#third theory

[backofthebookshelf]

I know I'm a week late but I do think people are misunderstanding the point of the Anthony Bourdain quote about Kissinger

The point was never "Anthony Bourdain has good politics and is an unproblematic fave," the point is that even someone with mainstream liberalish politics who goes to Cambodia for a food tour - a, let's be honest, very bougie type of trip to be part of your job - and has a basic understanding of history and a bare minimum of human decency can come away from that bougie food tour wanting to murder Henry Kissinger with their bare hands. The point is that Henry Kissinger fucked up this country so bad the only reason he wasn't lynched decades ago is because it's on the opposite side of the world and the people who were in proximity to him never really saw what it was. The point is that if we could see firsthand what our First World politics do to the Third World we would understand that monsters walk among us and it's a cultural failing that we let them die at home at 100 years old surrounded by their friends and family.

[cosmicportal]

“There are three classes of people: those who see. Those who see when they are shown. Those who do not see”

~Leonardo Da Vinci

[specterthief]

"That Akechi and the protagonist are looking this way is actually to establish that they're aware that this scene is Maruki's ending."

clawing at the bars of my enclosure

[lov3-sweet]

I just realized that the order of the beasts release is the order of when we meet the starter gang but in reverse.

Custard and Mystic flour being both healers.

Chili pepper and Burning spice being spicy cookies.

(Now we meet Wizard and Strawberry at the same time but non the less.)

Wizard and Shadow milk cookie being mages/Wizards.

Strawberry and Eternal sugar being both sweet as Strawberry extract or syrup is really sweet and has alot of sugar.

And finally GingerBrave and Silent salt, knights are usally known for their bravery and Gingerbraves story contrasts White lily/ Dark enchantress's who is Silent salts counterpart.

Am I going insane or am I on to something?

[poorly-drawn-mdzs]

Dungeon Meshi: The RPG

[pokemon1oadvanced]

They’re so funny I can’t-

[mostlysignssomeportents]

“Brand safety” killed Jezebel

I'll be at the Studio City branch of the LA Public Library this Monday, November 13 at 1830hPT to launch my new novel, The Lost Cause. There'll be a reading, a talk, a surprise guest (!!) and a signing, with books on sale. Tell your friends! Come on down!

Progressives: if you want to lose to conservatives, all you need to do is reflexively praise and support everything conservatives turn into a culture-war issue, without considering whether they might be right. Because sometimes…they're right.

Remember early in the Trump presidency, when conservatives all woke up and discovered that America's spy agencies – excuse me, "the intelligence community" – were dirty-tricking psychos who run amok, lawlessly sabotaging democracy? Progressives have been shouting this ever since Hoover's FBI tried to blackmail MLK into killing himself:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FBI%E2%80%93King_suicide_letter

But millions of progressives forgot about COINTELPRO, CIA dirty tricks and CIA mass spying when this "intelligence community" temporarily set out to wrong-foot Trump. Remember James Comey votive candles?

https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2019/08/30/james-comey-fbi-memo-leaks-trump-inspector-general-report-column/2157705001/

Anthropologists have a name for this phenomenon, in which one side reverses its positions because their sworn enemies have done so. It's called schizmogenesis, and it goes like this: "If they hate it, we love it":

https://pluralistic.net/2021/12/18/schizmogenesis/

Schizmogenesis is an equal-opportunity delusion. Within living memory, white evangelicals supported abortion, because their sworn enemies – Catholics – opposed it. Some of those white Boomer women who voted Trump because abortion was literally the only issue they cared about held the opposite position on abortion not so long ago – and completely forgot about it:

https://text.npr.org/734303135

The main purpose of the culture war isn't immiserating marginalized people – that's its effect, but its purpose is to distract low-information turkeys (working people) so they'll vote for Christmas (the ongoing seizure of power by American oligarchs). For the funders of conservative movement politics, the cruelty isn't the point, it's merely the tactic. The point is power:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/03/09/turkeys-voting-for-christmas/#culture-wars

Which brings me to "woke capitalism." Conservative string-pullers have whipped up their base about the threat of companies embracing social causes. They (erroneously) claim that corporations have progressive values, and that big business is thumbing the scales for causes they despise. The purpose here isn't to sow distrust of capitalism per se. Rather, it's to stampede talk-radio-addled supporters into backing the oligarchy's agenda. Remember when culture war leaders told their base to support being gouged on credit-card junk fees "to own the libs?"

https://pluralistic.net/2023/08/04/owning-the-libs/#swiper-no-swiping

That's schizmogenesis working against the conservative rank-and-file, tricking them into taking the side of a cartel of wildly profitable payment processors who are making billions by picking their pockets (credit card fees are up 40% since the covid lockdowns), because (checks notes), Target pays these profiteers a lot to process its payments, and Target sells Pride merch (no, really):

https://pluralistic.net/2023/08/04/owning-the-libs/#swiper-no-swiping

It's easy to point and laugh at conservative dopes when they're tricked into shooting themselves in the balls to own the libs. This is not a hypothetical example:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/05/28/holographic-nano-layer-catalyser/#musketfuckers

But progressives do it, too, particularly when they embrace monopolies as a force for positive social change. Remember 2019, when people got excited about playing loud pop music at Nazi rallies in the hopes that the monopoly video platforms' copyright filters would make any video from that rally impossible to post?

https://memex.craphound.com/2019/07/23/clever-hack-that-will-end-badly-playing-copyrighted-music-during-nazis-rallies-so-they-cant-be-posted-to-youtube/

I warned then that if this tactic worked, it would be used by cops to prevent you from recording them when they're macing you or splitting your skull with a billyclub, and yup, within a couple years, cops were blaring Taylor Swift music in hopes of preventing the public from posting videos of their illegal conduct:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/04/07/moral-hazard-of-filternets/#dmas

Conservatives are (partially) right about woke capitalism. It is a threat to democracy. Concentrating the power to decide who gets to speak and what they get to say into the hands of five or six corporations, mostly run by mediocre billionaires, is bad for society. The moderation decisions of giant platforms are a form of (commercial) censorship, even these don't violate the First Amendment:

https://locusmag.com/2020/01/cory-doctorow-inaction-is-a-form-of-action/

(The progressive delusion that censorship only occurs when the First Amendment is violated is a wild own-goal, one that excuses, for example, the decision by school book-fair monopolist Scholastic to remove books about queers and Black and brown people from its offerings as a purely private matter without consequences for free speech):

https://www.themarysue.com/scholastic-response-to-authors-and-illustrators-on-diverse-books/

Conservatives are only partially right about woke capitalism, though. Here's what they're wrong about: corporations don't have values. Target isn't selling Pride tees because they support progressive causes, they're selling them because it seems like a good way to increase returns to their shareholders. Individuals – even top executives – at Target might endorse the cause, but the company will only durably support the cause if that endorsement is profitable, which means that when it stops being profitable, the company will stop supporting the cause:

https://www.cnn.com/2023/05/23/business/target-lgbtq-merchandise/index.html

The idea that corporations have values isn't merely stupid, it's very dangerous. The Hobby Lobby decision – which allows corporations to deny basic health-care expenses for women on the basis that a Bronze Age mystic wouldn't approve of an IUD – rests on the ideological foundation that corporate personhood includes corporate values:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burwell_v._Hobby_Lobby_Stores,_Inc.

Citizens United – the idea that corporations should be allowed to funnel unlimited funds to politicians who'll sell out the public good in favor of investor profits – also depends on a form of corporate personhood that includes values:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizens_United_v._FEC

There are undeniably instances in which corporate monopoly power benefits progressive causes, but these are side-effects of corporate power's main purpose, namely: taking money and power away from working people and giving it to rich people. That is what monopoly power is for.

Which brings me to ad-tech, "brand safety," and the demise of Jezebel, the 16 year old feminist website whose shuttering was just announced by its latest owner, G/O Media:

https://www.metafilter.com/201349/This-is-the-end-of-Jezebel-and-that-feels-really-really-bad

Jezebel's demise is the direct result of monopoly power. Jezebel writes about current affairs – sex, politics, abortion, and other important issues of great moment and significance. When we talk about journalism as a public good, necessary for a healthy civic life, this is what we mean. But unfortunately for Jezebel – and any other news outlet covering current events – there are vast, invisible forces that exist solely to starve this kind of coverage of advertising revenue.

Writing for the independent news site 404 Media, reporter Emanuel Maiberg and former Motherboard editor-in-chief Jason Koebler go deep on the "brand safety" industry, whose mission is to assist corporations in blocking their ads from showing up alongside real news:

https://www.404media.co/advertisers-dont-want-sites-like-jezebel-to-exist/

Maiberg and Koebler explain how industry associations like the World Federation of Marketers' Global Alliance for Responsible Media (GARM) promulgate "frameworks" to help advertisers automatically detect and exclude real news from consideration when their ads are placed:

https://www.peer39.com/blog/garm-standards

This boycott makes use of scammy "AI" technology like "sentiment and emotional analysis" to determine whether an article is suitable for monetization. These parameters are then fed to the ad-tech duopoly's ad auction system, so Google and Meta (who control the vast majority of online advertising) can ensure that real news is starved of cash.

But reality is not brand-safe, and high quality, reputable journalistic outlets are concerned with reality, which means that the "brand safe" outlets that attract the most revenue are garbage websites that haven't yet been blacklisted by the ad-safety cartel, leading to major brands' ads showing up alongside notorious internet gross-out images like "goatse":

https://www.404media.co/sqword-game-dev-sneaks-goatse-onto-a-dozen-sites-that-stole-his-game/

More than a fifth of "brand safe" ad placements end up on "made for advertising" sites, which 404 Media describe as "trash websites that plagiarize content, are literally spam, pay for fake traffic, or are autogenerated websites that serve no other purpose than capturing ad dollars":

https://www.ana.net/miccontent/show/id/rr-2023-06-ana-programmatic-transparency-first-look

Despite all this, many progressives have become cheerleaders for "brand safety," as a countervailing force to the drawdown of trust and safety at online platforms, which led to the re-platforming of Nazis, QAnon conspiratorialists, TERFs, and other overt elements of the reactionary movement's vanguard on Twitter and Facebook. Articles about ads for major brands showing up alongside Nazi content on Twitter are now a staple of progressive reporting, presented as evidence of Elon Musk's lack of business acumen. The message of these stories is "Musk is bad at business because he's allowing Nazis on his platform, which will send advertisers bolting for the exits to avoid brand-safety crises."

This isn't wrong. Musk is a bad businessman (he's a good scam artist, though). Twitter is hemorrhaging advertisers, notwithstanding the desperate (and easily debunked) stats-juking its "CEO," Linda Yaccarino, floats onstage at tech conferences:

https://www.techdirt.com/2023/10/11/math-problem-for-linda-yaccarino-if-90-of-the-top-advertisers-have-come-back-but-are-only-spending-10-of-what-they-used-to-how-screwed-are-you/

But progressives are out of their minds if they think the primary effect of the brand safety industry is punishing Elon Musk for secretly loving Nazis. The primary effect of brand safety is killing reality-based coverage of the news of the day, and since reality has a well-known anti-conservative bias, anything that works against the reality-based community is ultimately good for oligarchy:

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

We can't afford to let schizmogenesis stampede us into loving things just because conservative culture warriors have been momentarily tricked into hating them as part of oligarchs' turkeys-voting-for-Christmas project. "Swivel-eyed loons hate it, so it must be good," is a worse-than-useless heuristic for navigating complex issues:

https://locusmag.com/2023/05/commentary-cory-doctorow-the-swivel-eyed-loons-have-a-point/

A much better rule of thumb is "If oligarchs love something, it's probably bad." Almost without exception, things that are good for oligarchs are bad for the rest of us. I mean, this whole shuttering of Jezebel starts with an oligarch imposing his will on millions of other people. Jezebel began life as a Gawker Media site, beloved of millions of readers, destroyed when FBI informant Peter Thiel secretly funded Hulk Hogan's lawsuit against the publisher in a successful bid to put them out of business to retaliate for their unfavorable coverage of Thiel:

https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2018/02/hogan-thiel-gawker-trial/554132/

This, in turn, put Jezebel under the ownership of G/O Media, who are unwilling to pay for a human salesforce that would – for example – sell advertising space on Jezebel to sex-toy companies or pro-abortion groups. G/O has been on a killing spree, shuttering beloved news outlets like Deadspin:

https://deadspin.com/this-is-how-things-work-now-at-g-o-media-1836908201

G/O's top exec, an oligarch named Jim Spanfeller who answers to the private equity looters at Great Hill Partners, is bent on ending reality-based coverage in favor of "letting robots shit out brand safe AI-assisted articles about generic topics":

https://www.msnbc.com/opinion/msnbc-opinion/ai-articles-disinformation-future-g-o-media-rcna95944

Three quarters of a century ago, Orwell coined a term to describe this kind of news: duckspeak,

It was not the man’s brain that was speaking it was his larynx. The stuff that was coming out of him consisted of words but it was not speech in true sense: it was a noise uttered in unconsciousness like the quacking of a duck.

When investors and analysts speak of "content" (rather than, say, "journalism"), this is what they mean – a warm slurry of platitudes, purged of any jagged-edged fragments to render it a perfectly suitable carrier for commercial messages targeted based on surveillance data about the "consumer" whose eyeballs are upon it.

This aversion to reality has been present among corporate decisionmakers since the earliest days, but the consolidation of power among large firms – ad-tech firms, online platforms, and "brands" themselves – makes corporate realityphobia much easier to turn into, well, reality, giving advertisers the fine-grained power to put Jezebel and every site like it out of business.

As Koebler and Maiberg's headliine so aptly puts it, "Advertisers Don’t Want Sites Like Jezebel to Exist."

The reason to deplore Nazis on Twitter is because they are Nazis, not because their content isn't brand-safe. The short-term wins progressives gain by legitimizing a corporate veto over what we see online are vastly overshadowed by the most important consequence of brand safety: the mass extinction of reality-based reporting. Reality isn't brand safe. If you're in the reality based community, brand safety should be your sworn enemy, even if they help you temporarily get a couple of Nazis kicked off Twitter.

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/2023/11/11/ad-jacency/#brand-safety

[jeena-says-hi]

Third life au where everything is the same but when Ren becomes the red king, he wears these:

[reggies-eyeliner]

when i think of ben and kenji as a secret third thing i actually cry in a fetal position because their relationship is arguably less definitive than other bonds between the nublar six in both jwcc and jwct like what do you mean that kenji's best friend is darius and his girlfriend was brooklyn and ben is also friends with darius who also has/had a crush on brooklyn and it's cemented that kenji has a silly best friend with sammy and a sibling dynamic with yaz and ben has a sibling dynamic with sammy and a wingman dynamic with yaz WHAT I AM TRYING TO SAY HERE IS THAT LIKE HONESTLY regardless of how they turn out in canon their relationship is so so special EXHIBIT A) who on EARTH looks at their best friend like THAT and tells him that he isn't that bad at getting people to open up and wears his fanny pack when he thinks he's dead and EXHIBIT B) who on earth looks that dejected when he sees his secret third thing and brooklyn kiss and literally manages to get him to open up the most beyond anyone else like. like it. they ruin me AND THEY'RE ALSO PARENTS OF A DINOSAUR EGG AND they i THEY HAVE CHRONIC HEART EYES SYNDROME but there's also an underlying tentativeness between them and a desire not to consistently hurt the other or regretting immediately if they do and it's yeah okay i am done

[macdennisnation]

iasip stills requests: sharing clothes pt.2

[adhd-sonic-the-hedgehog]

wanted to do an art render of elise in the modern maria style (including my combat outfit design)

[sapphoherselz]

hi do you ever wonder if wyamack EVER met the Foxes before their time? I'm talking any age, any time in their lives, especially the ones where they really needed a paternal figure to help them out or get them out of trouble?

like he goes grocery shopping and sees this quiet kid trying to stuff as much food in his pockets wo being noticed? but David of course does and the kid is already taking a step back, looking at him with pure terror in his eyes as if he's seeing just another person that can hurt him but of course that doesn't happen. what does happen is that david offers to pay for anything the kid wants and then starts asking question like that's one nasty bruise you got there, want to tell me what happened? and then out of nowhere the boy's mother appears and starts tugging the kid away in a not very gentle manner and David tries to interfere but they're hurriedly walking away before he can get the words out of his mouth (he has to physically stop himself from going after them because that would just frighten the kid more)(he goes back to the same grocery store at the same hour for an entire month, hoping to find this short kid hiding somewhere and maybe tell his mother exactly where she can put her hands)

or maybe he's walking home late at night and sees this kid sitting on the sidewalk and he approaches cause shouldn't you be at home? wouldn't your parents worry? do you want to give them a call, you could use my phone but the kid tenses so much that David takes several steps back and starts talking about everything under the blue sky trying to get him to calm down. when that eventually happens, they end up sitting (with some comfortable distance) next to the other in utter silence, until the kid goes "I don't want to go home" and David is like. okay. we can stay here for as long as you'd like. the night is young and I have snacks in my pockets. did I tell you already that I'm an exy coach? what do you mean you don't know what exy is- no I'm not making that up, it's a job and I have it! they even pay me for it! (he ends up falling asleep in a sitting position and wakes up alone, the marble next to him having long gone cold) (he doesn't even remember if he had managed to make the kid smile or if his eyes were playing tricks on him) (if he starts walking home later than usual just to sit on a lonely sidewalk for hours then it's his business and no one else's)(and yes he does bring with him all of the snacks he thinks the kid would like) (no he didn't spend minutes choosing them)

like something something the red string theory something something everyone is always connected something something

[captainsantiagos]

me for the next 7 days putting together theories on what leads up to that hug

[deliriousblue]

THEORY OF LOVE (2019) episode three

[nethnad]

watching nuwho and then classic who depictions of the master is so funny you have ten going "i know him... i could detect him anywhere if he was on earth...." and then in the sea devils the master is just meandering around the same building complex as the doctor and it takes jo looking out the window and going "WAIT A SECOND" for him to even notice he's there. bestie your husband is committing crimes as we speak ignore the golf guy for 3 seconds maybe

[cjskribblez]

>Inverse Theory<

The theory that the entire life series is being viewed in reverse.

The games end when Grian finally wins that which he created in 3rd Life, freeing the players.

Ok. So hear me out. There is alot of it that doesn't make sense, mostly character wise, but let's put all of that to the side for one moment to entertain this.

-Cleo and Etho have a divorce arc in limited life. Funny, but they barely interacted in double life. Now, at the time of this writing, they have a wonderful duo going on in secret life.... hmm. Interesting

-Martyn has said his canon reasoning behind Lizzie and Mumbo not being in double life was because the previous season was too traumatic for them and they needed more time to recover. If we apply this logic going from Last life to 3rd, the logic still applies.

-This also would mean Skizz wasn't in double because limited life was painful for him... yeah. Ouch.

-Now I haven't seen Lizzie's last life pov all the way through, but she was a fairy queen, correct? And Ren was her bodyguard. Her second in command. I like the idea of Ren becoming a king in 3rd because of that.

-This also makes Pearl's descent into madness in double life a bit sadder, but with a happy ending of her and Scott teaming next season (last life)

-Bdubs kills Impulse the one time he forgets to give him a clock.... oof

-There is also very funny things with this theory, like Grian throwing an axe into Scar's back and then waking up as his soulmate. (Which would also explain why he didn't want to team with him in last life)

Ok that's all in my brain rn, don't take this too seriously as it's not a theory I think is canon or should be, but its a fun idea to spin around I think. Feel free to add stuff !