#there were like 12 people total

[1-ufo]

I am feeling so ill right now? Like headache and dizzy and nauseous

[zeravmeta]

seeing a bunch of yugitubers finally white knuckling teeth clenching admitting that links were actively detrimental for the game and that pendulums were not the core issue is so satisfying, actually

[jackfrostimposter]

genuinely why is there so much misinformation about the guardians of childhood book series?

[nguyenfinity]

Another project, a dozen drawings based on 3 rules you set for yourself!! mine were flower heads, shows the sky somewhere, and they're all different times of day

[arielluva]

still the same

little self-portrait thing starring my bathtub that hasn't changed since i was 7 (besides the stickers getting more faded)

[innko]

japanese medical negligence will drive you to american without health insurance behaviors

[pigspeetsandhooflikefeets]

Millie’s backstory is actually so lame. She wasn’t even bullied for it. No one called her “run-of-the-Millie” because she wasn’t good at anything? I expected something deep, that would explain why she’s so obsessed with Priya’s parents, like her parents were so kind to her that she can’t stomach being forced to do all that. Instead she’s kinda disappointed.

Like geez, she’s mad at her generation for not curing polio- POLIO’S VACCINE WAS MADE WHEN JONAS SALK WAS 41. AND he was born in 1914. How is that your parent’s generation!? That’s the Lost Generation! And God forbid teenagers be a little immature when they are young. Their brains are literally wired differently. Anyone who obsesses over development (as I do actually, I study adolescent development for fun) would know that!

Also, assuming she did publish that book she was writing- who is it for? The show is being AIRED on television. People could SEE Ripper and Chase and whoever be morons. Ripper adamantly mentioned his record desire on camera. She’s not selling underground information. The only people who would care about these findings are people who ALREADY subscribe to the idea teenagers aren’t productive human beings. And those people don’t need some “insider information”, because the show already exists. They have DIRECT quotes to source from the other contestants. Why would second hand from Millie do anyone any good? Because she’s willing to punch down and throw her generation under the bus? They’re not going to protect her. The older people who hate them too hate her just as much. She didn’t even try to cure polio.

[emometalhead]

.

[exoexid]

the suyeol lore is so crazy

[dribs-and-drabbles]

Vice Versa ep 12

IT'S THE LAST ONE FOLKS!

So I really did go a bit feral with the theorising over what the last colour theme would be...and it wasn't a complete surprise that it was Crystal Clear since 'transparent' had been suggested - after all, there had been details in ep 11 and throughout the series that hinted towards this.

Anyway, during the ep, this theme of Crystal Clear can been seen in the way Puen and Talay are being open and honest with each other, and with the information they offer to the other universe travellers, and in Talay's honestly to Gyo about his relationship with Puen as well as his drunken confession to Puen. Puen also had to grapple with being asked of his private life - and being told to cover up his relationship (in a 'glass house' of all places) but instead deciding to be transparent about his feelings to the press.

To reflect this, a lot of the colours in the beginning of the ep are pale tones, creams, whites, and greys, or very neutral, with only a few stronger colours here and there.

There were also small bits of red in the beginning, but either just momentary (top left and bottom right below) or subtle (bottom left, with the purple/pink of the plastic covering, or top right, with the letter box and in the car - just look how glorious that pink trumpet tree is, imagine how beautiful it could have been had we seen it in bloom 🌺). This is similar to how the show used red/colours more sparsely in ep 11 as a distinct contrast to the 'colour-world' of the alternate universe. Also I loved that the first time the main background colour wasn't just creamy/white was in the association - a call back to how colourful the alternate universe was:

But then things got interesting. First, alone in the restaurant (apart from the sax player and the wait staff of course), Puen gives the folder and t-shirt to Talay - reminders of their time in the alternate universe - and their world becomes full of colour, albeit mainly neutrals, browns, blues and yellows. The only noticeable 'red' tone, being their pink drinks.

And second, upon a closer re-watch, I noticed that the ep seemed to be loosely divided into three parts, with each third having it's own highlighted colour...and being bridged from one to the next by scenes infused with a lot of brown - which I'd like to think is because it's showing the seriousness of those moments... Anyway, the first third, as I've said above, is more neutral or pale in tone, and covers the time up until the live-stream interview. The second third covers the time of Puen and Talay's estrangement which followed the interview.

Now, in past episodes where Puen and Talay have had a similar separation - whether physical or emotional - red/pink became mostly absent until they reconciled (ep 6, ep 7, and ep 9). However, in ep 12, they did...wait for it...THE OPPOSITE!...alright...VICE VERSA!! In that, when Puen and Talay were dealing with their separation, we got more blocks of red. First with Puen's manager (embodying the STOP and 'facing reality' interpretations of red) and the pink sofa (also note all the brown!):

Then with Tou's cardigan (matching Talay's blue on Tup) and the huge red curtains behind Talay, reminders for Talay about the reality of his and Puen's love (which Tou and Tup emphasise in recounting seeing Puen look for Talay):

And with Gyo's pastel pink top (matching the blue in the background) - whose idea to film Talay and get the usb to Puen enabled them to reunite - and Puen's own red top, which he wears during the glasshouse interview and back at his apartment:

Although there's very little visible red when Talay gets caught by the press (only the letter box again), he is stood in front of the pink trumpet tree - which is poignant since he is having to deny his love for Puen when the symbol of their relationship is towering over him (imagine how great this scene could have been if it had been in bloom!).

But then Puen makes a choice (albeit fuelled by Talay's drunken confession). He goes against the script given to him by his manager and declares his feelings for Talay and intentions with their relationship to the world.

And here we shift into the last third and the predominant colour becomes blue - starting with the press conference, where Puen himself is in dark blue and many of the press also have shades of blue. I love the setting of this with the white face with open mouth behind...and the inside of the mouth being a bright red - Puen is speaking his truth, his reality...and into a red microphone too.

Then at Talay's home, both Puen and Talay are in blue (and note all that brown again)...

And later again in lighter blues (when their worries are more alleviated), when they visit the last place they were together in the alternate universe...but this time with hints of red/pink in the car as well.

At the very end, although neither are in pink/red or blue, Talay says that Puen "paints his life pink forever"...I think that we can also read into this later use of blue that the same applies in reverse -> Talay also paints Puen's life blue forever. No?

[Ep 1] [Ep 2] [Ep 3] [Ep 4] [Ep 5] [Ep 6] [Ep 7] [Ep 8] [Ep 9] [Ep 10] [Ep 11] [Ep 12]

[aroaceofthesea]

People hate on bianca but if i was given the chance of being immortal AND not having to be with my sister 24/7 i would absolutely take it some of you don't have any siblings and it shows

[a9saga]

i completely forgot that tao from exo used to ask other members to shower with him, which i thought was the most hilarious thing when i was 16.

[leemarkies]

i’m back to complain excessively about the complete lack of content/releases from the two biggest medieval rpg franchises in the past decade

[maddy-ferguson]

some of the posts about the duffers being bad writers are starting to sound like people just...not vibing with the plot and not about criticizing the writing😭 like just because something fucked up is happening doesn't mean it's fucked up that they wrote it

[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/

[youremyonlyhope]

There is a nonzero chance that I have COVID.

Yayyyyyyyy.

Let's hope it's just a cold...