#wholesale market examples

[parntipnamsri]

Watercolor Tips and Hints For Stretching Watercolor Paper

Below are the steps on how I like stretching my paper for watercolor. The instructions are interspersed with a variety of tips and tricks to make sure that you don't get caught in the 'traps that young artists fall into'. I'd like this to serve as an information source, so I've covered everything I could imagine that could go wrong to ensure that you have all the solutions when you run into problems.

It's quite easy, but it is a resource for all similar to medication notes . They are filled with details about things we don't be able to experience. Don't get overwhelmed by the facts Stretching is an essential procedure that will give your painting a professional appearance. The process of stretching isn't complicated and will be a second nature process in no time. The tips and tricks listed here will ensure that your painting is properly stretched and that you will not run into unneeded pitfalls during the time of painting.

I've never experienced any issues stretching my paper. If you experience any issues - then it's probably easy. The most frequent cause is the use of the a4 paper manufacturers for stretching the paper. or using the incorrect tape. Unfortunately, there are some inferior tapes available.

Here are the steps and the solutions before you know the question! Enjoy the fun! The benefits from stretching your paper can be many but the main ones are:

Even surface tension that allows paint to flow in a uniform manner and allows for soft blending and stunning, even changes in hue

Stretching reduces the possibility of creating major waves on our paper when we use in the washes of wet - (waves or buckles can result in the pigment sitting in troughs, which is not a great look!)

You'll be tempted to take a break and pour your thoughts on paper. Being forced to fight the effects of a warped surface could hinder your enjoyment during the process of painting and also create a sloppy result. It's wonderful to be able to lay down in beautiful, wet washes and not be concerned of causing runbacks, blooms and the cauliflower blossoms.

[probablyasocialecologist]

In a conversation with Civil Eats, lead author Jason Hawes, a Ph.D. student at the University of Michigan, said this his team compiled “the largest data set that we know of” on urban farming. It included 73 urban farms, community gardens, and individual garden sites in Europe and the United States. At each of those sites, the research team worked with farmers and gardeners to collect data on the infrastructure, daily supplies used, irrigation, harvest amounts, and social goods. That data was then used to calculate the carbon emissions embodied in the production of food at each site and those emissions were compared to carbon emissions of the same foods produced at “conventional” farms. Overall, they found greenhouse gas emissions were six times higher at the urban sites—and that’s the conclusion the study led with. But not only is 73 a tiny number compared to the data that exists on conventional production agriculture, said Omanjana Goswami, an interdisciplinary scientist at the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS), but lumping community gardens in with urban farms set up for commercial production and then comparing that to a rural system that has been highly tuned and financed for commercial production for centuries doesn’t make sense. “It’s almost like comparing apples to oranges,” she said. “The community garden is not set up to maximize production.” In fact, the sample set was heavily tilted toward community and individual gardens and away from urban farms. In New York City, for example, the only U.S. city represented, seven community gardens run by AmeriCorps were included. Brooklyn Grange’s massive rooftop farms—which on a few acres produce more than 100,000 pounds of produce for markets, wholesale buyers, CSAs, and the city’s largest convention center each year—were not. And what the study found was that when the small group of urban farms were disaggregated from the gardens, those farms were “statistically indistinguishable from conventional farms” on emissions. Aside from one high-emission outlier, the urban farms were carbon-competitive.

[wheelsgoroundincircles]

1986 Pontiac Grand Prix 2+2

It is often said that racing improves the breed, and the move by Formula One to a hybrid drivetrain has seen the equivalent technology in road cars evolve at an unprecedented pace. Manufacturers will always seek what is commonly called “an unfair advantage,” exploiting the rule book to its outer limits to extract greater speed from their racing models. It was against this backdrop that Pontiac released its 1986 Grand Prix 2+2. It was developed as a homologation special for NASCAR competition and only graced showrooms for one year.

NASCAR competition has evolved into a sport featuring control underpinnings and exterior panels that are almost identical across all participating brands. Today’s cars share little with their predecessors, and the term “stock car” has a reasonably loose meaning. Earlier generations were based upon showroom models, and it was against this backdrop that cars like the Chevrolet Monte Carlo Aerocoupe and the Pontiac Grand Prix 2+2 emerged. General Motors sought aerodynamic and downforce improvements for their participating models, and smoothing the airflow across the body and rear spoiler achieved this without introducing additional drag. Wholesale sheetmetal changes weren’t warranted, but adding a fastback-style back window achieved the goal at a reasonable cost. The cars weren’t the most elegant on the planet, and the reduced trunk opening to accommodate the changes reduced practicality. Still, the Aerocoupe and 2+2 proved effective on superspeedways like Daytona and Talladega. Pontiac released 1,118 examples of the Grand Prix 2+2 to qualify for NASCAR competition, with all finished in a combination of Silver and Gray. The history of this car is unclear, but it presents exceptionally well for its age. The paint retains a healthy shine, while the plastic and graphics are excellent. Dealers sold the 2+2 at a premium price, but the extra cost didn’t guarantee that these classics would lead an easy life. Many owners drove them hard and fast, and it is common to see dilapidated and rusty examples appearing in the classic market. This car has avoided that fate and would turn more heads today than in 1986.

Pontiac considered the Grand Prix 2+2 to be a muscle car, although the 165hp and 245 ft/lbs of torque produced by its 305ci V8 doesn’t hint at anything special. Buyers received a four-speed 200-4R automatic transmission and a 3.08 rear end as standard fare, with no manual option to improve performance. The ¼-mile ET of 17 seconds perfectly demonstrates the depths of The Malaise Era. While that figure looks modest by modern standards, it was what buyers expected during that period. The situation would improve in the future, but it is sobering to consider that you can drive a four-cylinder family sedan or hatchback off the showroom floor today that could show this Grand Prix a clean set of heels.

The Pontiac Grand Prix 2+2 was a one-year-only model sold in limited numbers. I don’t find these the most attractive cars on the planet, with Chevrolet achieving better aesthetic results with its Aerocoupe. However, beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and you might find yourself irresistibly drawn to this classic. I respect that if it is the case because it is a car that would still draw crowds thirty-eight years after it rolled off the line. Evolving racing rules mean we will probably never see similar vehicles in the future, and owning this Grand Prix would be a link to the company’s motorsport heritage.

[phoenixyfriend]

The Myth of the Rational Actor

Ko-fi prompt from @vincentursus:

the myth of the rational actor please?

The myth as such: people will act in a perfectly rational manner, and the economy will respond in reaction to that.

So... the idea here is that emotions will never influence someone's actions in making economic choices.

Which is, as we can guess, bullshit.

To quote Medium,

Mainstream (neo-classical) economics idealizes human beings as perfectly rational actors when it comes to making decisions. This concept, known as rational choice theory, is based on three assumptions: 1. People have complete and consistent preferences (which can be assigned quantitative values called utilities) among a set of decision outcomes 2. People act independently based on full and relevant information 3. People always select the decision option that maximizes their utility.

So. That's absurd. Let's start from the bottom, utility.

One of the first things you learn in any marketing class is that half the industry is run on an appeal to emotion.

(The other half of it actually is an appeal to logic, like 'you can use this tool to compare your insurance costs,' which is the aforementioned rational action.)

The most obvious example of that utility element being wrong is: Food.

For a completely rational actor, the food purchased would be the most nutrition for the least cost. Taste is irrelevant. Ambience is irrelevant. Occasion is irrelevant. You fill out the food pyramid for whatever you can pay the least amount of cash. Buy a fifty pound bag of rice, wholesale canned tuna, and frozen veggie mixes that you only need five minutes to heat up and consume.

Chocolate? No. Salt or sugar? Only enough to fulfill your need for water absorption. Spices? Waste of money!

This sounds extreme, because a complete lack of emotional impact on your purchasing habits is extreme. You seek things that make you happy or pleased. You search for sweet tastes that cheer you up, for fatty tastes that satisfy you, for spicy flavors that you can eat in a competition with your friends to prove who's the manliest.

That's not rational! But we do it! Food is an inherently irrational thing to purchase, unless you are so strapped for cash that you cannot afford to be anything other than fully dedicated to the highest calorie:dollar ratio that you can find.

The other thing that the utility factor disregards is charity. On the standard 'rational' definition used in economics, charity is completely irrational for anyone who doesn't get a tax cut from it.

But people engage in charitable actions and donations anyway.

Full and relevant information: Uhhhhh no

I think we can all agree that full and relevant information is not actually a reality for most people.

Manufacturers bend the truth. Marketers omit things. Word of mouth is unreliable. Influencers lie. Online reviews are fake.

Some don't! But you don't know who is or isn't lying unless there is a law that controls what information they can put out. Researching takes time, and figuring out which lies are actually lies is difficult.

There are a lot of videos all over YouTube talking about scams, both the obvious, and the more subtle. There's a reason that misinformation is such a huge industry these days, and hey! A lot of misinformation relies on those aforementioned appeals to emotion that are both a marketing device and a rhetorical one.

Complete and consistent preferences: Sometimes?

I mean, some people have complete and consistent preferences. I have a favorite Starbucks drink that I get most times (technically I have four and it depends on the weather). I have stylistic preferences for my clothing. I have musical preferences.

But it still takes me time to make decisions when at a restaurant, you know? My little sister likes a lot of foods, sure, but if you ask her to pick a place to eat it can take literal hours. Hell, there are entire phenomenons named after the fact that people don't have preferences and have trouble making decisions!

And on top of all that, you have people whose 'preference' is spontaneity. They pick whatever they haven't tried before, because it's new, and exciting, and that's cool!

Which really harshes the mellow on that whole "clear and consistent preferences" thing.

Where does that leave us?

Well, the rational actor is clearly a majorly inaccurate standard to hold individual consumers and the market to. That said, I don't think more than a handful of very extreme people would ever claim that the rational actor is an absolutely perfect predictor for the market.

Rather, it's used as a starting point. If the market reacts to forces in a completely rational manner, here is what we would be expecting. Then, upon projecting the actions of the market under the most rational and perfect conditions, we can apply other possible factors. The possible success of a marketing campaign. The risks of weather or politics impacting supply lines. An unexpected trend rising up from a comedic social media moment among teens and young people.

Imagine you have a catapult. Imagine you know what the catapult will do under perfect conditions, with consistent rope length and artillery weight and weather conditions. The numbers you run your basic physics class formulas with are the rational actor.

The market trends that cause that rational prediction to have error margins is the equivalent of "the wind's been varying between 3mph and 9mph, and from NW to SWW."

I'm not sure how safely I can get away with embedding images that I don't personally have the rights to when they're actually relevant to the education portion of this, and not just a silly joke like the TGP inclusion up there, so I'll just tell you to go look at the first graph at this link, and you'll see what I mean about the 'best, most predictable case' line vs the 'actual possibilities' forecast.

Hope that helps!

(If you wanted me to go more into the history of this concept than its actual uses, uh... whoops?)

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Rural towns and poor urban neighborhoods are being devoured by dollar stores

Across America, rural communities and big cities alike are passing ordinances limiting the expansion of dollar stores, which use a mix of illegal predatory tactics, labor abuse, and monopoly consolidation to destroy the few community grocery stores that survived the Walmart plague and turn poor places into food deserts.

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

https://pluralistic.net/2023/03/27/walmarts-jackals/#cheater-sizes

"The Dollar Store Invasion," is a new Institute For Local Self Reliance (ILSR) report by Stacy Mitchell, Kennedy Smith and Susan Holmberg. It paints a detailed, infuriating portrait of the dollar store playback, and sets out a roadmap of tactics that work and have been proven in dozens of places, rural and urban:

https://cdn.ilsr.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/ILSR-Report-The-Dollar-Store-Invasion-2023.pdf

The impact of dollar stores is plainly stated in the introduction: "dollar stores drive grocery stores and other retailers out of business, leave more people without access to fresh food, extract wealth from local economies, sow crime and violence, and further erode the prospects of the communities they target."

This new report builds on ILSR's longstanding and excellent case-studies, augmenting them with the work of academic geographers who are just starting to literally map out the dollar store playbook, identifying the way that a dollar stores will target, say, the last grocery store in a Black neighborhood and literally surround it, like hyenas cornering weakened prey. This tactic is repeated whenever a new grocer opens in the neighborhood: dollar stores "carpet bomb" the surrounding blocks, ensuring that the new store closes as quickly as it opens.

One important observation is the relationship between these precarious neighborhood grocers and Walmart and its other big-box competitors. Deregulation allowed Walmart to ring cities with giant stores that relied on "predatory buying" (wholesale terms that allowed Walmart to sell goods more cheaply than its competitors bought them, and also rendered its suppliers brittle and sickly, and forced down the wages of those suppliers' workers). This was the high cost of low prices: neighborhoods lost their local grocers, and community dollars ceased to circulate in the community, flowing to Walmart and its billionaire owners, who spent it on union busting and political campaigns for far-right causes, including the defunding of public schools.

This is the landscape where the dollar stores took root: a nation already sickened by an apex predator, which left a productive niche for jackals to pick off the weakened survivors. Wall Street loved the look of this: the Private equity giant KKR took over Dollar General in 2007 and went on a acquisition and expansion bonanza. Even after KKR formally divested itself of Dollar General, the company's hit-man Michael M Calbert stayed on the board, rising to chairman.

The dollar store market is a duopoly. Dollar General's rival is Dollar Tree, another gelatinous cube of a company that grew by absorbing many of its competitors, using Wall Street's money. These acquisitions are now notorious for the weaknesses they exposed in antitrust practice. For example, when Dollar Tree bought Family Dollar, growing to 14,000 stores, the FTC waved the merger through on condition that the new business sell off 330 of them. These ineffectual and pointless merger conditions are emblematic of the inadequacy of antitrust as it was practiced from the Reagan administration until the sea-change under Biden, and Dollar Tree/Family Dollar is the poster child for more muscular enforcement.

The duopoly has only grown since then. Today, Dollar General and Dollar Tree have more than 34,000 US outlets - more than Starbucks, #Walmart, McDonalds and Target - combined.

Destroying a community's grocery store rips out its heart. Neighborhoods without decent access to groceries impose a tax on their already-struggling residents, forcing them to spend hours traveling to more affluent places, or living off the highly processed, deceptively priced (more on this later) goods for sale on the dollar store shelves.

Take Cleveland, once served by a small family chain called Dave's Market that had served its communities since the 1920s. Dave's store in the Collinwood neighborhood was targeted by Family Dollar and Dollar General, which opened seven stores within two miles of the Dave's outlet. The dollar stores targeted the only profitable part of Dave's business - the packaged goods (fresh produce is a money-loser, subsidized by packaged good).

The dollar stores used a mix of predatory buying and "cheater sizes" (packaged goods that are 10-20% smaller than those sold in regular outlets, which are not available to other retailers) to sell goods at prices that Dave's couldn't match, driving Dave's out of business.

Typical dollar stores stock no fresh produce or meat. If your only grocer is a dollar store, your only groceries are highly processed, packaged foods, often sold in deceptive single-serving sizes that actually cost more per ounce than the products that the defunct neighborhood grocer once sold.

Dollar stores don't just target existing food deserts - they create them. Dollar stores preferentially target Black and brown neighborhoods with just a single grocer and then they use predatory pricing (subsidizing the cost of goods and selling them at a loss) and predatory buying to force that grocery store under and tip the neighborhood into food desert status.

Dollar stores don't just target Black and brown urban centers; they also go after rural communities. The commonality here is that both places are likely to be served by independent grocers, not chains, and these indies can't afford a pricing war with the Wall Street-backed dollar store duopoly.

As mentioned, the "predatory buying" of dollar stores is illegal - it was outlawed in 1936 under the Robinson-Patman Act, which required wholesalers to offer goods to all merchants on the same terms. 40 years ago, we stopped enforcing those laws, leading the rise and rise of big box stores and the destruction of the American Main Street.

The lawmakers who passed Robinson-Patman knew what they were doing. They were aware of what contemporary economists call "the waterbed effect," where wholesalers cover the losses from their massive discounts to major retailers by hiking prices on smaller stores, making them even less competitive and driving more market consolidation.

When dollar stores invade your town or neighborhood, they don't just destroy the food choices, they also come for neighborhood jobs. Where a community grocer typically employs 12 or more people, Dollar General employs about 8 per store. Those workers are paid less, too: 92% of Dollar General's workers earn less than $15/h, making Dollar General the worst employer of the 66 large service-sector firms.

Dollar stores also lean heavily into the tactic of turning nearly every role at its store into a "management" job, because managers aren't entitled to overtime pay. That's how you can be the "manger" of a dollar store and take home $40,000 a year while working more than 40 hours every single week.

Understaffing stores turns them into crime magnets. Shootings at dollar stores are routine. Between 2014-21, 485 people were shot at dollar stores - 156 of them died. Understaffed warehouses are vermin magnets. In the Eastern District of Arkansas, Family Dollar was subpoenaed after a rat infestation at its distribution centers that contaminated the food, medicines and cosmetics at 400 stores.

The ILSR doesn't just document the collapse of American communities - it fights back, so this report ends with a lengthy section on proven tactics and future directions for repelling the dollar store invasion. Since 2019, 75 communities have blocked proposals for new dollar stores - more than 50 of those cases happened in 2021/22.

54 towns, from Birmingham, AB to Fort Worth, TX to  Kansas City, KS, have passed laws to "sharply restrict new dollar stores, typically by barring them from opening within one to two miles of an existing dollar store."

To build on this momentum, the authors call for a "reinvigoration of antitrust laws," especially the Robinson-Patman Act. Banning predatory buying would go far to creating a level playing field for independent grocers hoping to fight off a dollar store infestation.

Further, we need the FTC and Department of Justice Antitrust Divition to block mergers between dollar-store chains and unwind the anticompetitve mergers that were negligently waved through under previous administrations (thankfully, top enforcers like Jonathan Kantor and Lina Khan are on top of this!).

We need to free up capital for community banks that will back community grocers. That means rolling back the bank deregulation of the 1980s/90s that allowed for bank consolidation and preferential treatment for large corporations, while reducing lending to small businesses and destroying regional banks. Congress should cap the market share any bank can hold, break up the biggest banks, and require banks to preference loans for community businesses. We also need to end private equity and Wall Street's rollup bonanza.

All of that sounds like a tall order - and it is! But the good news is that it's not just groceries at stake here. Every kind of community business, from pet groomers to hairdressers to funeral homes, falls into the antitrust "Twilight Zone," of acquisitions under $101m. With 60% of Boomer-owned businesses expected to sell in the coming decade, 2.9m businesses employing 32m American workers are slated to be gobbled up by private equity:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/12/16/schumpeterian-terrorism/#deliberately-broken

Whether you're burying a loved one, getting dialysis, getting your cat fixed or having your dog's nails trimmed, you are already likely to be patronizing a business that has been captured by private equity, where the service is worse, the prices are higher and the workers earn less for harder jobs. Everyone has a stake in financial regulation. We are all in this fight, except for the eminently guillotineable PE barons, and you know, fuck those guys

At the state level, the authors propose new muscular enforcement regimes and new laws to protect small businesses from unfair competition. They also call on states to increase the power of local governments to reject new dollar store applications, amending land use guidelines to require "cultivating net economic growth, ensuring that everyone has access to healthy food, and protecting environmental resources.

If all of this has you as fired up as it got me this morning, check out ILSR's "How to Stop Dollar Stores in Your Community" resources:

http://ilsr.org/dollar-stores

I’m kickstarting the audiobook for my next novel, a post-cyberpunk anti-finance finance thriller about Silicon Valley scams called Red Team Blues. Amazon’s Audible refuses to carry my audiobooks because they’re DRM free, but crowdfunding makes them possible.

Image: Mike McBey (modified) https://www.flickr.com/photos/158652122@N02/38893547595/

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

[Image ID: A ghost town; it is towered over by a haunted castle with a Dollar General sign on it, with the shadow of Count Orlock cast over its tower. One of its turrets is being struck by lightning.]

[racefortheironthrone]

Re zoning regulation reform: could you go into detail as what that would look like in terms of wiping the slate clean. I feel like it would be better to go the houston route and just be zoning free

You do not want to go the Houston route.

Houston may claim to be "zoning-free" - and to be fair, it doesn't have some of the more common regulations on land use, or density, or height restrictions (more on this in a minute) - but the reality is far more complicated and the status quo is not one that's friendly to the interests of working-class and poor residents, or to the possibility of sustainable urbanism.

The answer to NIMBYism isn't to abolish all regulations and let the free market rip, it's to surgically target zoning, planning, and litigation that is used against affordable housing, public/social housing, mass transit, clean energy, and walkable neighborhoods, and to replace it with new forms of regulation that encourage these forms of development.

So let's take take these categories in order.

Zoning

As I tell my Urban Studies students, zoning is both one of the most subtle and yet comprehensive ways in which the state shapes the urban environment - but historically it has been used almost exclusively in the interests of racism and classism. Reforming zoning requires going over the code with a fine-toothed comb to single out all the many ways in which zoning is used to make affordable housing impossible:

The most important one to tackle first is density zoning and building heights limitations. The former directly limits how many buildings you can have per unit of land (usually per acre), while the latter limits how big the buildings can be (expressed either as the number of stories or the number of feet, or as both). Closely associated with these zoning regulations are minimum lot size regulations (which regulate how much land each individual parcel of real estate has to cover, and thus how many how many housing units can be built in a given area), and lot coverage, setbacks, and minimum yard requirements (which limit how much square footage of a lot can be built on, and what kinds of structures you can build).

the other big one is use zoning. To begin with, we need to phase out "single use" zoning that designates certain areas as exclusively residential or commercial or industrial (a major factor that drives car-centric development, makes walkable neighborhoods impossible, and discourages the "insula" style apartment building that has been the core of urbanism since Ancient Rome) in favor of "mixed use" zoning that allows for neighborhoods that combine residential and commercial uses. Equally importantly, we need to eliminate single-family zoning and adopt zoning rules that allow for a mix of different kinds of housing (ADUs, duplexes and triplexes, rowhouses/terraced houses, apartment buildings).

finally, the most insidious zoning requirements are seemingly incidental regulations. For example, mandatory parking minimums not only prioitize car-dependent versus transit-oriented development but also eat up huge amounts of space per lot. The most nakedly classist is "unrelated persons" zoning, which is used to prevent poorer people from subdividing houses into apartments, which zaps young people who are looking to be roommates and older people looking to finance their retirements by running boarding houses or taking in lodgers, as well as landlords looking to convert houses from owner-occupied to rental properties.

So I would argue that the goal of reform should be not to eliminate zoning, but rather to establish model zoning codes that have been stripped of the historical legacies of racism and classism.

Planning

Similar to how zoning shouldn't be abolished but reformed, the correct approach to planning isn't to abolish planning departments wholesale, but to streamline the planning process - because the problem is that right now the planning process is too slow, which raises the costs of all kinds of development (we're focusing on housing right now, but the same holds true for clean energy projects), and it allows NIMBY groups to abuse the public hearings and environmental review process to block projects that are good for the environment and working-class and poor people but bad for affluent homeowners.

As those Ezra Klein interviews indicate, this is beginning to change due to a combination of reforms at both the state and federal level to speed up the CEQA and EPA environmental review process in a number of ways. For example, one change that's being made is to require planning agencies and environmental agencies to report on the environmental impact of not doing a project as well, to shift the discussion away from petty complaints about noise and traffic and "neighborhood character" (i.e, coded racism and classism) and towards real discussions of social and environmental justice.

At the same time, more is needed - especially to reform the public hearing process. While originally intended by Jane Jacobs and other activists in the 1970s as a democratic reform that would give local communities a voice in the planning process, "participatory planning" has become a way for special interests to exercise an unaccountable veto power over development. Because younger, poorer and more working class, and communities of color often don't have time to attend public hearing sessions during the workday, these meetings become dominated by older, whiter, and richer residents who claim to speak for the whole of the community.

Moreover, because community boards are appointed rather than elected and public hearings operate on a first-come-first-serve basis, an unrepresentative minority can create a false impression of community opposition by "stacking the mike" and dialing up their level of militancy and aggression in the face of elected officials and civil servants who want to avoid controversy. (It's a classic case of diffuse versus concentrated interests, something that I spend a lot of classroom time making sure that my students learn.)

Again, the point shouldn't be to eliminate public hearings and other forms of participatory planning, but to reform them so that they're more representative (shifting public hearings to weekends and allowing people to comment via Zoom and other online forums, conducting surveys of community opinion, using a progressive stack and requiring equal time between pro and anti speakers, etc.) and to streamline the review process for model projects in categories like affordable housing, clean energy, mass transit, etc.

Litigation

Alongside the main planning process, there is also a need to reform the litigation process around development. In addition to traditional tort lawsuits from property owners claiming damage to their property from development, a lot of planning and environemntal legislation allows for private groups to sue over a host of issues - whether the agency followed the correct procedures, whether it took into account concerns about this impact or that impact, and so forth.

As we saw with the case of Berkeley NIMBYs who used CEQA to block student housing projects over environmental impacts around "noise," this process can be used to either block projects outright, or even if the NIMBYs eventually lose in court, to draw out the process until projects fall apart due to lack of funding or the proponents simply lose their patience and give up.

This is why we're starting to see significant reforms to both state and federal legislation to streamline the litigation process. The categorical exemptions from review that I discussed above also have implications for litigation - you can't sue over reviews that didn't happen - but there are also efforts to speed up the litigation process through reducing what counts as "administrative record" or by putting a nine-month cap on court proceedings.

Again, this is an area where you have to be very surgical in your changes. Especially when the politics of the issue divide environmental groups and create odd coalitions between labor, business, climate change activists, and anti-regulation conservatives, you have to be careful that the changes you are making benefit affordable housing, clean energy, mass transit and the like, not oil pipelines and suburban sprawl.

[wyrdwulf]

I've been looking at Palworld discourse as I come across it because it's something that interests me in a few ways. Discussions of AI usage and of plagiarism in media affects artists, and I am a big Pokemon guy even if I am highly critical of the games and company practices rnow. I think there's a lot of valid reason not to support Palworld/studio that made it, and to criticize the game-- the dev being a huge fan of using AI in making games and Cryptobro is enough for me, tbh. But I also feel like there are some arguments and reactions being had about why the game is bad where there's like, validity to them to an extent, but that people are working on assumptions or being overly reactive in a way that muddies valid arguments that can and should be made? And I think overlooking that is. I dunno. Not helpful in trying to have conversations on what is and isn't bad form in making art.

One of the big things is the whole accusation that the monster designs in Palworld are AI generated. I will be perfectly upfront with my take-- based on comments and tweets made by the dev, (especially the one below) I really do suspect that AI could have been used to either make monster designs wholesale, or to 'help' the process along. However, there is no definitive proof of this. This has not been confirmed. But I see so many people spreading that 'fact' as if it is. And again, I really do suspect that could be the case, but like. It's not helpful to spread misinformation, even if it's for a cause that might be good. Both because misinfo is just generally harmful and because it can do so much harm to your argument when you include falsities or state conjecture as fact to people.

Side note-- I've been seeing now that there are claims that the Palworld models are either direct rips of or heavily copy Pokemon models. For that, too, I've already been seeing that the claims of them being full rips can be proven false, but that it is very arguable that there are some severe similarities between elements of certain models, etc. I'm no 3D modelling expert, so for me I really just want to take this information with a grain of salt and wait until I see definitive proof one way or another.

Another thing I've been thinking about is the claims of the monsters fully plagiarizing existing Pokemon... To start, there's a whole question of parody and what constitutes being fair parody versus just stealing which I feel could be debated here. From what I've seen, the game was kinda marketed as parody, and looking at for example the Salazzle clone, its description really seems like it's parodying Salazzle to me. But moving past that, I do really feel that some of the Palworld monster designs are blatantly ripping off Pokemon-- however, I think that it's like, WAY less than I see a lot of people asserting. I've seen some people arguing that the Palmons are legally distinct enough that none are ripoffs but like, c'mon--

I genuinely think someone who argues that this guy doesn't look like Luxray is lacking observational skills.

This is another one for me that like, yes, the silhouette and certain features are different enough to make it 'distinct', but I feel like anyone with pattern recognition should be able to see the colors and design elements being waay too similar here to be a coincidence.

Also, there are definitely designs that feel like mashups of multiple Pokemon features to me, like this guy feeling like it's got Meganium, Serperior, Lilligant, Goodra in it--

But then there are some that I see people using as examples of plagiarism where I'm just like. Brother. That's just Common JRPG Mob Design.

I'll just use this guy as my one example but like. Claims that this is just a Wooloo rip are wild to me. This looks like I can find it in like half of fantasy JRPGs. There's other examples like this where I'm just like... I get that because a good amount of these monsters ARE very likely ripoffs/inspired by existing Pokemon, people are trying to find the Pokemon 'in' each Palmon, but I feel like so many of the comparisons are stretches which can weaken genuine argument.

Also this is an aside but a very petty thing-- I'll be seeing people claim X palmon is a ripoff of Y Pokemon when there's a different Pokemon that feels like a better comparison, like this guy?

So much closer to the unreleased water starter line from gen 2 than Lapras. C'mooooon.

I guess tl;dr though, I think there are genuine issues about artistic integrity, plagiarism, possible AI use and such which should be discussed about this game, and again, the company's ties with AI and crypto are reason enough to not support them, but. I feel like when having these conversations it's best to critically think about what's proven fact and what's speculation, and to consider what's a strong argument for why it might suck and what's not.

[dollofdeath]

[ENG Translation] Soun Character Story #2: How to Spend Time at the Kamen Café

"noa" is used for the agent's name. enjoy!

Noa: Welcome, Soun-san.

Soun: May I sit here?

Noa: Of course, please have a seat.

Noa: Are you ready to order?

Soun: I would like the café's recommendations and wine to go along with it.

Noa: Certainly!

Noa: You know, I'm surprised you stopped by. I always thought Koki-san cooked you something before work.

Soun: Koki went to a wholesale market today.

Soun: Apparently there are some ingredients on sale that he'd like to use for the lounge's menu.

Noa: It's just like him to obsess over unusual foods…!

(Time passes)

Leon: Thank you for your patience. Here is the herb roasted chicken and baguette set.

Soun: Ah, thank you.

Soun:…

Soun: …This is good.

Soun: What kind of spices do you use?

Leon: It's an herb blend, sir. If I may say, it is our very own original recipe.

Soun: I see. And how did you select the platter?

Leon: Taking into account the color of the chicken, I decided on a material that wouldn't dampen its image. The harmony between the tableware and the food is one of the pleasures of dining.

Soun: Was the arrangement also your doing?

Leon: Yes, sir. Whatever I decide, I always make sure to get Master Noa's input as well.

Soun: Your food service is not only meticulous, but also beautiful. The quantity, too, is just the right amount.

Leon: Pleasing our customers is an endeavor that takes continuous trial and error, so it's a great honor to hear those kind words from you, Master Soun…!

OPTION A: Leon's dedication sure is amazing! Soun: It's certainly an example to live by.

OPTION B: Somehow, it feel as if we're being tested. Soun: …Not at all, I was just curious.

Soun: I'll have to visit again.

Noa: Thank you very much. We look forward to seeing you next time!

Noa: …Phew. I definitely didn't expect to be bombarded by so many questions. Soun-san is a stickler for details, isn't he? Leon: …Perhaps he was here to scope out the enemy. Please be careful, Master Noa.

Noa: I suppose so…

[candiirabbitart]

I think its so cool that you have your work in so many stores! Do you have any tips on how to get art into a local storefront? I've been wanting to do it and cold called two businesses once, one straight up said no and the other seemed interested until I gave my pricing (maybe it was too high? idk). I have keychains and stickers that would go well in game shops I feel like

Thank you so much! I am actually quite lucky to live in an area where there are many opportunities for independent artists like myself.

I actually have been rejected by a few places, and I tried contacting a store with their applications open THREE times and never got a response, and even tried my local manga shop that sells a variety of anime and japanese culture goods but they said they currently had no intentions of working with local artists. So you're not at all alone!

There are SO MANY places nowadays that are open to artists. Small business, bookstores, coffee shops, cafes, comic/manga/game stores, nerdy stores, artist collectives, markets, conventions, galleries.

Try to get connected with artists in your area, they might know of places and things you've never tried. please make sure you have a portfolio ready to show ANYONE that includes your main focuses and best works. If you're going in person, please bring some of your products to show as examples.

Please make sure you have bio/description of your brand/services ready to go "I am candiirabbit, a self-taught illustrator. Creating cute and whimsical art in a nostalgic retro anime style. Pulling inspiration from rabbits, jfashion, magical girls,  and fairy tales, I make a variety of goods and art that celebrates the magic in life." you want to make sure you use descriptors that encompass your style, products, themes, etc to make it easy for them to understand quickly what you're offering.

Some places will have you rent a space with possible extra commission fees. (e.g. $25/month + 10% fee on sales) Some will go by consignment, which will be you get the majority of your sales, while the store keeps whatever percentage you've agreed on. (e.g. 60/40) Some will buy wholesale, so you will make your money upfront in that purchase, but it might not be as much as other routes, but it is a guaranteed sale.

People recommend AROUND 30-50% your retail price is general wholesale price. This will differ from person to person, you decide. Please make sure you know what your production cost is so that you are not losing money. (e.g. $10 production, $20 wholesale, $30 retail) This helps to make sure you're still making money even through wholesale, especially if you have a lot of expenses in your art business. Please make sure you have a list of wholesale prices ready IF YOU ARE OFFERING WHOLESALE. Generally people will have a minimum purchase for wholesale like $100+.

There is another option if you don't have many places in your area. Some collectives and stores will have artists from out of state or another country mail their goods to them. Usually I find that these places will be VERY strict with quality and theme/aesthetic/styles, so please be aware of that.

Some places will have you creates your own set up and displays. You might even have to package and label your own goods in a professional way. And always remember business cards!

I hope this was helpful, please reach out if I missed something! Good luck and have fun!

[pricechecktranslations]

Hi! I was checking your blog and I noticed that you translated Ichika's new permissions on the use of her art, thank you very much for making that information more accessible, although I think she changed them again, well I got that impression from the last tweets she posted, tbh for me, who doesn't know much about copyright laws, it's starting to get a little confusing.I don't know if it's because of the way she writes it or if it's really a complicated matter.

I think perhaps I'm the one who's not being clear. So I will try to be as precise in my delivery as possible.

Ichika is not talking about legal copyright. She is not saying she'll come after people with a team of lawyers. She is an independent artist on the internet. She is simply talking about what she does and does not approve of people doing with her work, the work she is uploading to her personal artist accounts. She is asking very politely for people to respect these rules. I promise you, it is not complicated.

To go into her newest tweets--she is simply trying to use more clear and unambiguous wording in her permissions page. That's it. Like emphasizing that it is specifically the reupload/reposting of her work that's the problem, and that any acceptable uses of her work (like as icons/headers) ONLY applies to things SHE has posted on her own accounts. If, say, it was done as a commission such as on a video, then she gives no permission for its use.

According to the updated profcard wording:

Ichika does not want people reposting or reuploading her work onto the internet, regardless of whether or not they've made edits to it.

The only exception to this is that people can use her art for blog headers/icons/etc for their personal online accounts. However, this only applies to art that she, Ichika, has posted publicly herself. The only modifications people are allowed to do to these is to trim the art.

If these personal accounts contain any radical or problematic statements, however, she would prefer people did not use her art for them.

She is talking solely from the perspective of her personal approval. Again--the above points are not regarding copyright law, they are regarding her preferences for the way people use her art.

She clarifies at the end that people are allowed to use or reference her art in a manner consistent with basic copyright law.

The only time she mentions copyright law is in the end, and that's just her noting that the usual exceptions to copyright law also apply to her art.

Now, if you plan to do anything at all on the internet, ESPECIALLY in fandom spaces that deal with Japanese media, I would strongly advise you to go and familiarize yourself with said copyright law (again, I am aware that Evillious being Japanese exclusive makes this a piracy fandom by necessity, but that's no excuse not to be aware of what laws you are breaking when you, say, upload the entirety of the "Daughter of Evil" manga to a public drop box). The vast majority of infractions are allowed to happen because the rights holders are gone/aren't aware of them/deem it a waste of time and money to pursue/beneficial for creating a foreign market/etc etc, not because it isn't technically against the law to do.

But anyway I would say that what she's referring to here is something called Fair Use in the US (disclaimer again that I am NOT a lawyer, nor am I familiar with Japanese copyright law). Fair Use allows for limited use of copyright protected material for non-profit purposes. For example, uploading 2 minutes of a 2 hour movie for the purposes of reviewing it, or uploading a small sample of pages from an art book to discuss the contents. I'm less familiar with how one would go about applying Fair Use to just wholesale uploading Ichika's Twitter art solely to have it on your blog, so my advice would be to just not do that, hope that helps.

[mariacallous]

Sometimes the most obvious questions are the best. In the case of the Conservatives, the most obvious question is so glaring that one wonders why Tory politicians don’t ask it ten-times a day before breakfast: why don’t they move to the centre?

The opinion polls are predicting a Tory rout on the scale of 1906, 1945 or 1997.

Surely in the interests of preserving the Conservatives as a fighting force the party must compromise to limit its losses to Labour. Here are a couple of compromises that occur to me. They make perfect political sense until you realise that conservatism has been so radicalised that compromise now feels like treason.

First, health. When we remember the suffering of the early 2020s, we will remember covid, of course.

But we will also remember the millions on NHS waiting lists, the elderly left for hours until ambulances arrive, the cancelled operations, the sick who would work if they could be treated but cannot find a doctor, the explosion in mental illness, the needlessly prolonged pain, the needlessly early deaths.

The Conservatives ought to be doing everything they can to improve the health service before polling day – out of a reptile-brain survival instinct if nothing else.

They will not do it because in British conservatism’s ever-diminishing circles health is not a concern.

The dominant Conservative factions want a right-wing policy offer of tax cuts and immigration controls. Not one of the party’s leaders has discussed how the increase in life expectancy means the demands on the NHS of an ever-larger pensioner population make tax cuts unaffordable. Nor have I heard honest discussion of how the need for foreign health and care workers to fill the gaps in provision makes immigration essential.

Rather than face up to the impossibility of Thatcherite economics in the 21st century they prefer to change the conversation and look the other way.

Let me offer a second example, which I think Brits will soon be obsessing about.

After years of delays Brexit Britain is finally imposing border checks on food imports from the European Union.  Wholesalers and retailers predict that bureaucratic costs and the need for veterinary and phytosanitary checks will lead to continental producers deciding to sell their goods elsewhere. Price rises and food shortages will follow.

What kind of government in an election year, of all years, wants empty shelves?

A Conservative kind of government appears to be the answer. The sensible move would be for the Conservatives to follow Labour’s policy of striking a deal to stick to EU standards and ease bureaucracy at the border.  That would mean the UK following European food regulations, as EU ambassadors have made clear.

But compared to dear food and empty shops, who the hell cares about that?

Tories care. Brexit is their King Charles head, their reason for being, their obsession.

David Frost, who negotiated the UK’s disastrous exit agreement with the EU, wrote an unintentionally revealing paragraph last week which encapsulated the ideological capture of British Conservatism.

“The Conservative Party owns Brexit. Whether ministers like it or not, or maybe even wish it hadn’t happened, it’s the central policy of the Party and the government. They must be prepared to defend and explain it – to show why it’s so important that Britain is a proper democracy once again. For if voters come to believe Brexit is failing, then the Conservative Party will inevitably fail too.”

There you have it. Brexit is the Conservative party and vice versa.

What a distance we have come! In 2016, a mere eight years ago, the Conservative party’s leader and most of its MPs supported the UK’s membership of the European Union. Eurosceptics posed as mild-mannered people. They promised that leaving the EU would not mean leaving the single market .

But then leave won the 2016 Brexit referendum and set us off on a spiral of radicalisation, which was instantly familiar to those of us who grew up on the left. 

Here is how it worked on the left in the 20th century.  You would be in a meeting where everyone agreed to a leftist policy: say that the government should encourage banks to give micro loans to poor people to keep them out of the hands of loan sharks.

Everything seems fine until an accusatory voice accuses all present of being sellouts because they do not believe in nationalising the banks,

Or today, after the great awokening, an academic department will propose reasonable measures to check that they are not unconsciously discriminating in their application process, only to be told that, if they were truly concerned with justice, they would decolonise the curriculum and purge it of “white” concepts such as truth and objectivity.

The near identical radicalisation of the right has been more serious because the right has real power.

Here is how its spiral into Tory Jacobinism went.

After winning the Brexit referendum in 2016, retaining the UK’s membership of the single market and the customs union suddenly became wholly unacceptable. They had to go.

As the ideological temperature rose, Theresa May’s attempts at compromise became sellouts, judges became enemies of the people, and the only acceptable way to leave became Frost and Johnson’s impoverishing hard Brexit.

We now have a new Tory ideology: “Brexitism.” It is a style of swaggering bravado and a bawling loud-mouthed way of doing business that goes far beyond the UK’s relations with the EU.

The catastrophic premiership of Liz Truss was “Brexitist”. She crashed the economy because she believed she was right to ignore the warnings of the Treasury, Bank of England and Office for Budget Responsibility.

What true Brexit supporter trusts experts, after all?

Brexit showed that you did not need them.  All you needed was the will to impose a radical agenda and then the world would accommodate itself to your desires.

In retrospect, 2016 plays the same role for the radical right of 21th century Britain that 1917 played for the British radical left in the 20th. The fluke communist takeover of Russia in 1917 convinced hundreds of thousands over the decades that revolution could succeed in the UK, even though communism never stood a chance in this country.

The fluke leave win of 2016 has had an equally mystifying effect. Because radical right politics succeeded in one set of circumstances, its supporters assumed they would succeed in all circumstances.

Nowhere in right-wing discourse do you hear suggestions that the Conservative defeat might be softened if the government appealed to the majority of voters. Instead, the right says that the only way to save the right is for the right to move rightwards and become more rightly right wing.

Once again, the parallels with the communist movement to people of my age scream so loudly they are deafening.

To quote the weirdest example. A few weeks ago, an anonymous group of wealthy men calling themselves the Conservative Britain Alliance spent about £40,000 on opinion polling, and gave the results to the Daily Telegraph. They showed the Conservatives were heading for a landslide defeat, as so many polls do.

But the spin put on it by the Conservative Britain Alliance’s frontman Lord Frost (again!) was that the Tories must move to the right to attract Faragist voters, not to try to stem the growth of Labour support.  

A further release from the anonymous group of wealthy men added to the impression of a right wing living in the land of make believe.

They produced findings that showed the Conservatives could win if Sunak were replaced by a hypothetical Tory leader. This imaginary figure was a political superhero who would be strong “on crime and migration” (naturally) but also had the superpower to “cut taxes and get NHS waiting lists down” at the same time.

Lower taxes and better public services all at once in a wonderful never never land.

My guess is that it will take three maybe four election defeats to batter the delusions of 2016 out of the Conservative party.

Perhaps no number of defeats will suffice, and Brexitism will be Toryism’s final delirium.

[ladyluscinia]

A better "Where do you buy groceries?" poll because the other one's choices were so broken in scope

Detailed descriptions below if you don't immediately know which answer applies

1. Big-Box / Hypermarket stores can have a grocery section but they sell a lot of other general goods too. If there's equal or more not-food (clothes, electronics, furniture) than food it's probably this.

2. Bulk / Wholesale stores often require memberships and you buy in bulk with limited selection for cheaper prices. These are basically warehouses.

3. Discount Supermarkets in the US, at least, have Aldi's business model stand out as somewhat unique, though I expect it has more competitors in Europe. There's a focus on the cheapest possible prices by emphasizing store-brand items and reducing employee staffing.

4. Large Grocery Chain examples in the USA include Kroger (& Brands), Safeway, Hy-Vee, Publix, etc. They are big enough to cover a whole region instead of just a few states.

5. Large Grocery Chain in Europe would be the supermarket you can reliably find all over your country and possibly neighboring countries. I think Asda in the UK counts? I haven't grocery shopped across Europe for more examples.

6. Same kind of store as above, scaled to your country size. Not gonna pretend I know enough about groceries across the world to give more details.

7. In the US, if it covers a few states but most of the country would have no idea what you're talking about? It counts. Everyone use best judgement on how small they would consider a "local" chain.

8. Another best judgement but I was thinking of brands like Whole Foods Market (pricier, organics) or Trader Joe's (emphasis on marketing private labels but not specifically budget goods).

9. This one is especially for Americans who are immigrants or from immigrant families that shop at specialty stores (ex: Pan-Asian Market) to buy ingredients / brands that the local options don't sell, but I would assume it's internationally applicable.

[yr-bed]

Robert Crumb's Devil Girl bars were an instant success when they hit the market in 1994. The bars themselves are long gone and any surviving bars are probably not edible. But Kitchen Sink Press marketed the chocolate bars in a sturdy display box modeled after the heavy-duty cigar boxes of earlier days. This display box is constructed of thick card stock nearly 1/8 inch thick on all 6 sides. Seven sides (including the inside lid) are covered by 4-color Crumb art. The inside lid was to be propped up by retailers to expose the 15 bars that were originally inside. It also revealed the slogan, "It's BAD for you!" ---a rare example of candor in advertising.

The honesty wasn't limited to the inner lid. Our favorite side (almost never seen by actual customers) is the bottom of the box. On that hidden side Crumb hand-lettered "A Word to Wholesalers and Retailers of the Devil Girl Choco-Bar," which is scanned here. It's a hilarious tongue-in-cheek anti-marketing statement. It certainly did nothing to deter sales of the product, which approached a half-million candy bars (not bad for a comic book company's sideline).

Devil Girl Choco Bars by R. Crumb

[agentmidnightrider]

Trump Made Marijuana Legal with THCA Flower

Summary for Each Section

Part 1: Introduction

The introduction sets the stage by providing historical context for marijuana legislation, tracing its roots from early uses and legal status to eventual prohibition. It also outlines the purpose and key provisions of the Farm Bill, highlighting its relevance to agriculture and hemp.

Part 2: Understanding the Farm Bill

This section delves into the historical context and evolution of the Farm Bill, with a focus on the 2018 version. It explains the specific sections addressing hemp and cannabis, and how these differ from previous versions, laying the groundwork for understanding the legal framework established by the bill.

Part 3: Legal Framework for Hemp and THCA

Here, the report explores the legal definition of hemp under the Farm Bill and the distinction between hemp and marijuana. It provides a detailed analysis of THCA, its chemical structure, properties, and legal status, along with the federal and state regulations governing hemp cultivation and compliance requirements.

Part 4: Impact of the Farm Bill on Marijuana Industry

This part examines the economic, agricultural, and market implications of the Farm Bill, highlighting the growth of the hemp industry, changes in farming practices, and the introduction of THCA products. It also looks at consumer trends and market acceptance.

Part 5: Scientific and Medical Perspectives

A comparative analysis of THCA and THC is provided, focusing on their chemical differences, effects, and therapeutic potential. The section also explores current medical applications of Wholesale THCA, ongoing research, and potential future applications.

Part 6: Social and Cultural Impact

This section discusses the changing public perception of cannabis, cultural shifts resulting from legalization, and ongoing legal and social challenges. It examines how cannabis is becoming integrated into mainstream culture and its impact on social norms and values.

Part 7: Case Studies and Real-World Examples

Through case studies, the report illustrates state-level implementation of the Farm Bill, profiles industry leaders and innovators in the THCA market, and offers a global perspective by comparing international cannabis laws and market trends.

Part 8: Future Outlook and Conclusions

The final part of the report looks ahead to the future of cannabis legislation, economic growth projections, and social implications. It concludes with a summary of key findings, policy recommendations, and suggestions for future research.

[artylo]

On Lecturing, Mansplaining, and The Way We Seek Information

What I find profoundly tiring about the senseless perversion of the conversational maxims nowadays is the seemingly insatiable urge for people to lecture others. Doubly so on the internet. I think this is somewhat of a new endeavour in everyone's repertoire, a honest to god brand new learned behaviour in the communal melting pot.

Of course, lecturing someone implies that there is some sense of superiority and of ego. One believes that the other could benefit with having something explained to them, so they do so with a sense of complete entitlement and with no consideration of one's receptiveness towards such an act. I see slighter examples of this online, like under interviews with rather oratorically gifted people like Orson Welles. Just here and there, someone will have isolated some pleasant and articulate phrase as one of the many comments. This in and of itself is not a bad thing - sententiae are after all fit for purpose. What is not to share? These individuals, however, cannot help themselves by just highlighting what they find pleasant to the ear, but the feel obligated to comment further on how "this is some advice a lot of young people can benefit from" or "this is a valuable lesson for everybody to learn right there". How observant. That these are words that the elusive "I" has deemed valuable - words that souls of perceived lesser taste ought to immediately apply. Of course, this seems innocent enough, but to me it speaks to a much larger shift in the way we perceive others and appreciate information.

Surely, if we are listening to or reading the same material, and we then come across the same sententia, which is evidently universally applicable to all facets of the human condition, something that everyone should and ought know, then why surmise that everyone else has somehow missed it. Why belittle the intelligence of your fellow man by acting as if your own intellectual facets are somehow better attuned to what is considered tasteful or profound. If the sententia is truly what you say it is, then shouldn't it be evident to the recipient without further elaboration on why this particular fragment is of vital importance for our species.

There is a whole industry of people who have essentially created a career putting together listicles of advice or quotes from famous people. Just the other day I came across a video, which was roughly about ten or so minutes, which essentially revolved around listing three sentences that were supposedly uttered by Ernest Hemingway, as advice to aspiring writers. This was of course padded for length and supported by several metric tons of visuals and calls to action, which as you might imagine could be a wholly different and lengthy topic of discussion. Yet, surely if I were to seek wisdom from the greats, then I would seek it out myself. That I would find meaning in their work or conversations they had had with their peers, rather than some montage bereft of all context.

The film critique industry has essentially morphed from mostly critique, analysis, and conspicuous marketing, into a factory for ready-made opinion pieces, which viewers eat up wholesale and regurgitate instead of indulging whatever thoughts they might have on the particular film. Dozens upon dozens of "Ending Explained" videos and articles, where people are given objective answers to subjective questions. Works to which many flock to immediately upon the credits rolling, just so there isn't any shred of ambiguity left. Not immediately knowing or being confused causes people to feel excluded from the group - excluded from people that can somehow explain - people who are perhaps confident enough to state their opinion at all, regardless of the consequences, in a way that to the rest of society looks like expertise and some higher sense of wisdom.

We're essentially begging each other to remove all doubt. To blindly trust in the loudest voices of our generation. Not doing so might open one up to being wrong or to being misinformed. In the court of public opinion, those are seen as grievous acts. How dare you not be aware that this is the case! Aren't you a fool!

This makes people afraid to share their thoughts and encourages a capriciously Orwellian exercise in doublethink. The environment which allowed for there to be the public's opinion and the private opinion is slowly being eroded. Conversing on a topic might seem fruitless when there is a video on the topic, which can be shared instead. The material doesn't contain the point - it is the point.

There is not innate reward in being able to synthesise your own thoughts any more. It's much easier to be indifferent after all. It's much easier to plead media illiteracy than it is to open oneself to ridicule. Expressing positivity or negativity towards a work might alienate you from the diametrically opposed group after all. Taste is prescribed, not cultivated.

Recently, I've been coming across a lot of media that mentions mansplaining - the act of a man explaining something, typically to a woman, in a manner seen as patronizing. I feel that that too is a symptom, or at least a more common example of what I'm seeing. In a sense, we want to perceive others' passions and interests as fundamentally their own and as non-transferable. There is no way of opening someone's eyes to something your hold dear without shoving it down their throat or presenting it as the rule of thumb. It creates this inane sense that the people around you are somehow less intelligent and less receptive to things, which you consider to be, of finer taste. That in and of itself motivates people to lecture and to present themselves as holier than thou. To present the information in a way that is mimetically palatable. If a lot of people believe something, then it must be correct. And if it is correct then it must be what people believe.

This kind of reasoning is indeed very democratic, but is liable to a vocal minority controlling the narrative and essentially prescribing what the majority opinion of a work will be. Worryingly so, this isn't even entirely isolated to fiction. News and information has become too plentiful and too difficult to sift through, so we flock to simple, pre-chewed, and condensed information, where some supposedly learned figure has handily decided what is important and what isn't for us. Being informed is becoming an exercise of trust in others, rather than a search for an objective truth.

Needless to say, what I am advocating for is for you to exercise self-restraint when it comes to satisfying your lust for information or the need to elucidate it in others. Form views of your own, before comparing them to those representing the zeitgeist. Do not seek to eradicate the views of others, so that you might substitute them with your own. Seek understanding in what you perceive as wrong. Question everything, including yourself, the views of those closest to you, and the views of those you deem wisest and most eloquent. Post-modernism is an exercise in individuality, and as we slowly move into an era of post-irony I feel it is going to become ever so important, if not more. In a very meta-modernist way, you might even choose to ignore my assumptions, which would also be valid. Are we there yet? You might very well think that; I couldn't possibly comment.

[incarnateirony]

When Mary Manchin argued that SPN gets zero market testing, even Destiel, I already had the fucking receipts that we cleared 3 years later safely after much scrutiny.

When Jess of Mary Sue screamed at me that "the authors had no intention" of trying to take Destiel anywhere, early season 14, I stared at her like the unplugged alien she was, while she trumpeted for example how well she knew berens bc she sits at con tables with him but can never read his eyes rolling out of his head.

When season 15 started, i said at the start of the season we were going there. Because, well, it was the first thing he wrote, and his ONLY reason to stay, which is weird for not having intent. But anyway this "STOP GETTING PEOPLES HOPES UP" condescending garbage was so thorough that Natalie Fisher, a real life friend of Meredith Glynn, argued there wouldn't be a confession that year, only a few episodes before it aired, when we already had three layers of leaks, including the script wholesale and some international stuff, like me too/i you

The entire time they barked and barked and omg it happened. Then the ending wiped out and they laughed at my old "spec" along with that confession of roadhouse reunions and more, missing everything else matched up down to events and death order just to pretend they won something.

They screamed and denied anything was removed or omitted or cut then we got the scripts and the cuts. And then they screamed louder, and literally started thanking covid for destroying the ending to give them what they wanted, or as close as they could ever get.

Jensen's graphic designer stared me in the face and told me the pilot was fake when I had a list of like, 30 reasons 100 miles long it was real that they'd never get, and i told them and 2p0 and everyone they were wrong and gasp, they were wrong!! Go figure that winkyface no Danneel DMed you wasn't real, but whatever they sent you last week sure popped ur lid

So then 2P0 tried to hyperfixate on proving the pilot was gonna be dramatically different and way overblew getting shrill about the reshoots, so I went ~somewhere and within 2 hours confirmed the exact nature of the reshoots, which beyond a few additional fills when the whole group came back for ep 2 were mostly finished with the extended pilot shooting, and how small and minor those were--phrasing tweaks, framing and light mood adjustments. Boom, a week later screener drops, says the same damn thing.

This entire thing is a fools errand of dipshits not understanding WHO has reliable info about WHAT and think A Source Is A Source Is A Source, They Know Someone, Right? -- and like, no. now 2p0 out here trying to frantically retool his pilot dialogue less than 2 weeks before the pilot airs and got so fucking up his own ass about it he forgot there were other episodes to track.

Seriously guys. Follow the leak history there and realize just why 2p0 and co are treading water so desperately for a narrative to fix. For years they brushed all of the above events under the rug but it's time to consider them as a complete picture--both what the creatives were fighting for, and how absolutely fucking disconnected 2p0 is. even people with better contact like Jess don't know what the fuck they're doing. They won't tell their real friends like Natalie most of the time. And low ranking workers in one department do not inherently know the business machinations above their paygrade.

It's time for fandom to start boxing this off. to not fall for 2p0's nonsense blending con sizzle reals and official ads to try to make confusion. To delineate the departments and understand who has perspective on what. To know where to reach above that. And to look for caveats or deflections in the way authors speak.

If you guys weren't desperate for anti confirmation biases or bitter confirmation biases, you'd be embarrassed for EVER reading jensen's "a script got leaked" shit the way 2p0 did. he didn't say it was fake, he said it was different, and that's true, they had already revamped the axis mundi visuals even before the reshoots but the song remains the fucking same, dudes, cope.

Look real, real hard at which fandom leakers speak clearly with confidence on these issues, and which ones like 2p0 say a pile of nothing commital so later he can pull one of 5 options out and say he was right. No, we don't do that shit here. That's not being In The Know, that's you not even being able to sort out your fifth degree rumors, what the shit.

History matters here, folks. Don't buy a car with a history of breaking down, and don't follow a blog like 2p0 that perpetually does.