifting of millions of people out of poverty. Every year, India adds a city the size of London to its urban population, involving vast construction of new buildings, factories and transportation networks. Coal and oil have so far served as bedrocks of India’s industrial growth and modernisation, giving a rising number of Indian people access to modern energy services. This includes adding new electricity connections for 50 million citizens each year over the past decade. 

The rapid growth in fossil energy consumption has also meant India’s annual CO2 emissions have risen to become the third highest in the world. However, India’s CO2 emissions per person put it near the bottom of the world’s emitters, and they are lower still if you consider historical emissions per person. The same is true of energy consumption: the average household in India consumes a tenth as much electricity as the average household in the United States.  

India’s sheer size and its huge scope for growth means that its energy demand is set to grow by more than that of any other country in the coming decades. In a pathway to net zero emissions by 2070, we estimate that most of the growth in energy demand this decade would already have to be met with low-carbon energy sources. It therefore makes sense that Prime Minister Narendra Modi has announced more ambitious targets for 2030, including installing 500 gigawatts of renewable energy capacity, reducing the emissions intensity of its economy by 45%, and reducing a billion tonnes of CO2. 

These targets are formidable, but the good news is that the clean energy transition in India is already well underway. It has overachieved its commitment made at COP 21- Paris Summit [a.k.a. 2015, at the same conference that produced the Paris Agreement] by already meeting 40% of its power capacity from non-fossil fuels- almost nine years ahead of its commitment, and the share of solar and wind in India’s energy mix have grown phenomenally. Owing to technological developments, steady policy support, and a vibrant private sector, solar power plants are cheaper to build than coal ones. Renewable electricity is growing at a faster rate in India than any other major economy, with new capacity additions on track to double by 2026...

Subsidies for petrol and diesel were removed in the early 2010s, and subsidies for electric vehicles were introduced in 2019. India’s robust energy efficiency programme has been successful in reducing energy use and emissions from buildings, transport and major industries. Government efforts to provide millions of households with fuel gas for cooking and heating are enabling a steady transition away from the use of traditional biomass such as burning wood. India is also laying the groundwork to scale up important emerging technologies such as hydrogen, battery storage, and low-carbon steel, cement and fertilisers..."

-via IEA (International Energy Agency), January 10, 2022

Note: And since that's a little old, here's an update to show that progress is still going strong:

-via Economic Times: EnergyWorld, March 10, 2023

[amplifyme]

I haven't performed a deep dive into this topic yet, so double curious about your thoughts:

Why do you think What Happens Later was so badly rated? The critic reviews and audience scores were bafflingly low-- especially for the type of genre let alone Meg's return to the screen-- and didn't, to my mind, fit the film. I went into WHL primed to diagnose or pick it apart in a constructive way because of the heavy criticism; yet, all the heavy-hitting, repeatable flaws mentioned were either overblown or unmerited.

Of course, no film is perfect. I'm just... flabbergasted it was that poorly received. Am I only seeing the negative instead of the positive reviews?

My only guess at why many of the reviews were less than enthusiastic is likely tied to unreasonable expectations for what WHL would end up being. Just about everything I read before its release was centered around how Meg Ryan was bringing back romcom as only she was able to do it. So folks were remembering How Harry Met Sally and Sleepless in Seattle, French Kiss and You've got Mail. And those were great 80s and 90s films that highlighted Meg in all her quirky, effervescent ways.

But that's not the sort of movie she made with WHL. Because she's not the same person she was in the 80s and 90s. She's older. She's been married, raised children, no doubt suffered her share of disappointments and heartaches, and she clearly wanted to reflect that in both her and David's characters. This was a romcom for mature adults. For folks who have several decades of living under their belts and know that not every love story has a happy (or easy) ending.

I think many folks were expecting the happily ever after that we saw in most of her romcoms. Instead she gave us a much more realistic but still uplifting story of what happens after the happy ending ends. How do you move on from there? How do you reconcile the differences between expectation and reality? How are you going to let that influence the way you navigate future relationships? More importantly, how do you get to the point where you can finally forgive not only the partner in that failed relationship, but yourself too. What have you learned and how will that affect you going forward?

To me, that's what What Happens Later was all about. And I thought Meg, David, and all involved gave us a lovely story about love, in all its aspects. But if that's not the story many were expecting, it makes sense they walked away disappointed. I generally sit down to watch a movie with zero expectations in mind and just let it take me where it will. But a lot of people don't. That's my best guess. 🤷🏻‍♀️

Hey, thanks for stopping by! It's always nice to hear from you!

[beardedmrbean]

Who knew? Nearly three and a half years after Covid-19 first appeared on the scene, the World Health Organisation has declared the pandemic officially over.

And there we all were thinking it had ended more than a year ago, when the UK and much of the rest of Europe abandoned the last of their Covid restrictions.

Late to recognise Covid as a pandemic, the WHO has also been late to acknowledge that thanks in large measure to Western medicines and vaccines, it is also now essentially part of history.

Perhaps that's because of the continued influence of China, which only very recently abandoned its zero-Covid policy.

As long as a major economy was still imprisoning its citizens at the slightest sign of infection, then I suppose it was indeed hard to declare the disease no longer a public health emergency.

For most of us, the pandemic has nevertheless been over for a long time now. 

The grimly dispiriting legacy is, however, still very much with us. 

In the UK, the national debt is a fifth of GDP higher than it was, inflation has soared to double digits, economically sub-optimal work from home remains deeply entrenched, labour shortages abide, and many people still complain of long term sickness – much of it unrelated to Covid as such but seemingly triggered by the pandemic's deprivations – with record numbers claiming out of work benefits.

The Government's response to Covid always looked to me like a ruinous over-reaction, and I became something of a lockdown sceptic.

I say “something of” because in the initial stages of the pandemic – call it the “we're all going to die” phase – something fairly dramatic was obviously called for, watching the TV images of emergency hospitals being built in Wuhan and overwhelmed ICU units in Northern Italy.

Politically, it would have been virtually impossible for the UK to have stood alone in remaining open even as virtually the whole of the rest of Europe was closing down. 

The Government would have fallen within weeks if it had stood by and done nothing. 

Even Sweden, which seems to have got its approach about right, eventually implemented a watered down version of the restrictions imposed elsewhere.

Instinctively, Boris Johnson, then Prime Minister, was against lockdown, preferring instead the idea of “herd immunity”, but then he became seriously ill himself, and ended up fully embracing the made-in-China response.

For some, such as the former Supreme Court judge Lord Sumption – who would regularly warn of police state authoritarianism – the objection was on principled libertarian grounds.

This was, however, very much a minority position. One of the most remarkable things about the whole sorry affair is quite how compliant the country proved, and how quickly we succumbed to instruction. 

Somewhat alarmingly, it turned out that supposedly freedom loving societies are remarkably willing to submit to authoritarian rule, especially if paid to stay at home, as was the case with furlough in the UK. 

Even the Government was surprised by the obedience.

Yet it was always abundantly clear that these were essentially temporary, wartime measures that would be lifted once the emergency was over, so on those grounds at least, most of us were initially willing to go along with the heavy handed approach imposed.

No, what worried me was not so much the loss of liberty as the economic impact, and once the case mortality rate was confirmed at less than 1 percent for advanced economies, the lack of proportionality and cost benefit consideration. 

I could never quite accept the argument that what was being done was similar to putting the economy into a medically induced coma, with the patient reawoken as if nothing had happened once the pandemic was over. 

As we can now see, the lasting damage was monumental.

It would no doubt have been disastrous had the health service been overwhelmed, but when the main justification for lockdown becomes the rallying call of “protect the NHS” you have to ask yourself what the whole thing was really all about. 

Insulating the health service from a sickness it is there to treat?

You cannot put a price on life, it can be argued, and therefore almost any cost is justified. It is also true that in the fog of war, mistakes are bound to be made; over-reaction is possibly better than under-reaction.

All the same, it now seems abundantly clear that the treatment was in many ways worse than the disease itself. We'll never know the counterfactual, or just how many lives were saved by imposing a strict series of lockdowns.

Most epidemiologists will tell you that it was a lot. 

But they are not paid to think about the wider consequences, and it is now patently clear that the lasting damage to education, the economy and to wider public health was off the scale.

What are the lessons? We don't need to wait for the results of the official inquiry, still years away, to know some of the answers. 

Let's make a start by examining the death toll, reported on a daily basis during the pandemic as if in some kind of international competition for how effectively each country was dealing with the crisis.

For a long time, Britain seemed to be bottom of the class, which in turn instructed the severity of the counter measures thought necessary. 

The worse the numbers looked relative to others, the more draconian and prolonged the restrictions became.

Given differing methodologies and reporting systems, the best way of measuring the impact is not through recorded deaths from Covid, but via the excess death rate over and above what would normally be expected. 

On this measure, most major advanced economies ended up in much the same place.

Britain was slightly worse than Germany and France, but not significantly so, and actually quite a bit better than Italy and Spain, according to estimates published in the Lancet. 

This was not the impression you got at the time, when the British response was widely viewed as uniquely incompetent. 

What is more, Scotland did worse than England, notwithstanding the plaudits the first minister, Nicola Sturgeon, received for outbidding Westminster on the countermeasures needed. 

The same is true of Wales, whose first minister, Mark Drakeford, was similarly lauded for a more restrictive and therefore seemingly capable approach. 

Well, not according to the numbers.

Culture wars, I'm afraid to say, are as likely to determine your view of the efficacy of lockdown as the underlying facts of the matter.

What we now know, however, is that lockdown is an extraordinarily costly way of dealing with a pandemic. 

It is to be hoped that this lesson at least has been learned, and that the response to future pandemics will therefore be better calibrated to the severity of the disease. 

A 1pc case mortality rate scarcely seems to justify what was done, even if it was admittedly much higher in older age cohorts.

A more consensual approach that keeps people properly informed but allows them to make their own choices on the degree of risk they are prepared to run must be the way forward.

[coldgoldlazarus]

I know the metroid timeline is purposely pretty vague, but do you have a headcanon for how long it's been since metroid 1? I figure it has to be at least a few years, even in the games themselves don't take place over a long period of time each

I think my initial off-the-cuff guesstimate would be somewhere in the vicinity of eight to ten years, with Samus in Zero Mission being in her mid twenties, and in her early-mid thirties as of Dread. Wanna double-check what little canon info there is later to make sure there aren't any glaring contradictions, and it's hard to say how Prime 4 may alter things or not, but here's my rough guesses about the timeskips between games.

Zero Mission to Prime - A couple years, enough time for the escaped frigate Orpheon to set up shop on Tallon IV before Samus comes calling. For simplicity, let's round to an even number; my instinct would be to say two years, but apparently one source says it is actually three. I'll split the difference and say 2 Years, 6 Months.

Prime to Hunters - A couple months at most, mainly because I'm pretty sure it was said explicitly somewhere that Prime and Echoes were six months apart. 2 Years, 8 Months

Hunters to Echoes - A few months, probably a slightly bigger space on this end of Hunters, but still not too long, in keeping with the aformentioned six-month gap. 3 Years.

Echoes to Corruption - Approximately a year, give or take, allowing for Urtraghus's near-complete seed conversion (unimpeded compared to Tallon IV) and creation of Urtraghan Pirate Phazon Cult, along with the other logistics groundwork laid for their massive attacks seen in the game. 4 Years.

Corruption to Federation Force - Merely a few months, as Samus would still have to have been recovering from her phazon corruption for the pirates to have feasibly captured her, and for the Federation to switch gears from their now-useless PED technology to Project Golem. (Meanwhile, I hold the headcanon that the Pirates are quite vast and decentralized compared to what the games claim/imply, thus the Urtraghan Phazon Cult was not representative of the entirety of the Pirates, and the Doomseye crew were a completely different branch who had been setting up seperately from the Urtraghans during the same time period, and were unaffected by their fall.) For rounding purposes, let's say that's four months, putting us at 4 Years, 4 Months.

Federation Force to Samus Returns - This space is the big unknown variable, especially given this is most likely where Prime 4 will fall, and we don't yet know whether it will ultimately be a one-off or start a brand new trilogy or what. But for now, assuming only Prime 4 goes in this space, I'll give it something like a round two years, with P4 happening closer to the back end of that, to lead fairly directly into Samus Returns with only a few months between them, with whatever incident occurs there finally spurring the Federation to order the Metroid extermination. But if they do wedge in even more games after Prime 4, I would stretch this section out to three or more years. But for now, 6 Years, 4 Months.

Samus Returns to Super - I detailed in another post that while I originally agreed with the general consensus that Super follows extremely closely off of SR, I have since changed my mind. Even though I have my issues with the forced inclusion of Proteus Ridley and the general tonal mishandling of Metroid II's ending, if we are to aknowledge that that event occurred, I feel like Super must make far more sense with some temporal distance between it and SR. Ergo, I posit that rather than them being a week apart at most as popular consenus goes, there must be a minimum of four months between them. Enough time for Ridley's attack to be written off as a fluke, and somewhere in that time Samus and the hatchling Metroid embarked on an adventure that convinced her it was unsafe at her side - either in too much danger, or too much of a danger to others, or both, thus prompting her to bring it to Ceres Station, kicking off the events of Super. So going with that conservative estimate of four months, that puts us at 6 Years, 8 Months.

Super to Fusion - (I am of course just not aknowledging Other M in this timeline. Fed Force is overhated IMO, but I don't have enough patience for OM.) Given that enough time must have passed between Samus Returns and Fusion for the Biologic Space Laboratories asteroid space station to have been set up around SR388 and brought into operation for the habitats to be filled, but the X parasite propogation on said planet only reached the station shortly before Fusion begins, I would guess about a year or so passed, with the bulk of that time being spent simply building the station before operations proper began only a month or two out from Fusion's opening. But that's relative to Samus Returns; relative to Super I would estimate that gap to be somewhere around eight months, bringing our total up to 7 Years, 4 Months.

Fusion to Dread - This is another kind of weird one given how Dread just has Samus working with the Federation again, even if presumably on rockier terms than before. There must have been at least a solid couple-month stretch of initially dealing with the fallout of Fusion, then things settle back into an uneasy status quo, before the transmission comes that sets off this newest adventure. At the same time, not too much of a long stretch, given Samus still has the Federation-loaned purple Gunship and her new/old AI friend. So another eight-month stretch there puts us at 8 Years.

If I say Samus is like, 24 in Zero Mission, (given it seems she was in her early 20s when she was with the Federation, and had already been a bounty hunter of good repute for a couple years as of ZM) then that puts her at roughly 32 (or 33 or 34 if I do stretch out the period between FF and SR) in Dread, which just feels right to me. These are of course all rounded to exact numbers, I imagine the actual stretches of time to be a bit more uneven, but still amounting to this overall length.

[jessicanjpa]

Some fluffy and silly Rosalie/Emmett headcanons for @turbulenceseverywhere . (They are going through some hard stuff so please add on to send some comfort their way.)

Many vampires and vampire couples have found a form of "sleep" they find comforting. Rosalie and Emmett's thing is falling fake-asleep together in random places, usually at home. Some of their favorites:

-curled up on the carpet in front of the fireplace

-slumped together on the couch with homework and textbooks strewn over them

-out on the porch swing: one of them sitting up, the other with their whole upper body crammed into the other's lap

-When they're in college, they love to fall asleep on campus. They'll have a late-night study date in the coffee shop and eventually sink lower and lower until they're napping on their laptop keyboards. All just so the barista has to wake them up at closing time. The lounges with the good bean-bag-y chairs are prime real estate too. And of course, falling asleep in class just to annoy the professor.

When Esme is the one to find them "asleep," it makes her mother-heart so happy to tip-toe closer and drape a blanket over them. Sometimes she brushes Rosalie's hair out of her face and Rosalie smiles gently and lets out a relaxed sigh. (They definitely do this sometimes just to cheer Esme up.) Of course if Edward or Jasper finds them, they're either ignored completely or a paper football is launched from across the house at them.

My converted van headcanon is here in case you haven't see that one. Basically it was a time Rosalie gave Emmett a really good surprise :)

They have sooooo many silly tallies running and some are decades old. Emmett will skip a rock across a pond with 37 successful skips and blurt out "That's 10,600 to 7,205!" Rosalie is winning 29,090 to 17,001 in the "Who can guess what Edward's first complaint will be after school today" contest. They're both a little too good at unwrapping a CD without tearing the plastic wrap, so that tends to be roughly a tie. Rosalie is so far ahead in "Who can make the humans do a double take" that Emmett will never catch up.

One time when Rosalie was feeling depressed in the late 50s, Emmett dug out the rifle they'd only used as a prop thus far. He dragged Rosalie outside and proceeded to impress her by hitting a tin can from 500 yards. (I know nothing about guns, somebody tell me if this range isn't suprahuman enough.) She was like...okay so? But then he gave her a cheeky grin and said "That's one to zero." Rosalie tried the rifle out and instantly said "You're on." The contest continues to this day. Last week the target was a tennis ball that had just been served by Jasper with a vampire-strength tennis raquet. That tennis ball was flying. Neither one hit it, so they'll try again next week.

Rosalie and Emmett are the Cullen couple most likely to play First Sight, a prank they play on human classmates in which they "meet" each other there in school and appear to start flirting, start talking, and eventually hook up. They like to drag it out and let the humans think they have a chance, but the problem is... they're not good at dragging it out. They have a teensy problem keeping their hands off each other, so it doesn't usually last more than a few days. Alice and Jasper can drag it out for months, so Rosalie and Emmett become the Supportive Best Friends in that secenario, with Emmett loudly egging Jasper on and Rosalie loudly telling Alice that she can "do better than that edgy weirdo." In this case they have to sit at different girl and guy tables and Edward is just kinda there rolling his eyes.