#Century 21 Productions

[marcovaleyeah]

02.06.24

#Mira-Marathon | Night at the Museum

Film Name: Night at the Museum (2006); Production Studios: Twentieth Century Fox, 21 Laps Entertainment, Ingenious Media, Dune Entertainment, 1492 Pictures, Sun Canada Productions; Director by: Shawn Levy; Screenwriters: Robert Ben Garant, Thomas Lennon; Starring: Ben Stiller, Jake Cherry, Carla Gugino, Robin Williams, Steve Coogan; Genres: Fantasy, Adventure, Comedy, Family; Running Time: 1 hour 48 minutes;

"Night at the Museum" (2006) is a comedy with Ben Stiller, where museum exhibits come alive at night. The film is distinguished by light humor, good acting and visual effects. Although the plot is predictable and the secondary characters are weakly developed, the film is ideal for family viewing.

My rating:

⭐⭐⭐

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Bossware is unfair (in the legal sense, too)

You can get into a lot of trouble by assuming that rich people know what they're doing. For example, might assume that ad-tech works – bypassing peoples' critical faculties, reaching inside their minds and brainwashing them with Big Data insights, because if that's not what's happening, then why would rich people pour billions into those ads?

https://pluralistic.net/2020/12/06/surveillance-tulip-bulbs/#adtech-bubble

You might assume that private equity looters make their investors rich, because otherwise, why would rich people hand over trillions for them to play with?

https://thenextrecession.wordpress.com/2024/11/19/private-equity-vampire-capital/

The truth is, rich people are suckers like the rest of us. If anything, succeeding once or twice makes you an even bigger mark, with a sense of your own infallibility that inflates to fill the bubble your yes-men seal you inside of.

Rich people fall for scams just like you and me. Anyone can be a mark. I was:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/05/cyber-dunning-kruger/#swiss-cheese-security

But though rich people can fall for scams the same way you and I do, the way those scams play out is very different when the marks are wealthy. As Keynes had it, "The market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent." When the marks are rich (or worse, super-rich), they can be played for much longer before they go bust, creating the appearance of solidity.

Noted Keynesian John Kenneth Galbraith had his own thoughts on this. Galbraith coined the term "bezzle" to describe "the magic interval when a confidence trickster knows he has the money he has appropriated but the victim does not yet understand that he has lost it." In that magic interval, everyone feels better off: the mark thinks he's up, and the con artist knows he's up.

Rich marks have looong bezzles. Empirically incorrect ideas grounded in the most outrageous superstition and junk science can take over whole sections of your life, simply because a rich person – or rich people – are convinced that they're good for you.

Take "scientific management." In the early 20th century, the con artist Frederick Taylor convinced rich industrialists that he could increase their workers' productivity through a kind of caliper-and-stopwatch driven choreographry:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/08/21/great-taylors-ghost/#solidarity-or-bust

Taylor and his army of labcoated sadists perched at the elbows of factory workers (whom Taylor referred to as "stupid," "mentally sluggish," and as "an ox") and scripted their motions to a fare-the-well, transforming their work into a kind of kabuki of obedience. They weren't more efficient, but they looked smart, like obedient robots, and this made their bosses happy. The bosses shelled out fortunes for Taylor's services, even though the workers who followed his prescriptions were less efficient and generated fewer profits. Bosses were so dazzled by the spectacle of a factory floor of crisply moving people interfacing with crisply working machines that they failed to understand that they were losing money on the whole business.

To the extent they noticed that their revenues were declining after implementing Taylorism, they assumed that this was because they needed more scientific management. Taylor had a sweet con: the worse his advice performed, the more reasons their were to pay him for more advice.

Taylorism is a perfect con to run on the wealthy and powerful. It feeds into their prejudice and mistrust of their workers, and into their misplaced confidence in their own ability to understand their workers' jobs better than their workers do. There's always a long dollar to be made playing the "scientific management" con.

Today, there's an app for that. "Bossware" is a class of technology that monitors and disciplines workers, and it was supercharged by the pandemic and the rise of work-from-home. Combine bossware with work-from-home and your boss gets to control your life even when in your own place – "work from home" becomes "live at work":

https://pluralistic.net/2021/02/24/gwb-rumsfeld-monsters/#bossware

Gig workers are at the white-hot center of bossware. Gig work promises "be your own boss," but bossware puts a Taylorist caliper wielder into your phone, monitoring and disciplining you as you drive your wn car around delivering parcels or picking up passengers.

In automation terms, a worker hitched to an app this way is a "reverse centaur." Automation theorists call a human augmented by a machine a "centaur" – a human head supported by a machine's tireless and strong body. A "reverse centaur" is a machine augmented by a human – like the Amazon delivery driver whose app goads them to make inhuman delivery quotas while punishing them for looking in the "wrong" direction or even singing along with the radio:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/08/02/despotism-on-demand/#virtual-whips

Bossware pre-dates the current AI bubble, but AI mania has supercharged it. AI pumpers insist that AI can do things it positively cannot do – rolling out an "autonomous robot" that turns out to be a guy in a robot suit, say – and rich people are groomed to buy the services of "AI-powered" bossware:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/29/pay-no-attention/#to-the-little-man-behind-the-curtain

For an AI scammer like Elon Musk or Sam Altman, the fact that an AI can't do your job is irrelevant. From a business perspective, the only thing that matters is whether a salesperson can convince your boss that an AI can do your job – whether or not that's true:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/07/25/accountability-sinks/#work-harder-not-smarter

The fact that AI can't do your job, but that your boss can be convinced to fire you and replace you with the AI that can't do your job, is the central fact of the 21st century labor market. AI has created a world of "algorithmic management" where humans are demoted to reverse centaurs, monitored and bossed about by an app.

The techbro's overwhelming conceit is that nothing is a crime, so long as you do it with an app. Just as fintech is designed to be a bank that's exempt from banking regulations, the gig economy is meant to be a workplace that's exempt from labor law. But this wheeze is transparent, and easily pierced by enforcers, so long as those enforcers want to do their jobs. One such enforcer is Alvaro Bedoya, an FTC commissioner with a keen interest in antitrust's relationship to labor protection.

Bedoya understands that antitrust has a checkered history when it comes to labor. As he's written, the history of antitrust is a series of incidents in which Congress revised the law to make it clear that forming a union was not the same thing as forming a cartel, only to be ignored by boss-friendly judges:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/14/aiming-at-dollars/#not-men

Bedoya is no mere historian. He's an FTC Commissioner, one of the most powerful regulators in the world, and he's profoundly interested in using that power to help workers, especially gig workers, whose misery starts with systemic, wide-scale misclassification as contractors:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/02/upward-redistribution/

In a new speech to NYU's Wagner School of Public Service, Bedoya argues that the FTC's existing authority allows it to crack down on algorithmic management – that is, algorithmic management is illegal, even if you break the law with an app:

https://www.ftc.gov/system/files/ftc_gov/pdf/bedoya-remarks-unfairness-in-workplace-surveillance-and-automated-management.pdf

Bedoya starts with a delightful analogy to The Hawtch-Hawtch, a mythical town from a Dr Seuss poem. The Hawtch-Hawtch economy is based on beekeeping, and the Hawtchers develop an overwhelming obsession with their bee's laziness, and determine to wring more work (and more honey) out of him. So they appoint a "bee-watcher." But the bee doesn't produce any more honey, which leads the Hawtchers to suspect their bee-watcher might be sleeping on the job, so they hire a bee-watcher-watcher. When that doesn't work, they hire a bee-watcher-watcher-watcher, and so on and on.

For gig workers, it's bee-watchers all the way down. Call center workers are subjected to "AI" video monitoring, and "AI" voice monitoring that purports to measure their empathy. Another AI times their calls. Two more AIs analyze the "sentiment" of the calls and the success of workers in meeting arbitrary metrics. On average, a call-center worker is subjected to five forms of bossware, which stand at their shoulders, marking them down and brooking no debate.

For example, when an experienced call center operator fielded a call from a customer with a flooded house who wanted to know why no one from her boss's repair plan system had come out to address the flooding, the operator was punished by the AI for failing to try to sell the customer a repair plan. There was no way for the operator to protest that the customer had a repair plan already, and had called to complain about it.

Workers report being sickened by this kind of surveillance, literally – stressed to the point of nausea and insomnia. Ironically, one of the most pervasive sources of automation-driven sickness are the "AI wellness" apps that bosses are sold by AI hucksters:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/03/15/wellness-taylorism/#sick-of-spying

The FTC has broad authority to block "unfair trade practices," and Bedoya builds the case that this is an unfair trade practice. Proving an unfair trade practice is a three-part test: a practice is unfair if it causes "substantial injury," can't be "reasonably avoided," and isn't outweighed by a "countervailing benefit." In his speech, Bedoya makes the case that algorithmic management satisfies all three steps and is thus illegal.

On the question of "substantial injury," Bedoya describes the workday of warehouse workers working for ecommerce sites. He describes one worker who is monitored by an AI that requires him to pick and drop an object off a moving belt every 10 seconds, for ten hours per day. The worker's performance is tracked by a leaderboard, and supervisors punish and scold workers who don't make quota, and the algorithm auto-fires if you fail to meet it.

Under those conditions, it was only a matter of time until the worker experienced injuries to two of his discs and was permanently disabled, with the company being found 100% responsible for this injury. OSHA found a "direct connection" between the algorithm and the injury. No wonder warehouses sport vending machines that sell painkillers rather than sodas. It's clear that algorithmic management leads to "substantial injury."

What about "reasonably avoidable?" Can workers avoid the harms of algorithmic management? Bedoya describes the experience of NYC rideshare drivers who attended a round-table with him. The drivers describe logging tens of thousands of successful rides for the apps they work for, on promise of "being their own boss." But then the apps start randomly suspending them, telling them they aren't eligible to book a ride for hours at a time, sending them across town to serve an underserved area and still suspending them. Drivers who stop for coffee or a pee are locked out of the apps for hours as punishment, and so drive 12-hour shifts without a single break, in hopes of pleasing the inscrutable, high-handed app.

All this, as drivers' pay is falling and their credit card debts are mounting. No one will explain to drivers how their pay is determined, though the legal scholar Veena Dubal's work on "algorithmic wage discrimination" reveals that rideshare apps temporarily increase the pay of drivers who refuse rides, only to lower it again once they're back behind the wheel:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/12/algorithmic-wage-discrimination/#fishers-of-men

This is like the pit boss who gives a losing gambler some freebies to lure them back to the table, over and over, until they're broke. No wonder they call this a "casino mechanic." There's only two major rideshare apps, and they both use the same high-handed tactics. For Bedoya, this satisfies the second test for an "unfair practice" – it can't be reasonably avoided. If you drive rideshare, you're trapped by the harmful conduct.

The final prong of the "unfair practice" test is whether the conduct has "countervailing value" that makes up for this harm.

To address this, Bedoya goes back to the call center, where operators' performance is assessed by "Speech Emotion Recognition" algorithms, a psuedoscientific hoax that purports to be able to determine your emotions from your voice. These SERs don't work – for example, they might interpret a customer's laughter as anger. But they fail differently for different kinds of workers: workers with accents – from the American south, or the Philippines – attract more disapprobation from the AI. Half of all call center workers are monitored by SERs, and a quarter of workers have SERs scoring them "constantly."

Bossware AIs also produce transcripts of these workers' calls, but workers with accents find them "riddled with errors." These are consequential errors, since their bosses assess their performance based on the transcripts, and yet another AI produces automated work scores based on them.

In other words, algorithmic management is a procession of bee-watchers, bee-watcher-watchers, and bee-watcher-watcher-watchers, stretching to infinity. It's junk science. It's not producing better call center workers. It's producing arbitrary punishments, often against the best workers in the call center.

There is no "countervailing benefit" to offset the unavoidable substantial injury of life under algorithmic management. In other words, algorithmic management fails all three prongs of the "unfair practice" test, and it's illegal.

What should we do about it? Bedoya builds the case for the FTC acting on workers' behalf under its "unfair practice" authority, but he also points out that the lack of worker privacy is at the root of this hellscape of algorithmic management.

He's right. The last major update Congress made to US privacy law was in 1988, when they banned video-store clerks from telling the newspapers which VHS cassettes you rented. The US is long overdue for a new privacy regime, and workers under algorithmic management are part of a broad coalition that's closer than ever to making that happen:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/12/06/privacy-first/#but-not-just-privacy

Workers should have the right to know which of their data is being collected, who it's being shared by, and how it's being used. We all should have that right. That's what the actors' strike was partly motivated by: actors who were being ordered to wear mocap suits to produce data that could be used to produce a digital double of them, "training their replacement," but the replacement was a deepfake.

With a Trump administration on the horizon, the future of the FTC is in doubt. But the coalition for a new privacy law includes many of Trumpland's most powerful blocs – like Jan 6 rioters whose location was swept up by Google and handed over to the FBI. A strong privacy law would protect their Fourth Amendment rights – but also the rights of BLM protesters who experienced this far more often, and with far worse consequences, than the insurrectionists.

The "we do it with an app, so it's not illegal" ruse is wearing thinner by the day. When you have a boss for an app, your real boss gets an accountability sink, a convenient scapegoat that can be blamed for your misery.

The fact that this makes you worse at your job, that it loses your boss money, is no guarantee that you will be spared. Rich people make great marks, and they can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent. Markets won't solve this one – but worker power can.

Image: Cryteria (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HAL9000.svg

CC BY 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en

[doyoulikethissong-poll]

Nightwish - The Phantom of the Opera 2002

"The Phantom of the Opera" is a song from the 1986 stage musical of the same name, based on the 1910 French novel of the same name by Gaston Leroux, which tells the tragic story of a beautiful soprano, Christine Daaé, who becomes the obsession of a mysterious, masked musical genius living in the subterranean labyrinth beneath the Paris Opéra House. The song was composed by Andrew Lloyd Webber, with lyrics written by Charles Hart and Richard Stilgoe, and additional lyrics by Mike Batt. The song was originally recorded by Sarah Brightman and Steve Harley, which became a UK hit single in 1986, prior to the musical. Listen to it here! In its theatrical debut, it was sung by Brightman and Michael Crawford in their roles as Christine Daaé and the Phantom. Listen to it here! The Phantom of the Opera was the longest running show in Broadway history, and celebrated its 10,000th performance on February 11, 2012, becoming the first Broadway production in history to do so. It is the second longest-running West End musical, after Les Misérables, and the third longest-running West End show overall, after The Mousetrap. The original West End production at Her Majesty's Theatre, London, ended its run in 2020, its run cut short by the COVID-19 pandemic.

Nightwish is a Finnish symphonic metal band from Kitee. The band was formed in 1996 by lead songwriter and keyboardist Tuomas Holopainen, guitarist Emppu Vuorinen, and former lead singer Tarja Turunen. The band soon picked up drummer Jukka Nevalainen, and then bassist Sami Vänskä after the release of their debut album, Angels Fall First (1997). In 2001, Vänskä was replaced by Marko Hietala, who also took over the male vocalist role previously filled by Holopainen or guest singers.

In 2002, Nightwish released Century Child, along with the singles "Ever Dream" and "Bless the Child". Century Child was certified gold two hours after its release, and platinum two weeks afterwards. It set a record on the Finnish album charts of most distance between a first place album and the second place. An enduring favorite of fans is the band's version of "The Phantom of the Opera". The song was routinely played in concerts until October 21, 2005, when vocalist Tarja Turunen was fired from the band and later replaced with Anette Olzon, whereupon the band announced that they would never play the song live again. This would hold true for 17 years until November 27 and 28, 2022, when Nightwish was joined by Dutch singer Henk Poort on stage at the Ziggo Dome in Amsterdam to perform the song. Marko Hietala joined Tarja Turunen at a couple of her solo shows in 2023 to sing "The Phantom of the Opera" with her. They are set to tour together in Spring 2024 in Latin America on Tarja's "Living The Dream – The Hits Tour".

"The Phantom of the Opera" recieved a total of 82,7% yes votes!

[do-it-uncomfterbl]

Every Fallout 4 Companion’s Approximate Birth Year (Part 3/3)

CVRIE — 2076

I assume Miss Nannies went out of production when the world exploded.

Codsworth — 2077

His box is still in your house during the prologue.

He also mentions enjoying the “months” he’s spent with you, though he might mean since Shaun was born.

Nick — 2175

We know it was over a century ago, but it can’t have been too far prior to the Gen 3 rollout around 2227.

I think Nick is the older brother, because it makes sense to start by creating a synth with stored personalities before trying to make one that develops a personality autonomously.

Longfellow — 2223

This man is only in his SIXTIES, they are LYING TO YOU

The Children of Atom were full-fledged on the Island when Longfellow was young. Confessor Cromwell is the one who sent them to Maine.

But he couldn’t have become Confessor until the mid-2250s, because he’s only FORTY-FOUR in Fallout 3, and he had a background as a trader before that! AND there still had to be time for the Children to travel all the way to Maine.

So Longfellow was born in the twenties, had his sad backstory in the fifties, and is about 65 in Fallout 4.

Strong — 2230

Strong could have been anyone, but I think he was either a divorced dad who would’ve been an accountant in another life, or just Mayor McDonough.

Hancock — 2235

Is 53-year-old Hancock controversial? Let me cook.

There’s support for the theory that synth McDonough was created before the election in 2282. We can assume the human had full gray hair at that point, because synths don’t go gray. So he was probably in his fifties at least.

John was younger, but he can’t have been that much younger. So he was probably ghoulified in his late forties.

Deacon — 2245

If you accept the John D. theory, this does put him a little on the young side, but it fits.

Gage — 2251

There’s not much backstory from his teens up to 2286, and I’m tempted to believe it was a shorter period. But he has late-thirties eyes.

…Eye.

Cait — 2260

Her parents helpfully drew the line at child trafficking, so we have a good idea of her age. She was 18 when she went into slavery and about 23 when she left.

Some time later, she spent about three years at the Combat Zone. Assuming some buffer room between the two periods, I put her at 27 years.

Danse — 2261

He’d have lived in the Institute for awhile, then Rivet City, then the Brotherhood.

He was already a paladin in 2277, but Maxson says it took him “many years” to become one.

Preston — 2262

I don’t know what it is about him that screams 25-year-old to me.

He joined the Minutemen at 17, then had “a few good years” before 2282 when Becker died.

MacCready — 2264

He was twelve in August 2277, and at that point he’d been mayor for three years.

He became mayor at ten. So he’s got to be nearly thirteen at the start of Fallout 3, which would make him 23 in Fallout 4.

Piper — 2166

Nat seems 13 to me. 

If Piper is old enough to have taken care of her as a baby, but not old enough to have significant memories of their mother, 21 sounds about wright.

Curie — 2277

Glory escaped the Institute in 2280, and she and G5 had known each other for some time before that.

Ada — 2281

Jackson seems to have created her reasonably recently.

Dogmeat IV — 2285

I think he is ouppy:)

X6-88 — 2287. 

Yeah, I said it.

This man thinks he’s so evil but he’s an actual baby.

My reasoning is that he wishes he had been there to see the University Point massacre in 2286, but apparently wasn’t.

It makes the game so much funnier.

If he was born earlier in the year, he could have been trained in time for the Kellogg flashback.

Part 1

Part 2

[reasonsforhope]

"Starting in July 2024, California will be the first state to charge an excise tax on guns and ammunition. The new tax – an 11% levy on each sale – will come on top of federal excise taxes of 10% or 11% for firearms and California’s [7.5]% sales tax (x).

The National Rifle Association has characterized California’s Gun Violence Prevention and School Safety Act as an affront to the Constitution. But the reaction from the gun lobby and firearms manufactures may hint at something else: the impact that the measure, which is aimed at reducing gun violence, may have on sales.

As a professor who studies the economics of violence and illicit trades at the University of San Diego’s Kroc School of Peace Studies, I think this law could have important ramifications.

One way to think about it is to compare state tax policies on firearms with those on alcohol and tobacco products. It’s not for nothing that these all appear in the name of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, also known as ATF...

The ATF focuses on those products because, while legal, they can cause significant harm to society – in the form of drunken driving, for example, or cancer-causing addictions. They also have a common history: All have been associated with criminal organizations seeking to profit from illicit markets.

Alcohol and tobacco products are thus usually subject to state excise taxes. This policy is known as a “Pigouvian tax,” named after 20th-century British economist Arthur Pigou. By making a given product more expensive, such a tax leads people to buy less of it, reducing the harm to society while generating tax revenue that the state can theoretically use to offset those harms that still accrue.

California, for instance, imposes a US$2.87 excise tax on each pack of cigarettes. That tax is higher than the national average but much lower than New York’s $5.35 levy. California also imposed a vaping excise tax of 12.5% in 2021.

Of the three ATF product families, firearms have enjoyed an exemption from California excise taxes. Until now...

How Much Will the Policy Help?

It’s unclear how the new tax will affect gun violence. In theory, the tax should be highly effective. In 2023, some colleagues and I modeled the U.S. market for firearms and determined that for every 1% increase in price, demand decreases by 2.6%. This means that the market should be very sensitive to tax increases.

Using these estimates, another colleague recently estimated that the California excise tax would reduce gun sales by 30% to 44%. If applied across the country, the tax could generate an additional $1.5 billion to $1.9 billion in government revenue.

One possible problem will come from surrounding states: It’s already easy to illegally transport guns bought in Nevada, where laws are more lax, to the Golden State.

But there’s some evidence that suggests California’s stringent policies won’t be neutralized by its neighbors.

When the federal assault weapons ban expired in 2004, making it much easier to buy AR- and AK-style rifles across much of the U.S., gun murders across the border in Mexico skyrocketed. Two studies show the exception was the Mexican state of Baja California, right across the border with California, which had kept its state-level assault weapons ban in place.

Gun seizures in Mexico show that all four U.S. states bordering Mexico rank in the top five state sources of U.S.-sold guns in Mexico. But California contributes 75% less than its population and proximity would suggest.

So, California laws seem to already be making a difference in reducing gun violence. I believe the excise tax could accomplish still more. Other states struggling against the rising tide of guns will be watching closely."

-via The Conversation, May 21, 2024

[ausetkmt]

Pharmacist Lunsford Richardson made Vicks a household name throughout the nation, but his popular product did not do the same for him.

Even in his native North Carolina, where his most celebrated of chemical concoctions has been right under our stuffy noses and on our congested chests for generations, the mention of Richardson’s name elicits blank stares from all but those who study and cherish history.

Richardson’s salve, Vicks VapoRub, helped the world breathe easier during the devastating influenza pandemic of 1918 and during the countless colds and flus of our childhoods, yet most of us couldn’t pick Lunsford Richardson out of a one-man police lineup, much less a who’s who of medical pioneers.

Why didn’t Richardson — by all accounts a creative inventor and smart businessman — ever become as famous as those vapors packed into the familiar squat blue jar?

Because his name wouldn’t fit on the jar.

That’s one version of the story. According to company and family lore, Richardson initially dubbed his promising new product Richardson’s Croup and Pneumonia Cure Salve. Realizing that this name didn’t exactly roll off the tongue nor fit when printed on a small medicine jar, Richardson changed the name to honor his brother-in-law, Dr. Joshua Vick. Another account suggests the inventive druggist plucked the name from a seed catalog he’d been perusing that listed the Vick Seed Co.

The truth may never be known. What is known, though, is that Lunsford Richardson created a medicinal marvel for the ages, the likes of which may never be equaled.

Croupy beginnings

A Johnston County native born in 1854, Richardson loved chemistry and hoped to study it at Davidson College. The college’s chemistry program at the time wasn’t as strong as he’d hoped it would be, so he studied Latin instead, graduating with honors in three years. He returned to Johnston County and taught school, but it wasn’t long before the young man’s love of chemistry got the best of him. In 1880, he moved to Selma to work with his physician brother-in-law, Dr. Vick. It was not uncommon in those days for doctors to dispense drugs themselves, but Vick was so busy seeing patients that he teamed up with Richardson, allowing him to handle the pharmacy duties for him. Richardson relied on his knowledge of Latin to help him learn the chemical compounds required to become a pharmacist, and that’s when he began to experiment with recipes for the product that would become Vicks VapoRub.

It wasn’t until Richardson moved to his wife’s hometown of Greensboro in 1890 that his magical salve and other products he created began to take off.

“He was a man of great intellect and talent,” says Linda Evans, community historian for the Greensboro Historical Museum, which has an exhibit devoted to Richardson and Vicks.

“Druggists at the time fashioned their own remedies a lot, and he created a number of remedies, in addition to his magic salve, that he sold under the name of Vick’s Family Remedies. He was obviously a man of such creativity.”

In Greensboro, working out of a downtown drugstore he purchased (where he once employed a teenaged William Sydney Porter, the future short story writer O. Henry), Richardson patented some 21 medicines. The wide variety of pills, liquids, ointments, and assorted other medicinal concoctions included the likes of Vick’s Chill Tonic, Vick’s Turtle Oil Liniment, Vick’s Little Liver Pills and Little Laxative Pills, Vick’s Tar Heel Sarsaparilla, Vick’s Yellow Pine Tar Cough Syrup, and Vick’s Grippe Knockers (aimed at knocking out la grippe, an old-timey phrase for the flu).

These products sold with varying degrees of success, but the best seller in the lineup of Richardson’s remedies was Vick’s Magic Croup Salve, which he introduced in 1894. And by all accounts, necessity was the key to its success.

“He had what they referred to as a croupy baby — a baby with a lot of coughing and congestion,” explains Richardson’s great-grandson, Britt Preyer of Greensboro. “So as a pharmacist, he began experimenting with menthols from Japan and some other ingredients, and he came up with this salve that really worked. That’s how it all started.”

Another version of the story suggests that all three of the Richardson children caught bad colds at the same time, and Richardson, dissatisfied with the traditional treatment of the day, which included poultices and a vapor lamp, spent hours at his pharmacy developing his own treatment.

Richardson’s salve — a strong-smelling ointment combining menthol, camphor, oil of eucalyptus, and several other oils, blended in a base of petroleum jelly — was a chest-soothing, cough-suppressing, head-clearing sensation. When the salve was rubbed on the patient’s chest, his or her body heat vaporized the menthol, releasing a wave of soothing, medicated vapors that the patient breathed directly into the lungs.

Vicks in the mailbox

In 1911, Richardson’s son Smith, by now a successful salesman for his father’s company, recommended discontinuing all of the company’s products except for Vick’s Magic Croup Salve. He believed the salve could sell even better if the company stopped investing time and money in the other, less successful remedies. He also suggested renaming the salve Vicks VapoRub, according to the company’s history timeline, to “help dramatize the product’s performance.” Richardson agreed, and a century later, the name’s still the same.

Meanwhile, Richardson intensified his marketing efforts by providing free goods to druggists who placed large orders and publishing coupons for free samples in newspapers. He also advertised on billboards and sent promotional mailings to post office boxes, addressed to Boxholder rather than the individual’s name, thus earning him the distinction of being the father of junk mail.

In 1925, Vicks even published a children’s book to help promote the product. The book told the story of two elves, Blix and Blee, who rescued a frazzled mother whose sick child refused to take nasty-tasting medicines. Their solution, of course, was the salve known as Vicks VapoRub.

Expanding and experimenting

As successful as the marketing campaign was, nothing sold Vicks VapoRub like the deadly Spanish flu outbreak that ravaged the nation in 1918 and 1919, killing hundreds of thousands of Americans. Loyal Vicks customers and new customers stocked up on the medicine to stave off or fight the disease.

According to the company’s history timeline, VapoRub sales skyrocketed from $900,000 to $2.9 million in a single year because of the pandemic. The Vicks plant in Greensboro operated around the clock, and salesmen were pulled off the road to help at the manufacturing facility in an effort to keep up with demand.

As the flu spread across the nation, Richardson grew ill with pneumonia in 1919 and died. Smith took over the company. Vicks continued to grow, buying other companies until Procter & Gamble bought it in the 1980s. Through the years, Vicks continued adding new products to its arsenal of cold remedies: cough drops, nose drops, inhalers, cough syrup, nasal spray, Formula 44, NyQuil. And whatever success those products attained, they got there standing on the broad shoulders of Richardson.

Richardson will never be a household name, but his salve has held that status for more than a century — and may do so for the next hundred years. And for Richardson, were he still around, that ought to be enough to clear his head.

A cure-all salve

Vicks users have claimed the salve can cure and heal many maladies. Even though Vicks doesn’t say the salve works for these problems, people still believe.

Toenail fungus: Rub the salve on your toenails, cover with socks, and sleep your fungus problems away. Cough: For a similar fix to a nagging cough, some believe rubbing Vicks on the soles of your feet can fix the problem. Dandruff: Rub Vicks directly on the scalp, and your flakes may just disappear. Chapped lips: Petroleum jelly is one of the ingredients in Vicks, and some say the ointment can help heal cracked lips. Mosquito bites: If you smooth Vicks on the red bumps on your legs and arms, it can supposedly take the itch right out. Warts: Dab Vicks on the wart, cover with duct tape, and it may fall off in a few days.

Greensboro Historical Museum 130 Summit Avenue Greensboro, N.C. 27401 (336) 373-2043 greensborohistory.org

See historical Vicks VapoRub bottles and learn about Lunsford Richardson.

[thecreaturecodex]

Yule Lad

"Gryla and the Yule Lads" © Marc Potts, accessed on his Threads account here

[It's been a while since I made a new Christmas monster, hasn't it? I woke up this morning with an uncontrollable urge to stat up the Yule Lads. It's December 21st at the time of posting, so look out for Window Peeper!]

Yule Lad CR 4 CN Fey This odd little man has a red cap, a white beard and a look of disheveled mischief about him. His fingernails are claw-like, and the shadows around him cast eerie shapes.

The Yule Lads are a gang of gnomish pranksters, each of them specializing in a particular brand of theft or harassment. They are so named because their habit is to descend upon communities during the winter solstice in order to wreak their mischief. They are the sons of the wicked troll Grýla and the lazy ogre Leppalúði, but themselves are not evil. They once were, and happily abducted children for their mother to eat, but they have mellowed somewhat with the passing of the ages. A household that endures their thefts and torments with good humor may find themselves rewarded with small strange gifts (often those stolen from other households).

There are thirteen prominent Yule Lads who travel together, coming down from the mountains one by one to prey on the same community before leaving in turn after a few weeks of mischief. Each one is named after their preferred targets or habits. They are, in their typical order of operations:

Sheepcote Clod, who harasses sheep and drinks their milk straight from the udder

Gully Gawk, who peeps on milkmaids and steals milk once it has been collected

Stubby, who steals burnt food and dirty pans and has very short legs

Spoon Licker, who licks the stirring spoons between uses to contaminate them

Pot Scraper, who steals leftover food before it can be stored

Bowl Licker, who eats food left out for domestic animals

Door Slammer, who wakes families up in the night with loud banging noises

Skyr Gobbler, who is voracious for skyr, yogurt and other fermented dairy products

Sausage Swiper, who hides in the rafters of smokehouses to steal sausages

Window Peeper, who is a voyeur and general thief

Door Sniffer, who can smell fresh baked bread from miles away

Meat Hook, who uses an ogre hook to steal meat from butchers and pantries alike

Candle Beggar, who steals candles in order to eat them

The Yule Lads prefer not to fight if they can help it. They use their mastery over shadows to teleport in and out of houses to rob and to frighten off anyone who attempts to stop them. If they are met with lethal violence, they will fight back, but typically attempt to flee if they see an opportunity. If one of the Yule Lads is slain, however, his brothers will declare a vendetta against his killer and retaliate in turn. These feuds end with the death of the killer and their associates, or with the killer paying off the Lads with sufficient weregild. Rumors circulate that there have been as many as fifty Yule Lads over the centuries, some of whom were slain and others of whom have grown bored of vexing people and retreated into the wilderness for good.

Yule Lad CR 4 XP 1,200 Variant advanced ogrekin redkind CN Small fey (giant) Init +6; Senses low-light vision, Perception +7 Aura twisted shadows (30 ft., DC 14)

Defense AC 22, touch 17, flat-footed 16 (+1 size, +6 Dex, +5 natural) hp 28 (3d6+18) Fort +7, Ref +10, Will +5 Weakness giant-blood, situational blindness

Offense Speed 30 ft. Melee 2 claws +6 (1d4+5) Spell-like Abilities CL 3rd, concentration +6 At will—dancing lights, darkness, detect thoughts (DC 15), ghost sound (DC 13), lullaby (DC 13) 1/day—grease (DC 14), minor image (DC 15), snare

Statistics Str 20, Dex 22, Con 23, Int 12, Wis 13, Cha 17 Base Atk +1; CMB +5; CMD 21 Feats Alertness, Deft Hands Skills Climb +9, Disable Device +11, Escape Artist +12, Intimidate +10, Perception +9, Sense Motive +9, Sleight of Hand +14, Stealth +18; Racial Modifiers +4 Intimidate Languages Common, Giant, Sylvan SQ deformities (varies), shadow jump

Ecology Environment cold mountains and urban Organization solitary or family (2-13) Treasure standard (thieves tools, other gear)

Special Abilities Deformities (Ex) Each of the Yule Lads has two deformities, one beneficial and one disadvantageous. These are as follows:

Sheepcote Clod: gnarled hands (claws deal 1d6 damage); stiff back (-4 to grapple and trip combat maneuver checks; can only stand from prone as a full-round action)

Gully Gawk: bulging eye (darkvision 60 ft.); light sensitivity

Stubby: thick feet (+4 CMD vs. bull rush, overrun and trip, +2 AC vs. charge attacks); stunted legs (-10 ft. movement)

Spoon Licker: lanky (+5 ft. reach); fragile (-4 Con)

Pot Scraper: thick skin (+2 natural armor); distractible (when rolls a natural 1 on an ability check, attack roll, saving throw or skill check, confused for 1 round)

Bowl Licker: oversized maw (bite attack dealing 1d4 damage); brittle bones (creatures gain a +4 circumstance bonus to confirm critical hits against him)

Door Slammer: vice grip (+2 to CMB to disarm and grapple, +4 CMD vs. disarm and grapple); obese (-2 Dex)

Skyr Gobbler: quick metabolism (+2 to Fortitude saves), weak mind (-2 to Will saves)

Sausage Swiper: long fingers (Climb speed equal to ½ land speed); offensive odor (-2 Cha, detectable at double range with scent)

Window Peeper: enlarged skull (+2 Int, [3 ranks in Appraise]); deformed hand (only one claw attack, -2 to attack rolls with two-handed weapons)

Doorway Sniffer: snout (scent); trusting (-2 to Will saves vs. mind-influencing effects, -1 initiative)

Meat Hook: oversized limb (can wield Medium weapons without penalty); flaking skin (-1 natural armor, vulnerability to nonlethal damage)

Candle Beggar: grotesque ears (blindsense 10 ft., +4 Perception); massive girth (-4 to Stealth)

Giant-Blood (Ex) Although the Yule Lads are fey creatures, they are the children of giants, and as such are treated as having the giant subtype for the purposes of spells and abilities. Situational Blindness (Su) The Yule Lads have trouble targeting creatures who can’t see them. Any creature that can’t see a Yule Lad (such as by closing its own eyes) gains partial concealment from it. Any creature that covers itself entirely (such as by hiding under a blanket) gains full concealment, even if the creature would not otherwise be considered hidden. Shadow Jump (Su) A Yule Lad can travel between shadows as if using a dimension door spell. The Yule Lad must begin and end its transportation in an area of dim illumination. A Yule Lad can travel up to 40 feet a day in this fashion, and can split this distance up in 10 foot increments if he so chooses. Twisted Shadows (Su) In areas of dim illumination or darker, a Yule Lad’s presence animates the shadows within 30 feet of it into leering or wicked shapes. The first time a creature ends its turn within this aura, it must succeed at a DC 13 Will saving throw or become shaken for 10 minutes. If the creature succeeds at the saving throw, it cannot be affected again by the same Yule Lad’s twisted shadows for 24 hours. This is a fear effect, and the DC is Charisma-based.

[thelibraryghost]

A Young Person's Guide to 18th-Century Western Fashion

unabridged version at blogspot

General info Cox, Abby. "I Wore 18th-Century Clothing *Every Day for 5 YEARS & This Is What I Learned (Corsets Aren't Bad!)." YouTube. May 10, 2020. Cullen, Oriole. “Eighteenth-Century European Dress.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2004. Glasscock, Jessica. "Eighteenth-Century Silhouette and Support." In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2004. Accessories Banner, Bernadette. "Women's Pockets Weren't Always a Complete Disgrace | A Brief History: England, 15th c - 21st c." YouTube. April 10, 2021. Colonial Williamsburg. "#TradesTuesday: Men's Accessories." YouTube. June 13, 2021. Murden, Sarah. "The Georgian era fashion for straw hats." All Things Georgian. December 6, 2018. Cosmetics & hygiene Cox, Abby. "I Followed an 18th-Century Moisturizer & Sunscreen Recipe & it kinda worked??." YouTube. February 21, 2021. Cox, Abby. "We tried making *5* different 250 year old rouge (blush) recipes || [real] regencycore makeup." YouTube. August 29, 2021. JYF Museums. "Hygiene in the 18th Century | From the Farm to the Army." YouTube. August 21, 2021. Décor Heckscher, Morrison H. “American Rococo.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2003. Munger, Jeffrey. “French Porcelain in the Eighteenth Century.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2003. Formal wear SnappyDragon. "This dressing gown changed fashion forever : the feminist history of going out in loungewear." YouTube. April 15, 2022. Stowell, Lauren. "The Many Types of 18th Century Gowns." American Duchess. March 15, 2013. Zebrowska, Karolina. "Cottagecore Style Is Much Older Than You Think." YouTube. June 30, 2021. Hair care Cox, Abby. "I made 250-year-old Hair Products Using Original Recipes (and animal fat...)." YouTube. November 7, 2021. Cox, Abby. "I tried a 300-year-old hair care routine for a year & this is what I learned (it's awesome!)." YouTube. January 23, 2022. Cox, Abby. "What's the Deal with 18th Century Wigs? (and why Bridgerton really messed this up)." YouTube. June 1, 2023. Laundry Cox, Abby. "Making 300 Year Old SLIME for Laundry Day." YouTube. June 15, 2023. Townsends. "Historical Laundry Part 2: No Washing Machine, No Dryer, Hit It With A Stick?" YouTube. June 3, 2019. Outer- & working-wear JYF Museum. "Getting Dressed | Clothing for an 18th Century Middling Woman." YouTube. March 18, 2021. Major, Joanne. "The practicalities of wearing riding habits, and riding ‘en cavalier’." All Things Georgian. March 12, 2019. Rudolph, Nicole. "What did Pirates ACTUALLY Wear? Fashion at Sea in the 18th c & Our Flag Means Death Costumes." YouTube. May 8, 2022. Shoes Chin, Cynthia E. "Martha Washington's Shoes." George Washington's Mount Vernon. No date. Murden, Sarah. "18th-century shoes." All Things Georgian. December 15, 2015. Rudolph, Nicole. "Real 18th century Shoes? Historical Shoemaker Examines an Antique." YouTube. December 13, 2020. Textiles Cox, Abby. "18th Century Printed Cotton Do's & Don't's." American Duchess. December 23, 2019. Stowell, Lauren. "Fabrics for the 18th Century and Beyond." American Duchess. June 14, 2021. Townsends. "Oil Cloth - Waterproof Coverings for Your Campsite." YouTube. July 30, 2018. Undergarments Major, Joanne. "Quilted Petticoats: worn by all women and useful in more ways than one." All Things Georgian. November 20, 2018. Rudolph, Nicole. "Making 18th century Stays for the Ideal Body Shape : Historical Undergarments." YouTube. August 12, 2023. SnappyDragon. "RUMP ROAST : Ranking historical fashion's wildest fake butt pads." YouTube. October 27, 2023. Townsends. "Sewing Histories' Most Popular Garment - The Fabric Of History - Townsends." YouTube. September 3, 2022.

[exercise-of-trust]

seemingly cool fiber arts person i followed a little bit ago just put radfem shit on the dash, anyway the blanket statement that the only contributions of men to textile production are capitalist/exploitative and the only contributions of women are household-centric/victimized is patently untrue. while less of a documented presence, women in medieval europe [1] absolutely participated in weaver's guilds and commercial cloth production [2], and men have been participating in household knitting in all parts of europe for as long as knitting has been a thing there [3]. like i'm not trying to say women haven't been deeply excluded from economic opportunities in the textile trade for centuries but you cannot be making sweeping statements like that about everyone in every part of the world through all of history and expect them to be true. do, like, a basic level of research and have a basic understanding of nuance, i beg of you [4]

footnotes/sources/etc under the cut, sources are a bit basic because i just grabbed whatever was nearest to hand but they should suffice to prove my point:

[1] i'm only referring to western europe here because that's the only region i feel comfortable talking about in any detail without embarrassing myself. systems of medieval cloth production in european guilds are not gonna look anything like the systems of hundreds of servants employed to do textile production for a household in china. don't make categorical statements about everyone everywhere all at once, you will end up with egg on your face.

[2] quotes from "when did weaving become a male profession," ingvild øye, danish journal of archaeology, p.45 in particular.

england: "in norwich, a certain elizabeth baret was enrolled as freeman of the city in 1445/6 because she was a worsted weaver, and in 1511, a riot occurred when the weavers here complained that women were taking over their work" + "another ordinance from bristol [in 1461] forbade master weavers to engage wives, daughters, and maids who wove on their own looms as weavers but made an exception for wives already active before this act" germany: "in bremen, several professional male weavers are recorded in the early fourteenth century, but evidently alongside female weavers, who are documented even later, in 1440" -> the whole "even later" thing is because the original article is disputing the idea that men as weavers/clothiers in medieval europe entirely replaced women over time. also: "in 1432-36, a female weaver, mette weuersk, is referred to as a member of the gertrud's guild in flensburg, presently germany" scandanavia: "the guild of weavers that was established in copenhagen in 1500 also accepted female weavers as independent members and the rules were recorded in the guild's statutes"

[3] quotes from folk socks: the history and techniques of handknitted footwear by nancy bush, interweave press, 2011, don't roast me it was literally within arm's reach and i didn't feel like looking up more stuff

uk/yorkshire dales: "...handknitting had been a daily employment for three centuries [leading up to 1900]. practiced by women, children, and men, the craft added much to the economy of the dales people." (p.21) uk/wales: re the knitting night (noson weu/noswaith weu) as a social custom practiced in the 18th/19th c.: "all the ladies would work on their knitting; some of the men would knit garters" (p.22) uk/channel islands: "by the early seventeenth century, so many of the islands' men, women, and children had taken up the trade of knitting that laws were necessary to keep them from knitting during harvest" (p.24) -> this one is deeply funny to me, in addition to proving my point uk/aberdeen: "the knitters, known as shankers, were usually women, but sometimes included old men and boys" (p.26) denmark: "with iron and brass needles, they made stockings called stunthoser, stomper, or stockings without feet, as well as stockings with feet. the men knit the legs and the women and girls made the heels" (p.32) iceland & faroe islands: "people of all ages and both sexes knit at home not only for their own use but for exportation of their goods as well" (p.35)

[4] actually? no. i'm not begging for shit from radfems. fuck all'a'y'all.

[awh-bowie]

⋆౨ৎ˚⟡˖ ࣪21 things i’ve learned since becoming an adult

˚ʚ♡ɞ˚ three years is not a terribly long time, but, i feel like regular metrics of time simply cannot be applied to girlhood and the transition to womanhood. my childhood felt like a single moment and being a teenager felt more like a century. but i digress, what have i learned in the three years since i became a legal adult?

୨୧ fostering meaningful friendships is far more important than any romantic relationship ୨୧

♡ the thing about romantic and physical relationships, especially when you’re young, is that they are not a reliable constant. all i can say about this is that close, trusted friends will benefit you better than any “situationship”.

୨୧ think of yourself like a plant, just a little bit more complex ୨୧

♡ what i mean by this is simple: if you feel awful for seemingly no reason, get some water, eat some fruit and go outside. more often than not, the mysterious specter making you sad is just yourself forgetting fundamental self-care!

୨୧ the best product for glowing skin is free! ୨୧

♡ drinking enough water is one of the easiest and most effective ways to maintain healthy skin. hydration helps flush out toxins, keeps your skin cells plump, and improves elasticity. scientifically speaking, staying hydrated supports your body’s natural detoxification processes!

୨୧ cry, cry, cry! ୨୧

♡ crying is a wonderful and natural way to release negative emotions, not something that is weak or embarrassing. we go into this life screaming and wailing, why stop now?

୨୧ invest in blue light glasses ୨୧

♡ blue light is the enemy of your eyes, especially looking at it in the dark. getting yellow-tinted glasses is a game changer, especially if you prefer low light! i never turn on my big light.

୨୧ you have boundaries, period. ୨୧

♡ there’s no such thing as not having boundaries. you can go through life without experiencing things you’d rather not experience again, these experiences create boundaries. if you genuinely can’t think of any boundaries, i suggest doing some journaling! here are some prompts i made for myself that really helped me.

୨୧ balance is good, but extremes aren’t evil ୨୧

♡ it’s okay to indulge, to be hedonistic! as long as you’re honoring yourself and the people in your life, go crazy every once and a while. that’s what life is about, diving into the things you love.

୨୧ use lighter concealer under your eyes ୨୧

♡ a lighter shade of concealer under your eyes helps brighten your face and hide dark circles!

୨୧ diet affects your skin and hair ୨୧

♡ proper nutrition plays a critical role in skin and hair health. consuming foods rich in vitamins and antioxidants, like fruits, vegetables, and lean proteins, can help prevent acne, improve hair growth, and promote a radiant complexion. see my post here to learn more ;3

୨୧ no one is looking at you, seriously, it’s biological ୨୧

♡ let me get a little sciency here. humans tend to overestimate how much people actually notice us, and this is something called the spotlight effect. it happens because our brains are wired to be super focused on ourselves, making us think everyone else is just as tuned in to us as we are. spoiler alert: they’re not. studies have shown that people pay way less attention to you than you think. realizing this is so freeing because once you know that your little slip-ups or bad hair days go unnoticed, you can start living with a lot less self-consciousness. embrace the freedom—no one is watching as closely as you imagine.

୨୧ independence isn’t loneliness ୨୧

♡ being independent doesn't mean you can’t ask for help or rely on others. sometimes the strongest thing you can do is reach out for support when you need it. true independence comes from knowing when to lean on others and when to stand on your own!

୨୧ dedicate time in your day to unplug ୨୧

♡ taking regular breaks from technology allows your brain to rest and recharge. studies indicate that unplugging can improve focus, reduce stress, and enhance well-being. scheduling time each day for a digital detox is beneficial for your mental health and productivity.

୨୧ you don’t have to justify the things you love ୨୧

♡ “i know it’s dumb but i really love [media] because it has my favorite actor in it!” STOP!! if you find yourself preemptively insulting your interest or explaining why you like it, stop and think. ask yourself what about the situation made you feel like you needed to do that.

୨୧ it’s okay to outgrow things ୨୧

♡ i wish i could stay a kid forever, but being an adult is kinda sick. drifting away from people, hobbies, media, etc… is a natural, unavoidable part of growing.

୨୧ it’s okay to not outgrow things ୨୧

♡ that being said, there’s nothing wrong with hanging onto the things that make you happy! if something you have from when you were a kid still brings joy to your life, it would be silly to give outgrowing it another thought. the fact that it still brings you joy means it cannot be outgrown.

୨୧ vitamin C for bright and even skin ୨୧

♡ vitamin C is a powerhouse for your skin!! it helps brighten your complexion, fade dark spots, and even out your skin tone by reducing melanin production. dermatologists recommend incorporating a vitamin C serum into your skincare routine to fight off free radicals and promote collagen production.

୨୧ being “busy” doesn’t equal being productive ୨୧

♡ it’s easy to confuse busyness with productivity. but being constantly busy doesn't mean you're getting more done. true productivity is about working smarter, not harder, and taking time to rest when needed.

୨୧ taking breaks IS productive ୨୧

♡ like i said, taking time to rest is key. studies show that regular breaks throughout the day, especially short ones, can improve concentration, reduce mental fatigue, and enhance performance!

୨୧ cold water rinse for shiny hair ୨୧

♡ a cold water rinse at the end of your shower can help seal your hair cuticles, resulting in shinier, smoother hair. cold water also helps reduce frizz and preserve hair’s natural oils.

୨୧ celebrate every victory ୨୧

♡ no win is too small! celebrating your successes, big or small, reinforces positive habits and boosts motivation. you deserve it, every day you exist is a victory in the eyes of others. according to psychologists, taking the time to acknowledge achievements can increase your sense of accomplishment and satisfaction.

୨୧ they say “trust your gut” for a reason! ୨୧

♡ your gut feeling, also known as intuition, is your brain’s way of quickly processing information based on past experiences and instincts. neuroscientists have found that gut instincts often come from subconscious pattern recognition, and trusting them can lead to better decision-making in situations where logic might not offer clear answers.

-Beau

[catalinemorosetheblog]

Otto and Hua's pseudo-friendship is fascinating to me because they are two very different characters, yet are formed from similar circumstances. More than that, I feel like they are different reactions to those circumstances-two sides of a coin, in a sense.

Hua lost her whole world-her hometown, her family, her friends and comrades, and even her memories. Fundamentally, the only constant in her life has been the goal of protecting humanity from the Honkai. Hua's goal has been purely selfless, even costing her own happiness. But this has had consequences! Heck, one of those consequences was creating Otto! Senti points this out in Chapter 21, had Hua killed Otto and Kallen during the Crusade, none of the story events would have ever happened. Even more so, Hua was indirectly responsible for the events of Seven Swords, another Otto defining event, as her intention to kill one of her students has an attempt to preserve this mission got her literally murdered. And yet despite all these things...Hua was able to change. She was able to see her flaws and improve as a person, and find a path beyond her mission, save humanity, and build a new "world".

Otto's loss, on the other hand, is smaller in scale, yet carries equal consequence. Kallen Kaslana was his whole world, and everything that he believed that was good about the world. When she died, saying he lost it is the understatement of the last five centuries. Thus began his century-long goal of reviving her, committing multiple atrocities and harming many people, some of whom were his own family. His mission was a purely selfish one, something him and many other characters do not hesitate to admit. And yet...without his actions, humans wouldn't have been saved from the Honkai. It's a strange paradox. He did keep humanity from dying to the Honkai for his reign as Overseer, and he created Theresa, Bianka, and most importantly, Kiana, all important to the final battle, especially Kiana, who literally becomes the embodiment of Finality. Somehow, in a weird irony, Otto's actions do some good. More harm though. Lots of harm. Still, Otto was not able to change. He remained largely the same for 500 years. His goal remained unchanged for 500 years. And the Will of Honkai was right. He would die for it.

If Hua is a flower, waiting for a place to bloom and lay down her roots, Otto is a long dead tree, his roots stuck deep in the ground. Both are products of the flow of time. Yet, Hua's clock has just begun to turn, and Otto's has finally stopped.

[the---hermit]

21|12|2024

So I haven't posted an update in a while. I have been struggling quite a bit with staying focused and low energy, in addition to getting a cold, which means that I am way behind schedule with my studying. This morning I managed to finally finish reading and underlining the last book for my political institutions exam, but I still have a couple of chapters I need to turn into written notes, and honestly I don't know how to approach this, because I really wanted to take the whole next week to just rest, but also I want to only have to review things after my holiday break. So I really don't know how to deal with things, I might try to finish the notes on Monday and then take a week off. Surely on Monday I will do the tiniest bit of planning just so I know what to expect from my time after the holidays. Because if I do not have a clear picture I know I won't be able to fully relax. I will also have to send a couple of emails and check stuff to subscribe to my exams, but that will be problem for future me. Music has truly been my one saviour in the past few weeks, I don't know what I'd do without it. The way it changes my mood and helps me avoid going into overthinking spirals is pure magic.

Today's productivity:

read first thing in the morning

finished reading and underlining Governo by Paolo Colombo (This was a short but very dense non fiction book on the history and concept of government. It focused a lot on the language, which I didn't expect but found very interesting. As expected the part dealing with more contemporary periods were the ones I struggled with the most. It was definitely well made, but I absolutely despise political history so I kind of struggled at the end. But that is totally a personal thing, I have to admit this is the second book I read in this series focused on political concepts and they are both very well made and curated. The are very dense indeed, but they are clearly made so that anyone can get what they are talking about and the way they both approached the concepts they were analizing in an historical way was really cool since usually when talking about politics people focus on the last century only.)

continued writing notes for the book mentioned above

finished working on a test I have to turn in next week

duolingo

📖: Iliad by Homer, Governo by Paolo Colombo

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Zuck’s gravity-defying metaverse money-pit

Tomorrow (Oct 31) at 10hPT, the Internet Archive is livestreaming my presentation on my recent book, The Internet Con.

Think of everything that makes you miserable as being caught between two opposing, irresistible, irrefutable truths:

"Anything that can't go on forever eventually stops" (Stein's Law)

"Markets can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent" (Keynes)

Both of these are true, even though they seemingly contradict one another, and no one embodies that contradiction more perfectly than Mark Zuckerberg.

Take the metaverse.

Zuck's "pivot" to a virtual world he ripped off from a quarter-century old cyberpunk novel (reminder: cyberpunk is a warning, not a suggestion) was born of desperation.

Zuck fancies himself an avatar of the Emperor Augustus (that's why he has that haircut) (no, really). The emperors of antiquity are infamous for getting all weepy when they run out of lands to conquer.

But the lachrymosity of emperors has little causal relationship to the anxieties of tech monopolists! Alexander weeps because he just loves a good conquest and when he finishes conquering the world, he's terminally bored. That's not Zuck's problem at all. When Zuck attains monopoly status, his company develops an autoimmune disorder, as his vicious princelings run out of enemies to destroy and begin to knife one another.

Any monopoly faces these destructive microincentives, but tech is exceptional here because tech has the realtime flexibility and speed that brick-and-mortar businesses can never match:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/19/twiddler/

Sociopaths with tech monopolies are worse for the same reason that road-rage would be worse in a flying car: adding new capacity to indiscriminate self-destructive urges turns ordinary car crashes into low-level airburst warfare:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/28/microincentives-and-enshittification/

The flexibility of digital gives tech platforms so much latitude to break things in tiny increments. A tech platform is like a Jenga tower composed of infinitely divisible blocks. The Jenga players are the product managers and executives who have run out of the ability to grow by attracting new business thanks to their monopoly dominance. Now they compete with one another to increase the yield from their respective divisions by visiting pain upon the business customers and end users their platform connects. By tiny increments, they increase the product's cost, lower its reliability, and strip it of its utility and then charge rent to restore its functionality:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/24/cursed-bigness/#incentives-matter

This is the terminal stage of enshittification, the unstoppable autocannibalism of platforms as they seek to harvest all the value created by business customers and end users, leaving the absolute minimum of residual value needed to keep both stuck to the platform. This is a brittle equilibrium, because the difference between "I hate this service but I just can't stop using it," and "Get me the fuck out of here" is razor-thin.

All it takes is one tiny push – a whistleblower, a livestreamed mass-shooting, a Cambridge Analytica – and people bolt for the doors. This triggers the final stage: the "pivot," which is a tech euphemism for "panic."

For Zuck, the pivot got real after a disappointing earnings call triggered a mass sell-off of Facebook stock, history's worst one-day value incineration, which lopped a quarter of a trillion dollars off the company's market cap:

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-12-19/dramatic-stock-moves-of-2022-led-by-meta-dive-nordic-flash-crash

This was when the metaverse became the company's top priority.

Now, in my theory of enshittification, the step that follows the pivot is death: "Finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die":

https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys

Many people have asked me about the conspicuous non-death of Facebook! That's where I have to fall back on Stein's Law: "Anything that can't go on forever eventually stops." Facebook can't continue to annihilate value, alienate its workers, harm the public, hemorrhage money in support of a mediocrity's cherished folly forever. Can it?

Admittedly, it sure seems like it can. Facebook's metaverse pivot has thus far cost the company $46,500,000,000. That is: $46.5 billion. That's even more money than Uber torched, seeking to maintain the illusion that they will be able to create monopolies on both transport and the labor market for driving and recoup the billions the Saudi royal family let them use for the con:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/02/11/bezzlers-gonna-bezzle/#gryft

Don't worry: the Saudi royals are fine! They cashed out at the IPO, collecting a tidy profit at the expense of retail investors who assumed that a pile of shit as big as Uber must have a pony under it, somewhere:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/05/19/fake-it-till-you-make-it/#millennial-lifestyle-subsidy

Uber has doubled the cost of rides and halved drivers' wages, using illegal gimmicks like "algorithmic wage discrimination" to squeeze a little more juice out of the nearly exhausted husks of its workforce:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/12/algorithmic-wage-discrimination/#fishers-of-men

But Stein's Law hasn't been repealed. Drivers can't drive for sub-subsistence wages. Do that long enough and they'll literally starve: that's what "subsistence" means. We lost a decade of transit investment thanks to the Uber con, at the same time as traditional taxi drivers were forced out of the industry. Uber can't be profitable and still pay a living wage, and the fantasy of self-driving cars as a means of zeroing out the wage-bill altogether remains stubbornly, lethally unworkable:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/10/09/herbies-revenge/#100-billion-here-100-billion-there-pretty-soon-youre-talking-real-money

Which means we're at the point where you can get off a commuter train at a main station and find yourself stranded: no taxis at the taxi-queue, no busses due for an hour, and no Uber cars available unless you're willing to pay $95 for a ten-minute ride in a luxury SUV (why yes, this did happen to me recently, thanks for asking).

As more and more of us are exposed to these micro-crises, the political will to do something will increase. This can't go on forever. "Don't use commuter rail" isn't a viable option. "Walk three miles each way to the commuter rail station" isn't viable either. Neither is "Pay $95 for an Uber to get to the station." Something's gotta give…eventually.

"Eventually" is the key word here. Remember the corollary of Stein's Law: Keynes's maxim that "markets can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent." Sure, anything that can't go on forever eventually stops, but that is no guarantee of a soft landing. You can't smoke two packs a day forever – but in the absence of smoking cessation, the eventual terminus of that habit is stage-four lung cancer. Keep hammering butts into your face and your last smoke will come out a crematorium chimney.

Zuckerberg hasn't merely blown a whole-ass Twitter on the metaverse with nothing to show for it – he's gotten richer while doing it! In the past year, his net worth increased by 130%, to $59 billion, thanks to an increase in Facebook's share-price, driven by investors who stubbornly remain irrational, keeping the Boy Emperor solvent long past any reasonable assessment of his performance.

What are these investors betting on? One possibility is that the rise and rise of Facebook's share-price represents a bet on technofeudalism. Since the Communist Manifesto, Marxists have been predicting the end of capitalism. That end seems to have come, but what followed capitalism wasn't socialism, it was the return of feudalism, an economic system where elites derive their wealth from rents, not profits:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/28/cloudalists/#cloud-capital

Profit is the income you get from investing in capital – machinery, systems, plant – and then harvesting the surplus value created by workers who mobilize this capital. Capitalism produces massive returns for its winners – in the Manifesto's first chapter, Marx and Engels just geek out about how productive and dynamic this system is.

But capitalism is also a Red Queen's Race, where the winners have to run faster and faster to stay in the same place. Capitalism drives competition, as other would-be winners pile into the sector, replicating the systems that the current winners are using and then improving on them. This is why the prophets of capitalist end-times like the FBI informant Peter Thiel say that "competition is for losers."

Capitalism's "profits" stand in contrast to the feudalist's "rents." Rents are income you get from owning something that other people need to produce things. The capitalist owns the coffee-shop, but the feudalist owns the building. When a rival capitalist opens a superior coffee-shop and drives the old shop out of business, the capitalist loses, but the rentier wins. Now they can rent out an empty storefront in the neighborhood everyone's coming to because of that hot new cafe.

Feudal and manorial lords also made their fortunes by extracting surplus value from workers, but these rentiers don't care about owning the means of production. The peasant in the field pays for their own agricultural equipment and livestock – control over the means of production is necessary for worker liberation, but it's not sufficient. The worker's co-op that owns its factory can still find the value it produces bled off by the landlord who owns the land the factory sits on.

The jury's still out on whether American workers really see themselves as "temporarily embarrassed millionaires," but America's capitalists have a palpable, undeniable loathing for capitalism. The dream of an American "entrepreneur" is *PassiveIncome: money you get from owning something capitalists and/or workers use to create value. Digital technology creates exciting new possibilities for rent-extraction: a taxi-operator had to buy and maintain a car that someone else drove. Uber can offload this hassle onto its drivers and rent out access to the chokepoint it created between drivers and riders, charging all the traffic can bear. This is feudalism in the cloud – or as Yannis Varoufakis calls it, cloudalism.

In Varoufakis's Technofeudalism, he describes Amazon as a feudal venture. From a distance, Amazon seems like a bustling marketplace of manic capitalism, with sellers avidly competing to offer more variety and lower costs in a million independently operated storefronts. But closer inspection reveals that Amazon is a planned economy, not a market.

Every one of those storefronts pays rent to the same landlord – Amazon – which determines which goods can be offered for sale. Amazon sets pricing for those goods, and extracts 45-51% of every dollar those sellers make. Amazon even controls which goods are shelved at eye-height when you enter the store, and which ones are banished to a dusty storeroom in a distant sub-basement you'll never find:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/06/14/flywheel-shyster-and-flywheel/#unfulfilled-by-amazon

Zuck's metaverse is pure-play technofeudalism, Amazon taken to the logical extreme. It's easy to get distracted by the part of Zuck's vision that will convert us all into legless, sexless, heavily surveilled low-resolution cartoon characters. But the real action isn't this digitization of our fleshy wants and needs. Zuck didn't spend $46.5B to torment us.

The cruelty isn't the point of the metaverse.

The point of the metaverse is to rent us out to capitalists.

Zuck doesn't know why we would use the metaverse, but he believes that if he can convince capitalists that we all want to live there, that they'll invest the capital to figure out how to serve us there, and then he can extract rent from those capitalists and start earning "passive income." It's an Uber for Cyberpunk Dystopias play.

Zuck's done this before. Remember the "pivot to video?" Zuckerberg wanted to compete with Youtube, but he didn't want to invest in paying for video production. Videos are really expensive to produce and the median video gets zero views. So Zuck used his captive audience to trick publishers into financing his move into video. He fraudulently told publishers that videos were blowing up on Facebook, outperforming boring old text by vast margins.

Publishers borrowed billions and raised billions more in the capital markets, financing the total conversion of newsrooms from text to video and precipitating a mass extinction event for print journalists. Zuck kept the con alive by giving away (fewer) billions to some of those publishers, falsely claiming that their videos were generating fortunes in advertising revenue. These lucky, credulous publishers became judas goats for their industry, luring others into the con, the same way that the "lucky" guy a carny lets win a giant teddy-bear at the start of the day lures others into putting down $5 to see if they can sink three balls in a rigged peach-basket.

But when we stubbornly refused to watch videos on Facebook, Zuck stopped spreading around these convincer payouts, and precipitated a second mass-extinction event in news media, as the new generation of video journalists joined their predecessors in Facebook-driven unemployment. Given this history, it's surreal to see publishers continue to insist that Facebook is stealing their content, when it is so clearly stealing their money:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/04/saving-news-big-tech

Metaverse is the new Pivot to Video. Zuckerberg is building a new world, which he will own, and he wants rent it to capitalists, who will compete with one another in just the way that Amazon's sellers compete. No matter who wins that competition, Zuckerberg will win. The prize for winning will be a rent increase, as Zuckerberg leverages the fact that your "successful" business relies on Facebook's metaverse to drain off all the value your workers have produced:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/12/18/metaverse-means-pivot-to-video/

This can't last forever, but how long until Zuck's reality distortion field runs out of battery? That's the $46.5B question.

The market can certainly remain irrational for a hell of a long time. But the market isn't the only force that regulates corporate outcomes. Regulators also regulate. Europe's GDPR is now seven years old, and it plainly outlaws Facebook's surveillance.

For nearly a decade, Facebook has pretended that this wasn't true, and they got away with it. Mostly, that's thanks to the fact that Ireland is a corporate crime-haven with a worse-than-useless Data Protection Commission:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/05/15/finnegans-snooze/#dirty-old-town

But anything that can't go on forever will eventually stop. Facebook has finally been dragged into EU federal jurisdiction, where it will face exterminatory fines if it continues to spy on Europeans:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/12/07/luck-of-the-irish/#schrems-revenge

In response, Facebook has rolled out a subscription version of its main service and its anticompetitive acquisition, Instagram:

https://about.fb.com/news/2023/10/facebook-and-instagram-to-offer-subscription-for-no-ads-in-europe/

For €10/month, Facebook will give you an ad-free experience across its service offerings (it's €13/month if you pay through an app, as Facebook recoups the 30% #AdTax rents that the feudal Google/Apple mobile duopoly extracts).

But this doesn't come close to satisfying Facebook's legal obligations under the GDPR. The GDPR doesn't ban ads, it bans spying. Facebook spies on every single internet user, all the time. The apps we use are built with "free" Facebook toolkits that extract rent from the capitalists who make them by harvesting our data as we use their apps. The web-pages we visit have embedded Facebook libraries that do the same thing for web publishers. Facebook buys our data from brokers. Facebook has so many ways of spying on us that there's almost certainly no way for Facebook to stop spying on you, without radically transforming it operation.

To comply with the GDPR, Facebook must halt surveillance advertising altogether. There's no way to square "spying on users" with "you can't surveil without explicit consent, and you can't punish people for refusing."

And of course, "not spying" isn't the same as "not advertising." "Contextual advertising" – where ads are placed based on the thing you're looking at, not who you are and what you do – is hundreds of years old. Context ads underperform surveillance ads by a slim margin – about 5% – but they're vastly more profitable for publishers. That's because surveillance ads are feudal, controlled by rentiers like Facebook, who own vast troves of the surveillance data needed to run these ads. Traditional ad intermediaries (agencies, brokers) took 10-15% out of the total advertising market. Ad-tech companies – the Google/Facebook duopoly – take 51% out of every ad dollar spent.

Eliminate surveillance ads and you torch their feudal estates. Facebook will always know more about someone reading a news article than the publisher – but the publisher will always know more about the article than Facebook does:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/05/save-news-we-must-ban-surveillance-advertising

There are rents under capitalism, just as there are profits under feudalism. The defining characteristic of a system is what happens when rents and profits come into conflict. If profits win – for example, if productive companies beat patent trolls, or if news publishers escape Facebook's rent-extraction – then the system is capitalist. If rents win – if investors continue to bet large on the metaverse as its losses pass $50 billion and head for the $100 billion mark – then the system is feudal.

Anything that can't go on forever will eventually stop. The question isn't whether the platforms will eventually become so enshittified that they die – the question is whether they will go down in an all-consuming fireball, or whether they'll go down in a controlled demolition that lets us evacuate the people they've trapped inside them first:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/09/let-the-platforms-burn/

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/2023/10/30/markets-remaining-irrational/#steins-law

Image: Diego Delso (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Puente_de_las_cataratas_Victoria,_Zambia-Zimbabue,_2018-07-27,_DD_10.jpg

CC BY-SA 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

[doyoulikethissong-poll]

Adele - Rolling in the Deep 2010

"Rolling in the Deep" is a song by English singer-songwriter Adele from her second studio album, 21 (2011). It is the lead single and opening track on the album. The song was composed by Paul Epworth and Adele in a single afternoon following Adele's breakup with her boyfriend. It was her reaction to, "being told that my life was going to be boring and lonely and rubbish, and that I was a weak person if I didn't stay in the relationship. I was very insulted, and wrote that as a sort of 'fuck you'."

"Rolling in the Deep" received widespread critical acclaim with praise drawn towards the song's production, its lyrics, and Adele's vocal performance. It represented a commercial breakthrough for Adele, propelling her to global superstardom. The song topped the charts in twelve countries and reached the top 10 in over twenty territories. It was Adele's first number-one song in the US, reaching the top spot on many Billboard charts, including the Billboard Hot 100 where it was number one for seven weeks. By February 2012, "Rolling in the Deep" had sold over 8.7 million copies in the US, making it the best-selling digital song by a female artist in the US, the second-best-selling digital song in the US and Adele's best-selling single outside her native country, topping her previous best-selling "Chasing Pavements". Worldwide, it was the fifth-best-selling digital single of 2011 with sales of 8.2 million copies. As of 2019, with sales of over 20.6 million copies worldwide, "Rolling in the Deep" is one of the best-selling digital singles of all time.

Its music video received a leading seven nominations at the 2011 MTV Video Music Awards, including for Video of the Year, and won three other awards: Best Editing, Best Cinematography and Best Art Direction. "Rolling in the Deep" was also the Billboard Year End Hot 100 Number One Single of 2011. At the 54th Annual Grammy Awards, it won awards for Record of the Year, Song of the Year, and Best Short Form Music Video, making it just the second song in Grammy history to win all three awards after "We Are the World" in 1986. Various critics and music publications ranked it as the best song of the year on their end-of-year lists with Rolling Stone ranking it at number 8 spot on its list of "The 100 Greatest Songs of the 21st Century". In 2021, the song was ranked at number 82 on the list of Rolling Stone's 500 Greatest Songs of All Time.

"Rolling in the Deep" received a total of 87,7% yes votes!

[stevebattle]

Wakamaru communication robot (2003) by Toshiyuki Kita, Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, Tokyo, Japan. "Wakamaru" was so named because the two sensors on its forehead resemble the eyebrows of the Heian Era Yoshitsune Minamoto, whose childhood name was "Ushiwakamaru."

"The design concept of Mr. Toshiyuki Kita, who designed "wakamaru", was to create "a humanoid robot that can approach its user." "wakamaru" is designed in the image of a human being, not merely as a "machine" or a "computer terminal," but rather as an "independent personality." Its familiar facial expressions and body appearance make it feel friendly to everyone from children to elderly people." – "Wakamaru" Design, MHI.

The three stages of Wakamaru are seen in the 6th image, from first concept in 2000, through Toshiyuki Kita's blue sleeved prototype, to its final form in 2003. "The first inkling of "wakamaru" lies in a company project titled "MHI Frontier 21," started in 2000. In order to start a new product/project with a 21st century theme, ideas were canvassed from all employees. Then, one of the proposals summarized by the investigation team, mainly consisting of younger employees was, the "Service Robot Project." ... "wakamaru" was born. A robot that can live with human beings, enriching the quality of life." – Who is "Wakimaru"?, MHI.

"Wakamaru, the multi-function service robot developed by Mitsubishi Heavy Industries close to a decade ago has never seemed to gain much traction or use outside of research labs and universities. While Wakamaru is extremely cute, most observers agreed that it didn’t really address a compelling customer need, especially at its USD$14,000 price point. A tweet earlier today by @rani_chocobreak seems to provide visual confirmation [see 7th image] that Wakamaru may have reached the end of its rope. According to the tweet, there are quite a few Wakamaru robots stored in the garbage collection area at an unnamed Japanese university." – Is Wakamaru Alive and Well, or…?, robots dreams, 2014.

Yet Wakamaru keeps on giving (see video). "Under MHI's "wakamaru gift" initiative, based on the number of handshakes the MHI Group makes monetary donations to support the earthquake and tsunami recovery effort in the Tohoku region. … To date, the number of handshakes with wakamaru [based at the Company's showroom on the second floor of the Shinagawa Head Office] has resulted in donations totaling 2.4 million yen. The money is being put to good use to fund various events supporting Tohoku's recovery, a project to cultivate seedlings for creating green spaces as a disaster-prevention measure, and activities to help nurture the next generation. Many people who have cooperated in this campaign have expressed their joy at being able to help in the Tohoku recovery effort." – "wakamaru gift" Campaign Reaches 8,000 Handshakes!, MHI, 2016.

[amechyofsorts]

The conversation around Toshiro sorta also makes it clear how people tend to keep expecting modern understanding of racism and xenophobia in a medival fantasy setting, one with fantasy races running around to further complicate things.

And like yeah, I doubt Kui was going for any manner of authenticity regarding medival race and national relations either, but it does feel weird to discuss how certain characters act through the lens modern racism and xenophobia, or at least only through that lense. "Microtransgressions" would not have been a concern to world travelers back then. One would very fast learn they would draw extreme curiosity or fear/discomfort from people, all of whom looked and acted entirely different from anyone you had ever seen before, and that almost no social standard from back home would work as you had learned it to all your life. There was no worldwide means of communication or information sharing that could properly prepare you for any of it.

Specifically what im trying to share here is that Toshiro was likely pretty used the kind of curiosity and social insensitivity Laios had displayed toward him, and wouldn't have thought too much of it, if not for his persistance and wanting to be his bff's as well. Laios isn't the racist white dude harassing a foreign student in college canteen about how weird and funny he looks and acts, despite living in the 21'st century and having all the means available to avoid that manner of behavior, he's a medival dude from bumfuck nowhere who was genuinely just extremely interested at the world being a bigger and more varied and interesting place then he was ever aware of, and also he's autistic as fuck on top of that.

But again, probably not the medival mindset what Kui specifically was shooting for, but even then, a fantasy world's understanding off all these matters would likely still be fairly different from ours anyway. Viewing, and judging the characters, strictly from the perspective of our modern day of understanding of these matters isn't likely very "productive" if you're trying to understand the characters.