#stage-level predicates

[jesterkoops]

MANY thoughts on the episode below the cut, but I just want to say that this show surely knows how to swing you in one direction in one episode, then swing you the opposite way in the next, then swing you back again in the following, then re-swing you once more with the latest... and the circle continues. I see people being very definitive with the direction this is all going after this episode, but if I learned anything from the last 3-4 episodes is that being definitive about anything is a complete waste of time.

I have to admit I wasn't as blown away or rattled by this episode overall as I expected to be after spoiling myself by accidentally opening Tumblr before I had seen the ep and seeing the reactions.

There's definitely elements, especially in the first half, that are very promising, and open up a ton of questions like the fact that Gemma seems to be there sort of her own volition? I mean, she might have resigned herself to being trapped there, but she doesn't really start demanding to go home until Dr Mauer tells her Mark has moved on. if so, what did they tell her/promise her to keep her down there? HOW did she exactly end up there? I thought we would find out by the end of the episode but nope. Did she actually have a car crash or did Lumon kidnap her and had Mark ID some random burned remains? Why kidnap her specifically though? Surely with all the people that were willingly severing themselves by that stage they would have found some poor soul to volunteer for whatever it is they're doing down there. What was she doing with the cards coming from Burt's department? And how long does she think she's been there exactly? 2 years is an awfully long time not to be conscious of it having passed. If you so desperately want to get out and be reunited with your husband and you're trapped there for years, wouldn't you lose it at some point and... well, pull an Helly in the elevator?

Then there's the rooms. If we start from the premise that she gets severed into a different Gemma every time she enters a room, by that logic, and by the fact that Mauer tells her that Cold Harbor means she will see the world again and the world will see her, Cold Harbor might mean something like some kind of final boss level (permanent?) severance. So I don't know that Mark completing Cold Harbor means she will be freed and him not completing it will doom her. It might be the other way around? It also always seemed weird to me that at Lumon they never seemed particularly hard-pressed to stop Mark physically looking for Gemma.

I don't really get, at the moment, how and if this might relate to those theories about reintegrating Kier's conscience into a resurrected body or if those theories are now totally off. The fact that she's a different version of Gemma every time she enters a different room means they might be experimenting with how different environments shape the same person to become someone different, but that's different from embedding a pre-existing conscience into a body. Why is this valuable to Lumon though? And how does it connect to Cobel's desire to obviously see the severance barrier permeated and for people to recognise each other?

As I mentioned in my previous post, I struggle with the idea of Gemma being actually alive because I feel it cheapens grief. However, if what Mark was struggling to deal with with was guilt, more so than just grief (which could be the case given the way their marriage was heading and their last interactions), then it might work. That would also give that hallway scene with Ms Casey in S1 ("I'm sorry" - "I forgive you") a new meaning. Guilt IS something that he could process and move on from if Gemma is still alive, because guilt isn't something that's predicated on learning to accept an irrevocable loss. I also realise now that to make Gemma's storyline somewhat interesting, it was sort of inevitable she'd be alive because otherwise we'd only see her via flashbacks (about which see my feelings below), which don't add THAT much to the story. Still would have preferred the alternative, but curious to see what they'll do.

Three things that might be minor but maybe aren't: 1) Devon wanting to take Mark to the cabins to talk to his innie, 2) the fact that it looked pretty deliberate when they did NOT show us Gemma's last name when she signed that form, and 3) Reghabi dumping it all when Devon said she'd contact Cobel. 1) Will Devon take him there in the end? Might that be a place where Helly might make an appearance outside of the severed floor? 2) Gemma is obviously not an Eagan (god... she's not, is she?), so why was her last name so important to hide? What other names do we know that are important to the story? Riggs? I'm blanking. 3) Does that mean Mark is not done reintegrating? Will Helena come into play as another person who has access to the tech/can help him that Devon didn't think of because she doesn't know her but she knows Cobel?

There were also elements that were kinda meh to me though. For the most part, it did seem to me like a fairly standard marriage flashback episode/dead wife montage, and I didn't really find anything particularly compelling about their past relationship. Like, yeah, Mark becomes a bit of an asshole at times towards the end, but nothing that hasn't been done before in backstories of couples struggling with infertility issues.

Speaking of, I really don't know what angle they're playing at with the infertility stuff because BOY they are laying it thick with this Mark/Helly/na baby (girl) foreshadowing now. It might be complete misdirection, but this thing has permeated every single episode this season between the intro, the dialogue, the sex. And while I struggle to see them have Mark finally experience fatherhood with another woman after they painted Gemma as a perfect wife/poor victim because it feels way too cruel to Gemma, how likely is it at this point that it won't happen (I have to admit for a second when Mauer said that, I wondered if the Gemma scenes were set in the future, but since Cold Harbor is still at 96% I doubt it)? I'm still rather uncomfortable with this whole thing and I wish things hadn't gone there given the backdrop, but hey... I'm here for the ride. Maybe they can surprise me!

Finally, the inevitable Mark/Gemma vs Mark/Helly/Helena comparison this will create (which is another reason I was not a fan of the "Gemma is alive" theory). So I'll get it out of the way now. Personally, I am way more invested in Helly/Helena than I am in the ship per se. My investment in the ship(s) is a byproduct of my fascination with Helly/Helena and the fact that there's layers, challenges, obstacles, character-development opportunities in MH that simply do not exist in MG precisely because of Helly/Helena's internal conflict and duality. MG are a pretty linear story, dictated primarily by an external challenge (freeing Gemma and reuniting). IMO, Gemma and Mark aren't characters that have the potential to challenge each other enough to make for a compelling story. Gemma can only challenge Mark now in terms of his reintegration because it's intrinsically related to how he now feels about Helly/Helena. And even the Mark/Helly/Helena quadrangle is only interesting because of Helly is an Eagan and the challenges that poses. If Helly/Helena had been just another innie, theirs would not have been as compelling a story either. Maybe that will change if Gemma becomes a bigger part of the next season, but that's where I'm at right now, and I doubt she will reveal such distinctively new character traits to change my opinion.

(Honorable mentions: I had to crack up at "he's stuck at 96%" showing the empty office - i.e., while Mark and Helly were off baby goating under tables. And what was up with the dopplegangers refining data down there? Does that mean the ones upstairs aren't actually doing the refining? Or are the doppleganger just passing on the data to the severed floor computers?)

[artbyblastweave]

You said you needed to be prodded to elaborate on why Worm should have been longer? Well consider this a prod, if I may be so bold.

A big chunk of it is rote contrarianism. Part of it is that I like Worm, my experience reading so much Worm was "Sweet! Even More Worm! I've got so much Worm left before I'm out of Worm!" So a version of Worm with More Worm is prima facie an enticing prospect.

In the non-reflexive, genuinely considered sense, there possibly should have been an interlude arc to flesh out the timeskip, make it feel like it was as much of her powered career as it objectively was. And I'm far from the first person to make this observation. But on another level, there's a sense where "Worm Should Have Been Longer" is conflated in my head with "Worm's Timeframe Should Have Been Longer." Which is tricky, and invites further unpacking-

One thing about Worm I've noted in the past is that the villain portion of Skitter's cape career- more than two thirds of the book- only takes place over about three months, but- speaking only for my reading experience- this was surprisingly easy to miss or elide in my consideration of the narrative. One reason for this is that Taylor and her supporting cast are so heavily fleshed out, are so well-realized, undergo so much character development in a compacted timeframe, that it felt like I had been following them for much longer than I had. This is enhanced (was enhanced?) by the out-of-universe passage of time; The S9 interlude arc is, like, a little over the one-third mark of the story, but Worm had been running for a year at the time that that was published, and it certainly felt like I’d been reading a years' worth of fiction while binging it. In this way Worm was truly faithful to its comic book origins; story arcs that take place over the course of hours but are published over the course of months, building reader familiarity with characters who objectively haven’t been at what they're doing for very long. A third element (noticed on rereads) is that Wildbow often opens with scene transitions/cold-opens or what-have you that, are generally contiguous with the preceding events, but simultaneously slightly obfuscate exactly how much time has passed. Arc 6 opens with Taylor finishing up with the ABB mop-up, and it’s blocked to demonstrate how far she’s come in such a relatively short time period. It can’t have been more than a few days since Lung. It explicitly wasn’t. But it had the vibe of having been a while.

What I’m working towards here, inch by inch, is the following conclusion: Worm has what I call an eyedropper approach to Taylor’s three-months and 22 arcs. Any given escapade feels like it’s just one vignette, emblematic of a longer, two-or-three-year stage of her life, scooped out and displayed as a representative sample of what’s going on. When shit hits the fan with Dinah, it feels like the upset of a longstanding status quo, even though by that point, Skitter has only been in five or six major engagements alongside the Undersiders. When they spend Arc 21 lancing various supervillain incursions into the city, it felt like I was watching a day in the life, like this was something the Undersiders had been dealing with, and would be dealing with, for a while- even though arc 21′s handful of engagements are basically the only times Skitter did that before she left. Purely from a vibes-based perspective, you could tell me that the first two thirds of Worm are occurring over the course of eight to ten years, and I might roll with that for a minute.

But the catch is- her villainous career has the vibes of lasting a long time, but it’s actually really thematically and logically important that it doesn’t. Skitter’s friendships within the Undersiders are strongly predicated on her ping-ponging from crisis to crisis so quickly that no true reckoning about their differing morals can ever come about. Skitter’s ability to administer as a benevolent warlord is heavily predicated on her lines of credit from Coil- and you cannot stretch that tension out much longer than it was stretched in canon without Dinah dying or Coil getting fed up with Skitters non-profitability. Breathing room is anathema to the story’s depiction of a pressure-cooker society where every crisis begets a new crisis. Nothing between Lung and Alexandria plays out the same way if anyone is allowed any amount of time to think about or process anything. And you actually see this in arc 21; it’s the first time that Skitter has a real opportunity to think about what the long-term looks like, and there’s a whole sequence where she’s getting nervous about her ability to reign in Regent over the long-haul. It’s the first time in three months where she’s had the luxury to worry about that kind of thing. 

You square this circle by.... basically, by striking the canon balance. There's a sense in which I'm increasingly convincing myself that I'm not talking about a problem Worm has so much as a problem Worm already has a workable-but-imperfect solution for. Create distinct periods in Skitter's development- "Rookie era," "Warlord Era," "Wards Era," whatever-each of which feel like they could balloon out into a years-long status quo if this were a comic, even though the cast are really living through the weeks where decades happen. Rely on the Sheer Amount Of Worm to smooth over the breakneck pace at which everyone's character growth and interpersonal connections are developing. There are a few points in the story where "fuck, has it only been three months?" is a salient mood to invoke. The get-together with Danny's coworkers, the back-to-school portions of arc 20. But for the most part the work already does a really good job of making the pinched timeframe a minor bit of fridge logic and not something hugely dissonant and immersion-breaking.

In the process of writing this I've basically argued myself out of thinking that there's much to gain from fucking around with this delicate balance. I don't know if that has implications for whether or not additional arcs covering the timeskip would help or hurt that balance- at a certain level of focus, that whole "you liked us, but you didn't love us" bit about Skitter's time with the Wards vs. The Undersiders becomes a much harder sell. It was already one of the hardest sells in the book for me, the thing that got me thinking about this in the first place. (two years vs three months!) But at some point, I have to bite the bullet- in a work as ambitious as Worm, "good enough" is a fine thing to settle for. It's good enough!

[accirax]

Elliot Cuevas Lore Check (Yoidoreshirazu MV Analysis)

After the intellectuals in our community had the thought to check the description of DRDTdev’s latest MV masterpiece, one fact became pretty clear: DRDT’s sparkly new MV is not fronted by one of our main cast of sixteen, or even a particularly pre-established side character. Instead, it’s time for Elliot Cuevas to take the stage, and bring with him a lot of questions ranging from “wait, that’s what he looks like?” to “wait, is the killing game predicated on a basis of lies?!” There’s… a lot running through my mind right now, and I see no better way to process it than to start answering the questions that I and others may have as best I can through a theory post. I’m living!

And when I say “answering the questions,” I mean that quite literally. I think that the best way to frame this analysis is to divide it into headlining questions, and tackle what we know and what we can learn piece by piece. Therefore, I think the most obvious question we can start with is:

#1: Who is Elliot Cuevas?

We don’t have a ton of information about the guy, but I’ve tried to compile what we do. By far the most information we’d gotten on Ellie prior to this MV was from the Chapter 2 Part 1 Q&A, where DRDTdev described a little about all of the major siblings we’d heard of so far. Here’s what DRDTdev said:

So, we know that Elliot was given the nickname “Ellie” (and presumably likes it, given that he’s credited in the MV as “Ellie”), and he looks really similar to Charles, which we also saw in the MV. Given how similar he looks to Charles, I’m going to assume that they’re biological brothers, which would make Ellie hispanic/latino. Similarly, I’m assuming that he identifies as male, due to his use of he/him pronouns and the term “brother” being applied to him. He likes pancakes and dogs, which… we’ll get back to later. Charles is stated to be 18+ at the start of Despair Time, which would make Ellie 29-32+ if he were alive today. Which… huh. Is he?

#2: Is Ellie alive?

The belief that Ellie is dead isn’t just a popular headcanon that metamorphosed into “fact”– his death is directly referenced in the text in the form of Charles’ secret. Your older brother, Elliot, died.

However, this MV does make it tempting to believe that Ellie could be alive, so let’s give it the benefit of the doubt for a moment. If Ellie is alive, there are two sets of two questions to consider.

Question #1: If Ellie is alive, why did people think he died?

Ellie was in a life threatening scenario that people believed he didn’t escape from, but he did. After this, he either took the opportunity to disappear, or something prevented him from reuniting with his loved ones.

Ellie did die, and the DRDT universe contains some sort of necromantic magic or time travel properties that could bring him back to life.

Question #2: If Ellie is alive, why does the secret say that he’s dead?

Whoever wrote the secrets (likely the mastermind) did so intending to tell the truth. They learned the information from a source that led them to believe that Ellie had died, and if Ellie turned up alive, they would be just as surprised as everyone else.

Whoever wrote the secrets (likely the mastermind) did so intending to lie. They knew that Ellie was really alive, and included his “death” in the secret just to fuck with Charles. This could also imply that other students’ secrets incorporate some level of lies.

If Ellie is alive, I think that the #1 situation is more likely for both questions.

If Ellie is dead, we don’t know exactly when his death happened. Given that Charles cites it under the umbrella of “childhood amnesia,” we can pin Ellie’s hypothetical death down to a time when Charles was a child. The National Institute of Health defines childhood as 3-11 years old. So, if Ellie died when Charles was 3-11, it would mean Ellie’s age of death would fall between 14 and 23.

I made this little moodboard to try to piece together around what age Ellie might be depicted as in the MV based on how DRDTdev has drawn people of various ages before. This is important under the assumption that Ellie canonically looked like this at some point during his life. ‘Cause (picking obviously wrong numbers here), if Ellie had died when he was, like, 2, it’d be weird if the MV showed him when he was, like, 50, right?

Allow me to take a little detour to discuss the Nageishi sisters and establish their ages. I initially ballparked Arei’s age as around 13 in that picture, which would have made her sisters (who are 2-5 years older than her) 15-18. However, there’s some actual evidence we can pull upon to clarify when that image might have come from.

In Arei and J’s FTE, J says that Arei “definitely [*was*] a highschool bully,” and Arei confirms that she was “the queen of her school.” Assuming that these two are to be believed, we can estimate based on the average age at which an American enters high school as a freshman that Arei has been a bully since at least around 14. While I don’t necessarily expect that Arei came in and became the queen bee on the first day of freshman year, it certainly would have been easier to establish her reign if the other students hadn’t previously seen her being bullied and tortured for a year or so beforehand. Therefore, Arei is probably in a maximum of eighth grade (12-13) in that image, so that she would have had enough time to sabotage her sisters before entering high school.

Additionally, although it isn’t stated in the secret the killing game handed out, Arei confesses to David and Teruko that she “got [her sisters] unlawfully sent to reform school.” Through a bit of googling, I learned that many reform schools cap out at about 16-17 years old, although it’s impossible to confirm that without knowing which state Arei grew up in. If that’s the case, then Fuyuko and Natsuko could only be a maximum of 17 years old, which is in the same sort of age range as Arei being a maximum of 15 in that picture. However, I don’t know if the Nageishi parents/the government would find it too useful to send the sisters to reform school for only one year, so it seems more likely that they’re younger than that in the picture. I might ballpark that Arei is 12 and Fuyuko and Natsuko are 15 in the picture.

Anyways, I think we can definitely rule out the possibility of Ellie dying when Charles was on the lower end of the age spectrum. He looks way older than any of the characters drawn “when they were kids”, and notably older than Arei as well. To me, he also looks older than Ryan, meaning he probably reached the age of an 18+ adult.

Unfortunately, there’s a really large age range that’s gone undepicted between the “18+” killing game participants and Mariabella, the only “parent-aged” adult we’ve seen so far. I would probably put Ellie’s appearance between the two, but it’s also possible that his unkempt hair and eyebags are making him look older than he actually was, a la Syobai Hashimoto of SDRA2 (the link is a spoiler-free picture of him). Syobai’s exact age is unknown, but generally young, yet many people think he’s an old man when they first see him. That phenomenon could be going on with Ellie as well.

If he is, we’ll say, 20 or older, though, there’s a limited number of ages he could have died at that would still fall within Charles’ childhood. If Ellie died, he did so when Charles was in the 8-11 kind of age range. Otherwise, for Ellie to reach the age he’s shown at in the MV, he probably survived to grow older than Charles’ family last remembers him. I think Ellie’s death is probably more likely, but, hey, that means we’ve narrowed down the period in which Charles could have acquired his childhood amnesia. That’s something!

#3: How does Charles feel about Ellie?

Well, okay. Obviously, in the current day, Charles doesn’t know who Ellie is, and therefore probably doesn’t have any strong feelings about him other than confusion. But, before Charles forgot about him, what was Charles’ opinion?

I actually thought that Charles really admiring Ellie was a canon fact, but looking back at it, I don’t think it was ever directly stated. That said, there are several reasons why I thought that their relationship was a positive one.

Told you we’d come back to Ellie liking pancakes! I’m sure it’s not a coincidence that, when Charles thinks of what he’d like to learn how to cook, he comes up with Ellie’s favorite food. It could be that Ellie used to make pancakes for Charles, or that they simply used to go out and get pancakes together, but Charles clearly has some sort of repressed memories about pancakes with his brother that makes him want to seek them out again.

We already knew that Charles and Ellie were known to look very alike, and this MV confirmed that was true, down to the length of their hair. If Charles didn’t like Ellie, he easily could have kept his hair short, like the haircut he had as a child, as a way to make them look less similar. However, Charles is very attached to keeping his hair in a long ponytail, just as Ellie wears it. That implies to me that Charles saw Ellie as enough of a role model to seek replicating the image of his brother through his own style even when he doesn’t remember that Ellie existed. That’s powerful.

#4: Why does Ellie look… like that?

Now this is a point that I’m still confused about. Charles’ affluent backstory has been alluded to multiple times. Both his inability to do his own laundry and his lack of knowledge in the kitchen imply that he had people to cook and clean for him. It’s possible that Charles’ parents were the ones doing that for him (which implies some level of wealth, but not so much as living in a house full of butlers and maids), but the general vibe I’ve gotten is that Charles’ family was well-off enough that they hired help.

If we assume that Charles and Ellie are biological brothers who spent enough time together to form a notable bond, it really seems like they would have grown up in the same household for both of their youths, together. So then, what gives with Ellie’s appearance? The patched up jacket, blemished face, and basic cigarette don’t match at all with the pristine white mansion with hedges that many might imagine for Charles. How would that have played out?

Option A: Ellie was the family’s rebellious wild child

I’m having trouble coming up with good examples, but there’s definitely a trope out there of a big brother character who’s a bit of a rude rebel, but still a pure-hearted dreamer that their younger sibling(s) can really look up to. Ellie was just the member of the uptight Cuevas family that couldn’t be tamed, no matter how hard his parents tried to cramp his thrifty style or stop him from going out and partying(?).

Notably, this option is quite confusing for Charles. Even if this figure is considered the typical epitome of cool, I don’t know if it’s someone who Charles would really gel with. As a child, Charles is depicted as pretty wide-eyed and innocent with his adorable little bubbles. I’m not saying that that kind of kid couldn’t come to idolize their rockstar big bro– just that, if they did, they probably wouldn’t turn out like Charles. Still, it could be an opposites attract situation, or perhaps forgetting Ellie and the ensuing trauma changed Charles more than we would have expected.

This interpretation is also… a bit of a leap, considering what we’ve seen of Ellie.

Like, these are not particularly the expressions of a thrill-seeking party animal who loves to crack open a cold one with the boys. Most of his expressions look wary, scary, or contemplative, and even the two that are smiling are doing so in more of a wry/teasing way. Fun-loving scamp Ellie might fit the way he’s styled his body, but not so much the expressions on his face. Perhaps the characterization was a little off?

Option B: Ellie was the family’s edgy black sheep

Instead of Ellie’s cigarette and messy ponytail implying that he’s supposed to be punk and cool, perhaps they’re meant to indicate that he was more emo and nihilistic. I don’t imagine that the Cuevas household would’ve liked this too much either, but it’s still a plausible way for a privileged teen to rebel against his family system. This kind of attitude matches more with the range of expressions we can gather from Yoidoreshirazu.

However, if it would be hard for Charles to relate to the last guy, I have no idea what Charles would be doing looking up to this guy. Maybe if their one-on-one moments showed Charles the soft heart behind Ellie’s tough exterior, Charles would’ve come to appreciate his perspective on life…? Yeah, I don’t really imagine these two enjoying a plate of pancakes together, either. Also, this would have been when Charles was, like, a kindergartener.

But if that’s the case, what then? Is my image of the Cuevas household just totally off? Or is this version of Ellie not compatible with the Cuevas household at all?

Option C: Ellie was kicked out of his family and left for dead

Especially in front of the grimy brick background and neon street sign, Ellie’s worse-for-wear appearance did make me think that this image of him could have been taken from a time when Ellie was without a home and living on the streets. As in, this look was never associated with the Cuevas household at all.

This option has some definite appeal because it allows a lot more flexibility from Ellie’s personality before he was kicked out. He could have been a stand-up guy, smart like Charles and a great mentor too, and only have adopted his more dour personality once he was kicked out of home. There are plenty of reasons why someone could be disowned that don’t (necessarily) reflect poorly on their character: Google lists being LGBTQ+, dating someone of a different race or religion, getting someone pregnant, or not following the profession your parents wanted for you as possibilities, depending on who the parents are and what they believe.

Any interpretation where the Cuevas parents are somewhat ashamed of Ellie would also help to rationalize why Mr. and Mrs. Cuevas lied to Charles about being an only sibling. If they really loved Ellie, they might have tried to bridge the subject with Charles one day, and not let the memory of their elder son fade into history. If he was someone they didn’t want to associate with in the first place, covering up his death would have been much more emotionally viable.

So, if the Cuevas parents are the kind of people to disown their kid for less-than-fair reasons, Ellie could have still been the kind of treasured big brother figure to Charles one might have expected while also getting kicked to the curb. However, this option raises the definite question of… how did Ellie’s death happen?

On the surface, that might seem like a strange question. Sadly, homeless people in the United States have an average life span that’s 17.5 years shorter than the average housed person’s life span, and the number of deaths have only been increasing in recent years. Especially in a civilization that was once home to the biggest, most awful, most tragic event in human history, trying to survive without a home might be quite difficult. 

All that doesn’t really apply to Ellie, though, because we have a pretty decent lead on how he died: dog attack.

Even if he might not remember why, Charles dislikes dogs, and has a remnant of that turbulent relationship etched into his very skin. Ellie actually likes dogs, an interesting point of contrast, but one that makes it clear that dogs are important to Charles’ backstory in some manner. I and others have then speculated that the attack in which Charles got that scar on his arm may have been the time at which Ellie died. Both events– the attack that created the scar and Ellie’s passing– were erased by his childhood amnesia.

The story would play out as something along the lines of “Ellie and Charles used to both really love dogs, and were approached by a dog one day. However, that dog was feral, and attacked Charles. He was bitten on the arm before Ellie told Charles to run as Ellie stayed behind to protect his brother. However, Ellie couldn’t fend off the dog himself, and was instead mauled to death. Charles escaped with an injured arm and a head full of trauma that would cause him to fully erase the memory of his brother from his mind.” Don’t know how feasible that exact scenario is, but I always imagined it as something like that.

So, if Ellie was living on the street at the time of his death, how would the two of them have come together for the dog to attack? Maybe Charles could have been visiting Ellie on his own, but, again, he would have been 8-11 years old at the time. Would the 8-11 year old Charles have really had the means or motive to set out alone to see his brother, and would the Cuevas family have really let their elementary school-aged son wander off into the streets alone?

Then there’s the issue of Ellie’s age again. Look. I’m not trying to say that every 23 year old should be able to 1v1 a feral dog in a fight. I’m 23, and if I had to fight a street dog to the death, I would probably lose! However, while I am a quiet nerd who likes to write thousand word essays about anime video game fanfiction characters in her free time, Ellie seems like a fairly athletic young man. If he looks like Charles, he’s also probably around Charles’ height of 5’9”. Plus, it probably didn’t have to be to the death. Couldn’t Ellie have used those long legs to run away, or his human hands to make an improvised weapon, or something? To me, it feels much more plausible for Ellie to have been killed in a dog attack if he were also a child/teen when it happened. But, that should be incompatible with his appearance in the MV. Unless–

Option D: Ellie became this way… after he was “dead”?

Wait, what? No, wait, I thought I had already determined that Ellie was dead! What do you mean it might ACTUALLY MAKE MORE SENSE IF HE WAS ALIVE??? WHAT HAS THIS MV COME TO?! AAAAAAAAAA–

Well. If this version of Ellie is what he “became” after he faked his death (or had it faked for him), certain elements start to line up. There is no conflict with the Cuevas family, because Ellie’s personality could have been completely different than what we see in Yoidoreshirazu. Similarly, we don’t have to solve why Charles would have built such a bond with this guy because this guy may not have existed when he was interacting with Charles. The brothers growing up in a household together would make it considerably easier for them both to encounter a mean dog at the same time. And, if Ellie didn’t have to reach this 20+ age before he disappeared from Charles’ life, the whole story could have been set much earlier, such that Ellie could have been fending the dog off when he was more of a kid or teen himself. Then, being separated from his family and presumed dead is what caused Ellie to lose his faith in life, take up his smoking habit, and hardly be able to sleep or smile.

This could still involve him being forced to live on the streets, although I would then wonder why he didn’t ever try to get back in contact with his family. Maybe he did and they turned him away? But, if he was an admirable son, I see no reason why they would do that. Perhaps he had expressed a bit more discontentment with the Cuevas family prior, and decided that, given this opportunity, it was for the best to sever his ties with them? That seems like a pretty extreme decision to keep up with given the state that Ellie seems to have wound up in, and would call into question how much Ellie cared about Charles if he was so willing to leave him behind.

It would kind of make more sense to me if, in this scenario, an outside force was stopping Ellie from reuniting with his family– for instance, if XF-Ture Tech offered Ellie a deal like they did to Min (somewhat forcing his hand), which included that he could never contact his family again. That could certainly make Ellie more important to the plot moving forward, and explain part of why he even got this MV. But, what would XF-Ture Tech want to do with some kid who was just near-fatally mauled by a dog attack? An near-fatal attack that… he doesn’t even seem to have scars on his face, neck, or right hand from???

Option E: this is how ellie looks in heaven or hell or whatever i don’t freakin know

Some of you may have been screaming at me the entire time that Ellie’s design may not be “canon,” so to speak, and you know what? That’s valid. It could simply be a projection of what Ellie could have looked like if he’d ever grown to this point in age, or his appearance may have been modified to better match Gumi’s disheveled vibe in the original Yoidoreshirazu MV, and not reflect his true personality. Ellie and Gumi do have really similar poses, cigarettes and all.

However, it would seem a little odd to me to give the audience what’s basically an AU design of Ellie before we got the original version. That would lead to insanely wrong conclusions like what I just wrote above if true, which could potentially cause people to interpret future content incorrectly. That’s not good. Besides, the song was still chosen for Ellie, and the song carries the same sort of gritty, nightlife vibe that the Gumi design does. Could the lyrics of the song really fit Ellie so well that the entire energy of the song and appearance of the MV could be waived?

#5: What’s up with these lyrics?

Sigh. I hate to move on to the next talking point when I haven’t yet resolved what we were last discussing, but, to be honest, I don’t know if I can resolve why Ellie looks and acts like that with the information we currently have. I’m kind of banking on the lyrics swaying me in the right direction when it comes to that interpretation, but given that I’m probably going to have to reverse engineer a lot of the lyrics’ meaning, I don’t have high hopes.

Well, we’ve already seen how I think these lyrics would apply to Rose, so how do I think they would fit Ellie? More questions ahead, but please note that I may be taking certain lyrics more specifically than they’re meant to be interpreted. I don’t have much else to go off of, so for the sake of gaining pretty much any knowledge I kinda have to assume the lyrics are total slam dunks.

#6: What can we learn about Ellie’s personality?

I woke up as an unaware drunkard  All of this bickering goes on til the dawn comes 

Ellie wakes up and immediately begins to complain. Unless he’s bickering with himself, he isn’t alone, although that doesn’t necessarily mean he has friends. In the original song, I imagine this lyric to be more about passersby or the general state of the world, so it could be the same case for Ellie.

In Ellie’s case, it’s unclear exactly what being a “drunkard” means. It could just be the literal interpretation, where Ellie is an alcoholic. I wouldn’t know. Being a drunkard could also extend to being an addict in general— we can be pretty certain that Ellie is a smoker (unless see Option E above). It could also be that the “drunkard” part of the phrase is less important and it’s more just about being unaware. Although, that would require further interpretation for later lines like “getting drunk again and again,” and Drunkard is also half of the song’s title (“An Unaware Drunkard”). Still, Elliot could be enveloped in the same sort of general haze I described back when I gave this song to Rose. Or, he could literally just be a guy that likes to drink a lot. Either way, it gives off the impression of someone who spends more time centered in his own world than butting into others’ businesses.

The singing voices are uncountable And once one gets lost in them, they end up at your xx Hey, look at how pretty it is, the day dream rondo  I hide a thousand and can only spit out ten

More introvert coding– he really doesn’t like being in large groups of people. Ellie keeps the same pretty neutral expression throughout all of these lines in the MV, which makes it kind of hard to discern exactly what these statements mean for him. Like, is “look how pretty it is” supposed to show how he’s easily distracted by dreams and frivolous things, or how he’s using positive things to distract those around him from how he “hides a thousand and can only spit out ten”? In either case, that latter line seems to imply that Ellie is dissatisfied with whatever he’s doing in life (or death?) right now– “can only spit out” makes me think that he feels he should be doing more.

Giving in, I’m living Getting drunk again and again, unexpectedly- Ah, it's not half bad

Ah, the infamous screenshot from the presumed dead man. This smirky face gives some definite context for the attitude of these lines. Ellie seems smug or proud that he’s living… because he’s beating the death allegations? Well, it could also be that he just enjoys living a life of sin (smoking and drinking), and/or enjoys defying the expectations of the Cuevas family in this way. There’s also a certain irony to saying “I’m living” while flaunting a cigarette in his hand. Ellie may also be someone who enjoys tempting fate and defying the odds.

Ellie’s facial expressions with these lines make me believe that he actually thinks that getting drunk again and again is pretty cool, and it’s not just a deflection from a tumultuous mind. Which, again, begs the question of whether the “drinking” is literal, or a metaphor for something else. With not much other information to go off of, I’m kind of assuming it’s both at the moment. Ellie (in this state) probably is someone who drinks and enjoys doing it, but also someone who doesn’t feel any guilt over ignoring– or forgetting– his problems.

#7: Did Ellie also forget about Charles?

There are a strange number of lines in this song that could imply that Ellie isn’t just being ignorant, he’s actually forgetting about something big. That something could be the memory of his younger brother, just like how Charles forgot the memory of his elder. Runs in the family, I guess?

I woke up as an unaware drunkard

Starting at the very first line, you could begin to view the lyrics through the lens of someone who lacked information about their past: “Elliot woke up somewhere random mostly forgetting who he was in a hazy state of being.” To be clear, I’m not saying that that’s the interpretation of the line, just an interpretation of the line. It’s an interpretation that builds further connections with later lyrics, though.

And then   The sacred mountain is covered in mud, it’s smeared and chipping away, ah yes, it's not half bad 

That's my muddy, obstructed, and broken vision of the future- It’s not half bad 

These lines focus on something being damaged or broken. Ignoring the original song’s references to Mount Penglai, which are completely absent from this MV, I would interpret a character’s “sacred mountain” as their central motivation. The pursuit of this goal would be very important, or “sacred” to them, and just as majestic as it is difficult to traverse and achieve. That pairs well with Ellie losing his view of the future, as both indicate that he’s completely forgotten what his purpose in life is.

And yet, he insists that it’s not half bad. Why? The most likely reason is that, for whatever reasons made him look like this, Ellie has just adopted the same sort of fatalistic behavior as Gumi did in her MV. However, you also might not think that forgetting something was bad if you ever forgot that you forgot it. For the majority of his life, Charles hasn’t thought that forgetting Ellie was a terrible ordeal because he had no clue that Ellie even existed. For Ellie, it could be frightening to know that you’ve forgotten a lot of who you are, but also freeing. That dichotomy could be what resulted in his current pensive yet playful behavior.

Getting drunk again and again, unexpectedly- Ah, it's not half bad I'm a drunkard unaware of my rival in love, so 

I'm a drunkard unaware of the story

These lines are ones that really made me think that Ellie could have forgotten Charles in particular. I’m really not sure what “rival in love” was supposed to mean in the original song, but for Ellie, that rival being his brother makes sense. He doesn’t have a lover, as far as we’re aware, but he may have had to fight against Charles for his parents’ affections in the past. Many siblings have a competitive relationship with one another, so Charles could also be described as a rival who Ellie loves. Charles is an easy stand-in for “the story” as well, as long as we assume that the main plot of the killing game is considered “the story.” Charles is a major player in the killing game who’s already been going on a major story arc of his own, and, being Ellie’s little brother, it would make sense if Ellie’s priorities in the story were Charles-focused were he aware of the killing game.

What would it mean if Ellie had forgotten Charles, though? It seems most likely to me that, if both brothers came to forget one another, the trauma would have stemmed from the same event. But, if Charles forgot about Ellie because of that dog attack, Ellie could have only had time to forget who Charles was if he survived for long enough after the attack to have that revelation. Also, don’t know how important this is, but if the attack gave Charles childhood amnesia, would it have had the same effect on a 20+ year old man? I don’t know enough about amnesia to know if the same circumstances that would cause a child to discard their memories would also result in an adult forgetting about aspects of their life. Then again, Ellie almost certainly suffered greater damage than Charles, so any aftereffects may have been more severe.

I obviously can’t declare with 100% certainty that Ellie forgot who Charles was, nor can I even get particularly close. Still, these strange threads seemed to be too prominent to ignore, and this was the best solution I could find to them with the information we know now.

#8: Who is “you”?

Twice in Yoidoreshirazu’s lyrics does the singer reference a character as “you.”

Neglecting my happiness, I never want to sober up until it's time to listen to your voice I’m giving into you, but you don’t even have anything to say and my body is dyed

Please don't let this fleeting happiness go away, until I can lend an ear by your side I’m giving into you, but you don’t even have anything to say and my heart is dyed

This person is quite important to the singer, as the singer craves their voice and succumbs to their person, their body and soul colored by the experience. And yet, there’s a sense of isolation, as “you” refuses to say anything back to the singer. It’s a classic tale of immense devotion met with quiet rejection for Ellie to partake in with… someone. I don’t know who.

For what it’s worth, I do think the lyrics imply that this is another human person as opposed to, say alcohol. While alcohol can certainly have a profound impact on a person, causing their happiness to come and go and changing aspects of their physicality, “you” is referred to with enough human traits that it doesn’t match up. Maybe anthropomorphized alcohol could have a voice, but when has it ever needed you to listen to it? To my knowledge, lending an ear to the bottle itself is pretty unheard of.

So, is “you” Charles? That makes some sense, as Charles is the only relevant character to Ellie’s story that we know much about. Based on what we’ve already established about Ellie and Charles’ probable bond, Ellie could definitely fit the devoted older brother character in one flavor or another. But then, why would Charles have rejected him? Could be the whole childhood amnesia thing, but then Ellie would have had to exist during a period of time when Charles had already developed the amnesia and also remember who Charles was enough himself to care. Charles could have also just not liked him much, but that contradicts with the evidence presented back at Question 3.

Honestly, I don’t think Charles is “you,” despite my lack of other options. Perhaps “we” can figure this out?

worn out, we all look horrible until all thousand voices become hoarse 

Yeah, there’s also a “we” in Yoidoreshirazu, which furthers the idea that, wherever he is/was, Ellie isn’t alone. The lyrics make it unclear whether the “we” is the singer + you (and maybe others), or just the singer + others– I’d probably lean that it probably wasn’t meant to include “you” in the original, but who knows how DRDTdev chose to interpret the song. Still, as alcohol isn’t normally described as “looking horrible,” this further implies that there are other human characters referenced in Ellie’s MV. In the case of “we,” Ellie also has to associate with these people enough to include himself as part of them. He’s in a group. Why? How? When?

#9: What differences are there between this MV and the original?

This one goes out to all the people who thought to go back and check the original Literature Girl Insane MV for differences while we were dealing with that whole project! It inspired me to try the same thing here, and see what happened.

Yoidoreshirazu is a much easier task than LGI, though, because it’s a simpler song and MV on all fronts. Both MVs only portray one character, one location, and one color for the lyrics to be transcribed in. (There’s also only, like, a max of twelve words on screen at a time, unlike David’s mental library.) For the most part, the two Yoidoreshirazus are very similar. None of the lyrics were edited from Magenetra’s translation on the vocaloid lyrics wiki, the lights turn on and off at the same times, and the DRDT version doesn’t appear to include any additional puzzles or easter eggs. Still, they aren’t exactly the same, so I’ll write out the differences I found playing them side by side for both my own and others’ purposes.

Gumi is on screen at the start, then quickly disappears and comes back, while it takes Ellie until the lyrics start to appear.

Not much extra to explain on this point. It may indicate that Ellie was missing or absent for a longer period of time, or at least that he’s more mysterious/quiet than Yoidoreshirazu’s Gumi.

Gumi has her tongue out a lot more at the beginning of the song.

Before Ellie takes off his hood (so, basically for the first half of the song), he only sticks his tongue out for one part of the song, from 0:52 (“getting drunk again and again”) to 0:59 (“my rival in love”). Meanwhile, Gumi has her tongue out from the moment the lyrics start (0:09, “I woke up as an unaware drunkard”) to the end of the first stanza (0:25, “all thousand voices become hoarse”), and then does it again from 0:43 to 0:59, the entirety of the first chorus (“the sacred mountain” to “rival in love”). This gives Gumi the appearance of being more rebellious, while Ellie is more moody.

Gumi smiles a lot more than Ellie.

When Gumi returns from the first chorus (1:00), she’s already smiling. While she shifts from a satisfied smirk to a smug grin to an enraptured beam to a content smile, she doesn’t actually stop smiling from the minute mark on until the vocals stop (2:10). Meanwhile, Ellie doesn’t smile at all until 1:50, and drops the playful tongue-out expression after a mere six seconds. The only lines that Ellie smiles for are “I’m living / Getting drunk again and again– Ah, it’s not half bad,” which is quite interesting. The overall result is the same as the bullet point above; that Gumi is at least better at pretending to be happy while Ellie is lost in his sorrows.

Ellie and Gumi’s expressions are pretty different in general.

Here are all of Ellie’s expressions versus all of Gumi’s expressions. In the end, Gumi actually had more expressions, which I wasn’t expecting. Some of their faces are mirrors to each other, while others are different.

Both Ellie and Gumi have a serious eyes closed face, a bored/neutral face, a bored tongue-out face, a scary face with big eyes, and a sleazy grin. The only unique faces Ellie has on top of those are the more playful tongue-out smile (present only when his hood is off) and the contemplative downward gaze. Gumi has a knowing smile, a hopeful smile, and a content smile. With those differences, we conclude that, on the whole, Gumi seems to have a bit more hope in the world, while Ellie is downcast. I’m sure you couldn’t have guessed that by the results of the last two points (/s).

Ellie has a costume change.

Not hard to notice; Ellie takes his hood off mid-MV while Gumi keeps her outfit the same.

There’s a part of the song where Ellie disappears while Gumi is present.

If anything in this question is going to be important, it’s probably this tidbit. At 1:39 in DRDT Yoidoreshirazu and 1:37 in original Yoidoreshirazu, the line “and my heart is dyed” plays. At this point in the MV, Gumi is present on screen, but Ellie is not. Gumi then disappears alongside Ellie for the following “sore wa” before both reappear for the chorus, but the difference is still notable. Something about the line “and my heart is dyed” caused DRDTdev to remove Ellie from the MV when he otherwise should have been there. This could mean that Ellie’s absence is what caused his heart to be dyed, that Ellie was actually absent when the heart dying occurred, or something else. Regardless, the difference in visuals– especially one that leaves the lyrics as the only thing on screen for you to look at– means that “and my heart is dyed” is likely the most important lyric of the song for Ellie.

Ellie is doing a whole lot more in the final chorus.

This is probably why I thought that Ellie had more sprites than Gumi did, other than the whole two outfits thing. Throughout the entire second chorus, Gumi only uses one face, the smile with big eyes. Meanwhile, Ellie rotates through four different faces before returning to the one he started with; scary stare -> neutral -> eyes closed -> grin -> tongue-out smile -> scary stare. It gives Ellie a whole lot more character than Gumi had in that final portion. Granted, the inverse is also true: Ellie switched faces less frequently than Gumi at the beginning of the song. It leads me to believe that the lyrics at the end of the song may be more important to Ellie than the lyrics of the start, as the end is featured as the most memorable portion.

#10: So, um… What did we learn, exactly?

Honestly… I don’t know. Unlike the Chapter 2 murder, which is intended to be basically solvable, or even the characters’ secrets, which have had much revealed with minimal possible permutations, so little has been confirmed about Ellie that it makes it near impossible to settle on one answer as absolute truth. I can write out my current best theory about what may be going on with Ellie, but it’s honestly so implausible that I don’t really think it’s going to be canon myself.

If we prioritize the information given to us in this music video and the Q&As and disregard the effects that our conclusion might have on the story of DRDT as a whole, then I think the most likely option was actually Option D, Ellie became this way after he died. I think that Ellie was a bright young man– maybe not perfect, but still an older brother that Charles could look up to. Ellie and Charles were really close when Charles was a little kid, and they loved to hang out and eat pancakes together.

One day– maybe when Charles was about 4 and Ellie was about 16?– Ellie saw a dog on the side of the road and, loving dogs, brought his baby brother over to say hi to it. Unfortunately, the dog was feral and mean, and it bit Charles on the arm, injuring him greatly. Defending Charles, Ellie attacked the dog and told Charles to run away for safety. Charles made it back to his parents, bleeding and horribly traumatized, while Ellie did not. Ellie never came back home, so his parents had no choice but to assume he was dead. They chose to conceal the existence of their elder son from their younger, whether to avoid triggering Charles’ phobias or because they too wished him erased from the history books.

However, even though the world believed that Ellie had died, he actually survived!  Though, not in one piece. He was probably severely wounded (perhaps leaving behind scars on any part of his body that wasn’t shown in the MV), and, just like his brother, suffered amnesia that caused him to forget who he was. From there, it depends on how he would have survived the dog attack.

If he barely emerged victorious from the battle due to his own power, then, with no memories, he was forced to live on the street. He gained his washed-up attitude from experiencing life’s hardships while being right on the cusp of remembering something more.

If he received aid from and then was indebted to a group like XF-Ture Tech, he may have been given some kind of help, but not without a cost. He probably started working for them in some capacity, even if he wasn’t a fan of his work/coworkers, and gained his washed-up attitude from years of nihilistically supporting the shady company.

The MV takes place in a time close to present day, when Ellie is reflecting on the state of his life and what he does remember. He hates the people he’s surrounded by, and can only lean on his bad habits (substance abuse and/or appearing more uncaring/airheaded than he actually is) to get by. He knows that he’s a shell of a person with no memories of his past or aspirations for his future, but there isn’t really anything he can do about it, right…? The vague memories of a “rival in love” and a main “story” are the only things giving him a taunting yet unerasable hope.

Woohoo, drama. But, like, that’s ridiculous, right? The secret literally said that Ellie was dead! How the hell could he still be alive? Did the mastermind’s source– whatever it was– just have the facts wrong, or are they actually lying? Wouldn’t the Cuevas family have looked harder for the body? Does amnesia even work like that? Does XF-Ture Tech even work like that???

Needless to say, I am still quite confused. The answer above is still the answer that makes the most sense to me, but it also has its own obvious flaws. I feel like I must just be straight up wrong about the identity of the Cuevas family, the method of Ellie’s death, the age at which Ellie appears in this MV, or something like that, but I don’t know what it would be. Even more than usual, I’d love to hear everyone else’s thoughts on this mysterious character. I feel like more analysis of the guy is going to come out soon, so hopefully some of the more numerical data like trying to pin down Ellie’s age or noticing the differences in the two MVs will help someone else make a breakthrough. Still, I encourage you to come forth with anything you have to say, because I want to hear it.

Thus concludes your instructional pamphlet on how to write an essay on a music video at a rate of 54 words per second of the music video. Thanks for reading!

[secularprolifeconspectus]

Debunk of the "fetus is a parasite" argument

bad pro-abort argument: "prenatal humans are in a parasitic relationship to their pregnant host so abortion is self-defense"

This ideological framework for pregnancy requires sooo much equivocation it's unbearable.

*exasperated sigh* but let's break it down:

1) let's start by acknowledging how dehumanizing it is to posit that pregnant people/mothers are just hosts to parasites. And the sheer misogyny of framing a healthy, ordinary function of the fertile female body as a medical ailment. Females are not inherently diseased! The fuck!

2) the parastic posit assumes that the female body does not want to be pregnant and actively fights pregnancy, but that makes no sense considering the mechanisms that female bodies have deliberately evolved to encourage, stabilize, and sustain reproduction. That is not parasitic.

3a) the self-defense posit implies that the prenate is an aggressor that uses force to violate their mother. But this requires that the prenate have power over the situation. A prenate has no volition & also isn't an agent in pregnancy. A baby shouldn't be held to adult standards.

3b) I've recently seen a the rebuttal that "a sleepwalker also doesn't have volition", and that is true, but a sleepwalker is an agent who exerts power if they actively commit assault. Again, false equivalence. A baby's existence is passive, not an aggression, and not a threat.

4a) another implication of these posits is that the prenate is invasive. This is predicated upon that the location of a human (in this case, the womb — where else does a prenate belong?) has an impact on their moral status, meanwhile dismissing place of origin and safe shelter.

4b) The complaint is then that female bodies are not merely "locations" or "shelters"; this is an oversimplistic extrapolation. The pregnant female body is an individual person & home to another person simultaneously. That is dynamic self-other transcendence, not objectification!

5) "the fetus is a parasite" is a thinly-veiled dehumanization strategy as outlined in stage 4 of The Ten Stages of Genocide. By equating prenatal humans to vermin & disease, such as parasitic infections, the normal revulsion against the "eradication" of human beings is overcome.

6a) the parasitic pregnancy framework is a fetal non-personhood argument pretending to be a bodily autonomy argument. On a gut level we know it's cruel injustice to deliberately harm a helpless child, so we must construe either "child", "helpless", or "harm" as false in abortion.

The parasitic frame does all 3. If the prenate is a parasite, then she is not a child, she is not helpess, & she can't be harmed. The argument is that something about being a fetus justifies her extermination; that autonomy takes precedence over dependence is just pretense.

6b) This logic often reduces down to "the fetus is a parasite so it's parasitic; the fetus is parasitic so it's a parasite", which is invalid circular reasoning AND founded in unsound premises. It's discrimination against an entire class of human beings for their age & ability.

Fetuses are not parasitic. Fetuses are not potential people. Fetuses are existing people. Preborn humans are powerless people. Elective abortion is abuse of power. Abortion is predatory. Abortion is a human rights violation. Abortion is mass genocide.

Abortion is literal murder.

Deconstruction of the bodily autonomy argument. Refutation of the right to refuse argument. Construction of fetal personhood.

[berniesrevolution]

CATALYST JOURNAL

If US journalism is going to survive, the advertising-based economic model has to be replaced by a robust and democratic public financing. In this interview, leading media scholar and activist Robert W. McChesney outlines a proposal to revitalize journalism along just these lines.

Interview by Editors

Editors: Just to set the stage, what is the state of the news media in the United States today?

Robert McChesney: It is basically in free fall, and probably about a foot above ground, falling at one hundred miles an hour. It’s in complete disarray and decline. This is not a controversial point. This is not something that is debated. Everyone sees this. The data is overwhelming.

The way people measure journalism, especially local journalism, is through funding and revenues for daily newspapers. Even today, daily newspapers provide most of the original news reporting in any community. This data includes digital journalism, which is the direction all journalism is heading, if it is not there already.

Until around the middle of the twentieth century, daily newspapers accounted for 1 percent of GDP in the United States. It was a massive industry, among the most prominent in the country, with a footprint in every nook and cranny of the nation. It started a slow decline in the mid-twentieth century, with total collapse over the past two decades, so that daily-newspaper revenues now account for less than one-tenth of 1 percent of GDP, and they continue to fall at a precipitous rate.

Why is that? Since social media came along around 2005, the whole business model that twentieth-century journalism is predicated upon collapsed, because it is based on 80 percent of the revenue coming from advertising. No one makes money on a daily newspaper from just subscriptions or selling copies. Circulation could never suffice. Advertising revenues are what kept papers alive — they were a kind of subsidy on top of the sales or subscription revenues.

When social media and broadband internet came along, it didn’t take very long for advertisers to realize they no longer had to subsidize journalism to reach their target audiences. They could go to Google or AOL or Yahoo or Facebook and say, “This is the target audience we want for our product, find them for us.” And those companies all had the micro-level information to say to the advertisers, “Yeah, we can send your message directly to your target audience on whatever website they’re on. We’ll get on it, so you don’t have to subsidize journalism anymore, and we can dramatically lower your costs and increase your effectiveness.”

And so advertisers abandoned daily newspapers; they no longer support them. As a result, newspapers’ incomes have fallen, and a significant percentage of them are now out of business. Just since 2008, the number of journalists in the country has been cut in half. And that was after two decades of previous downsizing. Most of what remains will be gone in short order. There’s just a handful of successful daily newspapers remaining, and they’re successful with a small s, not a capital <S — the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal.

While I emphasize local news media, national news media is far from satisfactory. Ironically, we now have a national news media that’s pretty much like what the Soviet Union had in its glory days. There are maybe two or three decently staffed newsrooms covering the entire country. Fifty years ago, there were probably as many as fifty different newsrooms in Washington, DC, many representing local newspapers that had Washington bureaus, like the Chicago Tribune, the Philadelphia Inquirer, and the Los Angeles Times. Many of those bureaus are closed now.

Editors: You’ve said that the public relations industry increasingly accounts for more and more news content.

Robert McChesney: That has been the case. It was actually built into journalism throughout the twentieth century, because public relations people realized that professional journalism had codes for newsgathering — reliance on official sources, and news events in particular — that PR firms could exploit for their clients. Newspaper owners liked PR because the material it provided allowed them to reduce their editorial budgets. Journalists were less enthralled by it.

PR-infused journalism has expanded in the last few decades with media corporations and conglomerates so eager for profits. They found that they could use more of these public relations materials as the basis of stories, that it would cut their editorial costs, and that readers might not notice much of a difference.

PR has always been there. Today, however, with media owners desperate to survive and far fewer working journalists on board, PR has more power than ever to shape the news as it pleases.

Something else happened with the emergence of super-profitable monopoly daily newspapers over the course of the twentieth century. News media institutions became fully commercial, owned by investors who cared only about profit maximization. In our constitutional system, however, news media were regarded as necessary political institutions, the veritable fourth branch of government that informed and empowered citizens so they could effectively engage in self-governance. In the nineteenth century, every great social movement — from abolitionism and women’s suffrage to agrarian populism and labor rights — was built around newspapers. Much of the work around rejuvenating local journalism is built on the idea that local news media will return to their roots and draw people into a public life that is in the process of disintegrating. When we recreate local news media, we are building the necessary institutions for effective democratic politics.

Editors: You refer to “news deserts” in your writing. What does this term mean?

Robert McChesney: “News desert” refers to something that has never existed before in American history. The term describes an area — a county, a town, or even a region — that has no paid journalists in a newsroom covering it, so nothing gets reported (or, if you want to loosen the definition a bit, if you just have one newsroom or so few journalists that it’s impossible for them to cover more than the local high school football game or take whatever the mayor says and transcribe it and call that news).

News deserts now account for the vast majority of this country. If you looked at a map, you would conclude that the whole country was pretty much a news desert. There are communities now, like Salinas, California, where there is not a single journalist. If you’re a politician there, you can do whatever the hell you want; no one’s going to have any idea.

(Continue Reading)

[hehe-hoho-ohno]

Something I've noticed about looking back on my old writing is that my feelings about it tend to go through predicable phases. (A bit like the 5 stages of grief, these are not linear or on a strict schedule, and there is a fair bit of bouncing back and forth between them.)

Phase 1: The Honeymoon Phase

I've literally just written it, and I think it's great, or at least passable enough to show to other people. Everything is good, and nothing hurts.

Phase 1.5: tired

This one isn't really a phase so much as a sign that I've been working on a project too long (hence the .5). It doesn't always happen, but when it does, it's during or immediately after finishing a project. I don't feel anything. The jokes aren't funny. The angst doesn't hit. I've been looking at it too long.

Phase 2: Cringe and Whinge

The honeymoon phase doesn't last long, and now I hate it. It's cringe. It's humiliating. It literally physically pains me to read. It's unreadable. It's excruciating.

Phase 3: Rationality

It's been long enough that I've forgotten some of the minor details of the work, and I am occasionally surprised when reading it. I can laugh at a joke I forgot I made, and am subsequently reassured that I am, in fact, very funny. Unfortunately, this actually proves nothing, as obviously I share the same sense of humor as myself. I am now able to view the work more objectively and see the flaws, but also recognize the parts that were well done.

Although reading my old stuff in this phase and beyond can be embarrassing (especially if it really was poorly done), it does not inspire the visceral levels of wanting-to-stab-my-eyes-out cringe and irrational hatred that defines the second phase.

Phase 4: Time Capsule

It's been a very long time. I have forgotten some major elements of the story. In addition to being able to view the work more objectively, I can also see how I have changed. How I have improved as a writer, but also how I have grown as a person. I no longer think or feel the way I used to, I may have even forgotten that I ever did. I couldn't write something like this today, even if I tried. It's a snapshot of my mind, perfectly preserved.

I feel... strangely fond, not just of the story, but of the young girl who wrote it very, very earnestly, even if it was a bit stupid.

[diazdefense]

hello all, as an eddie diaz defender there are some things i have been compelled to put out there in the tumblr ether. i trust that they will find their rightful audience 🙏

i would just like to address something that has been really annoying me as i've lurked on tumblr as of late, and that is the persistent arguments by a certain set of shippers that:

tptb only allowed 911 to make 1 character queer and they chose buck

if eddie does come out as gay, it would be something new and not something that has been written into the character for several seasons

now I could write up an entire dissertation on how eddie's relationships with women are all glaringly written with the intent to demonstrate eddie's repression, but i feel like that is unnecessary as you could find better write ups on all of that elsewhere.

what i do want to say is that it is incredibly frustrating for people to talk about eddie as if he is at the most a "queer-coded" character and not one legitimately written as gay. the writing is not subtle and buddie shippers are not reading into things bc of their ship.

the fact that the coming out storyline involving tommy was initially going to be with eddie was not just a fleeting idea the writers had on the same level as eddie initially being brought in as maddie's love interest. that obviously came during the ideation stage of eddie as a new character on the show, before he was the eddie we know today.

having eddie come out this season was a storyline written for eddie as an established character, a decision which is very obviously predicated on all of his prior characterization. tim minear did not just throw a dart and go "yeah, why not make eddie gay?". that was the storyline he planned to tell until there was a last minute change and it became buck's coming out instead. however, that does not mean that eddie's character has magically become straight.

he is still being written as the same repressed man, who has now reached a breaking point as his excuse that "shannon was the love of his life" and that's why he cannot forge genuine romantic connections with women has led him to lose the most important thing in his life.

this has brought eddie to the rock bottom from which he will finally be able to build himself back up, but this time by being true to himself and not just doing what others tell him or what he thinks is "the right thing to do". this is what eddie's character has been building towards and to not acknowledge that is to completely misunderstand him.

eddie will be coming out in season 8 and i hope when he does you will all realize JUST HOW WRONG YOU WERE.

(also buddie is obviously happening)

[darkmaga-returns]

Long time readers, or at least those who were reading MIH during the Russia Hoax years, will recall that my thesis on the entire Mueller Witchhunt was that it basically piggy backed on the Crossfire Hurricane predication—which was based on Hillary’s Russia Hoax. For those not familiar with the concept of “predication” it boils down to this.

The FBI needs to have actual reasons based in fact before it can open an investigation. Or, put it this way. This FBI needs an “articulable factual basis” to believe that some subject matter falls within its investigative mandates before it can open an investigation. Not just a theory—there must be facts that reasonably support any theory. At various stages of any investigation that predication is reviewed both internally at the FBI as well as by DoJ attorneys.

Now, there are a number of different levels or types of investigations, and some of the preliminary types of investigations come with restrictions on the investigative techniques that can be used. You’ll recall that the Russia Hoax investigation involved the use of FISA—a National Security form of “wiretap”. A FISA order requies very specific predication requirements that must be satisfied before it can be instituted, and which must be approved by a special “court” (of somewhat dubious constitutionality). FISA orders can only be approved if a full investigation has already been approved. Applications for FISA orders are gone over with a fine tooth comb at every step of the way before they land before the FISA court (FISC)—by the FBI and by DoJ. Everyone involved has specialized training in such matters.

[darkfictionjude]

Havent had time to read the updates. But i do fully expect that the ROs will do something. Bad:tm: to the mc, like emotionally. But like varying levels of intentional, or at least premeditated intention. And idk mc might have another breakdown triggered by it or wtv. Maybe MC is used as bait for the monster.

But im also expecting for my mc to go in romancing one of them and end up so emotionally broken by them as to finish the story solo lmao

-many asks nonnie

Hahaha some predications nonnie. I feel like you can see some light emotional hits when in antagonizing route. Although I think mc is stronger than breaking down based on what the ROs say (at this stage at least), they’ve unfortunately heard worse.

Although the bait thing could only work if mc is a girl. Maybe not, we really haven’t asked the killer about it’s opinion on the gender politics of the 90s, maybe I can give that option when mc’s leg is being nibbled

[the-garbanzo-annex-jr]

How Anti-Semitic Rhetoric Became Mainstream

Using anti-Semitic rhetoric, society historically accused Jews of being rich oppressors as well as leeches. Jews were rulers as well as disloyal agitators. Jews, they opined, are members of an inferior race; now, they are members of a privileged one.

Contemporary Jew-haters have similarly evolved in their use of anti-Semitic rhetoric. They have transformed what were once the sentiments of the radical fringe into the accepted stance of our current woke moralists. 

“Doublespeak” – the deliberate use of language to conceal or distort the truth, a concept made popular in George Orwell’s 1984 – is the main tool in the arsenal of today’s anti-Semites. Spouting the correct language, they have seamlessly transformed their expressions of unbridled, raw hatred into commendable academic jargon. Unfortunately, it is also pure anti-Semitic rhetoric.

“What is really important in the world of doublespeak is the ability to lie, whether knowingly or unconsciously, and to get away with it; and the ability to use lies and choose and shape facts selectively, blocking out those that don’t fit an agenda or program,” explains writer Edward S. Herman in his book Beyond Hypocrisy.

Phase I: “Zionism is Racism”

Post World War II, the anti-Semitic rhetoric shifted away from overtly anti-Jewish to a new concept, “anti-Zionist.” The murder of six million Jews in the Holocaust was a fresh memory. This made attacking Jews on the international stage less politically attractive.

While this didn’t stop powerful countries from closing their doors to Jewish refugees from Europe, it did change the discourse. Now, Jews were attacked by the declaration that “Zionism is racism.”

Where and how did this ruse begin? Not surprisingly, with the Soviets, world-class masters of doublespeak.

The USSR’s Campaign Against Israel

The 1917 revolutionary forces in the former USSR officially abolished the Czarists’ discriminatory policies against Jews. Yet, the reality of life for Jews under the Bolsheviks was one of state-enforced antisemitism and demonization.

Jews lived with quotas as well as outright rejection from universities. Many professions simply shut them out. When they did find employment, they faced glass ceilings, never able to progress to the highest levels.

Yet, surprisingly, when the state of Israel was created in 1948, “All international communist parties supported partition and the creation of a Jewish State,” documents Philip Mendes in Jews and the Left: The Rise and Fall of a Political Alliance.  

This included as well the U.S. Communist Party which called Israel “an organic part of the world struggle for peace and democracy. The French communists viewed the Israelis in solidary with “resistance” fighters throughout the world.

Why Soviet Support Changed

Immediately after Israel’s 1948 victory in the War of Independence, “Zionism was … celebrated by the left as an organic movement of national return and a model for national liberation and decolonization movements throughout the world,” writes Alex Rychin in “Red Terror: How the Soviet Union Shaped the Modern Anti-Zionist Discourse.”

“Israel’s victory in its War of Independence and refusal to succumb to far mightier foes was positively awe-inspiring to adherents of political movements predicated on toppling structures of power,” explains Rychin.

Ironically, it was the communists who understood Zionism for what it actually is. Namely, the return of the Jewish people to their indigenous homeland (“Zion” being one of Israel’s biblical names). Historically, the Jewish people are the only people in existence who have had a continuous presence and a claim to the land in what is now the state of Israel.

However, communist support for the nascent state of Israel waned quickly, not due to ideology but to politics. By the time the modern state of Israel was created, the Cold War between Russia and the United States had already begun. The two superpowers pitted against each other, each vying for world dominance, including in the Middle East.

Israel's Support for Democracy

By the early 1950s, when it became apparent that Israel was espousing Western democratic values and supporting America, the Soviets realized they needed to significantly downgrade Israel, if not entirely ostracize it in the eyes of the world. That's where the anti-Semitic rhetoric came into play.

As a first step, the Soviets began spewing and exporting rabid anti-Semitic rhetoric. Specifically, they embarked on an intense and concentrated campaign against the “Zionists.” Part of this campaign was the infamous 1953 “Doctors Plot.” There, the Soviet government levied false charges against prominent Jewish doctors. They accused them of planning to murder leading government and communist party officials.

“The propaganda was highly compelling and steeped in long-established [anti-Semitic] themes of Jewish bloodthirstiness, greed, corruption, manipulation and cunning. It would contend that the very existence of a Jewish homeland was not only a plot of imperialism, but a mortal danger to the peace of the world,” writes Rychin.

While Russia was busy introducing the term “anti-Zionist” into the global lexicon, most Americans were focused on the Vietnam War and the Civil Rights Movement. Yet Soviet-supporting professors at top American universities were paying close attention. In truth, anti-Semitism had never been in short supply at these universities. Most of them had Jewish quotas of their own.

The UN Ruse

At the UN, the Soviets began employing an audacious strategy using anti-Semitic rhetoric against Israel learned. Although the Nazis were their arch enemies, the Soviets learned from none other than Adolf Hitler. In his 1925 book Mein Kampf, Hitler praises the efficacy of using the psychological technique known as the “Big Lie”-- essentially promoting a lie so big that no one would believe that anyone "could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously."

Rychin documents the fabrication of the “Big Lie” against Israel by the Soviets:

When a sub-commission of the United Nations was tasked with drafting a convention on the “elimination of all forms of racial discrimination,” the proceedings naturally focused on apartheid, neo-Nazism and antisemitism. But the Soviets viewed the reference to antisemitism as a direct rebuke to their anti-Jewish measures, and served up an amendment that “was almost a joke,” even to the Soviet delegation itself.

The amendment inserted Zionism into the listed forms of racism. According to sources close to the deliberations, the Soviets understood “full well that the idea that Zionism is racism is an indefensible position,” yet they floated it anyway, in part to turn the US-led initiative into farce, and in part perhaps, to see how far a “big lie,” could go.

Ultimately, the Convention was adopted with neither antisemitism nor Zionism referred to … But the seed had been planted.

On 10 November 1975, the General Assembly of the United Nations passed resolution 3379 on the “elimination of all forms of racial discrimination,” which determined that “Zionism is a form of racism and discrimination.”

The accusation stuck, and pro-Israel advocates are still fighting this absurd allegation.

Phase II: “Zionism is a settler-colonial white supremacist ideology”

Today, anti-Semites still use the “Zionism is racism” canard against Israel. But now, the anti-Semitic rhetoric comes with a litany of other “sins” – namely that Israel is a “settler-colonial white supremacist” state. In this context, its “racist” nature is simply a given.

What caused the switch in language? How does it benefit those who desire to bring down the only Jewish state in the world? 

“Coalition of the Oppressed”

Most Americans viewed the election of Barack Obama as president of the United States as a watershed moment. Finally, the country thought, the era of post-racism had arrived. The fight for racial equality began with the freeing of the slaves. It was codified into law through the 1968 Civil Rights. Yet, it saw its ultimate expression in Obama’s election.

Most Americans thought that the era of post-racialism in America had finally arrived. Yet, Obama’s reaction to a number of pivotal moments in his presidency – the 2012 shooting of Trayvon Martin in Florida, the 2014 police shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri (an event that sparked the Black Lives Movement) and the 1915 death of Freddie Gray while in police custody in Baltimore – proved otherwise.

With racial tensions flaring, the Obama years constituted the perfect atmosphere for the divisive concept of critical race theory to break through the walls of academia and find its expression in the streets of America.

By the end of Obama’s second term as president, a Rasmussen poll found that 60 percent of American voters thought race relations in the United States had worsened since President Obama’s election. A similar New York Times/CBS poll taken at the same time found that nearly 70 percent of Americans thought race relations in America were bad. This represented a level unseen since the 1992 Rodney King riots.

Critical race theory’s charge that America is a “systemically racist” country was powerful. Yet, those in Obama’s camp who were forward thinking knew that this grievance alone would not be enough to sustain their power base over time. Obama also recognized the limitations of this charge.

Identity Politics and Anti-Semitic Rhetoric

It was thus during his second term that Obama embraced the concept of identity politics. He began to push the idea of a “coalition of the oppressed.” The coalition included blacks, women (feminists), Hispanics, Muslims, indigenous and other “brown” people as well as those identifying as gay, lesbian, trans and a myriad of other emerging sexual identities – essentially all those granted victim status due to their oppression by the “Establishment.”

Jews were noticeably and pointedly not included.

In the 1960s, the “Establishment” was loosely defined as the structures of societal authority. By the early 21st century, those reviving the concept had a much more specific definition of their oppressors. Namely, “white supremacist colonial powers.” Those powers specifically included Jews, Zionists and Israelis, all of whom were now identified as white, European interlopers on land indigenous to “Palestinians” (a term previously used in common English to identify anyone living in British Mandate Palestine, Jews and Arabs alike).

Despite Sharia law’s treatment of gays, women and minorities, the coalition welcomed Islamist organizations. It did the same for radical Palestinian organizations, rebranding their violent tactics and support for terror conveniently as “resistance.”

Many of these organizations, such as Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), had already enjoyed victim status on college campuses. This was due to the successful mainstreaming of the “Zionism is racism” mantra, classic anti-Semitic rhetoric.

"Points of Unity"

When Nerdeen Kiswani, co-founder and former chair of New York City SJP (NYC SJP), began the radical Palestinian group Within Our Lifetime (WOL), it was with this broader “coalition of the oppressed” in mind. On a page titled “Points of Unity, “ WOL’s website reads,  

“We are anti-Zionists. Zionism is a settler-colonial white supremacist ideology built on the genocide and dispossession of the Palestinian people.”

On the same page, WOL pledges its allegiance to

“all oppressed nationality people in the United States and around the world to engage in all forms of struggle in pursuit of freedom.” 

One of WOL’s goals is to “Globalize the Intifada,” a strategy they employ to tie all “liberation” of “colonized and oppressed people” to persecution by the Jews – in WOL’s words, to “break free from the genocidal grip of U.S. imperialism and Zionism.” 

Neveen Ayesh: A Case Study

Ayesh is a millennial Palestinian-American activist working as the government relations coordinator for the Missouri branch of American Muslims for Palestine, an extremist anti-Israel organization with links to terror groups and terror financiers. The Anti-Defamation League has accused AMP of “provid[ing] a platform for anti-Semitism.”

She was active on Twitter between 2011-2017 when she was between 18- to 24-years old. There, she openly and unabashedly expressed her vitriolic hatred of Jews and spewed anti-Semitic rhetoric. A sample of her rage from that period includes the following tweets:

“#crimesworthyoftherope being a Jew" ( August 4, 2011)

“I want to set Israel on fire with my own hands & watch it burn to ashes along with every Israeli in it. Call it what you want to call it idc" (February 17, 2014)

“I should join al-Qassam [Hamas’ terrorist wing]. Be the first female to join their group lololol #IdLoveToThough." (August 2, 2014)

Ayesh is now a political ally of Congresswoman Cori Bush (D-MO) and co-hosted a fundraiser for her. She also has political aspirations of her own and has toned down her anti-Semitic rhetoric.

Re-branding Anti-Semitic Rhetoric

Canary Mission recently called out Bush for her relationship with Ayesh (whose antisemitism was widely known). In an attempt at damage control, Ayesh responded with a long tweet thread, essentially excusing her antisemitism by re-branding it in the “language of the oppressed.”

After acknowledging that she had said “horrible things” about Jews and assuring us that she is really “not that person,” she blamed her hatred on the “chaos” she claims is part of the Palestinian experience.

“Chaos,” she says, “that no one seemed to - and still does not - care about because we’re brown. Muslims and Christian’s alike but we’re brown and Palestinian Arab.”

Ayesh says that after moving to the United States and going to college, she “learned how to assign academic terminology to what I had witnessed, experienced, & continue to experience at home & abroad. I became able to speak from an analytical and informative aspect rather than an emotional one of rage …”

Namely, what Ayesh learned was how to use anti-Semitic rhetoric effectively. Now, she labels Israel a “settler-colonialist white supremacy” entity. From this perspective, it then becomes legitimate to advocate for Israel’s total destruction.

Agendas Over Facts

Increasingly, agendas are more important to our populace than facts. This makes language a powerful tool in the arsenal of anti-Semites. It is particularly dangerous when used by radical groups like the New York-based Within Our Lifetime (WOL). These groups have successfully used venomous rhetoric to inspire physical attacks on Jews.

Last year, WOL activists sent Jews in New York to hospitals through their violent attacks. The group’s aggressive campaigns have been linked to the dramatic increase of attacks on Jews in the wider New York population.

Through equally anti-Semitic and venomous rhetoric, campus groups like Students for Justice in Palestine have successfully created atmospheres at U.S. universities where Jews are not only pushed out of student leadership positions but where Jewish students at large no longer feel safe on campus.

Like their Soviet predecessors, today’s anti-Semites rely on the “Big Lie” to sell their wares. Unfortunately, they are being sold to increasingly uneducated and gullible consumers.   

[omegaphilosophia]

The Philosophy of Ontological Lateness

The philosophy of ontological lateness explores the concept that certain entities or phenomena come into existence or become fully realized only after the preconditions for their existence have been established. This idea can be interpreted in various contexts, such as metaphysics, epistemology, or even existentialism, reflecting on how and why certain aspects of reality or knowledge emerge only under specific circumstances.

Key Concepts in Ontological Lateness

Existential Preconditions:

Ontological lateness suggests that for some entities or concepts to come into being, certain preconditions must first be met. This can relate to the development of complex organisms in biology, the emergence of consciousness in philosophy of mind, or the unfolding of historical events.

Temporal Sequencing:

The notion of lateness implies a temporal sequence where certain phenomena are necessarily preceded by other developments. For instance, advanced scientific theories often rely on foundational discoveries and earlier empirical observations.

Contingency and Necessity:

This philosophy examines the interplay between contingency (things that could have been otherwise) and necessity (things that must be the way they are). It looks at how contingent events and conditions give rise to necessary outcomes in the context of ontological emergence.

Evolutionary Perspectives:

In evolutionary biology, ontological lateness can be seen in the gradual emergence of complex life forms, where each stage of evolution depends on the prior development of simpler forms of life. This gradual process illustrates how complexity and advanced traits appear late in the evolutionary timeline.

Cultural and Historical Development:

Historically and culturally, certain ideas, technologies, and social structures emerge late, building on the foundations laid by previous generations. The Industrial Revolution, for example, was predicated on earlier scientific discoveries and economic conditions.

Examples and Applications

Philosophy of Mind:

Consciousness and higher cognitive functions can be seen as late ontological phenomena, emerging only after the development of complex nervous systems and advanced brains. This perspective highlights how mental states depend on prior physical and biological developments.

Scientific Theories:

Advanced scientific theories, such as quantum mechanics or general relativity, emerged only after significant prior developments in classical mechanics, mathematics, and experimental methods. These theories are ontologically late because they rely on a framework established by earlier discoveries.

Technological Innovations:

Many technological advancements, such as the internet or space travel, could only emerge after the development of fundamental technologies like electricity, telecommunications, and aerospace engineering.

Social and Political Structures:

Democratic political systems and modern legal frameworks are often seen as late ontological developments that depend on earlier societal changes, including the Enlightenment, revolutions, and the establishment of individual rights.

Implications of Ontological Lateness

Understanding Progress:

Ontological lateness provides a framework for understanding the progression of knowledge, technology, and social structures. It emphasizes the importance of foundational developments and the interconnectedness of various stages of progress.

Interdisciplinary Insights:

This philosophy encourages interdisciplinary insights by showing how developments in one field (e.g., biology, technology) rely on prior advancements in other fields. It highlights the cumulative nature of knowledge and progress.

Existential Reflection:

On a more existential level, ontological lateness invites reflection on the human condition, our place in the universe, and the unfolding of individual lives. It suggests that personal and collective growth is a process that builds on previous experiences and conditions.

The philosophy of ontological lateness delves into the nature of existence and emergence, exploring how and why certain entities and phenomena come into being only after specific preconditions are met. By examining the temporal sequencing, contingency, and necessity of ontological emergence, this philosophy provides valuable insights into the progression of knowledge, technology, social structures, and the human experience.

[theseventhoffrostfall]

Read all of the 3 body problem books so you don't have to.

TL;DR its very cold and sterile and no real stakes as a result, making it take place over thousands of years and devoid of enough human connection it has a very "why should I care" feeling. I am not sure if this is a Chinese cultural way of viewing things but it reads like the outline of a better story that'd be filled in later. Closest comparison I can make is Warhammer except everyone has human length lifespans and you look at things from a galactic level scale and after 10,000 years it's hard to care about anyone. I also largely hate all things being equal pessimists at this point. It felt more like a weird acid-trip deep dive into a thought experiment that you pull out of and think "huh, that was fucked up" than any great sweeping narrative and no, i dont care how groundbreaking or deconstructive your story is, it needs to have a plot that makes you invested and the lack thereof isn't the accomplishment you think it is.

But it also irks me that it once again falls into the "this isnt your dumb made up science fiction, this is REAL science fiction" trap. It feels like these authors have 1 specific thing they are maybe more interested in, in this case mathematics, and use that as a crutch of superiority while the rest is as made up as everything else. I'll give GRRM a mild pass since he was writing in the aftermath of Dragonlance, but spec fiction has an issue of defining what it ISNT instead of what it IS. Hell, Tolkien could come out today and market LOTR as "the most realistic fantasy because it charts linguistics and genealogy and cultural evolution in a much more realistic way" vs the others that don't. Which is both ironic given that Tolkien is usually the example used to contrast [insert current trendy author]'s works and the primogenitor of many many things, and also proving the point really that no one writes "better" or "smarter" sci fi/fantasy, and that most authors have 1-3 things they really hone in on accuracy wise and fudge the rest.

(NOTE: yes, there are lots of dumb fantasy/sci-fi that dont even try, Dragonlance doesn't even try to make the 3rd book any good which is why you should stop with Gigachad Sturm Brightblade's better-than-it-has-any-right-to-be character arc)

On the "Probably accurate in one respect but inaccurate in others", I know it's partially a product of the times and understanding of the math involved in both has changed, but the premise of the alien invasion is predicated on the notion that FTL travel is utterly impossible--rather than mathematically possible to the point of the drive being one of the least difficult things to build in a starship--while quantum entanglement-based FTL communication is trivial to manage rather than actually impossible.

It's very much a story where you could find and replace "Aliens" with "wizards" and "Technology" with "Spells" and not change all that much, but in perfect fairness I know very little about the author and if he ever claimed to be Ultra Realism Man personally or if that title was thrust upon him.

The bits of attempted human connection I was seeing in the early stages of the 2nd book are literally why I dropped the series, so I'm not gonna complain about that going away moving forward.

Also, yeah, Sturm is the best part of that series bar none. Elf chick's character development dovetailing off of his arc was also surprisingly interesting, even though they (naturally) faceplanted in handling it at the end of the original trilogy.

[mrbopst]

The one thing that has bonded all Richmond bands together over all the years I’ve lived in the city is their lack of idiot appeal.

It’s not that many haven’t tried; it’s just that they have all failed. Our most almost famous indigenous music makers of yesteryear such as Single Bullet Theory, the Good Guys, the Orthotonics, House of Freaks, Bio Ritmo, Avail, Strike Anywhere and GWAR made inroads into mainstream consciousness, but for one reason or another, they were never able to break into the top 40. Even today’s crop of Richmond bands such as Hot Lava, The Gaskets, Brainworms, Municipal Waste, No BS Brass Band and many others who enjoy the luxury of a more open marketplace then their 20th century counterparts still lack the all important idiot appeal factor that could potentially land them on the cover of Rolling Stone. I used to think it was something in the water that made our bands have only fringe appeal, but the mixture of bullheaded artistic vision, the lack of a music industry and defining zip code based sound as well as the city’s openly contentious relationship with live performance is the more likely culprit. For years, the city’s music scene operated solely because people wanted it to exist. That has all changed with Lamb of God. They are kings of the idiots. What’s funny about this is that, in true, time-honored Richmond fashion, they didn’t tailor they’re act to idiots, the idiots came to them. Their rise to fame didn’t happen overnight either. They played for nearly a decade without anyone in the mainstream even noticing playing music almost by its very definition had extremely limited commercial appeal. It was only through a combination of single-minded determination, savvy business decisions and luck (they are living proof that the harder you work the luckier you get) were they able to parlay all their efforts into bona fide mainstream success. I never would have thought it possible all those years ago when I first saw them play that they would have the number 2 record in the country and be touring the world with the likes of Metallica. I still can’t believe it and besides drummer and number one reason why the band is so successful, Chris Adler, neither can the rest of them. The downside to being king of the idiots is that, well, you are king of the idiots. Of all the music forms, Heavy Metal music is the one most predicated on total obliteration. I’ve been around many a wasted crowd in my time, but when I saw Lamb of God perform recently at the National, that crowd wasn’t just wasted, they were completely annihilated. Before the show even started, I was standing on the balcony looking down at the packed floor when a guy near the front of the stage began spewing bile like a vomit sprinkler on everyone around him. He saturated nearly everyone within 5 feet of him in gastric juices before the bouncers could drag his ass out. During the show itself, I counted 12 people puking their guts out and I had to avoid numerous liquor inspired vomit puddles walking around on the floor. Nearly everyone I overheard was boosting about how wasted they were or about how much more wasted they were going to get after the show. For a band whose music demands an almost inhuman attention to detail and clarity of vision to perform correctly, the unabashed nihilism that it provoked in the true believers was an odd case of cause and effect to witness. The crowd seemed more enamored with their own heroic intoxications than the band they were seeing. And that’s too bad. When people asked me how the show was, my response was in the land of the blind the one-eyed man is king. Not only is Lamb of God a great stadium rock band, they are not idiots for if they were they never would have achieved the level of success they have today. It’s the one lesson the idiots have yet (and most need) to learn. Chris Bopst May 26th, 2009

[xsoldier]

Let's also dial this hostility back a bit and look at the bigger picture into which this is taking place, while also looking at more modern issues.

The entire psychology behind mascots & marketing is building upon a facsimile of interdependent trust with a corporation or product as if it were a recognizable friend. Consumerism is DESIGNED for this to be a totally normal thing that no one so much as stops to think about, and it is not even REMOTELY a new thing.

We've always been taught empathy towards non-human beings who treat us with respect. Data in Star Trek is probably the most immediately obvious example, but this even extends to the droids in Star Wars as well as those placed in defacto positions of servitude have respect because we understand that position as a reflection of our own struggles within that type of inescapable system.

Hell, even the WORD "robot" just literally comes from the word for "slave" so there's an absolute mess of complication around all those things, even without getting into how even the relationship between drives being master/slave got ethically evaluated. Suffice to say, there's a lot of reason for sensitivity around how you present something like this.

The marketing isn't any different than you'd expect to see if this were ACTUALLY a humanoid robot servant you could see, which is a common moral quandary in fiction. This one is only a voice, but this just the same fundamental pattern that's ubiquitous to all marketing, and if anything — treating a human-like thing as utilitarian objects would be an even more disturbing approach, but also less likely for people to use because of how we're socially inclined to act.

Stack that up with how Speech-to-Text and other voice services being normalized are an absolutely MASSIVE part in making a lot of forms of previously a11y-specific technology largely ubiquitous. There's a massive benefit in marketing any number of speech recognition services as a normal, comfortable thing that's just like talking to a regular person, as software like Siri have a marked impact for elderly and the visually impaired, and there's a lower barrier to entry to understand how to use it.

However this intersects with something else:

Late-stage capitalism has pushed to the point where isolation & loneliness are at an all-time high, and rather than addressing the issues that an unsustainable economy predicated upon sucking away every waking hour people have, it's also amplifying overdependence upon parasocial and artificial crutches as a replacement for the thing it's taken away.

At its core, being kind to your Alexa is just like being amicable towards the GPS in your car or talking to your stuffed animals. Anything else that presents itself as a human facsimile — we reflect our normal social behaviours towards it. That gets even more amplified when the limited social contact people have is with people who mistreat them, and all they're looking for is a simulation of the same kindness that they're attempting to give.

The actual issue here is that there is a massively growing demographic who has a lack of meaningful connections with other people, and an increased level of stress at the same time which amplifies tensions to complicate forming those connections with or to others. Technology is often an extremely meaningful stepping stone to healing from that — and is massively vulnerable to exploitation.

Which brings us to… modern AI doing that.

Everything with Alexa's marketing falls into a natural intersection where it's easy for it to be uncomfortable no matter how you approach it, but it isn't necessarily any more or less nefarious than any other piece of marketing. But AI chatbots are the single most predatory system out there because it takes everything about that faux psuedo-familial relationship and projects it into something that is MEANT to make you attach to it and pay for that as a service.

I cannot tell you the number of "this AI Chatbot will send you NSFW pictures and flirt with you" ads that there are out there, where it's designed explicitly to prey upon people who are lonely and learn how to better monetize those people and keep them attached to the app. As if that wasn't bad enough, there are even ones where it's designed to mimic actual people and become an alternative version of them for you:

This is one I stumbled across the other day:

While I understand the core sentiment about Alexa, I think that the reality of that situation is exponentially more complicated and far from being cut-and-dry as one way or another. The sentiments expressed by the people in the replies are ones that deserve compassion rather than ridicule, because that's why there's leverage in those things in the first place.

However, I think that that overall sentiment of loathing towards the coldly exploitive manipulation of a psuedo-familial bond by the mechanisms of late-stage captilaism is undeniably justified. Even moreso when looking at just how sickeningly exploitive ai tech companies are with these same things, and how much worse that is in feeding off a feedback loop that only harms people.

i hate how they market alexa as a ‘member of the family’ like that’s SO fucking blatantly insidious and terrifying also if i wanted an untrustworthy/cold/emotionless machine in my life i’d just talk to my fuckin father 

[sponsorlicenceinfo91]

Navigating the Spouse Visa Application: Common Pitfalls to Sidestep

Embarking on the spouse visa journey represents a significant milestone for couples seeking to build a life together in a new country. It is a pathway predicated on demonstrating genuine commitment and meeting stringent criteria set forth by immigration authorities. However, the intricate nature of the application process means that even well-intentioned applicants can falter, leading to delays, refusals, and considerable emotional distress. Meticulous preparation and an awareness of potential stumbling blocks are therefore paramount. Understanding the Top Mistakes to Avoid on the Spouse Visa Route is the foundational step towards a successful outcome.

One of the most frequent areas where applications founder is the financial requirement. Applicants must unequivocally demonstrate the sponsoring partner meets the minimum income threshold, or that the couple possesses adequate savings. This is not merely about having the funds; it's about presenting the evidence in the precise format stipulated by the rules. Payslips must cover the specified period, bank statements need to be complete and correctly certified, and self-employed individuals face a particularly exigent level of scrutiny regarding their financial documentation. Ambiguity or incomplete pecuniary evidence is a common reason for refusal.

Beyond finances, proving the relationship is 'genuine and subsisting' is a cornerstone of the application. Immigration officials need to be convinced that the marriage or civil partnership is not one of convenience. Simply possessing a marriage certificate is insufficient. Applicants should furnish a veritable portfolio of evidence demonstrating shared life and mutual commitment. This can encompass joint financial responsibilities (like bank accounts or tenancy agreements), photographs spanning the relationship's duration, travel itineraries from shared holidays, and correspondence records (emails, messages). Failing to provide a comprehensive and convincing narrative of the relationship is a critical error.

Inaccuracies or omissions on the application form itself, however minor they may seem, can also derail the process. Every question must be answered truthfully and completely. Discrepancies between the information provided on the form and the supporting documentation can raise red flags. It is crucial to double-check all entries, ensuring dates, names, and addresses are accurate and consistent across all submitted materials. Rushing this stage or failing to understand specific questions can have significant repercussions.

The English language requirement is another hurdle that trips up some applicants. Unless exempt, the applicant must pass an approved English language test at the required level. Booking the correct test with an approved provider and achieving the necessary score are non-negotiable. Assuming proficiency without formal certification or taking the wrong type of test are easily avoidable errors.

Furthermore, the accommodation requirement is often underestimated. Applicants must prove they have adequate accommodation available for themselves and their dependents without recourse to public funds. This involves providing evidence such as a tenancy agreement, mortgage statements, or a letter from the property owner, along with details confirming the property is not overcrowded and is suitable for habitation. Overlooking the specifics of this requirement can lead to an application being rejected.

Finally, procedural errors, such as missing submission deadlines, paying incorrect fees, or failing to provide biometrics when requested, can halt an application in its tracks. Adhering strictly to the timelines and procedures outlined by the immigration authorities is essential.

Navigating the uk spouse visa application demands diligence and attention to detail. By understanding these common pitfalls – from inadequate financial proof and relationship evidence to simple form errors and procedural missteps – applicants can significantly enhance their prospects for a positive decision, paving the way for their shared future. Seeking professional immigration advice can often be a prudent investment when facing such a complex undertaking.

[33bowls]

MQA DIY

This is about MQA DIY for all of you cultural creatives.

Posting here, as 33 has not participated much in online audio forums since the early ‘00s, as the atmosphere, even before the advent of MQA haters, trolls, and sock puppets, was a toxic stew of mis-information, to put it lightly. They are just the latest incarnation of that.

First off, except for observational knowledge or entertainment value, it is assumed that any DIY endeavors are predicated with a certain level of tech smarts, starting with which end of the soldering iron to grab.

https://a.aliexpress.com/_oCAjAXR

This USB card “only” does MQA unfolding, with appropriate green and blue LED indicators to authenticate, as in verify and indicate MQA and MQA Studio data streams. Unlike Golden Showers “this is not a review” Oatmeal, 33 does not have a terabyte of pirated files, so was not able to verify unfolding beyond the first, but with 33’s own master files, have verified first unfold does indeed unfold. Do you believe in radical honesty and transparency on a first data?

Two other important features of this USB card: it also reclocks the bits at the output, for minimal correlated jitter, and has the option of internal cleaner 5volt power independent of the USB buss.

The vast majority of MQA music files only need first unfold, as the masters of them were likely 88.2 kHz or 96 kHz, in part since the plethora of A/D equipment supports those sample rates, and, thanks to the grift that keeps on giving from Gates, Allen, and Ballmer, windows does not support driverless USB faster than that data rate. Wideband plug and play is mac territory, that windoze has yet to catch up with.

As to where to send these lovely bits, an obvious choice is the ESS 9039M, with internal MQA rendering. Be aware that ESS chips, being a unique H bridge output topology, are very sensitive to power supply issues. Any perturbations, including thermal tails in the power supply regulators will contaminate the audio signal. I suggest adding a PNP current boost to any regulator, which lowers output impedance and buffers the regulator from signal variations, which do not fully cancel out in the ESS chip’s balanced mode. There is still intermodulation induced by power supply variations. If you are not an OCD left brain measurement only kind of dude, I suggest that running the ESS chip in voltage out mode, and buffering that voltage signal with whatever buffer you prefer, even tubes, which will sound better than the usual monolithic opamp virtual ground current to voltage stage, but won’t measure, at lest in steady state conditions, as well. But, you know, sonics.

Other dac chip options are R2Rs from BB and AD, and even Philps. There are more than a few PCM 58, PCM63, TDA1541 still available. I mention these because, they have have a pure unipolar current output available, which lends itself to a passive I/V scheme, with a cascode buffer or just bipolar transistor holding the output close to ground, and the passive scheme of your choice. Fets, tubes, whatever you prefer. You know, sonics.

With these or other R2R chips, you can go for the ever popular NOS non oversampled mode. All other factors being equal which they rarely are, NOS tends to sound solid, but a bit flat dimensionally. If you prefer filtered, I suggest the BB DF1706 in slow rolloff 4x mode. This is a minimum phase filter with very little time dispersion, and in 4x mode, allows for first and second unfolded MQA, which results in 8fs and 16fs respectively. The BB 58 and 63 chips can handle that, the Philips 1541 should be NOS only, can only handle 4fs. Also, with these R2R dac chips, re-clocking the LE signal right at the chip with a separately regulated D flip flop, if setup/hold timing is good, will result in lower jitter and cleaner sonics.

This phenomena of flavoring to taste with different reconstruction filters on playback illustrates the importance of conjugate filters to exactly retrace the waveform that full path unfolded and rendered MQA uniquely does. The MQA unfolding done by this USB card feeding an ESS 9039M dac chip will do that. An irony is that with the advent of digital audio, one of the claims made was no more subjective futzing to adjust the playback sonics, as is done with analog, finely adjusting the VTA of different cartridges, record clamps, turntable isolation schemes, the works. Joke's on you, Mr. Digital.

What R2R playback schemes are missing is the final MQA rendering with exact conjugate filtering, but the loss is minimal to many ears, as most of the heavy lifting is already done in the MQA encoding process. You still get the de-blurred encoding with gently shaped dither that mimics the analog world in keeping information below the noise floor intact, and minimal noise modulation, along with source verification, aka authentication.

As alluded, thermal tails in either power supply regulators, or in the signal path are a bugaboo that is often overlooked. 33’s listening tests have indicated that a *LOT* of the perceptually significant sonic action is going on below -80 dB. Nuances and subtle textures do matter to the gestalt of the listening experience.

Also it should be pointed out that low cost chi-fi components such as this expose the misnomer about high licensing costs as just that, a misnomer. There is a whole world of opportunity out there besides Uncle Sam’s Playground, who do not have access to unlimited bandwidth; and recognize and enjoy the cleaner sonics that MQA provides.

Addendum:

This MQA USB card, the Nonwa, is compatible with TI//BB DF1706 filter, and NOS 28 pin plug in modules, when the mclk is set to 512 Fs, 22/24 MHz. Not all filters are happy with that, some want 256 Fs 11/12 Mhz. Now, what is cool is the mclk can be set to 1024 Fs, 44/49 MHz, and with an ESS dac chip mentioned above, you can operate the ESS in synchronous mode, without needing a 100 MHz clock. Just feed the mclk to it and enjoy even better sonics.