#tell me about your detective!

[weirdly-specific-but-ok]

reblog this with your favourite traumatised twink loserboy (gn)

[bumblingbabooshka]

Janeway doesn't need a therapist when she gets back to the alpha quadrant she just needs Tuvok to tell her [in detail] the psychological observations he's made about her over the past 11 years and she can go from there <- Untrue but much more likely for her to agree to

[bludpudding]

the concept of corinthian being an adversary against the dead boy detectives is OBVIOUSLY something I very much want to see but after a few weeks of thought I have a few notes, the main one being:

what the fuck do they think they’re gonna do against the corinthian

ask nicely? give him therapy? that’d take a shit ton of therapy.

you cannot kill what is not alive, and you cannot kill a multitude of ideas that are held within the minds of humankind. in order to erase corinthian, otherworldly forces would be required to completely eradicate every concept he represents (which, in this case, would include erasing edwin seeing as he is queer and VERY much struggles with it. and you know damn well none of them are going to take that risk). otherwise, the corinthian as a story will remain. he can, however, be uncreated and left dormant by dream, but if that were to happen it would no longer align with the sandman canon. more so fanfic territory than a plausible episode.

there are other ways for a case revolving around the corinthian to be solved; his victims could receive closure just by knowing more about what happened to them, thus being able to move on.

but otherwise they’re shit outta luck

[theinfinitedivides]

'why did you do this?' 'there's someone i have to protect in my heart.' LEE HAE F*CKING RYEON WHO GAVE YOU THE RIGHT

[twc-thoughts-you-didnt-ask-for]

The most unrealistic part of Book 3 is in M’s route when they take a shot and absolutely nobody openly loses their mind about it

[tumortain]

[bombshellsandbluebells]

Ok because I can’t let this thought go, I need to say my piece on media analysis and fandom’s version of it really quickly:

I’ve worked as an on-set dresser, a set dresser, and in the set decoration department in other roles. I get how set dressing works. And I’m also a huge fan of media analysis and overanalyzing and drawing meaning where you find it from the text, intentional or not.

I’m all on board with finding details in the set dressing and expanding on them, but there are so many times I see posts that argue small set dec details are intentional and foreshadowing something - usually a ship going canon - when it never feels that way to me. Yes, there is thought behind every aspect of film, but that doesn’t mean that the exact placement of everything has some great meaning behind it. Sometimes the meaning is “it would make logical sense for this item to be in this space” and nothing more.

I don’t comment on these posts bc I don’t want to be overly negative or ruin anyone’s fun, but the problem I keep seeing happening in fandom spaces is that meaning that was never intentional on the creators’ part will be drawn from small details and passed around fandom as proof of foreshadowing of something that was never intended to happen. And because someone is able to find meaning in something, people believe it was an intentional set-up.

Sometimes the item is just there. Sometimes a set dresser went “yeah that looks good” and there’s nothing more to it. Sometimes the DP goes “yeah that shot looks visually good and the items in it make sense” not “every item placed in this shot is intentional”.

(Sometimes something gets stuck in a weird place and you don’t notice it until cameras are about the roll but it’s like, not worth the hassle of holding for art bc literally everyone hates holding for art, so it just lives there now.)

The problem isn’t drawing meaning from the text where you find it. That’s a great way to interact with media honestly. The problem is making the mistake of deciding it was intentional AND intentionally setting up the exact scenario you already wanted to happen. Bc honestly, until we hear it from the creator’s mouths, we don’t know always know what minor details were intentional.

[chiropteracupola]

recently I've read a very meaty and murdery novel, and, since I haven't stopped thinking about it, now I've made a playlist about it.

[listen here]

[clockworkcheetah]

the kitten-shark absolutely wouldve made a come back

like dirk has a wtnv ‘and hes holding a cat’ moment when hes in blackwing and he just throws the cat and unleashes hell

[agentnatesewell]

Lmao seeing your tags on the Serah's Reblog made me think Suri seeing Nate, Immediately clinging to his legs going "I am NEVER letting go of this man-"

Hello, my friend! You are right, she would totally be clinging to his legs, and she would never let him go!

It wasn’t love at first sight for her, but Nate definitely had Suri at hello. How she feels about and for him (which she shared when they were ‘researching’, that she loved him), was never anything she was actively searching for, but everything she’s ever wanted.

How that’s evolved over book three, Nate’s confession at the end about it being so hard, kind of has her in an interesting head space. But it allowed her to tell him that he needs to trust her because she truly believes that together, they can face and handle anything.

Thank you for the message! It’s good to hear from you! Hope you’ve been well 💕

[steakout-05]

eeuuaghh i would like everyone to know that i apologise if i have not responded to your reblogs/mentions/posts on tumblr, i have really terrible social anxiety and for some reason people talking to me makes my nervous system think i'm being hunted for sport by a resident evil boss. sorry if i havent responded i'm not being rude i'm just having a panic attack :P

additionally: social anxiety is actually the reason why a lot of my old posts from late 2022 had weird spacing and spelling mistakes. i was too anxious to type properly

[illdothehotvoice]

I GOTTA stop reading comments on Twitter it always makes me mad lmfao how do you people exist and how do you feel like your opinion is warranted on every post ever fjfhfbdbdbfhdf

[leatherbookmark]

sitting and thinking (in the context of my fic but also in general) about the things about jgy that lxc doesn’t know, but specifically those that wwx KNOWS but won’t tell him. because that would make him soft, and we don’t want that

[startrekandstarcrises]

don't think i realized how much of a sucker i am for the Found Family trope until a one-off character i barely had an opinion of said "can i come home now?" to the main character he was staying with meaning, obviously, "can i ditch this weird dinner you've sent me to and come back to your house, which i am spending a few days at" but my whole brain went "HOME??? adopt him? new son/nephew/precocious younger sibling/protege? 11/10 yes please. i love him i want to protect him etc."

[fedoranon]

I just did the mission that made me rage quit this game 5 years ago and I legit took notes on paper and everything and at NO POINT DOES ANYONE MENTION THESE CHARACTERS BEING SIBLINGS WHAT THE ACTUAL FUCK

I WAS ROBBED!!!!

[mostlysignssomeportents]

“If buying isn’t owning, piracy isn’t stealing”

20 years ago, I got in a (friendly) public spat with Chris Anderson, who was then the editor in chief of Wired. I'd publicly noted my disappointment with glowing Wired reviews of DRM-encumbered digital devices, prompting Anderson to call me unrealistic for expecting the magazine to condemn gadgets for their DRM:

https://longtail.typepad.com/the_long_tail/2004/12/is_drm_evil.html

I replied in public, telling him that he'd misunderstood. This wasn't an issue of ideological purity – it was about good reviewing practice. Wired was telling readers to buy a product because it had features x, y and z, but at any time in the future, without warning, without recourse, the vendor could switch off any of those features:

https://memex.craphound.com/2004/12/29/cory-responds-to-wired-editor-on-drm/

I proposed that all Wired endorsements for DRM-encumbered products should come with this disclaimer:

WARNING: THIS DEVICE’S FEATURES ARE SUBJECT TO REVOCATION WITHOUT NOTICE, ACCORDING TO TERMS SET OUT IN SECRET NEGOTIATIONS. YOUR INVESTMENT IS CONTINGENT ON THE GOODWILL OF THE WORLD’S MOST PARANOID, TECHNOPHOBIC ENTERTAINMENT EXECS. THIS DEVICE AND DEVICES LIKE IT ARE TYPICALLY USED TO CHARGE YOU FOR THINGS YOU USED TO GET FOR FREE — BE SURE TO FACTOR IN THE PRICE OF BUYING ALL YOUR MEDIA OVER AND OVER AGAIN. AT NO TIME IN HISTORY HAS ANY ENTERTAINMENT COMPANY GOTTEN A SWEET DEAL LIKE THIS FROM THE ELECTRONICS PEOPLE, BUT THIS TIME THEY’RE GETTING A TOTAL WALK. HERE, PUT THIS IN YOUR MOUTH, IT’LL MUFFLE YOUR WHIMPERS.

Wired didn't take me up on this suggestion.

But I was right. The ability to change features, prices, and availability of things you've already paid for is a powerful temptation to corporations. Inkjet printers were always a sleazy business, but once these printers got directly connected to the internet, companies like HP started pushing out "security updates" that modified your printer to make it reject the third-party ink you'd paid for:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/11/ink-stained-wretches-battle-soul-digital-freedom-taking-place-inside-your-printer

Now, this scam wouldn't work if you could just put things back the way they were before the "update," which is where the DRM comes in. A thicket of IP laws make reverse-engineering DRM-encumbered products into a felony. Combine always-on network access with indiscriminate criminalization of user modification, and the enshittification will follow, as surely as night follows day.

This is the root of all the right to repair shenanigans. Sure, companies withhold access to diagnostic codes and parts, but codes can be extracted and parts can be cloned. The real teeth in blocking repair comes from the law, not the tech. The company that makes McDonald's wildly unreliable McFlurry machines makes a fortune charging franchisees to fix these eternally broken appliances. When a third party threatened this racket by reverse-engineering the DRM that blocked independent repair, they got buried in legal threats:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/20/euthanize-rentier-enablers/#cold-war

Everybody loves this racket. In Poland, a team of security researchers at the OhMyHack conference just presented their teardown of the anti-repair features in NEWAG Impuls locomotives. NEWAG boobytrapped their trains to try and detect if they've been independently serviced, and to respond to any unauthorized repairs by bricking themselves:

https://mamot.fr/@q3k@hackerspace.pl/111528162905209453

Poland is part of the EU, meaning that they are required to uphold the provisions of the 2001 EU Copyright Directive, including Article 6, which bans this kind of reverse-engineering. The researchers are planning to present their work again at the Chaos Communications Congress in Hamburg this month – Germany is also a party to the EUCD. The threat to researchers from presenting this work is real – but so is the threat to conferences that host them:

https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/researchers-face-legal-threats-over-sdmi-hack/

20 years ago, Chris Anderson told me that it was unrealistic to expect tech companies to refuse demands for DRM from the entertainment companies whose media they hoped to play. My argument – then and now – was that any tech company that sells you a gadget that can have its features revoked is defrauding you. You're paying for x, y and z – and if they are contractually required to remove x and y on demand, they are selling you something that you can't rely on, without making that clear to you.

But it's worse than that. When a tech company designs a device for remote, irreversible, nonconsensual downgrades, they invite both external and internal parties to demand those downgrades. Like Pavel Chekov says, a phaser on the bridge in Act I is going to go off by Act III. Selling a product that can be remotely, irreversibly, nonconsensually downgraded inevitably results in the worst person at the product-planning meeting proposing to do so. The fact that there are no penalties for doing so makes it impossible for the better people in that meeting to win the ensuing argument, leading to the moral injury of seeing a product you care about reduced to a pile of shit:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/11/25/moral-injury/#enshittification

But even if everyone at that table is a swell egg who wouldn't dream of enshittifying the product, the existence of a remote, irreversible, nonconsensual downgrade feature makes the product vulnerable to external actors who will demand that it be used. Back in 2022, Adobe informed its customers that it had lost its deal to include Pantone colors in Photoshop, Illustrator and other "software as a service" packages. As a result, users would now have to start paying a monthly fee to see their own, completed images. Fail to pay the fee and all the Pantone-coded pixels in your artwork would just show up as black:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/10/28/fade-to-black/#trust-the-process

Adobe blamed this on Pantone, and there was lots of speculation about what had happened. Had Pantone jacked up its price to Adobe, so Adobe passed the price on to its users in the hopes of embarrassing Pantone? Who knows? Who can know? That's the point: you invested in Photoshop, you spent money and time creating images with it, but you have no way to know whether or how you'll be able to access those images in the future. Those terms can change at any time, and if you don't like it, you can go fuck yourself.

These companies are all run by CEOs who got their MBAs at Darth Vader University, where the first lesson is "I have altered the deal, pray I don't alter it further." Adobe chose to design its software so it would be vulnerable to this kind of demand, and then its customers paid for that choice. Sure, Pantone are dicks, but this is Adobe's fault. They stuck a KICK ME sign to your back, and Pantone obliged.

This keeps happening and it's gonna keep happening. Last week, Playstation owners who'd bought (or "bought") Warner TV shows got messages telling them that Warner had walked away from its deal to sell videos through the Playstation store, and so all the videos they'd paid for were going to be deleted forever. They wouldn't even get refunds (to be clear, refunds would also be bullshit – when I was a bookseller, I didn't get to break into your house and steal the books I'd sold you, not even if I left some cash on your kitchen table).

Sure, Warner is an unbelievably shitty company run by the single most guillotineable executive in all of Southern California, the loathsome David Zaslav, who oversaw the merger of Warner with Discovery. Zaslav is the creep who figured out that he could make more money cancelling completed movies and TV shows and taking a tax writeoff than he stood to make by releasing them:

https://aftermath.site/there-is-no-piracy-without-ownership

Imagine putting years of your life into making a program – showing up on set at 5AM and leaving your kids to get their own breakfast, performing stunts that could maim or kill you, working 16-hour days during the acute phase of the covid pandemic and driving home in the night, only to have this absolute turd of a man delete the program before anyone could see it, forever, to get a minor tax advantage. Talk about moral injury!

But without Sony's complicity in designing a remote, irreversible, nonconsensual downgrade feature into the Playstation, Zaslav's war on art and creative workers would be limited to material that hadn't been released yet. Thanks to Sony's awful choices, David Zaslav can break into your house, steal your movies – and he doesn't even have to leave a twenty on your kitchen table.

The point here – the point I made 20 years ago to Chris Anderson – is that this is the foreseeable, inevitable result of designing devices for remote, irreversible, nonconsensual downgrades. Anyone who was paying attention should have figured that out in the GW Bush administration. Anyone who does this today? Absolute flaming garbage.

Sure, Zaslav deserves to be staked out over an anthill and slathered in high-fructose corn syrup. But save the next anthill for the Sony exec who shipped a product that would let Zaslav come into your home and rob you. That piece of shit knew what they were doing and they did it anyway. Fuck them. Sideways. With a brick.

Meanwhile, the studios keep making the case for stealing movies rather than paying for them. As Tyler James Hill wrote: "If buying isn't owning, piracy isn't stealing":

https://bsky.app/profile/tylerjameshill.bsky.social/post/3kflw2lvam42n

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

https://pluralistic.net/2023/12/08/playstationed/#tyler-james-hill

Image: Alan Levine (modified) https://pxhere.com/en/photo/218986

CC BY 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/