#I was really just using it as a news aggregator

[thunderheadfred]

it's not worth getting into the details, but a complete stranger on threads managed to say something so deeply triggering and hurtful about my decision to start a family that I bawled my eyes out in real life, to the point that my partner thought I was like, about to die or something, so uh..... think I'm officially done with that algorithmic garbage fire...........

[omarwolaeth]

It's such a tiny innocuous thing that really doesn't matter, but I feel like calling duel monsters a children's card game (when it's fundamentally baked into everyday life, and your social existence is judged by what you play and how you play it so very intensely, for everyone in-universe) is an absolute injustice to what it is for that universe of people.

[treasure-mimic]

So, let me try and put everything together here, because I really do think it needs to be talked about.

Today, Unity announced that it intends to apply a fee to use its software. Then it got worse.

For those not in the know, Unity is the most popular free to use video game development tool, offering a basic version for individuals who want to learn how to create games or create independently alongside paid versions for corporations or people who want more features. It's decent enough at this job, has issues but for the price point I can't complain, and is the idea entry point into creating in this medium, it's a very important piece of software.

But speaking of tools, the CEO is a massive one. When he was the COO of EA, he advocated for using, what out and out sounds like emotional manipulation to coerce players into microtransactions.

"A consumer gets engaged in a property, they might spend 10, 20, 30, 50 hours on the game and then when they're deep into the game they're well invested in it. We're not gouging, but we're charging and at that point in time the commitment can be pretty high."

He also called game developers who don't discuss monetization early in the planning stages of development, quote, "fucking idiots".

So that sets the stage for what might be one of the most bald-faced greediest moves I've seen from a corporation in a minute. Most at least have the sense of self-preservation to hide it.

A few hours ago, Unity posted this announcement on the official blog.

Effective January 1, 2024, we will introduce a new Unity Runtime Fee that’s based on game installs. We will also add cloud-based asset storage, Unity DevOps tools, and AI at runtime at no extra cost to Unity subscription plans this November. We are introducing a Unity Runtime Fee that is based upon each time a qualifying game is downloaded by an end user. We chose this because each time a game is downloaded, the Unity Runtime is also installed. Also we believe that an initial install-based fee allows creators to keep the ongoing financial gains from player engagement, unlike a revenue share.

Now there are a few red flags to note in this pitch immediately.

Unity is planning on charging a fee on all games which use its engine.

This is a flat fee per number of installs.

They are using an always online runtime function to determine whether a game is downloaded.

There is just so many things wrong with this that it's hard to know where to start, not helped by this FAQ which doubled down on a lot of the major issues people had.

I guess let's start with what people noticed first. Because it's using a system baked into the software itself, Unity would not be differentiating between a "purchase" and a "download". If someone uninstalls and reinstalls a game, that's two downloads. If someone gets a new computer or a new console and downloads a game already purchased from their account, that's two download. If someone pirates the game, the studio will be asked to pay for that download.

Q: How are you going to collect installs? A: We leverage our own proprietary data model. We believe it gives an accurate determination of the number of times the runtime is distributed for a given project. Q: Is software made in unity going to be calling home to unity whenever it's ran, even for enterprice licenses? A: We use a composite model for counting runtime installs that collects data from numerous sources. The Unity Runtime Fee will use data in compliance with GDPR and CCPA. The data being requested is aggregated and is being used for billing purposes. Q: If a user reinstalls/redownloads a game / changes their hardware, will that count as multiple installs? A: Yes. The creator will need to pay for all future installs. The reason is that Unity doesn’t receive end-player information, just aggregate data. Q: What's going to stop us being charged for pirated copies of our games? A: We do already have fraud detection practices in our Ads technology which is solving a similar problem, so we will leverage that know-how as a starting point. We recognize that users will have concerns about this and we will make available a process for them to submit their concerns to our fraud compliance team.

This is potentially related to a new system that will require Unity Personal developers to go online at least once every three days.

Starting in November, Unity Personal users will get a new sign-in and online user experience. Users will need to be signed into the Hub with their Unity ID and connect to the internet to use Unity. If the internet connection is lost, users can continue using Unity for up to 3 days while offline. More details to come, when this change takes effect.

It's unclear whether this requirement will be attached to any and all Unity games, though it would explain how they're theoretically able to track "the number of installs", and why the methodology for tracking these installs is so shit, as we'll discuss later.

Unity claims that it will only leverage this fee to games which surpass a certain threshold of downloads and yearly revenue.

Only games that meet the following thresholds qualify for the Unity Runtime Fee: Unity Personal and Unity Plus: Those that have made $200,000 USD or more in the last 12 months AND have at least 200,000 lifetime game installs. Unity Pro and Unity Enterprise: Those that have made $1,000,000 USD or more in the last 12 months AND have at least 1,000,000 lifetime game installs.

They don't say how they're going to collect information on a game's revenue, likely this is just to say that they're only interested in squeezing larger products (games like Genshin Impact and Honkai: Star Rail, Fate Grand Order, Among Us, and Fall Guys) and not every 2 dollar puzzle platformer that drops on Steam. But also, these larger products have the easiest time porting off of Unity and the most incentives to, meaning realistically those heaviest impacted are going to be the ones who just barely meet this threshold, most of them indie developers.

Aggro Crab Games, one of the first to properly break this story, points out that systems like the Xbox Game Pass, which is already pretty predatory towards smaller developers, will quickly inflate their "lifetime game installs" meaning even skimming the threshold of that 200k revenue, will be asked to pay a fee per install, not a percentage on said revenue.

[IMAGE DESCRIPTION: Hey Gamers!

Today, Unity (the engine we use to make our games) announced that they'll soon be taking a fee from developers for every copy of the game installed over a certain threshold - regardless of how that copy was obtained.

Guess who has a somewhat highly anticipated game coming to Xbox Game Pass in 2024? That's right, it's us and a lot of other developers.

That means Another Crab's Treasure will be free to install for the 25 million Game Pass subscribers. If a fraction of those users download our game, Unity could take a fee that puts an enormous dent in our income and threatens the sustainability of our business.

And that's before we even think about sales on other platforms, or pirated installs of our game, or even multiple installs by the same user!!!

This decision puts us and countless other studios in a position where we might not be able to justify using Unity for our future titles. If these changes aren't rolled back, we'll be heavily considering abandoning our wealth of Unity expertise we've accumulated over the years and starting from scratch in a new engine. Which is really something we'd rather not do.

On behalf of the dev community, we're calling on Unity to reverse the latest in a string of shortsighted decisions that seem to prioritize shareholders over their product's actual users.

I fucking hate it here.

-Aggro Crab - END DESCRIPTION]

That fee, by the way, is a flat fee. Not a percentage, not a royalty. This means that any games made in Unity expecting any kind of success are heavily incentivized to cost as much as possible.

[IMAGE DESCRIPTION: A table listing the various fees by number of Installs over the Install Threshold vs. version of Unity used, ranging from $0.01 to $0.20 per install. END DESCRIPTION]

Basic elementary school math tells us that if a game comes out for $1.99, they will be paying, at maximum, 10% of their revenue to Unity, whereas jacking the price up to $59.99 lowers that percentage to something closer to 0.3%. Obviously any company, especially any company in financial desperation, which a sudden anchor on all your revenue is going to create, is going to choose the latter.

Furthermore, and following the trend of "fuck anyone who doesn't ask for money", Unity helpfully defines what an install is on their main site.

While I'm looking at this page as it exists now, it currently says

The installation and initialization of a game or app on an end user’s device as well as distribution via streaming is considered an “install.” Games or apps with substantially similar content may be counted as one project, with installs then aggregated to calculate the Unity Runtime Fee.

However, I saw a screenshot saying something different, and utilizing the Wayback Machine we can see that this phrasing was changed at some point in the few hours since this announcement went up. Instead, it reads:

The installation and initialization of a game or app on an end user’s device as well as distribution via streaming or web browser is considered an “install.” Games or apps with substantially similar content may be counted as one project, with installs then aggregated to calculate the Unity Runtime Fee.

Screenshot for posterity:

That would mean web browser games made in Unity would count towards this install threshold. You could legitimately drive the count up simply by continuously refreshing the page. The FAQ, again, doubles down.

Q: Does this affect WebGL and streamed games? A: Games on all platforms are eligible for the fee but will only incur costs if both the install and revenue thresholds are crossed. Installs - which involves initialization of the runtime on a client device - are counted on all platforms the same way (WebGL and streaming included).

And, what I personally consider to be the most suspect claim in this entire debacle, they claim that "lifetime installs" includes installs prior to this change going into effect.

Will this fee apply to games using Unity Runtime that are already on the market on January 1, 2024? Yes, the fee applies to eligible games currently in market that continue to distribute the runtime. We look at a game's lifetime installs to determine eligibility for the runtime fee. Then we bill the runtime fee based on all new installs that occur after January 1, 2024.

Again, again, doubled down in the FAQ.

Q: Are these fees going to apply to games which have been out for years already? If you met the threshold 2 years ago, you'll start owing for any installs monthly from January, no? (in theory). It says they'll use previous installs to determine threshold eligibility & then you'll start owing them for the new ones. A: Yes, assuming the game is eligible and distributing the Unity Runtime then runtime fees will apply. We look at a game's lifetime installs to determine eligibility for the runtime fee. Then we bill the runtime fee based on all new installs that occur after January 1, 2024.

That would involve billing companies for using their software before telling them of the existence of a bill. Holding their actions to a contract that they performed before the contract existed!

Okay. I think that's everything. So far.

There is one thing that I want to mention before ending this post, unfortunately it's a little conspiratorial, but it's so hard to believe that anyone genuinely thought this was a good idea that it's stuck in my brain as a significant possibility.

A few days ago it was reported that Unity's CEO sold 2,000 shares of his own company.

On September 6, 2023, John Riccitiello, President and CEO of Unity Software Inc (NYSE:U), sold 2,000 shares of the company. This move is part of a larger trend for the insider, who over the past year has sold a total of 50,610 shares and purchased none.

I would not be surprised if this decision gets reversed tomorrow, that it was literally only made for the CEO to short his own goddamn company, because I would sooner believe that this whole thing is some idiotic attempt at committing fraud than a real monetization strategy, even knowing how unfathomably greedy these people can be.

So, with all that said, what do we do now?

Well, in all likelihood you won't need to do anything. As I said, some of the biggest names in the industry would be directly affected by this change, and you can bet your bottom dollar that they're not just going to take it lying down. After all, the only way to stop a greedy CEO is with a greedier CEO, right?

(I fucking hate it here.)

And that's not mentioning the indie devs who are already talking about abandoning the engine.

[Links display tweets from the lead developer of Among Us saying it'd be less costly to hire people to move the game off of Unity and Cult of the Lamb's official twitter saying the game won't be available after January 1st in response to the news.]

That being said, I'm still shaken by all this. The fact that Unity is openly willing to go back and punish its developers for ever having used the engine in the past makes me question my relationship to it.

The news has given rise to the visibility of free, open source alternative Godot, which, if you're interested, is likely a better option than Unity at this point. Mostly, though, I just hope we can get out of this whole, fucking, environment where creatives are treated as an endless mill of free profits that's going to be continuously ratcheted up and up to drive unsustainable infinite corporate growth that our entire economy is based on for some fuckin reason.

Anyways, that's that, I find having these big posts that break everything down to be helpful.

[pumpkinpaix]

You have questions! We might have answers.

What is this collection?

As Maria puts it: this collection is a critical look at some of the things that we, the editors, think have made CQL such a hit around the world. Of course, part of that success comes from the webnovel MDZS and the show CQL themselves—we love the characters, the mystery, and the drama, who doesn’t?! However, the authors in our book also look at topics like translating danmei (both officially and unofficially), adapting danmei for new audiences, and interacting with fandoms and fanworks. The larger argument of the book is that all of these things played a huge role in CQL’s visibility and success, and we wanted to start making those moving pieces visible, especially for audiences who mainly watched CQL in translation.

You keep using the word “academic”—what does that mean, exactly? 

Maria: Ok, not to get pedantic here, but this actually touches on some things that I’m really excited about for the book. Traditionally, academic work is written by people who have a deep expertise in the subject (signified by having a PhD and doing specific kinds of research), and then the work itself is peer-reviewed (i.e., sent to other experts in the field for them to evaluate whether it’s sound, original, and interesting enough to publish, without knowing who wrote it). And both of these things are true about our book—our authors have deep knowledge and the book was peer reviewed—but also. We specifically asked for chapters from younger scholars and from fans who also have deep knowledge about topics that academia doesn’t always know or value enough, and we include an interview from the fan-translator K. who did the Exiled Rebels translation. So the hope is that: this book is academic, and also—more!

Who are you? 

Yue studies adaptation, fantasy, and popular culture texts using a feminist lens. She wrote an early, influential article about danmei adaptations and also has a book about feminist adaptations of Chinese fantasy.

Maria studies fanworks, contemporary fantasy, and genre literature. She’s scrambling to finish her dissertation right now.

How were the chapter spotlights chosen?

Voluntarily! The concept of a small social media promo was kicked around by some of the contributors and those interested in the idea filled out a short interview with what they wanted to share. We'll be posting about 2 introductions and 2 spotlights a day for the next week or so!

Who's running this social media campaign anyway?

Not the publishers! A few enthusiastic collection contributors got together and, with the assistance of the editors, have put this promotion together. We do not in any way represent Peter Lang in an official capacity! We just worked hard and wanted to share. :)

Are you making any money off of royalties from this book? 

LOL not even remotely

What about this promotion?

also no. alas

Where can I find this book? 

You can find our listing on Peter Lang’s website here. As for other retailers, a quick search should turn us up!  

How can I access this book if I cannot buy it from Peter Lang / [book retailer of choice]?

As collection editors and contributors who signed a legal agreement with Peter Lang, we have granted Peter Lang exclusive right and license to edit, adapt, publish, reproduce, distribute, display, and store our contributions, and we must cooperate fully with the Publisher if the Publisher believes a third party is infringing or is likely to infringe copyright in the contribution. 

That being said, these are academic papers, which means that contributors may make copies of the contribution for classroom teaching use! (These copies may not be included in course pack material for onward sale by libraries and institutions). Of course, any linking, collection or aggregation of chapters from the same volume is strictly prohibited.

(FAQ may be updated periodically!) (all posts on Catching Chen Qing Ling)

[tokoyamisstuff]

Fragments Pt. 1/3

Homelander / GN! Reader

Ch. 1: Fallen Angel

Summary: After a new drug rendered Homelander both powerless and amnesic, he gets saved by someone blissfully unaware of who he is.

Shoutout to @blindmagdalena who did the impossible: Making me simp for this guy. Your writing is simply impeccable! 💌

Warnings: Injury, blood, lots of exposition, not proofread

Notes: Hurt/comfort, OOC, pre-canon, Scientist! Reader, idc about logic gaps (I will cry if you point them out to me)

Four days already, and he still hasn't woken up.

Winter in the Canadian Arctic was rough, with the polar night bringing permanent darkness, as well as severe snowstorms that could last up to a week.

Luckily enough your old radio communication system was still functioning, so you were at least able to request a few necessities in advance: Food and water for another person, a doctor of course...

...and clothes for the guy you had to cut out of this ridiculous costume to patch him up properly.

Leaning back in your chair, you take some deep breaths, unable to concentrate on your work. Your glance unwillingly wanders back to the man lying on your bed, still unconscious.

Who knows how long the weather will cut you off from help arriving? You just hope he will make it until then.

Maybe it's for the better, though - since whoever had done this to him could still be out there wanting to finish the job, too.

It bordered on a miracle that he landed so close to your research station, when you were outside to notice at that. And the storm followed only shortly after you managed to pull him inside.

That man really had more luck than anything, even while having been messed up like this.

You watch him until you're sure he's still breathing and not in any discomfort, once again catching yourself admiring his handsome features.

If you didn't know any better, you'd say he was a literal fallen angel that crashed from the goddamn sky, right into your little front yard.

Damn it, the loneliness that came with this job made even your thoughts pathetic...

Well, to your defense, you've been raised pretty isolated your whole life, with parents being a doctor and a scientist that were devoted to spend their work at the most remote areas of the world.

It surely was a unique childhood with lots of traveling, and you were mostly spared the soulless corporate-controlled bullshit that was modern society. To add to that, your parents were never fond of using electronics for more than practical reasons. Not that there was internet connection where you lived either way.

All in all, while you obviously know about supes in general and might even have heard about Homelander the brief time you spent in civilization, the last time you've actually seen his face on a magazine or some sort was decades ago - and you didn't care enough to remember.

So it was no wonder that you were completely oblivious to who exactly was lying in your bed this whole time.

Sighing, you close your laptop with a dramatic gesture before making your way to the kitchen unit. You pour yourself a coffee to fill your rumbling stomach, having rationed the food in favor of your new involuntary roommate.

Having followed the footsteps of your parents - yet without proper funding - you led this mission all by yourself. At first it was bearable, since an elder native couple came to visit and assist you from time to time.

But your work demanded you to stay secluded from human intervention, deep in the mountains with the next tiny village being half a day march away. And now that winter made traveling scarce due to the dangers, the idea of some company certainly wasn't so bad.

You almost felt bad for being excited about him being here - whatever had happened to make him end up here was exactly the oppsite of great, after all.

Even though the emergency power aggregate was whirring loudly, the sound of strained groans reaches your ear - not the first time those past few days. So you immediately rush over to the man's side, pouring him a glass of water and dissolving some painkillers in it.

"It's gonna be alright" you assure him, unable to tell if he can even hear in this state. Blood is seeping through the makeshift bandages, making you realize you should probably reapply them soon. Maybe after the meds had some time to release their effect...

...however, just when the cup touched his lips, two icy blue eyes snapped open, making you wince.

"Don't touch me, fuck!" a raspy voice snapped at you, quite understandable in his situation. He pushed you away from him, causing you to stumble and fall as the glass scattered on the floor right next to you.

"Whe-where am I? And who the fuck are you?!"

"Who the fuck am I?" You felt almost offended at the accusation in his look, having to remind yourself that the person in front of you is in fact in an exceptional situation. "You're in my house. I found you injured in the middle of nowhere. So I should be asking you!"

His face fell in shock at the realization, internal struggle present in his features as he finally whispered - no, whimmered "I...can't remember..."

Racketing his brain around to make sense of the situation, he stumbled across his own words and repeated "I-I-I-I can't remember!"

"Can't remember what exactly?" You spoke more softly now as you got up, tentatively approaching him. He on the other hand jumped up from the bed, panic increasing with every passing second.

"Anything! I-I don't know who I am- shit, what happened?!" He was shaking, muscular chest having as he started to hyperventillate. You hesistantly put your hand on his back, feeling him tense at the sudden contact. "Please don't move too much. You're injured."

Only now he noticed the medical wraps around his chest, abdomen, left arm and both legs. Hell, his whole body was aching but the adrenaline wouldn't let this stop him from standing up, pacing around the small room.

Being overwhelmed with the situation as well, you decided it was best to tell him everything. "D-don't freak out, but we're in the middle of the arctic." Having a feeling that he wouldn't believe you - fair enough, though - you opened the door, revealing a snowy landscape. The doorway was already halfway buried under a snowy blanket, and the heavy winds were biting his exposed skin. "We'll have to wait until the storm settles. And even then, with your injuries you probably won't make it to the nearest village."

There was a long pause of silence between your explanation and his response, blinking at you in both disbelief and despair. "...if you don't know me, then how the hell did I get here?"

"My best guess is that you're a supe" you shrugged, hoping his memory loss didn't also affect his general knowledge. You pointed towards the torn bodysuit in the bin, stating matter-of-factly "You literally fell out of the sky. Even with the snow absorbing part of the impact, you should be dead - especially with those injuries."

Not really good at comforting someone, huh, you internally scolded yourself. Yet you gave it your best to calm him down and sign your goodwill.

"Sit down or your wounds will reopen." After a brief moment of looking at you all forlorn and maybe even a little distrustful, he accepted your help. You led him back to the edge of the bed, sitting next to each other as support for him to stay upright.

"Doesn't feel like anything about this body is 'super' right now..." he joked bitterly, rubbing his sides. You chuckle sympathetic, carefully patting his back in reassurance. "Maybe you don't have access to your powers because of the amnesia? I'm not quite sure how any of this works."

"Yeah, maybe..." His eyes were now locked on you, forcing a weak smile as he finally took a proper look at you. "You still didn't tell me to who I owe my life."

"Me?" as inappropriate as it was for the situation, he did manage to make you flustered just by that - and it didn't really help that he was still only in his underwear, testing your decency not to stare. "Oh, my name's Y/N Y/L/N. I'm an ecologist. Been here for eight months to document the effects of climate change on the biome, and-"

"Climate change?" he rose an eyebrow at you, "There's a goddamn snowstorm outside, woman."

Oh. He was one of those guys. Note taken.

"Anyways" you changed the topic to not provoke a pointless discussion, still unable to keep yourself from rolling your eyes. "Do you at least remember your name?"

The man clutched the ragged costume you had handed him, forcing his exhausted self to remember something, anything at all...

...but every time he tried, there was a sharp pain in his forehead that tore him away from the memories locked away somewhere in his brain.

And smehow, no matter how insane it might sound, he felt like this was his own mind's subtle warning to better keep it this way.

"I think...my name's John" he ultimately stated, rubbing his temples as his face contorted in pain. You continued rubbing circles on his back in an attempt to comfort him, whispering "Hey, don't overdo it. Focus on healing first, and then we'll see if anything else comes back. Alright?"

John nodded mutely, and you gifted him an uplifting smile, cheering "Well then, nice to officially meet you, John! Feel at home as long as you need."

He shook your hand almost symbolically, feeling almost hopeful knowing that despite the grim situation, he was supported by such a kind stranger.

"Nice to meet you too, Y/N. I'm all in your hands."

_____

A/N: This was written on my phone at 1am, so please bear with me. The next chapters are gonna be better.

[Part Two]

[ninjagobythenumbers]

Bechdel Testing Ninjago

So, a little while ago I did the Bechdel test on Ninjago because I've always seen the show as sort of an interesting case study in how women are portrayed in cartoons. Of course, I'm aware the Bechdel test originated as a joke and something passing the Bechdel test doesn't make it feminist/not. Rather, or for me at least, it's an indication of how deficient female representation can be at an aggregate scale. As a way to analyze Ninjago, I feel it works as it shows how female representation over the course of the show. If you're interested I'll now discuss my thoughts on how the analysis went season by season. DISCLAIMER: I did this for fun.

The pilot was easy. Nya's the only one, so test failed across the board. The first episode that passed the test was when Jay's parents came to visit. Yay Edna! Mystake does show up in episode 7 but, I don't count it as she has not yet been named. 12&13 had a kid's mom in a bus which I decided was enough cus hey, Mom's a name she uses.

Here's where we really get going. Patty Keys, their real estate agent continues to show up through seabound as a background character, which is pretty cool imo. Episode 5, Mystake finally gets named. Episode 6 was huge for my chart as it's the introduction of Misako. You'd think episode 7 is when her and Nya talked but that's actually when Nya and Gayle had a lil convo. From then on I spent the episodes just staring at the Nya and Misako thinking "talk to her talk to her talk to her." Fortunately, when they did speak, Nya and Misako would be discuss like science, maps, and fate of the world so I never ran into a problem with rule 3. That is, until Rebooted.

The good news is Pixal's here so it'll be years before we fail rule 1 again. The bad news is we've got a love triangle so goodbye rule 3. Nya actually talked to her student, Sally, and Pixal quite often but it was so often about Jay or Cole so I would just be scouring the episode for a single exchange where they talked about anything else. During the Tournament, Nya, Pixal, Skylor, and Misako were all in different groupings and it was rare that Tox or Camille would say something so no rule 2/3 successes until late season.

The good news is, the love triangle is over so we're back to rule 2 usually meaning rule 3. The bad news is, Pixal's in Zane's head so we're back to hoping Misako and Nya say something to eachother. Nya usually shared her scenes with Wu, Ronin, and Jay during these seasons so chances were few and far between. However, unlike the first few seasons where the default was male, we're now getting some female henchmen (Bansha and Dogshank) so that made things easier.

Thank you for being in Day of the Departed Edna Walker. Early Hands of Time was tough because Nya, Misako, and Commander Macchia were rarely in the same scenes. In the latter half of the season though, we thankfully see the return of Pixal. Maya also helped us with some wins.

What a breath of fresh air. Thanks to Harumi & Ultraviolet's introduction, Pixal's return, Mystake's upgrade to a reoccuring character, and Nya & Misako's continued support, failing even rule 3 is pretty rare during the Oni Trilogy. We run into some complications during Hunted because though we have Skylor and the aforementioned characters in Ninjago and Faith & Jet Jack in the First Realm, sometimes people don't talk to eachother. And that's ok. Overall, smooth sailing.

Ah??!? What happened. Worry not. I realized this was, in part, because the Oni Trilogy had 20 minutes worth of chances for women to speak to eachother, these were only 10 minute episodes. So, for the sake of comparable units of analysis, I considered each pair of episodes to be 1 episode. I'll show both charts until DR.

It looks a little better, but it's still not at Oni Trilogy levels. Still, I'd be curious to see what the test would look like if I dissected the earlier episodes into 10 minute chunks because it's probably not a great sign if 10 v 20 minutes makes such a big difference. Ok, proceeding. The Fire Chapter was usually pretty successful because Pixal, Aspheera, or Nya would usually end up talking at one point or another. Gayle even helped at one point. The Ice chapter usually achieved successes through Nya talking to Sorla. In one episode, I counted the Preminent's roars as conversation with Pixal. The Ice Chapter had quite a few failures largely because, as in previous seasons, all the women were split up.

Despite the fact that Nya was one of the longest lived ninja, Prime Empire has total failures at levels not seen since before season 2. This is largely because for the most part, Pixal and Nya are never in the same episode. Racer 7 helps but she was only there for a bit. I should point out that I feel like the 10 minute era is really when Pixal starts feeling like part of the team to me. She's always part of homebase meetings and always plays a key part in missions. Alas, if she's not in episodes with Nya, that's not going to show up on my chart. It's a reminder of the fact this test doesn't show substance.

Master of the Mountain is similar to the other seasons of its era. The fact the 10 minute era tended to show its plots episode by episode (ex: Ep 3 = Plot A, Ep 4 = Plot B, Ep 5 = Plot C) rather than all in one really takes a toll on the test. For the most part, Nya and Vania were our only chances for success and it was rare they'd share an episode. We also had the rare rule 3 failure with the Queen of the Munce episode. Thanks Jay. The Island only had Nya until they found Misako, so it was struggling even more.

It feels right to see all green when it's a Nya season. In the beginning of Seabound, they put Nya, Pixal, and Maya on a boat together and by jove it made things easy. Late season was a bit trickier because Nya was on her own journey. Crystalized had Skylor, Pixal and some ressurected villains saving the day. Late Crystalized is the way it is because it had so, so many different groupings. I have a chart based on groupings and this season was such a challenge.

I really felt the difference with Dragons Rising. I mean, you can see the difference, but it was even more clear when doing my data collection because it was just so easy. Rather than grabbing at scraps of dialogue like I had to do in early seasons, there was often a wealth of more meaningful conversation between female characters to choose from. As with the Oni Trilogy, a female villain with a female henchman makes things easy because they scheme together. We also had Nya and Sora on a joint quest. Funnily enough, there is a rare rule 3 failure because Sora and Kreel only talked about Kreel's friend in one episode. Episode 17 had the classic split up issue and actually would've failed entirely if not for Agent Underwood, which is actually a great example of my next point. You can really tell how male is no longer the default because not only is there the introduction of all the fantastic new female main characters, but also there's plenty of random female characters scattered throughout. I haven't seen DRS2P2 yet but I expect it'll be more of the same. I should mention I also made a chart with the reverse (two named men in an episode who talk about eachother about something besides a woman). Only three episodes fail in any capacity. (Say thank you to the Akita, Pixal, and Harumi solo episodes). If you read this whole thing, thank you. I had a lot of fun doing it. Let me know if there's any other charts I can do!

[gynandromorph]

god this shit took forever to sketch. another NofNA emulation comic. it reminds me of the midterms in secretary, for obvious reasons, but Legend is sort of an inverse secretary situation, where she is exceptional at fighting, but wants to write.

let me see what i can remember...

PS, the blue-eyed black lemur, has been friends with Legend since their mutual first season at college, as mentioned above her reference sketch... they probably became more friendly after being paired up to peer edit each others' work. PS has since graduated from college and works as a markscraft. Legend frequently commissions PS to scribe for her, not only because they are friends, but because PS is one of the few markscrafts in the area who isn't a rodent. many primates go into law or medicine. mainly Legend commissions notetaking in classes -- she is too insecure to share her stories. PS has a more relaxed, informal personality, and i tried to get that across -- i think it's relevant to why she decided to become a markscraft instead of pursuing more intense study. still, i also tried to get across that they are good friends, not just scribe and customer, particularly with the amount of touching that PS does. the impulse to touch and groom is probably innate for her as a primate. there isn't as much information about her species, but in ring-tailed lemurs, lemurs usually only groom based on the strongest bonds, rather than more communal aggregate grooming as a sort of social currency. i honestly don't know what PS would need to note during finals, but i think Legend just Wanted her there anyway.

the bird, DL, fighting the squirrel, GG, is a grey shrike. i imagine him as an average student in the middle of his education, but i think he is in the class for combat purposes, because pressure point manipulation can be incredibly powerful, more so if from a less expected species like a bird.

mr. deciding is a much more serious, no-nonsense teacher, possibly due to his specialty. when you're teaching students how to explode a kidney with a handshake, you probably just play it safe and try to put the fear of god into them before any kidneys get exploded. i wanted this class to have a much heavier emphasis on safety of the participants than the class in secretary, with a more focused goal than "who can beat the shit out of each other better." i think the goal of fighting to show off knowledge here is still Fucking Insane, but it's just. their culture, i guess. you can technically "move" your pressure points, so being able to defend yourself by utilizing this knowledge can also show off what you've retained. the mouse next to him is a proctor, who is an extra teacher brought in to judge and often write for another teacher, but primarily as a peacekeeper and bouncer. in classes where a student can theoretically totally disable a teacher by just touching them once, the precaution is seen as necessary. the mouse is probably a combat-oriented point invocation instructor.

the mandrill, MK, is a first-season or first-year student -- i assume that one class, from midterms to finals, is a season, as secretary seems to start near autumn. midterms have snow, and finals are during early spring. anyway, that's tangential. i think he's very new to the educational system. i pictured him as a medical student. in his fighting style, i made him more defensive; he doesn't really know nearly as much about attacking an opponent in a fight. he does think at least about his opponent's most immediate reactions, but doesn't have enough experience with fighting to think ahead to the degree that Legend does. you can see him make the same mistake that Legend did against Machinations, which disables his non-dominant hand. needless to say, he will probably always be aware of headbutt proximity now. he attempts to use two factures in the fight within a style meant to evoke debilitating vertigo by manipulating the connection between the occular, vestibular, and proprioceptive systems. it's obvious that he created the style from his medical classes. it is fairly empty as far as styles go. interrupted facture: nystagmus, which causes the world to spin around the opponent by involuntarily twitching the eyes back and forth. second facture: strabismus, which misaligns the pupils, primarily impeding aim. denied by Legend because a honey badger does not rely on vision or a vestibular system as much as a primate does -- not something he really considered when making the style. factures that never ended up being used: pursuit, which forces the target to follow a spinning image of themselves instead of looking where they should; and mask's lasting, which forcibly initiates saccadic masking, suppressing the intake of new visual information altogether.

the large bird is a bateleur. the mouse is just a regular house mouse. the lizard is an ornate sandveld lizard. the opponent of the lizard is a common mole-rat, also called an african mole-rat (even though most species of mole-rats live in africa). the monkey god i'm not super sure but i believe it's just a vervet monkey. the other mouse is also a common house mouse.

GG is a second-year student, which is the last year for a rodent. i think she's been kind of aimless -- she thinks incredibly fast as a squirrel, and finds solving problems in the moment to be a much more successful endeavor than trying to plan ahead. she doesn't worry about the future and doesn't ruminate on the past much. she's aware that she isn't the best ever and doesn't apply herself as much as others, but it also doesn't particularly bother her. kind of ironic, given the aesop she slops onto Legend after the fight. i imagine that she will eventually choose the name Serendipity. i tried to write her lack of foresight, but compensatory quick thinking in both fights. like the shrike, GG is a combat-oriented student. the style she briefly introduces at the beginning is called fanciful flower's delightful blight. it is based on the deadly nightshade flower and its berries -- which are toxic, obviously, and a hallucinogenic. squirrels flick their tails for many reasons, and the most common reason is simply a default flicking to attract predators. their tails are designed to "deglove" easily; if a predator lunges for their tail, which is the moving part of them, the skin and fur will tear off, and the squirrel can escape. delightful blight utilizes the attention-grabbing flicking of the squirrel's tail as a nightshade plant to induce a trance-like state. the berries represent temptations so much more pleasing than what you ought to focus on. a nice berry and a flower to smell are so much nicer than struggling in a fight. even when you resist them, they linger in your mind, and "plant seeds" when the berry falls as self-restraint is worn down over repeated abstinence from the temptation. factures induce hallucinations and nausea. she primarily uses the base rodent style to fight Legend here, but also uses base squirrel style twists, which include more acrobatics, backflipping, and contortions.

the two things that really catch Legend off-guard use limbs that she doesn't have, and most opponents don't have -- elbows long enough to use defensively, and a long, rope-like tail. she is otherwise supposed to be fairly adept at analyzing what an opponent will do, usually a few steps ahead, related to her ability to fabricate narratives quickly. you can see her also come up with a lie for kicking GG fairly quickly... she was going to say the impulse was in her legs because she was trying to move away from GG's strike.

anyway if any part of this fight is like... unfathomable i can probably explain. i've already been typing for way too long, lmfao

[hellsite-proteins]

i have only made a few structures for this account so far, but i'm quickly realizing that none of these text posts really look like anything. so, here are a few of my favourite real proteins for your enjoyment!

Sonic Hedgehog

this is probably one of the most famous examples of a protein with a pop culture name. it was first discovered in fruit flies, but also exists in humans and is important in embryonic development. because of its relevance to serious health conditions, the name has been highly criticized

structure:

ATP Synthase

we all know that the mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell, but that doesn't fully take into account how cool it is! ATP is the 'energy currency' of the cell, and is synthesized using a proton gradient and this awesome motor of a protein. the best way to understand it is by watching animations like this video.

structure:

BiP

this is a chaperone in the endoplasmic reticulum, which basically means it binds to proteins as they are synthesized and translocated into the ER lumen, allowing them to slowly fold into the correct shape. chaperones in general are really neat, but this one has the bonus of sounding cool, and gets bonus points for being inside the endomembrane system instead of just out in the cytosol.

structure:

GFP

this fluorescent protein was originally found in jellyfish, but exists in other animals as well, and gives off green fluorescence when exposed to UV light. it is commonly used in research to tag and visualize things, and E. coli cells expressing GFP are visibly green when grown on a plate (I've worked with them and they look very cool!) this protein has a beta barrel, and the parts around it have been modified to create new versions with different colours

structure:

Prion protein

the prion protein is naturally expressed, but its function is unknown. however, it is best known due to prion disease, which is caused by misfolded versions of the protein that spread destruction like an infectious agent as they cause nearby healthy proteins to become misfolded. this causes conditions including chronic wasting disease in deer, mad cow disease in cattle and Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease in humans. prions constantly change their structure unless they are bound to something else, which forms a very stable structure. this then continues to bind other proteins, eventually forming an aggregate that damages tissue.

structure:

all of these structures were downloaded from pdb and the structures are linked

[glass--beach]

hi do you like ok computer (1997)

because i really just don't get it (especially as the second-best album of all time) but i reeeally want to & i respect your opinion on that a lot

yea that album kinda changed the course of my life lol. wall of text incoming

first - don’t let rym or aoty or whatever tell you what’s good and what isn’t, everybody’s got their own taste & criticisms that go against the grain are very important!! i will say anything that’s that consistently highly rated across different websites & publications is probably undeniably significant and worth listening to. whether listening feels like discovering a new favorite or sitting through a history lesson is where taste comes in. it’s important to interrogate the canon too as there is an enormous amount of implicit bias in what even gets in front of critics and in the metrics they grade music by. review aggregate sites have democratized this process a bit & all the good and bad of democracy has come with that lol.

so, the album gets praised for a couple of reasons - its innovative production, its commentary on the historical zeitgeist, and the pop appeal of much of the songwriting.

production - the album makes heavy use of cutting edge effects units, digital editing, computer trackers, sampling, and even features little bits of voice synthesis. most of it is stuff that had existed in music before radiohead, artists like aphex twin (and much of the rest of warp records’ 90s catalog) and bjork were ahead of the curve in a lot of the aesthetic aspects of okc and had influenced radiohead a lot, which is even more evident on their followup kid a. radiohead was not breaking new ground in using these sounds, but they were among the first to put it all in a rock context, taking cues from the weirder cuts on the beatles’ white album, the experimental “krautrock” band can, and miles davis’ classic jazz fusion album bitches brew.

context - radiohead had grown up during the decline of much of the social democratic programs that had helped to facilitate the education and performing careers of much of their early influences such as joy division and the smiths. by the time okc was being written they had lived through the austerity of the thatcher era, the fall of the soviet union, and now were watching the labour party turn increasingly neoliberal under tony blair. there was a general sentiment in the west that the progress of history had slowed or even stopped in favor of the neoliberal order. at the same time, tech was booming and computers were starting to find their way into more aspects of daily life. the album imagines a boring dystopia, where machines are rabidly advancing but humans are stuck in stasis. a major connecting theme is infrastructure - the airbag through which thom yorke is “born again,” the “cracks in the pavement,” the family politics that separate romeo and juliet in exit music, the mechanical voice of fitter happier giving contradictory directions for maintaining the status quo. even the escapist fantasy of no surprises comes in the form of carbon monoxide. and then, the record ends with the “ding” of an appliance that has completed its task.

songwriting - the band’s previous album the bends really is a pop masterpiece. i recommend it to anybody who wants to get into radiohead but doesn’t vibe with their later work. okc expands that compositional style through, for one thing, the more apparent influence of classical music on tracks like paranoid android or the Chopin homage exit music; let down even features polymetric layering characteristic of Steve Reich. it also features some songs that are too good to even need to push the envelope much, like karma police or one of my favorites, no surprises, which seems to reference the beach boys’ wouldn’t it be nice or the velvet underground’s sunday morning.

to be honest, i like okc mostly because it really spoke to me at a formative time in my life, when i was like 15 and felt heavily disconnected from the world around me. the album deals with those feelings in a very different context but it’s a feeling many people can relate to for many different reasons - i was closeted in a conservative culture, not a depressed british rock star lol. it also was an excellent gateway into many of the bands’ influences, who are also favorites of mine now. most people who love the album don’t really go as deep as i like to with understanding it, but maybe what i said here will give you something else to listen for, idk. maybe you just gave me an excuse to infodump about an album i love lol :)

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Uplinkchump Linkdump

On June 20, I'm keynoting the LOCUS AWARDS in OAKLAND.

It's Linkdump Saturday! This is the day on which I clear the giant backlog of links from the previous week that I haven't managed to post in my newsletter's "Hey look at this" sections. This is my 19th linkdump; here's the previous 18 dumps:

https://pluralistic.net/tag/linkdump/

Let's start with some fun and games. Liam is a high-schooler who created "Bad Plumbing," a Jenga-style boardgame using a variety of 3D printed shapes; the game was a smash hit at his local game-jam, so now he's kickstarting it:

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/liamclift/bad-plumbing

The shapes are delightful and Seussian, and there's a very ingenious game dynamic that's not just "make the pile bigger." You can pre-order for $30, and for $100, you'll get a version with a custom-designed shape of your specification. I backed!

It's lovely to see something that's both excellent and delightful, but to be honest, the majority of this week's links are excellent and enraging. Most of these links from The American Prospect, which has, under David Dayen's executive leadership, gone from "a magazine I really like" to "the first thing I read every day."

This week saw a the Prospect publish a stunning series of articles on prices, a sacred object for neoliberal economists, who see them as the carriers of the information that allows society to order itself for maximum efficiency and broadest benefit. Unfortunately for these economists, the love-affair with prices is one-sided: they may love prices, but prices hate neoliberalism.

The dogma that says that any government interference in pricing will destroy the economy by "distorting" prices does not survive contact with reality. The instant the government steps away from regulating monopoly, and its handmaiden, fraud, prices go batshit crazy.

This week's Pluralistic newsletters were dominated by this brilliant series in the Prospect. On Wednesday, I wrote about the Prospect's investigations into algorithmic and surveillance pricing:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/06/05/your-price-named/#privacy-first-again

And yesterday, it was the epidemic of junk fees:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/06/07/drip-drip-drip/#drip-off

There's more than I could fit into the newsletter, though, like Friday's excellent piece on the scourge of surge pricing by Sarah Jaffe:

https://prospect.org/economy/2024-06-07-urge-to-surge/

Jaffe's piece was especially interesting given economist Ramsi Woodcock's compelling case that surge pricing is a per se violation of antitrust law:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/07/26/aggregate-demand/#pure-transfer

The Prospect series was so timely. After decades of pricing orthodoxy, economists like Isabella Weber are making huge waves (and attracting a tsunami of abuse). Weber's interview with Vass Bednar on the Globe and Mail's Lately podcast this week is a must-listen:

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/podcasts/lately/article-the-millennial-economist-who-took-on-the-world/

(Though if you get your econ ideas from the New York Times, you'd miss this whole revolution, as the Grey Lady's views on prices remain mired in the Reagan era:)

https://twitter.com/HalSinger/status/1798849195664916648

Few prices are more important than the price of the roof over your head – after all, "shelter" is only second to "food" in the hierarchy of needs. Dayen's Friday story for the Prospect in NIMBYism gets to the crux of the cost-of-living crisis: people who own houses want houses to be expensive, and will go to enormous lengths to make sure that shelter costs as much as possible:

https://prospect.org/infrastructure/housing/2024-06-07-homeowners-want-housing-prices-to-go-up/

Dayen attributes this to "the wealth effect" – that is, most people would like to be richer, and the minority of Americans who have a positive net worth owe that status to rising house prices, and the plurality of Americans who have a negative net worth thanks to a mortgage are counting on rising house prices to flip them into the black.

When America threw off the Gilded Age, we charted two courses to prosperity for working people: labor unions and home ownership. The ruling class cannily convinced us to rely solely on the latter. The housing emergency raging across the country is the inevitable result of that decision:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/06/06/the-rents-too-damned-high/

The Prospect's consistent brilliance isn't merely an editorial matter, of course. The magazine features a recurring cast of some of the best muckraking writers in the field, and the absolute peak of that impressive pile is Maureen Tkacik. Tkacik's work on Boeing is stunning:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/01/boeing-boeing/#mrsa

Her labor coverage is second to none:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/14/prop-22-never-again/#norms-code-laws-markets

And no one writes better than her about private equity:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/06/02/plunderers/#farben

I am in pure awe of Tkacik's prolific and expert work. So when I read her piece on Long Covid in the Prospect this week, I was stunned to learn that she has been severely disabled by this heavily downplayed – but rampant – chronic illness:

https://prospect.org/health/2024-06-06-nih-perpetuating-long-covid-denial/

The fact that Tkacik is doing this career-defining, high-frequency work while being randomly smashed by a series of acute Long Covid incidents makes her achievements nothing sort of heroic. But Tkacik's Long Covid coverage isn't a lament for her personal situation – it's a characteristically brilliant investigative story about the systematic cover-up of Long Covid by the NIH, which has a long history of dismissing inconvenient illnesses as psychosomatic, from black lung to chronic fatigue.

Tkacik's Long Covid coverage adds yet another subject where I'm learning more from the Prospect than from other sources – part of a host of issues where the magazine leads the pack. An issue far more squarely in its wheelhouse is antitrust, especially the intersection of antitrust and labor rights.

This week, I eagerly devoured Luke Goldstein's story about the latest in a series of lies that Amazon executives were caught making to the US government:

https://prospect.org/labor/2024-06-06-senators-allege-amazon-lied-delivery-drivers/

You may recall when Jeff Bezos lied to Congress, claiming that the company didn't spy on its sellers and clone their best products:

https://www.bbc.com/news/business-58961836

Or when Amazon posted a lying rebuttal to a Congressman who objected to its drivers being forced to pee in bottles in order to meet its punishing schedules:

https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/policy-news-views/our-recent-response-to-representative-pocan

The latest lie: Jeff Bezos and CEO Andy Jassy lied to the Senate about the company's relationship to its drivers, whom it insists are "independent contractors" because they are hired through cutouts called "Delivery Service Providers":

https://pluralistic.net/2022/04/17/revenge-of-the-chickenized-reverse-centaurs/

These drivers work for Amazon. It dictates their working conditions. It installs cameras that watch their eyeballs while they drive. It enforces an illegal "no poach" system that fixes their wages. And it lies about all this. To the Senate.

You know what they say, it's not the crime, it's the cover-up. Tech barons go through life in a warm bath of their own bullshit, surrounded by lackeys who are contractually prohibited from calling them on it. They forget that there are people out there in the world who won't offer them this deference – including lawmakers and regulators.

That's why Facebook lied to the FCC when they bought Instagram, withholding key information in order to secure regulatory permission for the merger:

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/ftc-claims-facebook-withheld-information-152834983.html

After decades of inattention, the world's governments have discovered a newfound energy for busting trusts and smashing corporate power. Five years ago, it looked like maybe this was a fixup by Big Cable or Big Content to take Big Tech off the board so they could claim more dominion over our lives:

https://memex.craphound.com/2019/06/04/why-is-there-so-much-antitrust-energy-for-big-tech-but-not-for-big-telco/

Today, every sector is coming in for antitrust scrutiny, and the tempo is only increasing. Just this week, the FTC and DOJ opened investigations into Microsoft, Openai, and Nvidia:

https://www.theverge.com/2024/6/6/24172868/ftc-doj-antitrust-openai-microsoft-nvidia-investigations

Yeah, there's still a lot of policy focus on tech, but that's because tech has extended its tendrils into every area of policy. That's the end-point of a decades-long process of tech going from sitting alongside important policy questions to being inseparable from them. I've had a front-row seat for that transformation, through my work with EFF, whose brief just keeps expanding as tech infuses every aspect of our lives and rights.

The latest example; EFF's "Surveillance Defense for Campus Protests" by Rory Mir, Thorin Klosowski and Christian Romero:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2024/06/surveillance-defense-campus-protests

The military has gone all-in on electronic surveillance, and campuses have gone all-in on militarized policing, so campuses are now sites of electronic warfare, and protesters are vastly overmatched. This is an excellent and timely guide.

Well, this is where this week's linkdump comes to an end. It only falls to me to send you off with one last week: Libro.fm's buy-one/get-one sale on DRM-free audiobooks, with a share of each sale going to an indie bookstore of your choosing! This is a heckin deal, and a great way to start weaning yourself off of the Audible monopoly (also, my latest novel The Bezzle, is in the sale):

https://libro.fm/bogo

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/2024/06/08/medley/#the-prospect

Image: Cjp24 https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Automobiles_in_a_french_junkyard.jpg

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

[genericpuff]

So Webtoons is getting sued by a bunch of law firms in class action lawsuit. Saw it on reddit. Apparently they lied to shareholders about revenue which is like one of the worst things I could imagine doing to your shareholders. Then their stock dropped again. Wow....wonder how this is gonna effect readers going forward or how they're gonna be more exploitative in the future. Not saying the down of Webtoons has begun but I wonder if it's gonna be the start of it.

Yep, I've been following this since the initial investigations began.

All that said, we likely won't see anything of this for a while, if anything even comes of it. The reality is that Webtoons... really didn't actually lie about being bad at making money. It's literally outlined in their IPO documentation:

So these lawsuits, at least in my opinion (*I AM NOT A LAWYER NOR AM I ANYONE WHO HAS ANY EXPERIENCE PLACING WALL STREET BETS, TAKE WHAT I HAVE TO SAY WITH MOUNTAINS OF SALT) is less about Webtoons 'lying' to shareholders and more so about them kicking the debt down the road which these lawyers want to try and hold them accountable for. It's not uncommon for startups to seek out private and/or public funding to help them stay out of bankruptcy, but such practice is incredibly shitty because if a company was already near the point of bankruptcy to begin with, what exactly is going to change to ensure that they actually make that money back with an additional net gain for those investors?

So in that sense, either something will come of this, or it won't, nothing's really a guarantee as of now. It's just as common for startups seeking public investments to get sued within their first 1-2 years because a company not returning on their initial investments within 3-6 months is a prime cut for lawyers to drool over. Despite their attempts to be honest about their earnings, the vast majority of Wall Street investors are paranoid little fuckers who invest in whatever's new and exciting with the hopes that it'll turn them a profit quickly and without headache. Unfortunately, Webtoons isn't a company that's known for having huge profit margins, which these investors would have realized if they knew anything about this industry or at the very least, bothered to read the fine print that Webtoons was obligated to lay out for them in their documentation. At best the majority of them saw Webtoons' offering that covered buzzwords like "content generation" and "AI" and went "yes please, I love money!" without realizing that webtoons, as a medium, have some of the highest production expenses to lowest-paying demographics out there and therefore companies like Webtoons aren't going to be a short-term gratification. It's more like waiting it out for the "next big thing" that will make that stock valuable again, a massive gamble that isn't guaranteed to payoff. And that's just the game of Wall Street in general.

That said, it's because of how difficult it is to directly monetize digital comics that Webtoons often has to rely on selling merchandise and IP rights in the hopes they'll land a whale - but even their pre-existing whales like Lore Olympus and Let's Play have either nothing to show for themselves, or have left the platform entirely. Of course, they'll vaguely claim that two of Netflix's highest-performing projects came from their platform, but any peek at an aggregated Top 10 list will prove that that is simply not true, and at best, they're referring to True Beauty's live action adaption, which is simply not even close to breaching that list of all-time top-performers (except probably in Korea but this is Goldman Sachs and their American investors they're trying to convince), All of Us are Dead (see above, same situation as True Beauty), and Heartstopper which is... not even an Originals series. Of course, that didn't stop Webtoons and Tapas from boasting about Heartstopper's Netflix adaption and its success on the platform, but literally none of its success is exclusively owed to either of those platforms, Alice Oseman flies solo and if anything, Heartstopper never would have gotten to the point it's at if it were tied down to a Webtoon Originals contract.

So in a sense, until anything comes of these lawsuits, they're more so just lawyers jumping on their own investment opportunity - the opportunity to get settlements from Webtoons for both their clients and themselves by extension. At best what they feasibly have against Webtoons is the company getting way too high on their own supply without anything to feasibly show in terms of profit for their IP's. Considering how many IP's they sold to television and film production studios back in 2019-2022 when they were at their peak over the lockdowns - a peak that is long in the rearview mirror - they are incredibly behind in actually paying off those promises. Even in a recent meeting they held just the other day with Goldman Sachs, they're quoted as saying: "When Rachel Smythe was a graphic designer in New Zealand, 4 or 5 years ago, and she had a story to tell, we enabled her to not just tell it in one part of the world, but globally. She became a NYT Bestselling author, she is rumored to be releasing soon as a major animated release."

When even the company that hosts Lore Olympus as its prize pig can only say that its long-anticipated TV production that both Rachel and Webtoons have been assuring people on repeat that the show is "still happening" and that what they've seen so far "looks amazing" is simply 'rumored to be releasing soon'... I don't even have the words to describe how embarrassing that is for them. Never mind the fact that Lore Olympus has been over for months and both it and its creator, Rachel, have been falling into the pits of irrelevancy. They don't have any other home-runners to bet on, they're just continuing to bank on Rachel as their own example of someone who "got big" even though it was years ago and that fame is now shrinking with the passage of time, you can even see the performance of the series dipping in its own front-end metrics over time. They are trying so hard to convince people that they're worth investing in when the one thing that actually DID have that kind of allure has now come and gone.

Never mind the fact that again, most Wall Street investors probably don't even participate in webtoon culture so the name "Rachel Smythe" isn't some golden ticket to fortune. Lore Olympus might get a bit more of a reaction, but it's going to be a lot more mixed due to how divisive the series became in the end, and general audiences who are new to Webtoons as a public company (and the medium as a whole) are still not so likely to know what the fuck that means or why it's significant. The best time to pull the "we have Rachel Smythe!" card in the public investing pool was, like many other things Webtoons has fallen behind in, years ago. Now it's clear Webtoons thinks that Rachel is their own personal J.K. Rowling, but they forgot the part where Rachel is creating for an incredibly niche and historically unprofitable medium that is nowhere near as big as what Harry Potter was back in its prime, and - personally speaking - that Rowling and Rachel are both, well... terrible at what they do.

Webtoons also has the added burden of not being a startup company. They're not some grassroots Silicon Valley tech startup run by a bunch of friends "with a dream", they're an extension of an industry that thrives overseas but barely has any infrastructure to support it here. They've been bankrolled for years by an overseeing tech company - Naver - but have consistently failed to get out of the red and so of course, now they're turning to public investments to help them out and subsequently, are passing that debt off to the next highest bidder, which is Wall Street. They had nearly a decade to figure their shit out here in the West and while they had their opportunities to thrive, those opportunities have come and gone, a lot of doors have closed and now this all feels like their own attempts to rip those doors back open again.

There is a LOT to insinuate already that Webtoons - a Korean-hosted platform - wasn't ready to enter the Western market and this fumbling of their public stock image is yet another great example of that. Even outside of Webtoons, other Korean-run platforms like Tapas have relied on private investments to keep them afloat (and still do, Tapas is still operating privately) and have routinely struggled to get a real foothold in the greater Western industry despite how much they hyped themselves up as the "next big thing". They're all playing the same game over and over again expecting better scores even though the playing fields are entirely different than what they've come to expect in Korea, where much of the entertainment industry is built around webtoons, much like how our entertainment industry in the West is built around comic giants like Marvel and DC (and even those giants are faltering as we've been seeing over the past several years).

Anyways. I don't know if this lawsuit is gonna go anywhere, there's a lot to the legal process that could lead to a variety of different outcomes, but at the very least, their plummeting stock value and the lawyers circling them from above is yet another notch on their belt of fuck-ups over the past few years. I know it's easy to say this in hindsight and I'm not the kind of guy to say "I told you so", but considering I've been following along with the bullshit of these major platforms for years and knew as soon as Webtoons was rumored to be going forward with an IPO that it would lead to disaster, I'm pretty confident in saying, "No really, I told you so." And I don't entirely blame the investors for that (except for the ones that clearly didn't read the fine print) - I also blame Webtoons for that, because they are a chronically unprofitable company run by a bunch of clowns who manufactured their own demise by getting in WAY over their heads and clearly don't even have a concept of a plan let alone an actionable one.

And that sucks, because the people who stand to get hurt the most are the ones who were made those empty promises years ago, long before the platform entered Wall Street - and that's the creators who were promised that their livelihoods would be secured and their work would be protected.

I will forever bully and make fun of Webtoons for everything they've done in and to this industry. I hope at the very least those investors learned an expensive lesson, and that the damage these lawsuits have already caused to Webtoons' public image - regardless of whether or not these lawsuits win - empowers others who have been screwed over by them to speak up and make their moves. They are not a monolith. They are a brittle business operating from the trunk of a clown car on their way to becoming a penny-stocks sham.

Fuck Webtoons <3

[centrally-unplanned]

I saw this figure "doing numbers" as a sort of shocking stat, a symbol of a world monetizing all sexuality or the like, and I don't think it is. OnlyFan's latest numbers are 305 million accounts, which is not, at all, the same thing as 305 million active users paying money. OnlyFans is a diverse porn platform with a lot of market segmentation; there are legions of free creator accounts (and "free" accounts), teaser content, etc. And meanwhile making an account is required for most viewing and takes five seconds.

Imagine if I told you, wide-eyed, that 4% of the world population had been on PornHub once. Would that shock you? The majority of people consume porn, and if they consume porn they do so pretty frequently. When doing that, they are going to at some point use the Biggest Sites Ever, like of course. It is the equivalent of telling me "did you know 4% of people have used google for porn." Wow, yeah, that is how platform aggregation works.

For a new generation of sex workers, OnlyFans is the default content hosting site. People will ofc migrate their habits. Most people won't ever pay (or will test and bounce), but the numbers don't really care about that. This stat is just a way of saying OnlyFans is doing well at attracting creator talent; you already knew that at least 4% of humanity consumed porn.

(Ignore the original source's aggrieved culture war framing lol)

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Jessica Valenti at Abortion, Every Day:

Indiana Attorney General Todd Rokita says that abortion reports aren’t medical records, and that they should be available to the public in the same way that death certificates are. While Rokita pushes for public reports, New Hampshire lawmakers are fighting over a Republican bill to collect and publish abortion data, and U.S. Sen. Tommy Tuberville has introduced a bill that would require the Department of Veterans Affairs to collect and provide data on the abortions performed at its facilities. Just last week, Kansas Gov. Laura Kelly vetoed legislation that would have required abortion providers to ask patients invasive and detailed questions about why they were getting abortions, and provide those answers in a report to the state.   All of these moves are part of a broader strategy that weaponizes abortion data to stigmatize patients and to prosecute providers. And while most states have some kind of abortion reporting law, legislators are increasingly trying to expand the scope of the data, and use it to dismantle women’s privacy.

Rokita’s ‘advisory opinion’, for example, argues that abortion data collected by the state isn’t private medical information and that in order to prosecute abortion providers, he needs detailed reports to be public. In the past, the state has issued reports on each individual abortion. But as a result of Indiana’s ban, there are only a handful of abortions being performed in the state. As such, the Department of Health decided to release aggregate reports to protect patient confidentiality, noting that individual reports could be “reverse engineered to identify patients—especially in smaller communities.” Rokita—best known for his harassment campaign against Dr. Caitlin Bernard, the abortion provider who treated a 10-year-old rape victim—is furious over the change. He says the only way he can arrest and prosecute people is if he gets tips from third parties, presumably anti-abortion groups that scour the abortion reports for alleged wrongdoing. He wants the state to either restore public individual reports, or to allow his office to go after abortion providers without a complaint by a third party. (Meaning, he could pursue investigations against doctors and hospitals without cause.)

Most troubling, though, is his insistence that women’s private abortion information isn’t private at all. Even though individual reports could be used to identify patients, Rokita claims that the terminated pregnancy reports [TPRs] aren’t medical records, and that they “do not belong to the patient.” [...] As I flagged last month, abortion reporting is becoming more and more important to anti-choice lawmakers and groups. Project 2025 includes an entire section on abortion reporting, for example, and major anti-abortion organizations like the Charlotte Lozier Institute and Americans United for Life want to mandate more detailed reports.

[...]  As is the case with funding for crisis pregnancy centers and legislation about ‘prenatal counseling’ or ‘perinatal hospice care’, Republicans are advancing abortion reporting mandates under the guise of protecting women. And in a moment when voters are furious over abortion bans, anti-choice lawmakers and organizations very much need Americans to believe that lie. We have to make clear that state GOPs aren’t just banning abortion, but enacting any and every punitive policy that they can—especially those that strip us of our medical privacy. After all, it was less than a year ago that 19 Republican Attorneys General wanted the ability to investigate the out-of-state medical records of abortion patients. Did we really think they were going to stop there?

@jessicavalenti writes a solid column in her Abortion, Every Day blog that the GOP's agenda to erode patient privacy of those seeking abortions is a dangerous one.

[cochart]

To add more serious note to my Duolingo & Feanor crackpost yesterday, I really do not like how many companies—not only Duolingo—have been pushing AI in language acquisition. Companies are pushing AI “instructors,” even daring to claim that they’re better than human instructors. But why?

Machine translation is already used in places like shopping sites where people would need them and where it doesn’t make sense for people to have to seek out a translation service all the time. But replacing humans with machine learning algorithms—because, let’s face it, “AI” makes the thing sound way deeper and smarter than it actually is—in the realm of literature and education is just bizarre.

I speak English as a second language and know Spanish (rusty haha) and Japanese on the side. Each language is an aggregation of my interaction with other humans. It’s a collection of accents, words, and expressions that I have picked up from people that I have met and books and movies that I’ve enjoyed.

So what does it mean when you speak to a machine instead of another human?

Sometimes, a language might just feel like a burden—a wall standing the way between you and what you want whether it be a job, an online purchase, or a fanfic. So it instead of it being means to communicate to other humans, it becomes something to be conquered, to be overcome, to be thwarted with our lord and savior technology.

In fact, I think that is precisely how the techbros treat everything that we consider an integral part of being human. Language is a barrier to be broken down with machine translation. Drawing is something to be overcome by automated generation. Why worry about how you could make your machine more humanlike when you can make humans more machine-like?

But when you learn a new language and knock on that barrier that used to bar you from talking to that foreign artist you love, you’re expanding outside yourself. When you learn to draw or sculpt, even if you’re just making squiggles and lumps, you look inside yourself. Language and art not only makes humans humans, but also lets them grow and change. Trying to deprive humans of that and calling it “progress” frankly sounds malicious and stupid.

[talenlee]

Why Is Druid?

Say that like ‘where is Wizard Hut?‘

I love the 4e Druid. This is a marked change from how much I liked the 3e druid, or how often you might see me playing a druid in a Baldur’s Gate game. Back in 3rd edition, the druid, despite being very powerful, never really engaged me, in part perhaps because I was always trying to find something exploitative and powerful rather than merely accepting the juggernaut of a toolkit the game just left in the Player’s Handbook. You couldn’t get clever with the Druid, you just had to pick it up and use it, like some sort of society of creative anachronisms where one of the anachronisms available to the players was has gun. Valid, but hardly sporting.

The Druid in 4th edition is different. Wildly different. Weirdly different, and different in one of those ways that shows what I think of as a seam in the design between 4th and 3rd editions of D&D.

The Druid was one of 3rd edition’s great mistakes, a full spellcasting class with healer capacity to serve as a pinch-hitter healer in a group that wanted things a little more varied, addressing an enormously complex potential build from its earlier edition, 2e, and all in the process, resulting in some deeply confused mash up of abilities that attempted to address confusion with volume. The druid of 2e had a special unique set of rules compared to the Cleric — for example, at a certain level, you passed into a specific category of Druidic ability and now you were technically a Hierophant, and Hierophants had seven extra spells of every level. Of course there was a limited supply of Hierophants in the world, so there was a question of if you could level up if another one existed, and maybe there’s a one-in, one-out policy? First in, first fired?

Anyway, I can’t speak to how it played, but I am at least aware, on the edges of it, that the 2e druid was odd. It had a lot of things it could do, but much of how it worked, reading the books, seemed to be interesting but challenging to manage. You could wild shape, you could heal, you could cast utility spells, you could even fight with some melee weapons — personally, I didn’t see any of it worth it, because none of the things it could do it could do very well.

3e addressed this seeming difficulty by instead taking all those different options and bringing them all up to the same level. Wild Shape worked by checking traits of monster units, which meant that you weren’t limited to specific reinterpretations of animals and instead could do what a druid feels like it should do — you know, turn into an animal. The spells were rebalanced and shared across different classes, which meant that they tended to work in a more standardised way. Armour rules were aggregated, and weapons were made less terrible.

The result was that the 3e druid went from being ‘decent’ at a bunch of things to ‘good’ at everything it wanted to do. The problem of the druid then became about picking the thing you wanted to at every opportunity, and doing a good job of it — you’d have druids carrying wands of healing so they could dedicate their spell slots to more important tasks, like Flame Striking opponents, or messing up the battlefield with roots. You’d also see druids keeping the ‘best’ list of animals on hand, and every new monster book presented a new chance for druids to develop a new best form.

It also created the strange question of What does the druid do?

The answer was ‘everything.’

The 4e Druid, in comparison and contrast to these designs is something very different that touches, at best, on the periphery of what the 3e Druid could be. I mean it stands to reason, you can only ever touch on doing everything when something you’re working from is so powerful. 4e with its role system of Defender, Striker, Leader and Controller, and its reliable, reusable balance math suddenly was confronted with fitting an elephant into a shoebox.

How do you represent something busted that could do everything in the context of a new system that sought to explicitly prevent that? I joked when the game was new that the four roles were Defender, Striker, Leader and Miscellaneous. That any class too powerful, with too much stuff it could potentially do, got thrown to the Controller role as suggested by the first Controller we ever saw being the Wizard. Oh and back in Player’s Handbook 1, the Wizard had a few builds that were pretty ridiculously pushed — the pinball wizard, I’ll talk about it sometime — and that meant that it was easy to feel like the Controller Does Everything.

That impression diluted through experience, of course, and eventually it came to that while yes, the Controller sure has some Miscellaneous vibes, the core of what the Controller was there to do was to attack the enemy action economy. Nice and obvious to a non giga-nerd, right? Okay, how about this: The leader lets you do more things, the controller stops them from doing more things?

And into this space, they poured the druid.

It works beautifully, for my tastes; the druid needs to do lots of things to feel properly druidy, but you need to make sure the doing lots of things doesn’t unbalance the game. Controllers have the widest variety of things they can do and ways they can do them – inflicting status conditions, changing enemy position, preventing specific action types, making areas on the battlefield inaccessible, these are all ‘controllery’ things, and that means there’s a lot of different ways you can flavour them. The Invoker is most famous for making zones in the play space hard to deal with, the Wizard has a build that slides things all over the place, and the psion controls people with immense penalties to their damage rolls.

Obligatory pause where, while reading this aloud, for either Fox or I to comment on how amazing it is that Dishearten is an AOE power.

Anyway, the druid was designed to be a mode switcher class. That is, there are two ways a druid can do things. One is a melee controller that makes a single target’s life harder, the other is a ranged controller that makes a large group of enemies’ lives harder. This mode switching then adds a new element to the class that your powers can interact with, where you now have control powers that can add a mode switching element to them as well. This is your Wild Shape – you transform into some kind of nonspecific beast, which can use your Wild Shape powers. Each form has fewer powers to manage, and you can build your druid to specialise in one or the other or do a mix.

This lets the druid do the ‘a lot’ without letting them actually do everything. You have a lot of choices and a lot of ways to play with those pieces, but even just how often you use the mode switch is part of what the druid does to control the battlefield. When I first played a druid, it was not uncommon to start a fight out of wild shape, use the first turn to make some kind of area control power, then shift into wild shape for the rest of the fight kicking people into that area control power. There are druids builds that work like wizards and only ever shapeshift to get away from problems, and make a hit while scuttling away, or to sit on a specific type of problem. There were druids who focused on summoning monsters and using them as kind of turrets on the battlefield, positioning allies in a way that benefitted them around those summons.

Lone artillery combat encounters, where you have a bunch of stuff in front of a long-ranged attacker? Druids love those. Even at level 1, that artillery is spending their days completely stuck underneath a Fire Hawk power.

Problem is, of course, that if you want to do Everything doing a Lot is going to miss something. That was what led to the subclasses of the druid, the ones that added healer elements to the druid, because the druid back in 3e could do that. It added animal companions, because the druid back in 3e could do that. Now I don’t worry too much about these things because if I wanted an animal companion on my Druid, I’d take a theme for that, but also because these changes were introduced in an Essentials book.

Which is to say, they’re crap.

They’re not crap crap, like I try to defend Essentials as giving players a choice for simplified character builds, but in the specific case of the Essentials Druids, in order to work with the simplified choices, these Essentials druids with their animal companions and their healing powers have to look at all other Druid powers and not use them. The only use they get out of their animal companion is using the specific subset of powers that make them work, and that makes combat more samey. But again: That’s a thing you probably want if you want a simplified build.

Still, it gives rise to my favourite joke – I mean like, funny thing, not really a joke, there’s no subversion of reality or anything here – about the Healer Druid. See, every Leader in the game gets an encounter power, usable twice a combat at level 1, that heals an ally with a bonus. Every class gets their own version that lets them distinguish their class specifically and add some interesting detail that shows how this Leader differs from other Leaders.

The Healer druid build gets Healing Word.

The Cleric power.

Literally, the same power, same name, listed as a Cleric power.

Check it out on PRESS.exe to see it with images and links!

[bluesturngold]

findhelp.org is the biggest aggregator of resources in the US, and if you're in a bad way (or if something is on the horizon that would put you in a bad way) it's worth looking through

if you reach out to the american red cross or united way for something they can't handle in-house, there's a good chance the caseworker is using findhelp to locate potential avenues of assistance

input your ZIP code to filter out programs that don't service your location, then you can filter by several categories based on what you're looking for help with. not all of them will be relevant to your situation, but i live in a pretty rural area and it's got just under 1,900 program results between the 10 categories.

if you check a subcategory and don't see what you're looking for there, try other similar subcategories just to make sure you aren't missing out on something.

just based on the work i've done helping people the past few months, here are some things i've noticed:

if you have money to pay some bills but not all of them, turn off auto pay for everything, then you'll generally want to prioritize rent/mortgage and your cell phone bill if you can.

do everything you can to not lose your cell phone number, even if that means transferring it to a really cheap prepaid service. if you can't help but lose the number, please reach out to someone beforehand and let them know where you are and where they might be able to get ahold of you (i.e. by calling a local library you intend to frequent, contacting your email, etc.). i frequently speak with friends and family members trying to help someone they lost contact with and i cannot stress enough how few options there are for locating and reconnecting people. if you're using a free calling/texting app on your phone, please make note of the phone number someone can call you back at. (also, they tend to rely on strength of wi-fi signal for clear service, there's a possibility a slow public wi-fi connection could make the call choppy.)

seek help early. some programs have caps on how much money you can request (this can make getting enough money to catch up on multiple missed payments difficult), or will only help after you meet a certain need threshold (this sucks, the US is deeply broken), but it's better to know the criteria ahead of time so you can reach out to them again later. and if that's not a requirement for the resource you reach out to, even better.

a lot of programs are likely to have turnaround times longer than you would like, and very few places have different tiers of urgency. if you expect to get an eviction notice or a utility shutoff notice, start looking for assistance ASAP, because if your landlord gives you a week to pay or get out, sometimes processing your application with a resource can take that whole week.

on that note, here's a resource for getting the gist of your state/territory's eviction laws: https://www.lsc.gov/initiatives/effect-state-local-laws-evictions/lsc-eviction-laws-database just in case you're being evicted unfairly, and here's guidance on how to deal with eviction: https://www.consumerfinance.gov/housing/housing-insecurity/help-for-renters/what-to-do-if-youre-facing-eviction/

have exact dates and numbers, always keep record of the bills that are unpaid, whether it's emails, screenshots of online payment portals saved to your phone, or paper bills

it's demoralizing if you reach out to a bunch of places and they can't help. however, you should keep reaching out while you're still in a position where you can. the more people you talk to, the more likely you are to find someone especially knowledgeable who can point you in the right direction, because the people you reach out to will vary so widely in terms of expertise and ability to assist: you may reach people who are paid employees with very specific training and little else to offer beyond that, you may meet brand new volunteers who are eager to help but need time to ask others for advice, or you might talk to career employees/seasoned volunteers who can get you set on the right path even if their organization can't help personally

you should apply for state and federal resources also. some places will only help if you're turned down by the government, or government aid is insufficient, so that's always a good avenue to try first.