#this panopticon is totally normal

[leam1983]

I posted 3,296 times in 2022

That's 1,163 more posts than 2021!

478 posts created (15%)

2,818 posts reblogged (85%)

Blogs I reblogged the most:

@hikineet-trash

@daemonhxckergrrl

@millenianthemums

@fizzyimp

@pollylittlehigher-littlelower

I tagged 1,085 of my posts in 2022

#work post - 93 posts

#thoughts - 68 posts

#life post - 30 posts

#it post - 26 posts

#long post - 20 posts

#on writing - 15 posts

#not a review - 14 posts

#youtube - 13 posts

#cyberpunk 2077 - 12 posts

#politics - 11 posts

Longest Tag: 129 characters

#a living area that would look like an eighties' megamall food court with a lamborghini testarossa in pride of place in the middle

My Top Posts in 2022:

#5

Rummaging Things Around

I have a thing in mind. A vaguely Lovecraftian thing, inspired by my re-reading Champion of the Worms, by Mignola and McEown. The early stretches are basically a pastiche of a pastiche, but that's never stopped me before...

So we have this guy - sort of a failed academic with something like a decent brain to call his own, that gets pulled out of a life of relative non-ambition by a more successful relative. The uncle's long been a curator for a bunch of obscure exhibits and more or less lives like the Dieselpunk Forties never ended and Eldritch Horror were real. He's the type who speaks six languages, unearths remote tribes the world over and somehow finds ways to show even the people of the 21st century that yes, here sometimes be dragons anyway.

Dropout is brought in to help his uncle with the curation of his new exhibit in an obscure little New England town, and it's through piecing things together that our main guy realizes the object of the exhibit-to-be is Hyperborea, also known as Ultima Thule - the very continent Nazi occult weirdos spent years chasing in the hopes of anchoring their theories about the Aryan race to anything at all. Hyperborea is Antarctica, of course, and briefly consisted of a few landmasses that weren't yet covered in ice, several million years ago. The story goes that the archipelago was colonized by an extant Hominid species, a forgotten branch of Humanity that has strengths and weaknesses altogether different from the Neanderthal and Cro-Magnon species that both preceded and followed them. They grew in secret, mastered art, language and philosophy - even dove into the mysteries lying beyond mere intellect and intuition.

Then, they vanished. No fossil records, no bones, no traces of their civilization - nothing except what our Uncle character finds.

And what does he find? Two burial sites that would make Tutankhamen absolutely green with envy. The catch is is laden in dark portents and the other one has an almost messianic undertone - as if opening this particular tomb would somehow usher in Mankind's next stage in History.

It's a small museum, Uncle's on the frail side, and his wing's curator isn't exactly on-the-level... Things get leaked, pictures are taken, and thieves get involved. As greedy as you'd expect and far too confident after overpowering an older man, an out-of-shape thirtysomething and a dumpy idiot in his sixties, they crack open the bigger, more festooned sarcophagus.

Things... take a turn for the worse. The Hyperboreans, as it turns out, owe their disappearance to their falling under the insane sway of a death cult. A Great Old One-esque monstrosity more than likely claimed them so completely it erased Hyperborean civilization from the map, leaving its priest to serve as the hierophant of things to come if anyone were to awaken him again. If an entire culture's drank the Kool-Aid, it follows that someone hell-bent on spreading destruction would receive Grade-A Messiah treatment, complete with a beatific burial site that just so happened to send the wrong impressions to a bunch of credulous grave robbers, millions of years ago.

Fighting back against zombies, spirits and other monstrosities, Uncle and Dropout lose the curator. Eventually, Uncle dies. Dropout is alone, barricaded in the same room as the second stone coffin, one that's etched out of crude limestone and that's had every carving and identifying marker chipped away by chisel. Someone did not want anyone else to find thar second tomb, and did not want anyone to open it.

With the world slowly succumbing to chaos outside and with nothing else to do, Dropout opens the second sarcophagus. What he finds inside is a... different kind of undeath, one that feels less like a perversion of life and more like one heck of an obstinate man that absolutely, positively refused to give in to death. The dessicated mummy reaches out with a dusty moan, grabs ahold of Dropout's neck - and pulls him in for a kiss.

When he finally breaks away, gagging and heaving, Dropout somehow instinctively knows that this contact served as a means to copy his thoughts, linguistic and situational skills, and awareness of the situation. As for the mummy, it's sitting up in its sarcophagus and lounging in it for a few moments, stroking its beard for a few breaths.

"Six million years, eh?" it says, its voice going from sepulchral croaks to a precisely-toned and conversational King's English over the next minute or so. "Well, I have to give you credit - you lot at least look like you never went snooping about in places where sane men aren't expected..."

It catches itself. "Ah, well, there was this one chunk of you with a thing for portents brought about by sulfurous fumes - Athenians and the Pythia, hm? Overall, however, if we're generous? Barring brief moments of potential concern like MKULTRA or some of your Feds keeping an eye on the Ayahuasca fad? I guess you could call yourselves blessedly ignorant."

The second mummy grins, which isn't a pretty sight. It scoffs. "I know - I look horrendous. Past a certain point, it really doesn't matter who or what your keeper is, man-flesh is as man-flesh does - but you're not here to listen to me ramble, are you? The Serpent is loose, the world will be devoured, End of Times, yadda yadda - unless you help me climb out of this thing."

The dropout screams. Shenanigans ensue.

21 notes - Posted June 14, 2022

#4

On Revengeance

I agree with Jacob Geller. Metal Gear Solid: Revengeance is prescient not only in how it's more or less become immortalized as a meme vector - which Monsoon would find ironic - but also in how it gave us something that should have triggered shirt-tearing and pearl-clutching Republicans and Conservatives, if they only gave a shit about video games.

See, Senator Armstrong is a stroke of genius. We spend most of the game piecing his agenda together, and eventually fight him head-on. At first, he spouts very on-the-nose rhetoric, as if Raiden were a CSPAN interviewer in need of a few conciliatory buzzwords. And yes, in 2013, a video game character shouted that he intended to make America great again. That's long before Trump would unabashedly take that zinger and plaster it on crimson caps manufactured in China.

So you wear Armstrong down and force him to not just ditch his well-pressed suit, but also all pretense. You realize that his America is basically a Libertarian's coyly-assumed ideal and a Fascist's wet dream, where policy is dictated by the strong and the weak only have two choices: tow the party line or die - either literally or socially. It's hard not to draw parallels with several politicians who embrace similar notions, out of the sociopathic conviction that what's really holding the Western world back is empathy.

It's strange to look at Putin and then reflect back on Armstrong - and to realize that Absolutist, do-or-die rhetoric can plausibly leave the mouth of an IRL politician. It makes you wonder where Putin, Trump or Bolsonaro would consider pushing their agenda, if they'd overdosed on Nietzsche.

Of course, it's also a setting where the Good Guys push Combat Maximalism and pure aggression, where lyrics land in the most appropriate spots in order to take already absurd moments and elevate them to the status of quoted maxims (see Rules of Nature) and where a franchise normally known for its extremely ponderous stealth mechanics effectively has a psychotic breakdown and spends five hours Wrecking Shit while wearing too much eyeliner.

In short, it's glorious, and it's probably the most ponderous and, I daresay, intellectual entry in Platinum Games' oeuvre. It's dumb, happy to be dumb, and also follows along with KojiPro's focus on anchoring its mechs-and-soldiers nonsense in real-world ethics. It's like catching one of Volodymyr Zelynsky's skits before he gained Ukraine's presidency, and realizing that this dude who was typically known for playing half-wits has one heck of a serious noggin on his shoulders.

22 notes - Posted May 2, 2022

#3

Your Average Soulsborne Opening

"Shit's fucked, man. The Important Twelve-Feet-Tall Big Guy ghosted on us. World's gone to shit. People are, like, fucked out of their minds! The Big Guy's Helpers could hold an intervention and force Him to come back, but they've all hit Snooze on their alarm clock. The only one who's Woken Up and Who Knows It's Monday is the Useful Idiot. That's you.

Your job: to get your massive buddies to get out of bed, either by slapping them a few hundred times or by slapping whatever it is that's keeping them down. You won't succeed, though: you're a Scrawny Shit, and Scrawny Shits get nothing done. Telling ya, man: we're doomed."

The narrator leans to the side. "What? We still have thirty seconds of intro left on this thing? Um... I'll just, uh, dramatically name-drop the Big Guy's Helpers! There's Bitch-Fucker the Unloveable! Asshole-Face! Weird Fucked-Up Dog Thing! That one female part of the gang with a slightly skeevy thing that makes you go 'Yeah, this is Japanese for sure!' Then there's the most important of them all, um... Steve!"

"You, though? You're a Scrawny Shit. You're so lowly even Steve doesn't know you. It all rests on you, though: wake up the Posse, bring the Big Guy back, and we just might move on to call you... A Player-Directed Plot Device."

22 notes - Posted April 11, 2022

#2

On Difficulty

"Hey, why are you so psyched for Elden Ring? You've never finished the Souls games or Bloodborne!"

To that, I've been replying that what I especially like about From Software releases is how granular things are. The total challenge is immense in all cases, yes, but the moment-to-moment gameplay is very piecemeal in design. You're rarely forced to do-si-do against four or five simultaneous enemies and you're typically given all the tools you need to do what obviously needs doing. The two catches are that boss fights have life bars the size of Siberia, and that they hit you like two angry trucks meeting again on the set of Jerry Springer. They're easily telegraphed, simple to read and uncomplicated in their tactics - the challenge-related aspect is only punitive in design.

Considering, every encounter is self-contained and it doesn't really make much of a difference to wonder if that incoming boss fight is going to feel different from the last mobs you wiped out.

Approaching the game like this means I never felt narrative or situational pressure, and that I'm more compelled by exploratory concerns than by the need to end up with a Pure White World Tendency or whatever else. I'm not really given to yeet myself across enemy-infested courtyards because I'm tired and this is my -nth corpse run. I'll be as cautious going back for that corpse as I was during the run that got me killed - and eventually, timing and luck are going to meet my mediocre Soulsborne skills and will let me wipe the floor with a boss I previously found impossible to face.

In that respect, Elden Ring is exactly what I hoped to see out of From in the murky depths of the future: a Soulsborne with transitional spaces approchable by any character of any skill level, thereby providing me with a safe space in which to develop my skills and farm without feeling like my gathered Souls are constantly on the line and in the care of my dubious skillset.

That means I'll be able to venture around Limgrave and beyond in the Lands Between without wondering if the Legacy Dungeons are part of my overall progression. I'll be free to backtrack as needed and to workshop angles of approach in wider spaces than were previously accessible. That's without mentioning stealth, around which I don't doubt you could build a frighteningly effective build that's less focused on pattern recognition. The designers' comments do suggest that while Elden Ring isn't easier than the previous titles per se, the player has more options - and some of them are effective at mitigating the perceived challenge.

To me, that's smart design. If difficulty is such a core aspect of your ethos, it makes sense that you'd want to forego gameplay menus and player-adjustable variables. However, tweaks can be dispersed in-game, and left to the player's discretion. Both this and the level design seem to combine into what's probably the most accessible Soulsborne title to date, all the while never disparaging the studio's reputation as a creator of punishing titles.

This is why I'm especially interested in this one, even if I'm expecting it to kick my ass for several weeks, before things start to click.

39 notes - Posted February 23, 2022

My #1 post of 2022

Cult of the Lamb - Quickie

Cornelius Agrippa's Formula for Making Fucked-Up Shit

One part "Aww, the artstyle looks a lot like Gumball's!"

Two parts of "Should I be amused or disturbed?"

A dash of "Well, someone knows their Lovecraft... Me likey!"

One Animal Crossing: New Horizons cartridge, chopped up in your choice of power blender

One USB stick containing a full playthrough of The Binding of Isaac. Any edition will do.

A grab-bag's worth of normally-throwaway secondary mechanics. Be sure to give them pride of place in your mixture, just to be sure the bigwigs at the Big Three discredit your design doc.

One cup of the blackest cynicism imaginable.

Two large handfuls of cake sprinkles. Empty your entire tub in there for extra awkward cuteness.

Shake, bake and deliver to Devolver Digital for publishing, because nobody else was going to touch this with a ten-foot pole

Actually make this motherfucker addictive and rewarding.

Plus - hey! The game's a complete offering! There's a roadmap planned, but what we get is a full game! The DLC's only cosmetic!

Buy it. This is highly, highly reccomended.

54 notes - Posted August 12, 2022

Get your Tumblr 2022 Year in Review →

[nephilimbrute]

Yo, how you doin' ? Did you play Side Order ? What are your (gay) though ?

i'm doin alriighhtt :3 i didn't play side order actually (I don't have a switch.) but i went through a gameplay with my friend and i'm scrounging up more lore >w< we were freaking tf out the whole time. especially me. i was screaming at every cutscene

like when marina showed us her computer background i goofy-screamed Out Loud (i probably did that like 8 times in total). there's literally No straight explanation for that, pearl's literally holding marina's zipper in that and he's laying down. nonone has a pic of their Best Friend (heavy quotes) laying down smiling all pretty and handsome like that

OHHHHH THIS ONEEE😭😭😭my girl is literally tearing up she's so happy😭😭😭😭😭 all the dev diaries were sooooo fwjgwgkxkgwkhcjcxjg😭😭😭😭

AND ALL THE PEARLINA???????? my GOD this girl is crazy i hate them so much!!!! /affectionate

jesus CHRIST girl pull yourself toGETHER... "aw pearlie! you say the coolest things" "she's sooooo coool" "pearl, don't drool over my diaries. i'm right here!" "i can't help it! pearl's just too precious. she's fearless at the core and adorable on top!" among many other marina quotes. i'm speechless

and ohhhhhh dedf1sh's letters😭😭😭😭 little marina i can't do this. i get so emotional when i see her, she was just a kid😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭AHHHHHJJJJJJJ😭😭😭😭😭😭😭

marina's hyperfixation on excavators persists. she's such a nerdddddd!!!!!!!

and ughhhghhghjf marina agitando. i was freaking out so bad when i saw her AND PARALLEL CANON. the lore implications THE LORE IMPLICATIONS×@!!!!! this also gives me some new content to use in my AU.....devilish

i said this before but the Order you see in the dlc is in my AU as a type of malware that marina created for herself. she encrypts it into the personal software she uses as an attempt to. self destruct (off) herself. but (Un)fortunately it didn't work. she's just stuck forever wallowing in her own grief

the memverse in my AU is where marina puts everyone she has under her mind control thingy. they're all hooked into the same memverse, marina has her own that she messes with to see the possible consequences of every action she does and. stuff.

and i also said this on my alt twt acc but in the Normal Side Order(...??) my agent 4 turns into parallel canon either voluntarily or unvoluntarily. and since there's others with him i decided to make them robotic clones of 8 and cap3. and they only serve to mock agent 8 and what little they remember of their lovers and themself, a materialized deteriorating memory

tbh i was more focused on the theme of side order instead of dedf1sh stuck in the elevator with two lesbians that would do the unthinkable if they weren't there

here's how i see it. so much for your memories fading away while you are actively trying to get them back

i also kept freaking out At dedf1sh. i shouted them for to get off the screen each time they popped up (also affectionate). creepy zombie GET OUT. dedf1sh and their dumb puppy eyes

unconscience is sooooo good i only listened to it twice and if i did any more times i would be gone and in the woods somewhere

i loved all the bosses.........marina and parallel are my favs....also rondo. That thing's so horrifying i love it. when i saw it i was like "what kind of panopticon shit is this....." and was absolutely THRILLED! to see that it was actually based on a panopticon as well as the floor level (0ct0ptic0n)

and these album covers??????they're so fucking AWESOMEEEEeee i love the album art of splatoon. when i saw all the stuff in alterna i was so amazed. the gear is so awesome too i wish i played splatoon. i'd grind the shit out of side order tbh......smollusk is so cute the. Awwww awww

also this dlc made me realize i'm a big machine but make it girly

as Side Order C.E.O i feasted GOOD this was a bountiful harvest

[rokhal]

Resident Evil 7 Biohazard whatever is an amazing portrait of the impact of methamphetamine in the rural US. Everything from the textures to the design of the environment to the story itself.

I guess, as an American, I should be used to living in a media panopticon where everyone knows how we talk and what our houses look like, but the Baker estate is not like a movie set or an influencer's home. There's real clutter, the kind that accumulates when you haven't moved cross-country in over ten years and your kids have grown up: kennels for cats who've lived and died, tool boxes, riding mowers, plastic bags full of plastic bags, pool toys. The age of the house shows, not just in the dated wallpaper and cupboards, but in the glimpses we get through the crumbling walls of construction techniques that have been obsolete for eighty years. The pegboard as wallboard. The cludged-together, homeowner-grade repairs of railings and staircases. The immersion is total. This could be any rural home I've ever visited whose owners lost the battle against entropy.

Houses on cheap land can get big. Real big. The Bakers appear to have inherited a plantation house, but there's a lot more on the property. It's perfectly normal to build a mother-in-law apartment and park a trailer in your backyard when you've got the land. Code inspector? What code inspector? You don't need no stinkin' permits. You're not gonna sell, and if you do, the buyer can figure out what they want to do with your wobbly deck.

You own the house and you've got no neighbors to complain about their property values. If you've got money, you trick out your garage. Get a lift. Get a hoist. Fuck it, dig an oil pit. You can do it! That's your man shed. Build some racks out of hog panel and hang all your tools in some haphazard arrangement that makes sense only to you. You've got to be your own mechanic if you want to keep your vehicles running.

Then there's the Baker family themselves. They were nice. Normal. Probably voted for Trump, but so did everyone they know. Of course they'd take pity on a nice white woman and a little girl begging for shelter, they're not animals. Jack was ex-military and pushy; Marguerite was socialized to stand by him whether or not he treated her well; Lucas was an amoral genius who couldn't make it in the real world; Zoe was at least prepared to fly the nest but either she'd tried and had to retreat, or she hadn't quite gotten up the nerve.

By the time we meet them, Jack and Marguerite are caricatures of themselves. Violent, paranoid, impulsive, irrational, moody. They can barely even function. Marguerite's kitchen is swarming with cockroaches and flies, and Jack's outbursts destroy the furniture and walls of the home that he was once proud of. The areas where Jack and Marguerite live are heaped with garbage bags, dimly lit, and filthy.

Every time we meet Lucas, he's wired as hell. Lucas seems hyperfunctional, constructing his elaborate traps and escape rooms, except he can't make the details come together. He lines the walls of his areas with white plastic sheeting, but the mold creeps through the seams anyway. He doesn't bother to change the codes on his padlocks. He toys with Ethan and banks on Ethan being too dumb to shove a bomb through a conveniently placed hole in the wall.

Zoe can still be reasoned with, but we see her fears in her diary. We see the tinfoil taped over her window to block the light.

Lucas, Jack, and Marguerite exhibit behavioral changes consistent with early, chronic, and long-term methamphetamine abuse. Their house bears the same marks of frenetic remodeling, ambitious yet ill-conceived design choices, repetitive behaviors, and neglect that scar so many homes occupied by meth addicts.

Meth is like other drugs in that it rewires the brain to promote drug-seeking behavior, but it also over time causes the brain to atrophy. Signs resembling dementia or schizophrenia eventually occur, accompanied by cognitive decline, and much of this is permanent. It becomes harder for the user to fight back against their dependency (against Eveline) the longer they use the drug (the deeper Eveline's mold works into their bodies).

This is an American horror story, it's a familiar American horror story, and it's a love letter to our country from Japan that seems to me to say, "We're so sorry about what you're going through. Here, shoot some mold-monsters about it."

[aro-geo-turtle]

TMA’s narrative structure and its reflection in character dynamics

With the end of @a-mag-a-day, I though it would be a perfect time to post this meta-analysis I’ve been thinking about for ages! Its always fun when a story’s ending wraps back around to its beginning in some way, and TMA dips into this a tiny bit via the “can I have a cigarette” moment, but I think the wider narrative structure and parallels in TMA actually get way more interesting than that. Long rambly analysis below cause I’m a writing nerd, and also remember this is purely my own personal interpretation.

I have three main points to make here.

A: season 4 is a twisted mirror of seasons 1 and 2, which act as a singular narrative unit, while season 5 is just like season 3 but more so in every way.

B: these parallels and mirrors between seasons are symbolized through Jon and Martin’s ever changing relationship.

C: the grand finale of Last Words feels like such an abrupt ending because it breaks the pattern established for how season finales are meant to work.

So let’s look at this chronologically:

Seasons 1 and 2 can be viewed a single unit in the overall narrative structure. They follow the same basic premise: Jon in his office at the Institute, alienated from his 3 assistants, trying to find out the truth about the supernatural. They both have a very slow pace, with only a handful of plot-furthering episodes among mostly world-building statement episodes. Then we have a cliffhanger leading into an action-packed climax, and then a calmer epilogue episode to clarify exactly what just happened and set up the new status quo for the next season. There are obviously differences (added supplementals, the paranoia, Gertrude’s murder, you know), but they follow the same general format. We also see the classic Jon/Martin dynamic established and shared between these two seasons: Martin reaching out to care for Jon, Jon rejecting and pushing him away. 

Season 3: Status quo? Out the window! Jon’s out of the Institute, traveling the world, we’re gone from the traditional 3 assistants to 4. The goal is no longer vaguely learning about the supernatural, we got most of those answers from Leitner. Instead we’re building towards the Unknowing from the very beginning. And the pacing here speeds up dramatically. So much happens, plot moving forward most episodes. This is where Jon and Martin’s dynamic first changes, too, finally becoming a lot more friendly. Some parts of the format stay the same, though. The ending is still made up of high-action climax episodes followed by an epilogue episode to set up the next status quo.

Season 4 is a return to the format of 1 and 2, but all twisted and reversed. Jon is in his office at the Institute, alienated from his 3 assistants, but it’s a totally different set of assistants (Tim, Sasha, Martin to Melanie, Basira, Daisy). We’re back to the slower pace, but after the mile-a-minute speed of S3, it feels agonizingly slow, a waiting game. The characters spend a lot of time sitting around. We know how the supernatural works, and now Jon’s looking for answers on what he’s meant to do about it. Of course, S4 also sees the reversal of Jon and Martin’s early season roles. Now it’s Jon reaching out and Martin rejecting him. And then we hit the finale and the tension that’s built up all season suddenly snaps. Once again, it’s a high-action climax followed by a slower epilogue that sets up season 5.

Season 5 is obviously the biggest status quo change of all. Literally all the rules of the normal world are shattered. It’s season 3 but even more so. We’re not at the Institute (there is no Institute), we don’t have the typical 3 assistants (that role doesn’t really seem to exist anymore). Like with the Unknowing, we have a clear goal from the very start: get to the Panopticon, kill Jonah, bring the world back. While the pace of 3 is rapid-fire, 5 is a steady march forward, episode by episode. Jon and Martin are once again friendly, and even more so, have finally connected and realized their feelings. And then we get to the grand finale. I think the reason the ending feels so abrupt to me and many others is because it finally breaks the format of season finales. Last Words is the action-packed climax episode but it has no epilogue episode. It just ends.

So, yeah! Those are my points. I just find looking at this all very cool.

[sadtraumatizedlonely]

Chapter 4—Panopticon Theory: Always Being “Watched"

In my feminism class in university, we discussed the panopticon theory of “watching” or rather, feeling like you’re being watched, within the context of self regulatory practices of women. The feeling of always being watched, that people are always looking at you so you have to behave a certain way very much resonated with me.

This feeling of being watched started when I was very little and has unfortunately followed me into my mid twenties. I am always prepared to get in trouble, even if I’m doing nothing inherently wrong. As a child, I believed fully that my father could see everything I was doing, this feeling was probably escalated by him saying “I have eyes and ears everywhere, there’s nothing you can do that I won’t know about.”

For a long time, I believed that he could read my thoughts. I still feel that sense that others can somehow know what I’m thinking and are watching me. Watching every mistake, monitoring how I behave, am I not acting normal? Am I giving someone a weird look? Am I too inviting to strangers or asking for trouble? Am I not nice enough to strangers? The thoughts swirl round and round in my minds eye, as I look up from my shell at the world silently judging me.

I once got in trouble for walking on the wrong side of the road when I was 12. I was headed to the library, and I decided to walk on the side of the road that doesn’t have a sidewalk. Word got back to my father (the local mechanic), and we had one of his famous “discussions” when he arrived home from work that day. Now, I can’t help but feel as though people are watching me, just waiting to see me misstep, all to get me into trouble.

The trouble, of course, no longer exists (unless you count getting into trouble with the law), as I am a grown woman, I pay my own bills, and have my own place to live. But this unfortunate feeling has still followed me. I make myself sick and sleep deprived worrying about “being in trouble”.

But, why the focus on being in trouble? Well, my survival relied on not being in trouble. Being in trouble meant physical pain (when I was too small to defend myself), shame, ridicule, and, or course, punishment. Not being able to leave the house, getting the phone I pay for taken away, having to be spanked, slapped, and screamed at, and being told I’m no good and never will be.

That is what I fear the most. I fear that my parents are right. I fear that I am actually a mistake that they decided not to get aborted. I fear that I’m not a good person and I make terrible choices. I also fear that I will pass these feelings onto my own children someday, as thought they can absorb my experiences in-utero.  

Let’s be real, maybe 5 cars total drove past me on that street (definitely not a highway), and if you are so concerned about my “safety”, why do I have to feel fear when discussing it with you? It is ridiculous to lecture a child about walking down the wrong side of the road, but that wasn’t the point of the lecture. The point was that someone told him I was “misbehaving”, and he could no longer keep up that “perfect child” mask I wore to protect him and his “reputation” around town. Unfortunately, the criminal charges my sister decided to press unmasked him for what he truly is: insecure, a bully, and a child in an adult’s body. My step mother only enabled this behaviour, adding on her own secret “spice” of verbal abuse and manipulation. All behaviours needing to be concealed from the world, to protect their senses of self.

So, how do I move forward?

I don’t think it’s as simple as “just ignoring it”. I think, unfortunately, having to prove I’m good will not go away easily until it finally sets in that I’m not only good or only bad. Until that child like (black and white) theory of goodness goes away, I’ll have to work on just “being”.  

[zorilleerrant]

yes it sucks to find out someone is a secret bigot but. people have got to stop acting like it's somehow nefarious and itself an act of social violence when people try to avoid controversial discussions.

people don't want to be yelled at and mocked! this is normal! people avoid bringing stuff up that will cause arguments because they don't want to have arguments, which is a healthy pattern of behavior, and should honestly be encouraged more. (there's all kind of research about why yelling at people on the internet is bad for your mental health, but I guess it feels more active to people than doomscrolling.)

I mean, you can say that they must know it's wrong if they think people would yell at them for it, except look at the wide variety of things people are willing to harass someone over, and how much of it is totally unreasonable. I'm unwilling to bring up my religion on here, because of how awful tumblr's culture is toward any religion they don't think of as the normal ones. hell, I won't even say what comics authors I do and don't like because the people who disagree are so vocal about how they disagree, and they're mean about it.

you can talk about trying to sucker people in with a sanitized version of your life (except, again, everyone avoids certain topics), but acting like avoiding conflict is, itself, somehow cruel or harmful is just reinforcing the fucked up notion that people's lives need to be publicly available to everyone at all times. that everyone needs to be reachable at all hours, and respond immediately. that people are entitled to know about a celebrity's gender and sexuality and relationship status. that it's cool to film strangers without even asking first. that privacy shouldn't exist.

the answer to who benefits here is whoever's doing the most datamining. don't contribute to the panopticon.

[linaasca]

This is such a different show than the first two animes we watched and has quite a bit to talk about. First thing that came to mind was that the world resembles the book "1984" by George Orwell in a lot of ways. From basic surveillance to being able to read what people are thinking about while they're doing it. The main government in Psycho-pass is a lot like Big Brother in the way that both strive for a well functioning society. Therefore, I believe two of the themes from these first four episodes are power and justice. Power in this world belongs to investigators and enforcers, or anyone who has the dominator in their hand. They decide who to point the gun at, and the gun decides whether the person shall live or die. Justice also plays a role in this, depicted in the scene where Shinya had the dominator pointed at the woman victim, and even though she had a criminal rating of over 100, Akane forced him not to shoot. Akane was trying to get justice for her since she was the victim of assault but Shinya wanted justice for the society.

The reading that went along with this anime shows many similarities as well. When the plague was going around, cities had "crows" that would hunt down sick and dead people, much like the enforcers do in Psycho-pass. And the government control those cities had back then with syndics and intendants making sure all houses were clean and no one was sick closely resembles inspectors from this show making sure no one in a threat to the society in the future. But the syndics were checking more for physical health of the residents while inspectors are checking the mental health. The authorities used to use words like mad or sane, dangerous or harmless, and normal or abnormal to decide if a person had the plague. In Psycho-pass, the gun tells the handler their criminal rating and how they should be dealt with, like a non-lethal paralyzer or total elimination. Finally, I made the correlation that the panopticon structure resembles the street scanners in the show. Both don't allow who ever is in its path to see if someone is observing them. So in both scenarios, the citizens would act how they naturally would and could help authorities pick out dangerous people. This show is definitely more interesting to me and I am intrigued to see how it plays out.

[banashee]

Hi Folks, welcome to my third fic for the Archival Pride 2021 project! Look at their tumblr for more info :) @archivalpride

Archival Pride 2021, Week three (June 15-21) Prompts: Love Languages, Doubt, Post-Canon, Intimacy, Home

The key words I've used here are Post-Canon, Home and Intimacy

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- Off-screen Arguments - scars - Trauma recovery - brief but canon-typical violence - References to Canon-Stabby-Stabby in MAG200 - mention of coma, no details - reference to homophobic Parent

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 A Second Chance

 Some days, it still feels like a dream. That they are here, together, that they get to have this. A home, a life - a second chance at everything.

 It’s been almost two years since the panopticon collapsed in an explosion, almost two years since Jon and Martin woke up… Here. “Somewhere else” they called it then, but now they simply call this place “home”. More precisely, they do so because first and foremost, they are home to each other.

 Even back when in the Institute, when both of them successfully managed to convince themselves their feelings for each other were one-sided, the few and far moments where they actually had time to themselves were precious. Even when Jon had woken up from his coma and Martin was working for Peter Lukas, just a small brush of hands or a quick hug in the hallway had felt like the only safe place left in the world. Just for a moment, before they had to move on, more alone than ever before.

 By the time Martin was deep in the Lonely and Jon had pulled him out, taken his hand and not let go until they were safely in Daisy’s little safehouse in the Scottish Highlands where no one would be able to find or hurt them. Or at least, that had been the plan… It only lasted for a little while.

 Still, even though the end of the world started there, the days and weeks they had before are precious to Jon and Martin to this day. It’s those weeks where they had a chance to really get to know each other, outside of work and countless terrifying encounters with the Fears.

 Days spent talking in front of the fireplace, curled up around each other or not talking at all. Especially on the bad days, when everything hits them at once, it is a little bit easier to deal with everything while they’re together. Cooking together, stepping around each other in the kitchen when they tried recipes neither of them had ever tried before, laughing at and playfully chiding each other when everything turns into a big mess.

 Hugs and kisses shared at the most random of times, just because they realized they can do this now.

 Over time, they shared a few personal bits and pieces. After the first time they  shared the bed, to be close and to keep the nightmares at bay, they started talking about their needs and boundaries.

 “I love you, and I love being close to you. But I, I also need you to know that… Well, I won’t be able to give you more than this. I don’t…  sleep with people. In, well, in      that     sense.” Jon had blushed and stammered his way through explaining what Asexuality means to him, and it is met with love and acceptance. He started to breathe a little bit easier then.

 A little while later, Martin told him about the disaster that was his coming out to his Mum. He didn’t mean to, he said that day in the safehouse with a bitter smile as he shook his head, but he’d hit a breaking point. One too many homophobic remarks, one too many unhappy sneers.

 “One day, I just. Snapped. Couldn’t take the bullshit anymore. I don’t even remember exactly what I      said     to her, but she was... “ Martin shook his head.

 “Not happy.” He laughed, but it wasn’t happy by any means. Jon understood all too well, and reached out with one hand, an offer to hold on tight, which Martin happily took him up on.

 “She didn’t… Like me very much before, I don’t think. Or, well, I      know     that now, but… But ever since I told her I am gay, that certainly didn’t help things. She never met any of my boyfriends or anything, but, well. That’s robably for the best.”

 Only a short while after this conversation, the world ended. After months and months of walking through a hellscape, they finally   arrived back in what once was London. Back at the institute - the tower of the Watcher.

 Once they got their chance to kill Elias and destroy Jonah Magnus, things… Went differently than planned.

 Even years after the fact, long long after, Jon and Martin wake up from vivid nightmares. The memories, both real and twisted, leave them sobbing and calling out for each other. Each time, they end up wide awake for hours, holding onto one another to try and keep the other from getting lost again. Dealing with everything is very much a work in progress.

 Guilt eats Jon up from the inside. He is talking about it, at least he does now, but the feelings are still there, sitting on his chest and taking his breath away. The guilt about walking off on his own and leaving everyone else, including Martin behind is one of the worst he’s ever felt, and even though they have talked and worked through this particular issue for a long time, Jon is still struggling with it. The main problem is that didn’t see another way, did what he thought was best. Now he knows there wasn’t a right decision in the situation they found themselves in, only damage control.

 But on a personal level? Yes, he screwed up, and he knows it.

 The scar on his chest hurts those nights, like a fresh wound. Jon finds himself clutching it, without even realizing that he is doing so. If he was, he would try to stop himself from it, but every time his hands rub over the place in the middle of his chest, when breath leaves his lungs for a while, he can tell that Martin’s eyes go blank and he hates himself a little bit more for having caused so much pain. .

 How often Martin wakes up in the middle of the night, dreaming again and again about that fateful day that ended with him stabbing the love of his life with a knife, he has long lost count. But it hurts, worse than anything else, and the memory alone sends him spiralling for a long time.

 If the Fears had any more power here, there is no doubt that Martin would find himself surrounded by thick, white fog those nights, cold and damp and utterly alone even with another person in the room.

 He’d spent months - years really - keeping it together just to keep going, doing what needed to be done and be there for the people around him. It’s what he’s always done, isn’t used to anything else, but Jon knows him well enough to recognize the signs and stop Martin before he destroys himself any further.

 “Let me take care of you.      Please    - You don’t have to keep going all the time.”

 Somehow, even with all the trauma and heartbreak, the two of them manage to form one functioning human being together when they can’t manage to be one on their own. On the really bad days, that is enough.

 Martin and Jon  have their hiccups - but they know just how much they adore one another, and that is usually enough to make them see reason even when things get hard.

       Especially in the first few weeks Somewhere Else, there is a lot of confusion and pain. Years of trauma and injuries they are unable to explain to anyone, because how do you explain even a fraction of the fears and the apocalypse they have walked through? None of it has happened here. This is a world that has never ended, and although the Fears certainly exist here, they are in the shadows, where they belong. As far as they can tell, none of the rituals have happened here, and the entities just. Exist, but don’t do nearly as much harm as Jon and Martin have experienced.

 So seeking out help, let alone from professionals, is hard. Lord knows, they need it - it takes the two of them countless trials to find individual therapists for themselves, and even longer to find one to attend for couples counseling who won’t make their skin crawl with anxiety. There are issues that need to be addressed, and it is hard to start somewhere.

 Some sessions are much, much harder than others. Unpacking the baggage is logical, it is something that needs to be done in order to deal with the trauma, but for a long time, it just hurts. It hurts, having to open up about things that are so deeply personal, and even though both Martin and Jon have come up with cover stories for their situation, they still have to work on all the emotions and the things that happened to them and their loved ones.

 Some days, either one or both of them will come home from a therapy session and simply collapse into bed. Most times, all they want then is to hold each other. Other times, they talk, but more often than not, being able to listen to each other's heartbeat as they shake apart or fall asleep from exhaustion is enough.

 Especially at first, when everything is still fresh, when the scars are still pink, raised and puckering, things are hard.

 Surprising no one, coming from a literal hellscape into a normal, relatively calm world, is a total whiplash. Things are tense between Jon and Martin for a bit. They want to stay together, because they love each other deeply - there was never any doubt, not even a bit. But there are some situations, issues and decisions that they need to adress.

 While things are still sore, it results in a number of exhausted, tearful arguments that leave both of them absolutely drained and limp from overwhelming sadness. The arguments themselves never last long, because both Martin and Jon are quick to make up and apologize after, but the feelings of exhaustion and heartbreak stay for long after.

 The arguments pull on wounds and it hurts. There really is no other way to put it. More often than not, Martin and Jon spend the night with no sleep, wrapped around each other so tightly it is almost painful. Holding onto one another is all they can do sometimes to keep each other from falling apart at the seams.

 Weeks turn into months, months turn into a year and so on. Both Jon and Martin have come a long way since they arrived here - they no longer call it “Somewhere else”. Their trauma still sits deep, but has become much, much more of a quiet background pain that occasionally comes out to play, rather than being a constant, stabbing sensation that leaves them bleeding and breathless, unable to function. Those days, thankfully, have become rare.

 They start to live, instead of just surviving.

 It is around that time that they decide they want to get out of the city. London, whether back in the old world or here, is not a quiet place to be, but now that they are free, they take the opportunity and run with it.

 A little bit of time passes, and between days spent walking hand in hand through the nearby park, nights curled up on the couch with books and tea and day jobs and even occasional evenings in the pub with coworkers, they find themselves standing in their empty apartment. All there is left is a single cardboard box and a potted plant, both of which are held by the two men who spent the last year and a half there.

 “...Jon?”

 “Yes, Love?”

 “I had no idea we had      so much     stuff, until we started to pack it all up.”

 “We do. I’m… Not entirely sure when that happened to be honest.”

 “....I believe somewhere between us starting to actually       do     things, and you discovering that tiny bookshop which I’m convinced should have been empty by now, thanks to you.”

 “Yes. And also the plants. Don’t forget your leafy children, Martin.” Jon leans into Martin’s upper arm for a moment, a small smile on his face. He would have pulled him into an embrace, but since Martin holds the last of their moving boxes, filled to the brim with books, and Jon’s arms are currently wrapped around the pot of a fairly tall dracea, just leaning in must be enough. The plant pokes far over his shoulder, long, dark green leaves lazily moving with him as he holds onto it, tight and secure.

 ‘Martha’ says a small, handwritten label on the pot, carefully stuck near the edge of the pot. Giving the plants human names had started out as a joke, a throwaway sentence, but then they bought more and more plants, and so a new tradition was born.

 “...To be fair, I had no idea there were so many until we had to get them all into the van.”

 “Oh, I’m sure you’ll find plenty of space in the new house that looks empty. Not for long though, knowing you.”

 Martin smiles at him, propping the box against himself. This thing is heavy - as small as their old flat is, it hasn’t stopped Jon from starting to form their own library throughout the living room. Truth be told, he is looking forward to seeing it expand once they’re settled into their new space. It'll be a fun opportunity to bicker over the proper way to sort them.

 (“By      colour    ?? Martin, Dear, Love of my life, what the       fuck    . You’ve worked in a      Library    for years!” Jon will ramble on in disbelief, and Martin will cackle to himself, knowing he managed to rile his boyfriend up about something that isn’t important at all. He knows they actually agree that books need to be sorted by Author’s names. But where would be the fun in admitting that right away?)

 “Ready to go?” he asks, and waits for his partner's affirmative nod before the two of them leave the apartment, for one last time.

 It’s time for a new chapter in their new life, and they’re more than ready to start it.

 The first morning in their new house, they are woken up by a fresh breeze coming through their bedroom window. It carries the scent of pine needles and damp earth with it. The birds outside are already singing the song of their people and have been doing so for hours, long before most humans are conscious. Waking up like this is bliss, even though the bed is about the only thing that is actually done in this room.

 There are boxes everywhere and their wardrobe is only halfway assembled, but the bed is comfortable and decked out in fresh covers that still smell of washing powder. Everything is fresh and new and feels a little bit like they’re on a holiday. Maybe someday, it will become their new normal, but as of now, it feels like a fresh start.

 As always, it’s Martin who wakes up first. He can smell the fresh, woodsy air, and it relaxes him in an instant. There is a small forest right by their house. It is at the end of the street where only a few more old, slightly lopsided houses are nearby. It is perfect for them.

 On their search for a new home, it was clear they wanted to go somewhere more rural, somewhere remote. Ever since the Lonely, Martin is struggling with too many people around him. He can go about his everyday life if he has to, but days with too many people and too much social interaction leave him sad and exhausted from pretending to be fine and peachy with it.

 It doesn’t help that many of the houses they looked at are seaside cottages. As beautiful as they look on the photos, conveniently taken on days with clear blue skies, this is England. There are way more rainy days filled with grey, suffocating fog, and that alone is enough to send Martin back into a full blown panic attack. It’s too much, way too much like the Lonely. Needless to say, they filtered their searches accordingly.

 Eventually, everything clicks into place and they find their dream house in a small residential area with little traffic and even less people. The quiet of the countryside makes both of the breathe easier-  it reminds them a little bit of their time in Scotland, even though the landscape isn’t nearly as raw here. They may or may not have found a field of very good cows nearby though.

 The cool breeze of the morning air makes Martin shiver a bit, and he pulls the covers a little bit tighter around himself and Jon. Predictably, his partner takes this as an invitation to adjust his octopus grip that he has around him to get even closer as he sleepily grumbles,

 “...Just five more minutes.”

 “Make it an hour and we’re good, Love.” With gentle fingers, he starts to detangle the long strands of hair that surround Jon. There is even more grey than there was only a few years ago - no surprise, what with all of the stress and trauma they have lived through.

 All that Martin gets in response to this is a low hum as Jon tightens his hold around him once more as he breathes a small trail of kisses along the side of his neck and up his jaw.

 He knows that Morning-Jon is not talkative, at all, but he knows him long and well enough to understand what he is telling him, even when he is half asleep himself.

 “I love you, too.”

[fatehbaz]

Non-places; strange allure of eerie landscape and liminal space:

Spectacular message.

Part 1: Ghosts, transgressions, thresholds, ecology, empire etc. Me being annoying.

Part 2: List of sources and reading recommendations.

Part 3, some excerpts I think you might like, here:

de Certeau, whose writing influenced Marc Auge’s work on non-places, from: “Walking in the City.” In: The Practice of Everyday Life. Translated by Steven Rendall. 1984.

Escaping the imaginary totalizations produced by the eye, the everyday has a certain strangeness [...]. [P]roper names carve out pockets of hidden and familiar meaning. [...] Ultimately, since proper names are already “local authorities” [...], they are [in the modern space, the non-place] replaced by numbers: the telephone number, [etc.] [...]. The same is true of the stories and legends that haunt urban space like superfluous or additional inhabitants. Their extermination (like the extermination of trees, forests, and hidden places in which such legends live) makes the city a “suspended symbolic order.” The habitable city is thereby annulled. [...] Objects and words also have hollow places in which a past sleeps, as in the everyday acts of walking, eating, going to bed, in which ancient revolutions slumber [...]. Travel (like walking) is a substitute for the legends that used to open up space to something different. [...] There is no place that is not haunted by many different spirits hidden there in silence, spirits one can “invoke” or not. Haunted places are the only ones people can live in -- and this  inverts the schema of the panopticon.

----------

I think Giggs said it well, too. [From: Rebecca A. Giggs. The Rise of the Edge. 2010 Draft.]

Unlike the sublime, with its axiomatic relationship with nature and its place in a history of “the outdoors,” the uncanny is more readily associated with anti-natural concerns - degrees of deadness; animated corpses, ghosts, and artificial beings; dolls, automatons, and doubles. [...] Modern shopping malls that replicate identical layouts, and retirement communities wherein every residential unit is built in the mirror-image of the unit  opposite – right down to the pearly patina of the laminex on the bench-tops. [...] The uniform architecture and visual   parroting of W/a/l/Marts, Apple/bees, Best/Buys, Starb/ucks and Borders [...].  This doubling of place not only arouses the unnerving suspicious -- “I’ve been here before,” and “am I here, or am I in fact elsewhere?” -- but additionally reaffirms the underlying unnaturalness of all place-based experience. The local is eerie on account of it being familiar. In other words, it is precisely because the local is “homely” that it is capable of being shot-through with the “unhomely.” The uncanny exists because there is an environment. Many of us may be struck by the uncanny compulsion to repeat in these self-same environments -- to return in search of the small dissimilarity, the idosyncrasy that distinguishes the “here” from the “there.” [...] Standing in the aisles of I/kea, frozen to the spot, you are seized by an alarming vision; you are split prismatically, and somewhere else another you is holding another flat-packed  E/ngan storage box in walnut [...].  As multinational corporations seek to comfort and disarm through their “commonplace” design, they also run the risk that such places become indirectly disturbing in their duplication. [...] Things are are ambiguous where there is too much multivalent, ambient information coming in from all angles. Human-animal-machine. Everywhere-anywhere-nowhere. Alive-dead-stimulant. Evolve-devolve-mutate. The uncanny concerns a dislocation of time [...] the resurfacing of intuitive misgivings into a space where there is no longer a clear language or psychological register within which they can be articulated. Hence, the uncanny does not disappear, but becomes more condensed and potent in societies where there is little room apportioned for the public acceptance of the pre-logical strangeness of experience. Where uncanny dubiety persists, it can no longer be assimilated into the hinterlands of the sacred or the mythic.

--------

And from Tim Edensor: “The ghosts of industrial ruins: ordering and disordering memory in excessive space.” Environment and Planning. 2005.

Within the interstices of the city there are a host of other spaces, part of a “wild zone”, a “[…] site […] which avoids the objective processes of ordered territorialisation […]”. What Ford (2000) calls the ‘spaces between buildings’, the unadorned backsides of the city, the alleys, culverts, service areas, and other microspaces, along with wastelands, railway sidings, spaces behind billboards, and unofficial rubbish tips, as well as the ‘edgelands’ or ‘urban fringe’ (Shoard, 2003), are spaces “where aesthetics and ethics merge and where there are no defined boundaries and constant ruptures […].” [T]his collection of marginal sites [...]. Staged […] through the intensified mediatisation and commodification of popular sites, myths, and icons […], mediated imaginary geographies circulate through adverts, soap operas, ‘classic’ rock stations […]. But […] the modern city can never become a wholly Appollonian, seamlessly regulated realm for it continues to be haunted by the neglected, the disposed of, and the repressed, most clearly in marginal sites where ghostly memories cannot be entirely expunged. [...] And yet their absence manifests itself as a presence through the shreds and silent things … a host of signs and traces which let us know that “a haunting is taking place.” […] Movement in ruins becomes strangely reminiscent of childhood […]. Crawling through dense undergrowth, scrambling over walls and under fences [...]. Such spaces might be compared to the ‘felicitous’ and ‘eulogised’ spaces – primarily the protective, inhabited domestic spaces, the ‘corners of our world’ – which provide the basis of feeling at ‘home’ […], but are also analogous to the dens of childhood, where the sensual experience of texture and micro-atmosphere are absorbed, “nooks and corners” which became “a resting-place for daydreams” that may reemerge during adulthood. [...] Being haunted draws us, “always a bit magically, into the structure of feeling of a reality we come to experience, not as cold knowledge, but as transformative recognition” […].

----

Also, from Bob Cluness: “I am an other and I always was…”: On the Weird and Eerie in Contemporary and Digital Cultures. University of Iceland MA Thesis. 2019.

On a material level, the eerie is often not located in the humanistic confines and locales of the family and home. Often, it is located in marginal spaces, in landscapes, sites, and structures where there is either a distinct lack of human presence, or there was once a human activity which has since disappeared. Various ruins, such as the ancient sites of Stonehenge […] to more modern locations such as abandoned buildings […].

Where society is increasingly on the move, movement turns a place into a passage of space, and therefore non-place. […] To facilitate the semblance of frictionless movement and exchange, the layout, design and production of non-places tend towards a structural homogeneity […]. Non-spaces therefore create a disavowal towards exhibiting any particular cultural roots or an innate historical connection with the surrounding area. […] The basic layout of a shopping mall or an airport is the same whether it is in Reykjavik or Rio de Janeiro. [...] Through their overriding spatial conformity, and the mechanical nature they invoke in the individual towards consumerism and social control, non-places invoke forms of eerie alienation [...] they allow the individual to psychologically disconnect, to drift […]. Such places (or non-places) are often where there is an absence of humanity, or where there is something or some agency at work that is just beyond our realm of understanding; “The eerie concerns the most fundamental metaphysical questions one could pose, questions to do with existence and non- existence.” As such, the eerie “is constituted by a failure of absence or by a failure of  presence. The sensation of the eerie occurs either when there is something present where there should be nothing, or is there nothing present when there should be something.” This becomes evident with the use “eerie” as descriptive terms, such as there being an “eerie silence,” or an “eerie cry”; at the heart of the eerie, it talks of an absence of something, or the presence of something, but something that is unknown and outside of our normal frames of knowledge and reference. [...] Fisher asserts […]:

It is about the forces that govern our lives and the world […] In the case of the failure of absence, the question concerns the existence of agency as such. Is there a deliberative agent here at all? Are we being watched by an entity that has not yet revealed itself? In the case of the failure of presence, the question concerns the particular nature of the agent at work. We know that Stonehenge has been erected, so the questions of whether there was an agent behind its construction or not does not arise; what we have to reckon with are the traces of a departed agent whose purposes are unknown.

[if-you-fan-a-fire]

TOWARDS THE CLASSIFIED SOCIETY

“Let me return to those original early nineteenth-century transformations. But now, instead of seeing state centralization, segregation, mind control or professionalism as the crucial changes, imagine the enterprise of classification to be the centre of power.

The great projects of discipline, normalization, control, segregation and surveillance described by the historians of this transition were all projects of classification. Foucault's version of this history conveys this element most clearly. His theory is curiously close to functionalism, labelling theory and to Illich's notion of iatrogenic growth: the system is non-rational and non-utilitarian in that it creates and classifies deviance rather than seeks to eliminate it. Foucault, indeed, greatly exaggerates this irony: the prison system has nothing to do with turning offenders into honest citizens; it simply manufactures new criminals, drives offenders deeper into criminality and recruits them to the criminal class. The regrouping of delinquents into a 'clearly demarcated card-indexed milieu' is seen by Foucault as a typical episode in the mechanics of power: the prison falls, so now there takes place 'a strategic utilization of what had been experienced as a drawback'. There is no need, however, to accept all the implications of this rather crude type of left-functionalism to see how the emerging control system neither prevented nor eliminated crime but translated it into different terms. The unorderly and inefficient world of eighteenth-century crime control gave way to a regulated, ordered universe. The bifurcatory form became theorized and formalized: the criminal to be separated from the poor, the poor to be divided up into deserving and undeserving, the criminal then to be divided into bad and mad. The asylum, the closed institution, performed the initial sorting out. This was the roughest filter. Then, within the asylum, all sorts of elaborate and intricate systems of classification began to evolve. Students of nineteenth-century prisons describe institutions in which up to 29 separate categories of inmate were worked out. The logical end of the process was solitary confinement - each individual in his own category. In the idealized panopticon, each one of these cells could be observed totally by a few unseen people. The exposure to cognitive passion was absolute - the smallest gestures, the merest words could be observed, described, classified and compared. Eventually these elaborate systems inside broke down because of their sheer complexity. But the passion for classification remained, to be redefined and made scientific by the twentieth-century enterprise of scientific testing. The elaborate systems inside the prison are duplicated by the equally elaborate systems outside - the new 'continuum of community corrections' with all its fine gradations and notations.

The obsession with classification is truly baroque, something like the life work of a mid-European lepidopterist. And the whole enterprise is largely spurious, not just because of the difficulty of matching people to methods, but because changes in control policy keep demanding new schemes of classification. Each part of the system starts with its own selection criteria to accommodate the 'right' client around whom the regime or service was designed and for whom a particular professional specialism exists. But if there are not enough 'right' clients, that is who fit the selection criteria for the diversion agency, community correctional centre, half-way house or prison - then the norm changes. Other clients are admitted, the regime is altered accordingly and a new technology of selection has to be devised.

Like methods of punishment or treatment themselves, these classification systems mayor may not 'work'. The category might be too broad or too narrow, the wrong candidate might be selected. Sometimes these mistakes can prove fatal, particularly at the output end where an offender might be classified as 'safe’ so to be released, but turns out to be dangerous. But these "forms of failure are perfectly suited for the crime-control system. Unlike the failure of a correctional measure itself, the 'failure' of a classification system rarely evokes troublesome ideological questions and never threatens professional interests. It simply calls for more and better classification - an agenda which can be followed with total agreement from everyone. Liberals and conservatives, reformers and managers, psychologists and guards, all are committed to seeking further refinements to whichever bifurcation they are concerned with - soft or hard, treatable or untreatable, safe or dangerous. The non-contingent nature of these refinements matters not at all.

Nor do fads and fashions in penal philosophy matter very much. At first sight, the just-deserts movement and the attack on rehabilitation seem to threaten the whole edifice of individual classification. But the various judicial modes within classicism and the disciplinary or treatment modes within positivism are more complementary than they appear. At one point, Foucault gives a pleasing explanation of the 'furious desire' of judges to assess, diagnose, receive reports and listen to experts (even the 'chatter of criminology'): it was as if they were ashamed to pass sentence. But as he shows, the need to classify runs deeper than this; I will try to simplify his tortuous and confusing 'history'.

The form of punishment in the great codification reforms of the eighteenth century simply refers the offence to a corpus of law which contains a single binary classification: the legal  opposition between permitted and forbidden, with prescribed categories of reaction.

Though it has to appear general and universal, a precisely adapted code, in fact, is aimed at individualization. Punishment has to be finely calibrated 'with neither excesses nor loopholes, with neither a useless expenditure of power nor with timidity.’ There was little psychological knowledge in the eighteenth century (tests, examinations, etc.) to supply this 'code-individualization link', so this Linnaeus-type taxonomy has to be found elsewhere. Criteria such as the repetition of the crime could be used to make the tactics of power more efficient. 

When the new disciplinary society emerges, so does a psychology of classification. The mind, not the body, the actor, not the act become the judicial object. The offender is examined, assessed and normalized - his 'soul' is brought before the court. This is not only to explain his action or to establish extenuating circumstances, nor to humanize the face of justice, but to re·-organize yet again the economy of punishment. The new methods of punishment and treatment (aimed at changing the offender) have to be legalized. The individualized classifications, that is, have to be reproduced in the system as legal forms.

The 'knowable man' now becomes the object of the human sciences. Inside and outside the court (but always sanctioned by the law) they begin testing, measuring, allocating each person to the correct space on which he can be differentiated. 

At every stage, classification is deeply lodged in the framework of punishment. It is no less important our current deterrence theory (punish Just enough to prevent repetition) or current just-deserts theory (punish just enough to redress the social balance). And even if they are not very good at matching, even if they are not too sure what works, and even if the court has a somewhat less than 'furious desire' to listen to them, the professional classifiers are still at work. In every judicial system we know, the number of social enquiry reports or recommendations submitted to the court grows incrementally. The soft/hard bifurcation makes the professional classifier even more important. As we move away from sentencing into the punitive apparatus itself, the urge to classify remains. In prisons, the magic wand of classification has long been held out as the key to a successful system. If only those who mess up the regime could be weeded out (sent to special prisons, units or isolation centres), the system could go ahead with its business. All that has changed over the last century is the basis of the binary classification. It used to be 'moral character', sometimes it was 'treatability' or 'security risk', now it tends to be 'dangerousness'. For example, at the end of the seventies, the Federal Bureau of Prisons set up a Task Force to investigate how to establish inmate 'custody level' in terms of dangerousness. They grouped the inmates according to 47 potentially significant factors from an initial list of 92 possibly relevant items, gahered from 329 staff. Institutions are grouped into a Security Designation Form according to 7 features, ending up with 6 security levels. Pertinent information is then teletyped to a central Designation Desk. Step-wise Multiple Regression is used to test validity. Each inmate has a Unit/Classification Team working with a Custody Classification Form. 

At the softer, community end, the classification business, as we have seen, lacks the rationality of models such as 'dangerousness', 'security risk' or ‘incapacitation' (which can all be empirically validated). There are just endless pitouettes between psychological characteristics (self-esteem, conduct impairment, hostility to authority); composite categories (risk, amenability, proneness); treatment modalities (reality theory, camping, behaviour contracting); and places (7.8 on the normalization scale?). Even cruder legal categories become shifting and uncertain. One official study commissioned to solve the problem of who were the 'status offenders' to be deinstitutionalized, found that 46 classifications were being used, and that, for the most part, these had no effect on the selection of target groups. This last project is an example of the convergence of academic with managerial and professional interests. There are workers who devise classification systems, others who operate them and meta-workers who classify these operations. Some professionals specialize entirely in the area. In one American enterprise, some 10 federal agencies, 31 task forces and 93 experts got together to study the impact of classification systems for children. To study the impact of classification systems though, is quite a different matter from joining the quest for the Golden Goose of systems that 'work'. For despite their apparently self-sealing logic, classification systems do indeed have an impact on the external world. Professional expansion is directed towards creating new categories of deviance and social problems, that is defining more people as belonging to special populations and then slotting them into one or other category. This is what labelling theory - correctly - means by the socially constructed nature of deviance. Professionals play a crucial role in making claims about the boundaries of the category and then ruling on who belongs to it. The logic of professionalism requires either that these boundaries be expanded to bring in new populations or that they be changed to relocate old populations. Types of deviance such as homosexuality, hyperactivity or drug abuse, the very nature of mental illness itself, categories such as dangerous, treatable or high-risk, have all been subject to this type of boundary adjustment. This is what happens in what sociologists variously call the 'politics of deviance', 'stigma contests', 'reality negotiations' and the 'power to criminalize'. But the real significance of classification lies in the form, not the content, the enterprise itself and not its end-results. The power to classify is the purest of all deposits of professionalism. This is what Orwell meant when he said that the object of power is power. And this is what Foucault meant when reminding us that power is not just a force which excludes and says 'No', but a form of creation: 'we should not be content to say that power has a need for such and such a discovery, such and such a form of knowledge, but we should add that the exercise of power itself creates and causes to emerge new objects of knowledge and accumulates new bodies of information.’“  - Stanley Cohen, Visions of Social Control. Crime, Punishment and Classification. Polity, 1985. p. 191-196.

[rogue-driv3r]

Hitting you with the whole list, 1-25 on that music ask list please and thanks

song off an otherwise popular album: hehe hard one. I'll go with Outlaw from Motörhead's "The Wörld is Yours"

Damn there are so many underground bands out there who definitely need more love. I'll go with my friends Overcharge 'cause they have a lot of potential for success and strong fanbase.

Within punk? Sex Pistols are definitely overrated. Yeah they "made history", yeah that's how a lot of people gets closer to punk, but they were probably the least punk band ever, no real ideals, poor music, just money machine.

Blackened crust, DSBM, metalpunk, d-beat noise are my fav subgenres atm.

Rob Miller from Amebix lives in the Isle of Skye and forges swords as a job. Unfortunately he also became a conspiracy theorist.

I generally ask what genre they're exploring or what genre/artists they already listen to, so I can suggest the proper bands for them.

For answer 6? I only suggest artists I really like, or I'm honest and say "yeah they are famous in their genre but I'm not really into them"

Sometimes I listen to controversial black metal artists, I'm just too curious. I don't think this invalidates my values.

I generally don't make playlists hahaha

The only one I made and loved is full of folk punk songs and sea shanties, used to play it going to pubs or drinking alone at home but I gave up alcohol so I haven't played it since.

Slipknot, was never truly into them except for a pair of songs back in high school

Mmh KISS maybe? I was 13 I think

I totally mean that. I really can't vibe with the sound, the lyrics, anything. It's music that expires quickly leaving no marks, just a soundtrack for ordinary people living an ordinary life. Unless a pop song is really trash, then it's fun to see drunk punks dancing on it after a concert hahahaha.

Mmh none of them, really I'm not into any... wait, probably the Cure and MAYBE joy division

It should be normal to listen to female or *any gender* artists. Ffs what matters are music and lyrics. Nah I don't feel superior or anything.

If you make a living off your music, good for you. If your label forces you charge people with stupidly expensive tickets, that's sad. If your style gets poor just to meet a wider public, that's very sad. But I'm mostly an underground person so.

I'd never go to a super big venue like a stadium with assigned distant seat. I wanna stay on the front row and occasionally get into a mosh pit.

Big no.

Acidez I think? Idk if back 5-6 years ago they were already big like the Casualties or not.

Very weird, I think it's almost impossible for an artist I like to escalate quickly. When I think about success I still mean in the underground scene, but worldwide.

Yes and no. Ofc everyone can listen to whatever they like, but sometimes the music you listen to says a lot about you. Like, if you listen to a lot of NSBM, NSHC, RAC etc it means you're probably a piece of shit. While if you only listen to whatever the mainstream radios pass on, me and you probably won't have a lot in common.

The most recent example is G.I.S.M., I really really can't get into them and idk why.

There are many italian rappers and trappers that i really can't stand, too pretentious and too unnecessarily, childish "bad boys". One example: Nitro

"Style" is not specific in the question sooo... Music style for dream project: Martyrdöd, Dödsrit, NONE, Iskra, Shining, Tragedy, Amebix, Panopticon. Music style for actual project: Agoraphobic Nosebleed, Disclose, Pulsating Cerebral Slime, Carcass, Terrorizer, Repulsion, Pig Destroyer, HIRS, Magrudergrind, Bloodbath, Fluids, Six Brew Bantha, Insect Warfare. If the question is referred to clothing style, then I don't have an artist as a reference, I'm a weird hybrid of american hardcore (vans and bandanna) and whatever punk subgenre with black skinny jeans, hoodie and band black t-shirt. Or crust when I wear my patched pants of course hahahha

Who tf is him?

Thx, and welcome 🖤

[jq37]

May we have a recap, please? :)

**spoilers for panic at the art show and home for the holidays**

OK people. I actually don’t have a ton of commentary on these two so I’m gonna try and keep it (relatively) short and sweet [Edit from Future Me: Failed Step 1].

Also, iirc, this is the week Dropout starts streaming new Fantasy High eps on Wednesdays which is very dope and I am very excited for. I probably won’t do full on recaps like I do for normal eps because, lbr, I don’t strictly have the time to be recapping these eps at all and it’s pure stubbornness that keeps me from making wiser time management decisions. But, rest assured, if I have an Opinion, you will hear it whether you want to or not. 

Anyway, on with the show. 

Last recap, I mentioned that this ep was giving me Aelwen house party vibes and now it reminds me of that ep in another way: Everyone rolled like TRASH almost the entire ep. It was so frustrating! They barely got any hits in until like halfway through the ep.

(Aw man, I just realized I’m gonna have to remember which spelling of Aelwen is correct again now that FH is coming back.)

I love how Murph is immediately like, “I need to make sure my wife doesn’t die during this fight avenging her fictional husband.”

Isabella also has Aelwen’s trick of poofing around the battlefield which is annoying as hell (ha) for the group.

Siobhan hilariously casts fear on Priya just to be spiteful. I thought she was doing it to help the evac process but no. It was a purely spiteful action. Bless. 

When Kug turns into an ape he, of course, turns into *the* NY ape, King Kong. 

“I roll a nat 20 on an epic shit.”

When Brennan was describing Kingston’s spectral New Yorker Guardians I was already thinking about that one part of Spiderman 2 (the OG Toby Mac version) and then he straight up said, “You mess with one of us, you mess with all of us,” and I lost it.

“Deny the stairs the pleasure of my feet.” Emily is a poet.

I want to know what makes a pigeon spicy more than anything. 

The fact that Brennan killed Ox AGAIN and then immediately looked into the camera and let the audience know the dog was fine because he clearly Oracle stared into the future between eps and saw the entire internet sharpening their pitchforks  was so funny. 

About midway through the ep, Pete tries and fails to send Isabella back to hell and Isabella starts monologing about her plans and connection with Robert Moses (she stole the list from Santa and is/was gonna marry Moses apparently). I wonder if Brennan was like, “These players are for sure gonna murder her without getting any useful info out of her unless she goes full Bond Villain right now.”

And, proving my point, Emily immediately does 56 points of damage, royally f-ing Isabella up. 

This is a really civilian heavy fight which feels weird in a way the FH fights never did. Like, these aren’t even civilians who live in an adventuring town in a fantasy world. These are just normal ass civilians in the wrong place at the wrong time. 

Pete fails a wild magic roll after failing to teleport into the building and then gets a choice of getting really strong (which prob would have let him bust down the door) or to teleport in (which is what he does and exactly what he wanted). Very clutch when the dice rolls play into the story like that.

Kingston lightning bolts Isabella’s hair off which is just malicious but also totally called for.

On her next turn, Sophie gets hurt on purpose to get low enough to activate her ring, lets her hair burn for long enough to shorten it to a cute bob, insults Isabella, then knocks her tf out. 

I love that Emily took one of her teeth (a seemingly crazy move) and when called out by Lou was like, “It’s a link to Robert Moses” (a completely reasonable answer). That’s the Axford one-two punch.  

I didn’t mention it before but, Willie the golem is here, first immobile but then brought back by Misty. Post fight, he says he was somehow brought here by one of the evil factions of the city and says they’ll talk about it later. Also, Misty makes out with him (DON’T KINKSHAME HER).

With a high insight roll, Kingston is able to deduce that the group was ambushed (though not by Priya) and that their victory was a really important one for the fate of the city. 

(Sidenote: The amount that Pete is Over Priya in this ep is so funny.)

Back at Wally’s (which is where Kug is now staying) Wally has gotten Kug a dog bed to sleep in and fancy charcuterie cheese because he and Ricky are the only pure-hearted people in NYC. 

At the same time, Pete and Kingston have a very sweet heart to heart and then settle down at Kingston’s place to chill and listen to jazz. Idk how else we expected this to resolve, considering this is a Brennan Lee Mulligan DM’d show where the sacred pillars are Teamwork, Friendship, Communication, and Making up an NPC on the Fly Because One of Your PC’s Decided to do an Insane Thing. 

Next up is the Christmas ep and Brennan, Emily, and Zac are in sweaters for the occasion. 

Well,actually it’s the 21st and Emily immediately clocks that that’s the solstice. 

Are cookies the good carb?/Absolutely not. But have fun with your life. (I love Ricky’s soft jock energy.)

“I run deliveries,” Pete says to Kingston’s parents, not technically lying but also not being completely truthful. Misty would be proud. 

Going over to Misty, it seems pretty clear at this point (and it’s confirmed in the promo for next ep) that Misty’s fairy business is some kind of de-aging/reincarnation for herself. I wonder how many of these she’s done so far. She said she’s been around for, what? 200, 300 years? Assuming she’s been doing then reincarnations at about 65-70 years old and she reincarnates to around 25? Maybe 6 times? Idk. Just spitballing. 

Saucer of milk to keep the faeries from stealing her (non-existing) children. Faerie lore is wild y'all. 

Did you take another level of warlock?/Yeah bitch.

The fact that since Sophie has joined a monastery, she’s only taken Warlock levels and no Monk levels is very funny from a story perspective. It’s like, she finally comes to this sacred place to be trained to her full potential and she’s just spending what should be her sparring time playing with her cat in exchange for spells. Wild. 

Emily’s cat-like, self-satisfied grin when Brennan is like, “So you just jerry-rigged yourself clairvoyance powers, huh?” is so good. 

And she did it on the fly because Emily Axford is winning D&D. There are no points but she’s winning.

So, uh, Emily does, two things, very in character right after the other:

Thing number one: She send her unseen servant to spy on her family. Her dad seems hardline, “F, Dale. Whatever. Family first. She needs to get over it.” On the other side of the spectrum is her mom who is very upset about the whole affair with her siblings falling in the middle. 

The second thing she does, very casually I might add, is have her unseen servant BURN DOWN HER HOUSE SO SHE CAN COMMIT INSURANCE FRAUD.

EMILY

Everyone loses their minds and rightfully so. What a wild-ass swing that no one could have seen coming. I love it. 

“I look in my backpack which is now my home[…]" 

I almost forgot that Ricky was a fire fighter who would not abide that nonsense until Brennan decided to cut to him. 

Ricky just dolphin swims across the Hudson in 2.5 mins to go put out the fire that Sophie set. Amazing. 

Ally mocking Emily/Sophie: Truthfully, I don’t know what happened.

"I love John McClane, because he loves his wife.” WALLY

Wally: Oh we’re gonna tell a lie on Christmas.

“This is what winning looks like.”

I would really like to know what trace stuff what on the drugs Pete got from 7 but Ally rolled too low to figure it out.

“I disassociate fully." 

Well it took him a long ass time but glad to have Pete on the selling drugs to kids is bad train. Choo-choo, dude. 

7 saying you can hack in real life in reference to his AK-47 has the same energy as Hardison using the word hack in literally any semi-weird episode of Leverage. 

SOCIAL MEDIA IS VOLUNTARY PANOPTICON

So Kug goes with Wally to David’s house disguised as a dog and, despite that, blurts out that he’s his dad immediately. Well, he tries to. The Umbral Arcana stops him, unfortunately. 

"I lick my son’s face.” KUUUUG. 

Sophie showing up with a raw goose and hellish rebuking it is so metal and it’s a shame no one got to appreciate it. 

Me when Sophie’s Mom changes into black top in solidarity for Sophie’s mourning: F EVERY OTHER NON-SOPHIE BICICLETA. I RESPECT YOU. 

Kingston is hustling very hard to get his man Pete a job which is a very Kingston move. That’s how guys like that show affection. 

Didn’t mention it before but Kingston’s parents and Mom specifically adopting Pete is very cute. 

Sidenote: Idk what 7 was talking about Pete trying to stay low profile. He wears a cowboy hat (now a ZEBRA STRIPED one, courtesy of Kingston). I think the subtlety train has sailed my guy. 

Esther shows up at the firehouse, carrying presents for her mom and grandma and looking for Ricky. The says that she’s kinda dealing with something and it feels good to be around him (beat) magically speaking. Sure. I’m gonna keep my Hercules soundtrack on hand just in case anyway. 

I think Ricky is the only person who, with no pretense, could give his crush a sexy calendar featuring him.

Anyway, turns out Esther’s mom and grandma are the furies of Tompkins Square and she’s fated to join them or something. 

Esther causally: I defy you, I defy the prophecy.

The fury thing would explain why Esther’s mom would have cursed Kug. They are famously magical punishers.  

Ricky is a magically certified Good Boy but we been knew.

Zac’s restraint to respect Esther’s personal boundaries in lieu of getting a lore drop to stay true to Ricky’s character is amazing. Mad props.

So we slide over to Misty’s Christmas party which Stephen Sondhein is attending and him having a character card kinda killed me. 

There’s a post on tumblr somewhere about playing faerie  incapability for impoliteness against a vampires need to be invited in and that’s what I thought about when Moses and his vamp friends showed up at Misty’s house.

Robert tries to talk Misty into striking a deal with him for protection from Titania. She’s very much not having it.  

“You know Robert, I love a comedy and I love a farce. I’d like to remind you of who it is that started this and it’s not me and it’s not my friends but I can assure you Robert Moses that we will be the ones to end it if you do not. Do you understand me?” Damn. That’s a mic drop from Misty. 

[As I’m editing this, I’m realizing I somehow lost a BIG chunk of text. I’m not gonna write it all up again but the Cliffnotes are as follows:

Between the Solstice and Christmas, the gang goes Grand Central Station to see the clockwork gnomes that live there because trouble is apparently afoot. Some size changing nonsense happens and Pete shoots a dog (with mini bullets, the dog is fine). Lou is enchanted even though Kingston is not (a common theme with him). Ally and Emily are on the same nonsense wavelength (as usual). 

There are dope magical dragon trains under Grand Central Station that go to the shadow realm which is a place I’d like to know about. Kingston has never seen these trains before even though you’d really think he would have.  

Murph says Gnome Rights which is wild if you know what Naddpod is like. 

Anyway, the high priestess of the gnomes passed out the other day and they figure out it was due to pixie magic which is suspicious. They also know they pixies have access to a “time stone” which leads me to believe that it’s Brennan and not Aguefort who thinks that Chronomancy is the most powerful magic of all. 

Sophie and Jackson go to Dale’s grave on Christmas. Jackson explains that the Order of the Concrete Fist is basically a literal school of hard knocks. A counterbalance to all the reach for the stars dreaminess that comes with NYC.

Dale was their chosen one who was supposed to stop the monastery from falling when some unspecified badness crossed over to this side, but when he went to the place where he was supposed to get guidance, there was no one there (clearly tying in to what Dale said to Sophie last time they talked. I wonder what she needs to get to the top of? Empire State maybe?).

Watching Murph watching Emily, his real life spouse, play at grief for her fictional husband and do some truly insane things is so funny because you can clearly see him thinking, “I am married to this woman,” which, in fairness, is probably the main thing he’s thinking when he’s playing D&D with Emily.

I’m probably missing something but that’s all I remember. Back to post-Christmas!]

So it’s opening night at Misty’s show and, somehow, Ricky’s first show ever. 

I love that Don Confetti is there because of Siobhan’s offhanded comment for a handful of eps ago about him being a supporter of the arts.

Anyway, everything is going great until the second act when Titania busts in through the mirror which is *not* is storage as Misty requested but on stage. It’s a theater fight, y'all! And not the West Side Story kind although if that doesn’t come up I will be very surprised. 

“Let’s kill Titania!” –Misty in the promo

Just going straight to 11, huh Misty?

See y'all then!

[soulvomit]

Growing up how I did, warped me in weird ways. I was used to living a lie and used to being fake in every setting. In this one I don't admit I'm Jewish, in this one I don't admit I'm LGBTQ, in that one I don't admit I live in a poor neighborhood, and in this other one I don't admit I'm not generational poverty, in the world I'm a woman but online I was genderless and in fiction/role play, I was male. I had a Rolodex in my head as a child of different parent-installed etiquettes for different spaces, and strict social instructions that varied from person to person, and my family treated this like our lives depended on it. And as a teenager I learned to be *just* non-fake *enough.* When I left LA, part of what I left behind was every person who'd known the old me, it was about reinventing myself.

And in the world I lived in and time I lived it, this is simply all... as one does. To not use any skills or advantages you have, including any ability to socially shapeshift that you might possess, would have been considered... stupid. Why would one have VOLUNTEERED for a worse life than they had to have?

But somehow now we have a different zeitgeist, where everything must be pinned down and defined by a public of millions. Everything rides on branding yourself correctly.

My whole identity was formed based around very specific intersections of privilege and lack thereof, and during a less authoritarian, less panopticon-like social moment. It was formed in spaces that had a lot of social mobility and adjacency and a lot of intercultural and intersubcultural interchange and in spaces that had a lot of economic diversity (even if that didn't mean equality). This doesn't mean it was lovely all the time. It was hard. But it was my normal.

I can't relate to this need to be easily defined in order to be found trustworthy, this broad social demand to be neatly pinned down and treated as potentially dangerous if one isn't neatly definable. Think about what "problematic" means in scientific taxonomy.

I feel like in my early social world, we lived nests of lies behind shifting masks but found pockets in which to be honest. There's something in the 1980s new age "soulmate" ideal that speaks to this - the one person by whom you can really be understood. It was about wanting to feel known, and still accepted.

Now there is a feeling of being perpetually watched, with nowhere to hide. (Is it any wonder that "darkness" as aesthetic has such appeal?) Perpetually exposed.

But now we're honest with the whole world, hated for not being, we're in an intense space of overly intrusive intimacy, and the evolving subcultures around costuming speak to that. (How long before face-obscuring fashion becomes totally normalized? We start wearing hoodies and masks as a regular and broad norm?)

This is supposed to be an improvement upon a world that meets a traumatized, sheltered, scared young person's evolving definitions of sociopathy.

But to me, it feels like... the world's most boring cyberpunk.

And I'm a problematic individual, in both the modern sense and the taxonomic sense, just for being a person shaped by different times, in a different broader culture.

[marginalgloss]

san andreas fault

The first thing worth saying about The Mars Room by Rachel Kushner is that although it is set in a prison for women, it is really nothing like Orange is the New Black. It is also not exactly a ‘prison novel’. Perhaps any description of it ought not to be centred on a prison at all; if we call it instead ‘a novel about a woman who had a rough childhood, who becomes a sex worker and whose life takes a bad turn through circumstances beyond her control’, that would be another way of talking about it. But it could also be called a ‘a novel about the post-industrial American landscape’ or ‘a novel about how capitalist ideology came to occupy unquestioned every aspect of what had previously been the prerogative of the state’. There’s a lot going on here.

Most of the chapters follow a woman named Romy Halls. Hers is one of those names which seems at first almost too Dickensian to be real, but which somehow concedes its own sort of authenticity. Romy is sent to jail after killing a man; after they met in the strip club where she was a dancer, this man began stalking her. Owing to an ineffectual public defender, this was no defence at all in the eyes of the judge. Romy is sent down, separated from her young son, with little hope that she will ever see him again. 

Prison is relentlessly awful. Every pointless, inhumane, degrading, exploitative detail is noted by the author — everything from the arbitrary rules that determine what can be worn to the expensive bureaucratic monopoly of the prison telephone system. OITNB at times suggested a camaraderie between the prisoners, and reminded its audience that the reasons women tend to end up in prison are often quite different to those of the opposite sex. The Mars Room does a little of the same, but it’s far more bleak and violent. By comparison it maintains a certain distance from the other prisoners. Many of them are nasty people: murderers, baby-killers; they throw boiling sugar-water in each other’s faces. The novel seems to concede that a certain kind of person here exists beyond the understanding of a novelist.

It is a bad place and the world outside is not much better. This is California in the early 00s, a blasted landscape of decaying malls, vacant lots, fast food forecourts and dubious strip joints. It is an infinite suburbia, radically decentred, deprived by design. This is where Romy grew up; the novel opens with a long bus ride that takes her out that world and into the prison-world, somewhere nameless out in the vast west coast wilderness. Geography is notable in this novel, but most of these places seem to exist beyond names. You couldn’t point to them on any map. In this regard, prison seems like the ultimate kind of placelessness. Incarceration involves a deliberate separation of the inmates from the natural world — the barren panopticon of the yard and the running track could barely be called nature. Eventually the prisoners come to feel a kind of dread at the sight of the mountains and orchards in the distance. They are only symbols of failed escapes, can only suggest slow suffering in the wilderness. 

But there are other aspects to this novel. From time to time a chapter will be written from another perspective, typically a male one. There is Gordon Hauser, a fairly average middle-class professor who runs classes for the inmates in Romy’s prison; and there’s Doc, a bent cop serving time for murder(s) in a separate facility for sensitive inmates (i.e. those most at risk from violent recrimination). Part of Hauser’s role is to stand in for the naivety of the expected audience of this book. He is educated, liberal, lightly contemptuous of the other staff, and mostly convinced that his role is to rehabilitate women who must have suffered some terrible evil to be where they are in life. He is confounded when some of the women tend towards exploiting his generosity. The reader might be inclined to be more generous towards the inmates. Even this doesn’t seem like an especially unreasonable thing for them to do, given the circumstances. 

Doc, on the other hand, is one of a handful of characters here who are almost entirely without redeeming features. (Kennedy, the man who Romy killed, is the other; the single chapter dedicated to him is a portrait of entitled, predatory masculinity that is grim without reservation.) Doc is simply awful — a sneering shell of a man — uncaring, unapologetic, universally contemptuous. These chapters throw into relief a broader problem that the book has with the voice of its characters: all of them are too much of their own type. If Doc and Kennedy are villainous, Hauser is mostly just an object of pity. Romy, on the other hand, is nothing but sympathetic, and at times her voice seems less like her own and more like an authorial surrogate. The problem is not so much that she’s literate, or that her voice is devoid of an ‘accent’ that we might associate with poverty in the Dickensian sense; it’s that there’s something in it which stretches the confines of first-person narration a little too far, until it feels almost like the narrator has herself become omniscient. She reads like a person commenting on their own life as if it had been lived by someone else. (Perhaps you could argue that this is the point.)

Hauser, meanwhile, does not spend all his time in the prison. We see a good deal of his life outside, underlining the kind of everyday freedom he enjoys in the wider world. Sometimes he retreats to a cabin in the wilderness to read, to live amongst people totally unlike him and to think great thoughts. Other authors are invoked — Thoreau, naturally — but also Theodore Kaczynski, who was once known as the unabomber. A handful of extracts (notably uncredited) from Kaczynski’s diaries are blended into the chapters here. I wondered about this. Those chapters emphasise his violent reaction to the industrialised destruction he saw all around him, which was apparently so at odds with the measured quality of his prose. 

Is that contrast as surprising today as it once was? I’m not sure. The Mars Room seems circumspect about the purpose of these passages. There’s a reluctance in the text to say what should be obvious: that Kaczynski went too far. Perhaps the novel is only trying to suggest that the impulse to tear it all down, by any means necessary, is still compelling. Who amongst us hasn’t been irritated by the sound of loud motorcycles, or appalled at the sight of logging in familiar patch of forest; who hasn’t felt the urge to do something? 

Fifteen or twenty years ago it was the thing to hold up Kaczynski’s writings as being philosophically sound — worth reading, even if the ultimate results of his methodology were beneath contempt. I wonder if this is still the case. The outsider logic of the unabomber — the man who would set himself apart from the rest of humanity, in his cabin, with his rifle — has almost become the new normal. I say ‘almost’ because Ted thought we should do without, while the angry white men who came after him saw no reason to chase the same asceticism. But some of them were happy to take up rifles and to build bombs regardless. They saw something of the same threat in the world around them.

[neptunecreek]

Exposing Your Face Isn't More Hygienic Way to Pay

A company called PopID has created an identity-management system that uses face recognition. Their first use case is as a system for in-store, point of sale payments using face recognition as authorization for payment.

They are promoting it as a tool for restaurants, claiming that it is pandemic-friendly because it is contactless.

Nonetheless, the PopID payment system is less secure than alternatives, unfriendly to privacy, and is likely riskier than other payment alternatives for anyone concerned about catching COVID-19. On top of these issues, PopID is pitching it as a screening tool for COVID-19 infection, another task that it's completely unsuited for.

Equities issues

It's important that payment systems not disadvantage cash payments, which have the best social equity. Many people are under-banked and in hard times such as these, many people use cash as a way to help them manage their budgets and spending. Cash is also the most privacy-friendly way to pay. As convenient as other systems are, and despite cash not being contactless, we need to protect people's ability to use cash1.

PopID is a charge-up-and-spend system. To lower their costs, PopID has its users charge up an account wn ith them using a credit card or debit card, and payments are deducted from that. Charge-and-spend systems are good for the store, and less good for the person using them; they amount to an interest-free loan that the consumer gives the merchant. This is no small thing: Starbucks, PayPal, and Walmart all have billions in interest-free loans from their customers. This further disadvantages people with budgets, as it requires them to give PopID money before it is spent and keep a balance in their system in anticipation of spending it.

PopID also requires their customers to have a smartphone for enrollment-by-selfie, which disadvantages those who don't have one.

To be fair, these issues are largely fixable. PopID could allow someone to enroll without a phone at any payment station. They could allow charge-up with cash, and they could allow direct charge2. But for now, the company does not offer these easy solutions.

Fitness to task

Looking beyond its potentially fixable perpetuation of systematic inequalities, it's important that a system actually do what it's intended to do. PopID is pitching it as a pandemic-friendly system, providing both contactless payments and as a COVID-19 screening device, using the camera as a temperature sensor. Neither of these is a good idea.

Temperature scanning with commodity cameras won't work

PopID promotes their system as a temperature scanning device for employees and customers alike. Temperature screening itself has limited benefit, as around half the people who have COVID-19 are asymptomatic.

Moreover, accurate temperature screening is expensive and hard. PopID is not the only organization to promote cheap face recognition with COVID-19 screening as the excuse. In reality, the cheap camera in a point-of-sale terminal is both inaccurate and intrusive as Jay Stanley of the ACLU describes in detail.

There's a wide range in the accuracy of temperature-scanning cameras, in normal human body temperature across a population, and even an individual's temperature based on time of day and their physical activities. Even the best cameras are finicky, not working accurately if people are wearing hats, glasses, or masks, and require the camera to view only one subject at a time.

Speeding up a sandwich shop line does help prevent COVID-19, because we know that spending too much time too close to other people is the primary mode of transmission. But, temperature scanning along with payment doesn't help people space themselves out or have shorter contact.

Face recognition raises COVID-19 risks

PopID pitches their system as good during the pandemic because it is contactless. Yet it is worse than payment alternatives.

PopID's web site shows a picture of a payment terminal, with options to use contactless payment systems such as Apple Pay, Google Pay, and Samsung Pay. Presumably, any contactless credit card could be used. Additionally, a barcode system like the one Starbucks uses is contactless.

PopID's point of sale terminal

Any of these contactless payment alternatives are much better than PopID from a public health standpoint because they don't require someone to remove their mask. The LA Times article comments parenthetically, "(The software struggles at recognizing faces with masks.)"

Indeed, any contactless payment system has less contact than using cash, yet even cash is low-risk. Almost all COVID-19 transmission is through breathing in virus particles in droplets or aerosols, not from fomites that we touch. Moreover, cash is easy to wash in soapy water.

This is a big deal for a supposedly pandemic-friendly system. The most recent restaurant-based superspreading event in the news is particularly relevant. A person in South Korea sat for two hours in a coffee shop under the air conditioning, and spread the disease to twenty-seven other people, who in turn spread it to twenty-nine other people, for a total of fifty-six people. And yet, none of the mask-wearing employees got the virus.

This is particularly relevant to PopID; a contactless system that makes someone take off a mask endangers the other customers. Ironically, if a customer sees a store using PopID, they better be wearing a mask because PopID is requiring them to come off momentarily. Or they could just shop somewhere else.

Security

PopID brings in new security risks that do not exist in other systems. They have the user's payment information (for charging up the payment store), their phone number (it's part of registration), name, and of course the selfie that's used for face recognition. There's no reason to suppose they're any worse than the cloud services that inevitably lose people information, but no reason to think they're better. Thus, we should assume that eventually a hacker's going to get all that information.

However, being a payment system, there is the obvious additional risk of fraud. PopID says, "Your Face now becomes your singular, ultra-secure 'digital token' across all PopID transactions and devices," yet that can't possibly be so.

Face recognition systems are well-known to be inaccurate as NIST recently showed, particularly with Black, Indigenous, Asian and other People of Color, women, and also Trans or nonbinary people. False positives are common and in a payment system, a false positive means a false charge. PopID says they will confirm any match through the verification process of asking someone their name. To be fair, this is not a bad secondary check but is hardly "ultra-secure." Moreover, it requires every PopID customer to tell the whole store their name (or use a PopID pseudonym).

Lastly, PopID doesn't say how they'll permit someone to dispute charges, an important factor since the credit card industry is regulated with excellent consumer protection. In the event of fraud, it's much easier to be issued a new credit card than a new face.

The end result is that PopID's pay-by-face is less secure than using a contactless card, and less secure than cash.

Privacy

PopID is an incipient privacy nightmare. The obvious privacy issues of an unregulated payment system that knows where your face has been is only the start of the problem. The LA Times writes:

But [CEO of PopID, John] Miller’s vision for a face-based network goes beyond paying for lunch or checking in to work. After users register for the service, he wants to build a world where they can “use it for everything: at work in the morning to unlock the door, at a restaurant to pay for tacos, then use it to sign in at the gym, for your ticket at the Lakers game that night, and even use it to authenticate your age to buy beers after.”

“You can imagine lots of things that you can do when you have a big database of faces that people trust,” Miller said.

Nothing more needs to be said. PopID as a payment system is a stalking horse for a face-surveillance panopticon and salable database of trusted faces.

Conclusion

PopID is less secure and less private than alternative forms of payment, contactless or not. It brings with it a lot of social equity issues that negatively impact marginalized communities. Moreover, any store using PopID and thus requiring other people to remove their masks to pay is exposing you to COVID-19 that you would not otherwise be exposed to.

Most alarmingly, it is also an insecure for-profit surveillance system building a database of you, your face, your purchases, your movements, and your habits.

This is a complex issue in that we all intuitively think of money as dirty, and in pandemic times, this is even more on everyone's mind. However, the evidence at this writing (September, 2020) is that exposure through touch is possible but not common, while transmission through breath is the way almost all transmission occurs. ↩︎

Yes, these potential fixes are in tension with each other. If someone using the system wants to be cash-only, they're going to have to have a pre-paid balance in the system. In the other direction, direct-charge system has higher costs to PopID, but that's their business issue, and not the customer's. ↩︎

from Deeplinks https://ift.tt/35XLRNC

[verritytorres]

radiant

anons note: i made it so its only been three months since call was arrested that he talks to rufus or whatever, mostly because i dont want like, a year age gap between everyone and the void kids, and like have everyone but tamara & jasper a year behind in school. i wonder how the magisterium would react to having not one, not two, but THREE makars?

…

call wakes up.

this is an odd phrase to start a story with. normally one would begin with explaining that call was asleep, before abruptly throwing the reader into the action like this, but i digress.

man, i have got to stop reading literary analysis before bed, thinks call.

but there hasn’t been books for him to read since before he was-

:wait, where am i?:

he looks down at his hands, expecting to see shackles but finding none. he looks around, and blinks for a second.

then blinks again.

:what the fuck???:

theres black, everywhere, and call instinctively knows he is in the same place that the elemental automotones was banished to.

is he alone? the only soul in the endless empty? is this his punishment?

oh, wait, theres aaron, he thinks. aaron waves from beside a spectral girl he thinks looks pretty scary.

:wait- aaron?:

  can you run in the void? there is no place to go- can you even walk? if you could, would you be able to tell?

the answer is yes, but only if there’s something else in the void to mark your progress- like how hitting the arrow keys in a video game doesnt mean shit if you’re in an empty, dark, undefined room, but distance suddenly gains meaning when you realize, no, the game’s not broken, its just a dark corridor and there’s the final boss- for example, a plastic, 1:1 scale replica of stonehenge completely indistinguishable from the real thing, a melting rhino, or your long-dead best friend’s ghost will mark your progress quite well.

  aaron is… a specter. so’s the girl beside him, who call is only marginally surprised to recognize as verity torres. they are both washed out, and unshadowed (somehow- where’s the light in this boring shithole coming from, anyways?) like an old polaroid held over a flashlight. their eyes are hollow white but curved with smiles.

as quick as call registers all this he is running towards aaron and scooping the now slightly shorter boy into a giant hug.

well.

trying to.

his hand goes through aaron like a mirage on a hot summer day.

aaron flickers out where call is trying to hold him and looks at his feet.

:aaron:, asks call, :why can’t i hug you?:

:because he’s dead, shitlips:, calls verity with her hands around her mouth.

aaron nods. he looks small and about to cry.

:wait, whats wrong?:, says call. he’s been thinking/saying/projecting telepathically the word wait a lot recently.

:i… i missed you.:

:we thought you wouldn’t show, birdcall.:, adds verity. she is hilarious and trustworthy, decides call.

call thinks for a moment. rare occurence, he thinks upon narrating this in his head. ouch. he just keeps dissing himself into a deeper hole.

:i think it was because of the handcuffs:, says call, :they were magic blockers, so whatevers letting me see dead people must have been stopped from activating.:

:technically, we’re not dead. we’ve been abruptly torn from our bodies and preserved with our innate chaos magic. we are the ultimate forms of the chaos-ridden:, says verity matter-of-factly. call gets the feeling that she’s wicked smart and suspects that she and tamara would get along quite well.

:handcuffs?: asks aaron, always paying attention to priorities instead of stupid science or whatever that call totally understands, yup.

:after you, uh… got voided, the mages kind of arrested me for being the Enemy Of Death and all:, says call, :i am not good at keeping secrets, by the way. i’ve been in the Panopticon since then, about 3 months of time. they just took the STUPID DUMB handcuffs off and replaced them with a ball-and-chain shackle like from gym class jump-roping lessons today.:

:holy shit:, says verity, :he talks more than i do, aaron.:

:shit, call, im so fucking sorry:, says aaron, ignoring verity. call stifles a surprised gasp at his language and smiles.

:its okay, aaron. its not your fault. i’m going to fix this.:

:fix what?:

:all of this shit. i’m going to KILL that little bitch alex, and im going to save you. im going to save you both, and we’re all gonna be TOGETHER again, and we’ll all go to the collegium together and watch shitty movies and tease jasper, and everybody will be happy again. all of us. i will save you both, and verity will become our friend too and she and tamara will probably run for president together and win.:

:im touched:, says verity, trying to act sarcastic but smiling, :you sure know how to pick ‘em, aaron.:

:she meant pick COUNTERWEIGHTS and BEST FRIENDS, right, TORRY?!?!:, replies aaron frantically, which confused call because he assumed that was implied.

:sure:, says verity noncommittally.

:when will i come back here?: asks call, interrupting aarons red-faced protests with the air of an oblivious man.

:hell if i know:, says verity, :i figure you’ll end up back here eventually.:

call looks at aaron again. holds his hand out tentatively to his friends washed out, ghostly one.

aaron reaches for calls hand, still a little red-cheeked.

his hand dissolves in calls proximity, but they pretend. it will have to do, until call revives them.

call will revive them, thinks aaron. it is hard for aaron to not believe that- to aarons eyes, his own hand is normally colored, nothing out of the ordinary, as is verity’s- but call’s hand is glowing.

I AM CRYING REAL TEARS VOID ANON I LOVE YUO