#Interview Panelists

[blackcatfilmprod]

This month Lord of the Rings, Chilling Adventure of Sabrina & Talk to Me actress Miranda Otto is comings to Queensland for a Screen Queensland Interview Panel event at the State Library of Queensland. So I hope I might see you all there. https://www.eventbrite.com.au/e/in-the-frame-screen-queensland-practitioners-forum-tickets-952990037857

[geuss-who]

has anyone else js like imagine themselves doing their dream job and interacting with other ppl except your also them at the same time doing your dream job or am I high

[apexprey]

job interview went well except for the part where i didn’t get a cold drink afterward

[wooltoesocks]

Shirahama Kamome interview at Desucon 2025, Finland

had the honour of attending her live drawing/interview last weekend, it was an absolute blast and i still cant really quite believe i got to see that. didnt win an autograph ticket, but what i did do was take notes from the panel, so if anyone's interested to read, here they are <3

feel free to share, but please credit :)

[] means stuff the panelists have said, () is me rambling

text version/ALT under the cut since it's a lot

14.6.2025 Desucon

guest of honour's program: Kamome Shirahama and the magic of drawing

disclaimer: might contain mistakes even tho i've tried to be as accurate to my notes and memory as possible <3

on the table she was going to be drawing at there were the usual 2 brushbugs wearing qifrey and olruggio's hats, but also a hattifatten

*a picture of shirahama's two brushbugs, wearing olruggio's and qifrey's hats, and a hattifatten on a table (from tongariofficial's twitter)*

the program schedule hadnt included a live drawing, so i dont know if that was going to be a surprise for us of if it was a last minute decision. shirahama said "unfortunately the hat is in the way of seeing", since she had the iguin mask on the entire time. since we had a lot of time, she would be drawing coco and qifrey. (i initially took this to mean she could draw them both since she had time but my friend interpreted it as being "BECAUSE we have time she will be drawing" so idk. she had a cool ring, which looked like it could hold ink or smth.

[did you read manga growing up and what were your favorite manga and mangaka as a kid?]

- like all kids she read manga, but also liked novels and movies

- her favorite were x-men and star was comics- she read manga that was maybe targeted to an older audience

[did you always draw as a kid?] (didnt write down this question but i think it was smth like that)

- according to her parents yes, and also she's drawn since she herself can remember

[when did drawing become your job?]

-she studied design (? and smth else idk i accidentally wrote design in english and finnish lmao) in university, and alongside that she got small jobs to draw atuff for for example teaching materials and games, and realised you could actually make a job out of drawing.

[what did you learn alongside your studies?]

- she had graphics as her major, but was also interested in accessibility design and something else (i think this had smth to do with the environment, maybe environmental design? but i had just written "something")

[how did you end up a mangaka?]

- self published manga drawings, and at some point a publisher reached out to her like hey do you wanna come draw for us

[what kind of material do you like to draw with?]

- the sketch she does with a pencil, and then the actual drawing with an inkpen- corona has chabged stuff a bit because you have to take into account how much can you meet with your assistants, so more of the drawing is done digitally nowadays

- she prefers drawing on paper, but for example if a design is going into a game (=onto a screen) she will draw it digitally to fit

- she's also been challenging herself recently by drawing more stuff digitally

[do you draw all the details in the sketch, or just at the inking part?]

- the pencil marks distract the drawing process, so she will add the details in the inking part

- "you are going to see it yourself with this"

[where have you taken influence from to your drawing style?]

- fantasy, rpg, europe (i think i meant western here??)

- okay so i had written "role-playing-game-styled" but idk what that rly means lol

- the style of wood carvings is medieval[your works have been published in maby magazines, is there a difference between magazines what kind of manga you draw?] (i think that meant her drawing style depending on magazine not the manga's story)

- it's not really the magazine that changes stuff, the drawing style changes depending on the story

- witch hat atelier is story-book-like

- style will accommodate what suits a game the best

[where does the style come from for each story?]

- no (???? what he fuck did i mean by this im sure it made sense in the moment)

- if it's a digital media, she will draw with a computer, a japanese story she will use a brush, and for a western story she will use harder pencils

[do you change your style depending on the target audience?] (more in the ways of a country a person is from, for example western/japanese)

- she will draw what will be enjoyable regardless of the target group/audience

[does your style change depending on the age group of your audience?]

- it's more in the language then, so the dialogue's difficulty changes

[where did you get the idea for enidewi?] (this just read "enidewi idea?")

- she likes european gothic angels and devils and wanted to write about them. there are a lot of things she likes in enidewi- she likes to tell stories with girls in them

(no idea what the actual question was, i just write "enidewi memories?")

- it's about 2 girls on trips and they get into shenanigans

- she has travelled a lot so she pulled stuff from her own experiences/stuff related to her own experiences

- she does hope that she hasnt been as much of a difficulty as those 2

[when did you get the idea for witch hat atelier?]

- she was thinking of it while drawing enidewi

- the idea has been with her for surprisingly long, 6 years before publishing

[were you imagining the story or the worldbuilding then?]

- no plot, but the setting, world and themes

[was the drawing part of magic in the story since the beginning?]

- it's been in the story since very early on

- there are some people who are incredibly talented at drawing in our world, but everyone can draw at least a certain amount, so she wanted a world where the magic is in everyone's reach so to say

[how did you design such an intricate magic system?]

- first she wanted a simple system that even a child could copy but wanted there to be some logic to add extra effects

[what is your favorite symbol?]

- the one coco uses a lot, meaning sylph shoes

[i think we would all want a spell to fly with our shoes]

- shirahama would want a spell to easy stiff shoulders (she was i think showing a v bad posture drawing position lol)

[too bad those are forbidden]

(no idea about the question here lol i missed it bc i was explaining the previous laughing to someone, she also had to read the question again from a paper she had so hell yea me too)

- the fears of how to get better at drawing

- there would be a feeling of relatability

[so the series has the "good guys" wearing a pointy brimless cap and the "bad guys" a brimmed cap, so a different philosophy means a different cap. where did you get the idea/why is it like this?]

- she was vaguely pointing at her iguin hat and doing the muscle flex pose like woo

- she cant say, and it will be revealed as the series progresses (she had her hands clasped at her chest i had written that down soecifically)

- wait with excitement for the upcoming chapters (i THINK she meant like any future chapter but tbh i for a sec thought the translator said NEXT chapter but dont get ur hopes up. ANYWAY WHAT THE FUCK)

(smth about the desig of characters again was distracted by the whole thing before)

- she think it's fun to make the character designs, it's it's becoming hard because there are so many characters

- she will sometimes go to her artist friends with a character idea like hey this is what this character is like what would they look like

[all the fans here would probbaly go crazy for a finland inspired outfit, what would it be like?]

- well it would be warm at least

[furhat]

[does qifrey's hat tell something about his character?]

- it's a modified version of his hat as Beldaruit's apprentice so not really

[how has it been like creating the rules within the world?]

- it's been fun thinking of the fashion styles and clothes (literally the note says "fashion styles and clothes fun so nice to make <nonsense> that was fun" so idk take of that what u will. the nonsense might have been "work" but i honestly dunno)

[what has been difficult to get to fit?]

- she says the weaknesses and holes are hard to work into the system so that it's noticable that things are wrong but not too much into either direction

- bring to light something about the differences in people ("bring forward motivation into that different people kinda" what. anyway not sure what i meant here, also not sure if this is still to the same question but i didnt at least write a question in this part so idk)

- she thinks a lot (about what, idk i think there was a question here too i missed about maybe magic?), magic is a technology that tries to make human lives easier

[do you intend to raise awareness of real life problems?]

- partially, and that magic is a positive depiction too so that might inspire to fix the real life problems[inspiration for witch hat during the creation of the series?]

- during middleschool/high school/university she liked lord of rings movies, and peter jackson films (idk if it was like she liked those during that time and they still inspire her or like was this just not answering the question but anyway)

[are there any spcific details inspired by other serieses?]

- ghibli, the idea of nausicae (? not sure about this but like those were mentioned)

[witch hat atelier is peculiar/unique with it's use of art deco. do the page compositions come to your mind as they will be or are they modified as you work?] (notes said to the first line just "wha unique, art deco" so i think that's what it meant?)

- there are both instances, some will be completed like they first came into mind, and others get elements and other stuff added while drawing[how does it feel getting recognition outside of japan too?]

- she is very happy about that, that people enjoy and read her stuff and she is very honoured overall, and it's nice that that's the case also in other countries

[reading pictures is pretty universal, is it kind of like the manga's magic that it's for everyone?]

- she said it's kinda of funny with japanese because kanji are pictograms so they are also pictures in a way

[so your series has an official spin-off called witch hat atelier kitchen. where did the idea for that come from?] (a lot of thumbs up from shirahama at the mention of kitchen yay)

- she was approached by the publishing like oh hey we have this idea to draw a witch hat food series is that okay with you[are you how deep in the creation process of kitchen, or is it just sato's work?]

- sato creates it, sometimes they might workshop some world related stuff, for example the names of vegetables, and how to connect kitchen with the main series more

[do you have a favorite character or do you love them all equally?] (she was looking between the translator and the audience and reaching for the brushbugs like tadaa kinda)

- brushbug is easy to draw so that's why, and especially drawn with a brush

[there's also a very cute hattivatti]

- she had bought it immediately after arriving to finland

[hattifattener are probably the closest finland has to a brushbug]

- "yeah that's how it is"

[you have worked with marvel, DC and star wars. how did this start?]

- she liked american comics and attended cons in the usa too, and showed some sketches for a producer/editor (idk the word but like someone in the industry)

[have you gotten to draw any of your favorite characters?]

- her first crush was wolverine

- she also like batman a lot

- she at least hasnt had the opportunity to draw them together in a work

- she draws a lot of female characters for her work usually too

[what's the process for cover art, do you get precise instructions or do you have more free hands with the design?]

- she gets mostly free reign, and does something to suit the character

- sometimes there will be instructions/asks to include something, for example if the story takes place in japan to put fitting elements there

[is there much of a difference working with foreign works compared to japanese ones?]

- not really, most differences depend on the work itself

[how much time do you get to making a cover?]

- she's been busy lately (👀👀👀) but usually the deadlines arent super specific, she will usually make one a month

[you worked in character design for the star wars: visions -series. how was the experience?]

- on top of all, the series is an animation, it was nice to get to work with other people

- also amazing to get to see her designs come to life

*a sneeze*

[do you have to take into account that the characters will be animated when making the design?]

- there wasnt as much creative freedom since star wars is a established franchise so a lot of the design elements already exist

- okay so i didnt hear if she said "you didnt have to simplify the designs" since it's animated or that "you did have to simplify the designs" so like uhhhh sorry for not being able to answer that :( i feel like it mighta been "you didnt really have to simplify" but oh well

[do you draw witch hat characters from a reference at the beginning until you memorize the design, or does the design change along the story?]

- she had made a few designs beforehand (i think this meant like of one character like a few versions)

[you also drew the comic adaptation for Star Wars: Visions. did you get strict rules for it of were you allowed to change stuff?]

- the story was completed so that wasnt changed- she kept the same visual spirit as in the animation

[is there a foreign work you would still like to get to work with?]

- a lot of eeeeeee pondering noices, she was holding her hand on her chin like when you think bout something

- she said it's a difficult question, but she would like to work with a tabletop rpg or boardgames (excited hand gestures)

[well im sure everyone here would at least love to play those]

- she mentioned she's done work with Pokemon cards and Fate/grand order

[there is a witch hat anime coming. what's your role in its production?] (excited hand gestures again)

- she says she checks the stuff the animators have done, and gives corrections if needed

- since the manga is black and white, she gived advice on the colourschemes, for example with what kind of coloring techniques the characters have access to and therefore what the clothes will look like

[is this the first time you've thought about the colours of some stuff?]

- there have been a lot, for example coco's dress in chapter 1

- she will ponder with the team what would work best

[how (much?) are you waiting for the anime?]

- "a lot, and also very excited that all of you will get to watch it"

[are there any serieses/games you like right now?]

- magus of the library (someone from the audience provided the english translation, the translator said "big wizard of the library" (in finnish). thumbs up from shirahama at that), it's very interesting

[well nice we're getting recommendations here]

[the world of witch hat atelier is rpg-styled, is there any videogame elements?] (something about videogames and witch hat world at least lol i kinda missed this bc of again the previous question)

- there's not really any video game elements, since there is no level ups or magic points

- more closer to fantasy literature

[you said you read manga before becoming a mangaka yourself. has making your own manga changed this hobby, are you tired of manga outside of work?] (many excited hand gestures again)

- she actually reads more manga now than as a kid- as a kid she didnt dare buy a lot if she didnt know the story that well (or like being way more cautious of what to buy), but now she feels like "she has permission" to read manga

- "oh it's part of the job i can buy and read manga"

[do you look back to your works and think a lot about what succeeded and could have been done better?]

- when she starts a new part in the series, she will read the previous one and think about what might have been left unexplained and try to broaden and explain the stuff later

[has the way you engage with and judge other people's manga changed after becoming a mangaka? do you think like "oh this could have been done differently" "oh this was really cool"?]

- she said she isnt "skipping school" when reading, she does look at novels too with new eyes now

[is it good to read others' fantasy works, or do you do it just because you like it?]

- she does keep up with what other people are writing, and says it's good to know what's going on so as not to write absolutely similar stuff

[oh it does look like the drawing is finished now.] (this was 12.17, the panel started at like 11, a few minutes over most likely)

- you could really see how she added the details with the ink pen and not with pencil (dont remember if this was shirahama or the panelists, but still so true and amazing to watch)

- "i erased the pencil marks out of the way"

- "thank you for having the patience to watch me draw"

[well this is going to turn into a thanking contest but i do think the pleasure is completely ours/thanks are completely on our side, thank you for drawing for us] (literally no thank YOU tetia core interaction)

[does anything come to mind that the finnish manga and anime -fans would be interested to hear that we havent realised to ask?]

- "thank you so much", she says it's nice to feel that people like the same stuff as she does, that even if we're from different countries that we are all fans of manga

[how has it been visiting finland for desucon?]

- she arrived a few days ago in helsinki, and the food and weather has been very good (this is hilarious she managed to come here on the 4 consecutive days when it's been sunny and so warm and not raining at all this whole year i feel like what. anyway glad she liked the food yayy)

- she still hasnt had time to properly visit desucon yet

when she left the stage she waved the hand of the brushbug that had oru's hat at the audience <3

[muirneach]

heres the clip. genuinely sooo fascinating to me

oshawa north con reelect is being a mad hater towards doug ford this is somehow refreshing. and why is this guy spitting facts on cbc rn about trumps impact on the cons and libs, despite also being besties with jd vance?? who is this guy

[ghostofhyuck]

NCT Dream in We Got Married!

AN: I miss this show so much </3

Mark Lee

I think that Mark would be in the international version of WGM. You’re a famous actress in your country and you were given this opportunity because they heard you're a huge fan of NCT. So you're literally panicking when you learned who your husband is! The first meet-up was Mark picking you up at the airport and you literally ran away lol. But Mark is so chill about it! He's such a caring husband, and you two tend to code-switch since you have a little knowledge in korean, but most of the time, you two talk in english! The panelists thinks that you two are a cool couple because of how casual you two are with each other. 

Huang Renjun

OHHHHH. You two are overflowing with visuals! You two are considered the flower couple because you two are just so goddamn pretty. <3 Your first meet-up was like in a maze and you two have to find out who's your partner is based on clues but really, you two already know because the news came out lol. But you met Renjun at the end of the maze with a flower bouquet with his hands and everyone was just, yep, flower couple right there. Most episodes were spent in your house, sharing domesticity and sweet moments, but your favorite moment with him was when you two spend a 2D1N stay at a countryside house. 

Lee Jeno

During the individual interview, both of you expressed that you two are a homebodies. So that's both of your concern since both were scared that they may come out as boring. It turns out to be true. After meeting Jeno at a coffee shop where he has to find his wife based on her order, your domestic stay-at-home married life began. Like, it when to the point where the staff have to arrange some activities for the two of you, so that you two can go out LMAO. Activities like you two going to an amusement park wearing school uniform like a high school sweethearts or maybe doing an escape room episode where Jeno has to hold your hands because you were too scared. (Everyone loves how sweet Jeno was during that episode.)

Lee Donghyuck

Your season with Haechan was loved by everyone! Because you two are so funny and very chaotic like, he loves teasing his wife but at the same time, you won't back down and you just match his chaos. Your first meet-up, Haechan has to know who his wife is based on their choreography since he learned that his wife is an idol too. But you danced to a different song and it took him fifteen minutes to learned that you tricked him lol. But there are subtle sweet moments between you two, especially the proposal! Haechan did it on an aquarium because you mentioned that you love going to aquariums. Also you two probably kissed during one episode. ><

Na Jaemin

AAAAAAAAHHHHHHH. I feel like Jaemin won this season. He's just so prince-ly and is such a great husband material, like during his individual interview, it was shown that he cooks, he has his own apartment and takes care of his three cats. He's a meticulous guy who's also good with expressing his expectation on the program. So the panelists probably fell in love with him already. When your married life began, everyone just coos at how you two would give each other the princess treatment, but of course, Jaemin wouldn't back down, like,,,, he gives his 100% with everything. Cooking you breakfast, carrying your bag, and placing you on the safer side of the road. <3

Zhong Chenle

Just like Mark, Chenle would also be in the international version of WGM! You're a solo artist in your country and was loved by everyone <3 So he's marrying your country's sweetheart! Your first meet-up was Chenle going to your country and meeting you at a tower that oversees your city! Everyone gushes at how cute you two are. A newly-wed young couple, so most of your episodes are very light-hearted and high school sweetheart like! You two also tend to code-switch when you two converse with each other since you know a little bit of korean. The last episode was Chenle sending you off to the airport and it was a bittersweet episode but you two were smiling before hugging one last time. :<

Park Jisung

You two are a shy couple! very shy and very awkward like, the first meeting, you two are just so quiet and no one says a thing after you two placed at order. Jisung thinks that it should be him who should initiate the conversation, so despite stuttering (it made you laugh), he tried to talked to you and ask you questions! Your season shows how you two progressed from two shy chicks into a comfortable couple who are very sweet with each other but at the same time, would tease each other. It was a surprised that your season went long, and in your last episode, you cried because it's finished, but Jisung comforted you, (he's trying hard not to cry though :<)

[what-eats-owls]

This info was of some surprise to folks on Bluesky, so I'm going to repeat it here in light of the sheer number of "the Internet Archive was an uncomplicated good apart from this one weird move" posts I've seen...

Are we all aware that IA has been gradually pushing the dogma that generative AI is a net public good, and has been feeding books, music, and video into AI?

This article is about how IA is actively using AI in their archives. It's an interview with Brewster Kahle, founder and Board Chair of IA. Choice quote:

This is the blog post about the comments they submitted to the US copyright office arguing against any new copyright regulations for AI. Some more choice quotes:

You can guess how I feel about framing the writers and artists whose work BUILT generative AI as "workers" who just need to be "retrained."

Last year they hosted a zoom panel called "Generative AI Meets Open Culture: Opportunities, Challenges & Ethical Considerations." Multiple visuals were AI-generated art, the panelists were asked to avoid discussing copyright. It's an hourlong panel and I couldn't find a transcript, so I skipped around to see if anyone addressed the elephant in the room. I found at ~32 minutes, a vague gesture at acknowledging it wasn't great if you tried to replicate an artist's style, but fine if you just wanted generic art.

(If anyone finds a more concrete statement in there, and/or a transcript, I'd love to know! The tenor I got was overall "look at how cool these tools are and let's talk about how they're a public good.")

At the end of January 2024, they hosted "Public Domain Day," including a panel on incorporating Generative AI in art. They invited two artists who utilize Generative AI, and a publisher whose books go immediately into the public domain. More quotes from their own writeup:

This was an event in celebration of public domain, but as far as I can tell, they've more or less avoided even acknowledging that creators are actively being harmed by Gen AI. Again, if anyone can find a clearer statement, please share it.

Another wrinkle in this is that Kahle, on behalf of the Internet Archive, sued the US Government in 2004, challenging the law that automatically granted and renewed copyright to a creator. Previously, copyright was opt-in only, had to be regularly renewed by the holder, and cost money to do so. The case went all the way to the Supreme Court in 2007, but was dismissed. (Scroll down to Docket 07-189, Kahle v Mukasey, for court filings.)

To be clear, this is the law that means you automatically own your own work. It's not a shock that Kahle's suit failed. But if Kahle had won, artists who didn't pay to secure and maintain copyright over their work would be SOL right now in the lawsuits against generative AI image and text scrapers.

So yeah. My tiny violin for IA continues to shrink.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Doublethink sump linkdump

On OCTOBER 23 at 7PM, I'll be in DECATUR, presenting my novel THE BEZZLE at EAGLE EYE BOOKS.

Trigger warning for #eikositriophobia: this is my 23d linkdump (Hail Discordia!), an erratic Saturday purge of the open tabs I haven't managed to blog this week; here's the previous 22:

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

When I was a kid, I idolized Harlan Ellison. I loved his prose styling, his stage presence, the way he blended activism and fiction, and the way he mixed critical nonfiction with fiction. As a 17 year old, I attended a writing workshop that Ann Crispin was giving at a local science fiction convention and she told me that I had the makings of a great writer, just as soon as I stopped trying to be Harlan Ellison.

But Harlan was a complicated figure. I attended the Clarion Workshop in 1992 specifically because he was our instructor, and came away bitterly disillusioned after he targeted one of my fellow students for relentless, cruel bullying, a performance that was so ugly that the board fired the director and permanently barred him from teaching the workshop.

Later on, Harlan became the kind of copyright maximalist who called for arbitrary internet surveillance and censorship in the name of shutting down ebook piracy. During a panel about this at a sf convention, he called one of the other panelists a "motherfucker" and threatened to punch him in the face. He took to badmouthing me in interviews, painting my position – whose nuances he certainly understood – in crude caricature.

But Harlan and I had many friends in common, people I really liked, and they were adamant that Harlan's flaws were not the whole story: if Harlan liked you, he would do anything to stand up for you, no matter the cost to himself. Famously, when Harlan taught Octavia Butler's Clarion, he demanded to know why she wasn't writing full time, and she replied that there was the inconvenient matter of making rent and groceries. He replied, "If that's all that's stopping you, come live in my guest house for as long as it takes, eat my groceries, and write." Which she did.

Which is great, but also: one of my own Clarion students told me about when his then-teenaged mother met Harlan at a sf convention and told him that she dreamed of becoming a writer, and he propositioned her. She was so turned off that she stopped writing forever (her son, my student, is now an accomplished writer).

So Harlan was a mixed bag. He did very, very good things. He did very, very bad things. When Harlan died, in 2018, I wrote an obit where I grappled with these two facts:

https://memex.craphound.com/2018/06/28/rip-harlan-ellison/

In it, I proposed a way of thinking about people that tried to make sense of both Harlans – and of all the people in our lives. There's an unfortunate tendency to think of the people that matter to us as having their deeds recorded in a ledger, with good deeds in one column and wicked deeds down the other.

In this formulation, we add up the good deeds and the bad deeds and subtract the bad from the good. If the result is a positive number, we say the good outweighs the bad, and therefore the person is, on balance, good. On the other hand, if the bad outweighs the good, then the person is bad, and the good deeds are irrelevant.

This gets us into no end of trouble. It means that when someone we admire slips up, we give them a pass, because "they've earned it." And when someone who's hurt us does something selfless and kind and brave, we treat that as though it doesn't matter, because they're an asshole.

But the truth is, no amount of good deeds can wipe away the bad. If you hurt someone, the fact that you've helped someone else doesn't make that hurt any easier to bear. And the kindnesses you do for other people make their lives better, no matter what bad things you've done to others.

Rather than calculating the balance of our goodness or badness, I think we should just, you know, sit with our sins and virtues. Let all the harm and joy exist in a state of superposition. Don't cancel out the harm. Don't wave away the good. They both exist, neither cancels the other, and we should strive to help more, and to do less harm. We should do everything we can to help those we harm. No one owes us a pass because of the good we've done.

That's the lesson Harlan taught me, and he taught it to me by absolutely failing to live his life this way – a fact that exists alongside all of the good he did, including the great art he made, which I love, and which inspired me.

Not long after Harlan's death, I got a phone call from J Michael Straczynski, Harlan's literary executor. As part of his care for Harlan's literary legacy, Joe was editing a new anthology of short stories, The Last Dangerous Visions, and did I want to contribute a story?

https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/harlan-ellison-last-dangerous-vision-1235117069/

Of course I did. Harlan edited Dangerous Visions in 1967: a groundbreaking anthology of uncomfortable science fiction that featured everyone from Philip K Dick to Samuel Delany. The followup, 1972's Again, Dangerous Visions, was, if anything, even more influential, including Le Guin's The Word For World IS Forest, as well as work by Joanna Russ, Kurt Vonnegut, David Gerrold, and James Tiptree, Jr.

Though some of the stories in these books haven't aged well, together, they completely changed my view of what science fiction was and what it could be. But The Last Dangerous Visions was a different (ahem) story. For complicated reasons (which all cashed out to "Harlan being very difficult to work with, sometimes for damned good reasons, other times for completely petty ones), TLDV was, at the time of Harlan's death, fifty years behind schedule. It was "science fiction's most famous unpublished book." Harlan had bought early work from writers who had gone on to have major careers – like Bruce Sterling – and had sat on them for half a century.

Then Joe called me to tell me that he was starting over with TLDV and did I want to contribute a story – and of course I did. I wrote a story for him with the title "Jeffty Is Five," part of my series of stories with the same titles as famous works of sf:

https://locusmag.com/2012/05/cory-doctorow-a-prose-by-any-other-name/

Joe liked the story, but not the title. He thought Harlan wouldn't have approved of this kind of appropriation, and he wanted to do right by the memory of his old friend. My first reaction was very Harlan-like: this is supposed to make you mad, it's my art, and if it offends you, that's your problem.

But I remembered the most important lesson I learned from Harlan, about good deeds and bad ones, and I thought about Joe, a writer I admired and liked, who was grappling with his grief and his commitment to Harlan's legacy, and I changed my mind and told him of course I'd change the title. I changed the title because Harlan would never have done so, and that's rather the point of the story.The story is (now)) called "The Weight of a Heart, the Weight of a Feather" (a very Harlanish title), and it's about the legacy of complicated people, whose lives are full of noble selflessness *and careless or deliberate cruelty. It's about throwing away the ledger and just letting all those facts sit together, about lives that are neither washed of sin by virtue, nor washed of virtue by sin.

It's a good story, I think, and I'm proud of it, and I'm interested in what the rest of you think now that the book is out:

https://www.blackstonepublishing.com/products/book-fyhm

Harlan was the writer who made me want to get good at reading my stories aloud. I was a charter member of the Harlan Ellison Record Club, as you can see for yourself from the time Harlan (accidentally) doxed me:

http://harlanellison.com/text/paladin.txt

After nearly 20 years of podcasting, I'm actually pretty good at this stuff. I'm going to be podcasting a reading of this story – eventually. I am nearly done "de-googling" my podcast feed, ripping it out of Feedburner, a service that I started using nearly two decades ago to convert a WordPress RSS feed to a podcast feed. In the intervening years, WordPress has come to support this natively and Feedburner has become a division of Google, so I've been methodically removing Feedburner's hooks from my feed, which is now proudly available here, without any surveillance or analytics:

https://craphound.com/feeds/doctorow_podcast

I'll be writing up the process eventually. In the meantime, I'm about to embark on another podcast fiction project, serializing my novella Spill, a "Little Brother" story that Tor's Reactor just published:

https://reactormag.com/spill-cory-doctorow/

The first part of "Spill" will go out tomorrow or Monday. Reactor also just published another "Little Brother" story, "Vigilant," which I read in last week's podcast:

https://craphound.com/littlebrother/2024/09/29/vigilant-a-little-brother-story/

One of my long-running beefs with Harlan was his insistence that the answer of copyright infringement online was to create an obligation on intermediaries – like ISPs – to censor their users' communications on demand from anyone claiming to have been wronged by a post or upload.

This would be bad for free expression under any circumstances, but it's an especially dangerous vision for ISPs, who are among the worst-run, most venal businesses in modern society ("We don't care, we don't have to, we're the phone company" -L Tomlin).

It's hard to overstate just how terrible ISPs are, but even in a field that includes Charter and Comcast, there's one company that rises above the pack when it comes to being grotesquely, imaginatively awful: Cox Communications.

Here's the latest from Cox: they sell "unlimited" gigabit data plans that cost $100 for the base plan and $50 to add the "unlimited" data. But – as Jon Brodkin writes for Ars Technica – Cox uniquely defines "unlimited" as severely limited:

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2020/06/cox-slows-internet-speeds-in-entire-neighborhoods-to-punish-any-heavy-users/

Now, you're probably thinking, ho-hum, another company that offered unlimited service and then acted like dicks when a customer treated it as unlimited, ::laughs in American Airlines::

https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesasquith/2019/11/13/unlimited-first-class-flights-for-lifehow-american-airlines-made-the-most-expensive-mistake-in-aviation-history/

But that's not the Cox story! Cox doesn't just throttle "unlimited" customers' internet to 2006-vintage DSL speeds – they slow down the entire neighborhood around the unlimited customer to those speeds.

As Brodkin writes, every Cox customer in the same neighborhood as an "unlimited" customer named "Mike" had their upload speeds reduced by more than two thirds, from 35mbps to 10mbps, to punish Mike. And they're not the only ones!

https://www.reddit.com/r/GNV/comments/gkicjg/comment/fr670cx/

Cox confirmed they were doing this, saying "performance can be improved for all customers in the neighborhood by temporarily increasing or maintaining download speeds and changing upload speeds for some of our service tiers."

Cox has been on a roll lately, really going for the shitty-telecoms-company gold. Back in August, 404 Media published a leaked pitch deck in which Cox promised advertisers that they were secretly listening to their customers' smart devices, transcribing their private conversations, and using them to target ads:

https://www.404media.co/heres-the-pitch-deck-for-active-listening-ad-targeting/

This isn't just appalling, it's also almost certainly fraudulent. As terrible as "smart" devices are (and oh God are they terrible), the vast majority of them don't do this. That's something a lot of security researchers have investigated, doing things like hooking up a protocol analyzer to a LAN with a smart device on it and looking for data transmissions that correspond to ambient speech in earshot of the gadget's mic.

My guess is that Cox has done a deal with a couple of the bottom-feedingest "smart TV" companies (as a cable operator, Cox will have relationships with a lot of these companies) to engage in this conduct. Smart TVs have emerged as one of the worst categories of consumer technology, on every axis: performance, privacy, repairability. The field has raced to the bottom, hit it, and then started digging to find new lows to sink to. This is just my hunch here, but I think it's highly likely that if there's a class of devices that are bugging your living room and selling the data to Cox, it's gonna be a smart TV (top tip: buy a computer monitor instead, and use your phone or laptop to stream to it).

Ask a certain kind of very smooth-brained, Samuelson-pilled economist about the enshittification of smart TVs and they'll tell you that this is a "revealed preference":

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revealed_preference

As in, sure, you may say that you don't want your TV to secretly record your private conversations and sell them to Cox, but actually you quite like it, because you have a TV.

While this is a facially very stupid argument, it's routinely made by people who think they're very smart, a point famously made by Matt Bors's "Mr Gotcha":

https://thenib.com/mister-gotcha/

Comics turn out to be a very good medium for stringing up the revealed preferences crowd on their own petards. This week, Juan Santapau's "The Secret Knots" added to the Mr Gotcha canon with an equally brilliant webcomic, albeit one with a very different vibe, entitled "Remind Me Later":

https://thesecretknots.com/comic/remind-me-later/

Santapau really catches the zeitgeist with this one, which is more of a slow burn than a zinger, and which shows how online "revealed preferences" nonsense grooms us for the same bullshit in every corner of our lives, even our psychotherapist's office. Highly recommended – an instant classic.

"Revealed preferences" comes from the Chicago School of Economics, a field that decided that a) economics should be a discipline grounded in mathematical models; and b) it was impossible to factor power relationships into these models; so c) power doesn't matter.

Once you understand this fact, everything else snaps into focus – like, why the Chicago School loves monopolies. If you model an economy dominated by monopolists without factoring the power that monopolists wield, then you can very easily assume that any monopoly you discover is the result of a lot of people voluntarily choosing to spend all their money with the company they love best.

The fact that we all hate the monopolists we have to deal with is dismissed by these economists as a mirage: "sure, you say you hate them, but you do business with them, therefore, your 'revealed preference' shows that you actually love them."

Which is how we end up with absolutely outrageous rackets like the scholarly publishing cartel. Scholarly journals acquire academics' work for free; get other academics to edit the work for free; acquire lifetime copyright to those finished works; and charge the institutions that paid those "volunteer" academics salaries millions of dollars to access their publications:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/08/16/the-public-sphere/#not-the-elsevier

These companies don't just lock up knowledge and tie an anchor around the scientists' and scholars' ankles, dragging them down. Their market power means that they can hurt their customers and users in every way, including through rampant privacy violations.

A new study from SPARC investigates the privacy practices of Springerlink, and finds them to be a cesspit of invasive, abusive conduct that would make even a Cox executive blush:

https://zenodo.org/records/13886473

Yes, on the one hand, this isn't surprising. If a company can screw you on pricing, why wouldn't they scruple to give you the shaft on privacy as well? But The fact that a company as terrible as Springer can be the dominant firm in the sector is still shocking, somehow.

But that's terminal-stage capitalism for you. It's not just that bad companies companies thrive – it's that being a bad company is a predictor of sky-high valuations and fawning coverage from the finance press.

Take Openai, a company that the press treats as a heptillion-dollar money-printer whose valuation will eventually exceed the rest of the known universe. Openai has a lot of problems – a mass exodus of key personnel, a product that doesn't work for nearly all the things it's claimed as a solution to – but the biggest one is that it's a bad business.

That's the theme of a fantastic, characteristically scathing-but-deep Ed Zitron article called (what else?) "Openai is a bad business":

https://www.wheresyoured.at/oai-business/

Zitron does something that no one else in the business press does: takes Openai's claims about its business fundamentals – its costs, its prices, its competitors, and even its capabilities – at face value, and then asks, "Even if this is all true, will Openai ever turn a profit?"

The answer is a pretty convincing "no." Zitron calls it a "subprime AI crisis" in a nod to Tim Hwang's must-read 2020 book about the ad-tech bezzle, Subprime Attention Crisis:

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

The fascinating thing about both Zitron and Hwang's analysis isn't that there are big companies that suck – it's that they are able to suck up so much money and credulous excitement, despite how badly they suck.

That's where power – the thing that neoliberal economists say doesn't matter – comes in. Monopoly power is a self-accelerating flywheel, as Amazon's famous investor pitch explains:

https://vimeo.com/739486256/00a0a7379a

Once a monopolist or a cartel wields market power, they can continue to dominate a sector, even though they're very bad – and even if they use their power to rip off both their customers and very powerful suppliers.

That's the lesson of Michael Jordan's lawsuit against NASCAR, as Matt Stoller explains in his latest BIG newsletter:

https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/michael-jordan-anti-monopolist

Jordan is one of the most famous basketball players, but after retiring from the game, he became a NASCAR owner, and as such, has been embroiled in a monopoly whose abuses are both eerily familiar to anyone who pays attention to, say the pharmacy benefit manager racket:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/09/23/shield-of-boringness/#some-men-rob-you-with-a-fountain-pen

But on the other hand, the fact this is all happening to race-cars and not pharmacies makes it very weird indeed. As with, say, PBMs, NASCAR's monopoly isn't just victimizing the individuals who watch racing, but also the racecar teams. These teams are owned by rich, powerful people (like Jordan), but are "almost always on the verge of bankruptcy."

Why is that? NASCAR rips them off. For example, teams have to buy all their parts from NASCAR, at huge markups, and the purchase contract prohibits them from racing at any rival event. There are a million petty schemes like this, and NASCAR carefully titrates its bleed-off to leave its victims almost at death's door, but still (barely) solvent enough to keep racing.

NASCAR also bought out all the rival leagues, and most of the tracks, and then locked the remaining tracks to exclusivity deals. Then the teams all had to sign noncompetes as a condition of competing in NASCAR, the only game in town – forever.

Hence Michael Jordan, a person who steadfastly refused to involve himself in politics during his basketball career, becoming a firebreathing trustbuster. Stoller cites Jordan's transformation as reason to believe that the anti-monopoly agenda will survive even in the event that Harris wins but bows to corporate donors who insist on purging the Biden administration's trustbusters.

That's a hopeful note, and I'd add my own to it: the fact that the NASCAR scam is so similar to the pharma swindles, academic publishing swindles, and all the other monopoly rip-offs means that there is a potential class alliance between university professors, NASCAR owners, and people with chronic health conditions and big pharmaceutical bills.

That high note brings me to the end of this week's linkdump! And here's a little dessert in case you've got room for one more little link: Kitowares "Medieval Mules", a forthcoming clog styled as trompe l'oeil plate armor:

https://www.kitowares.la/

Pair with old favorites like lycra armor leggings:

https://loricaclothing.com/collections/leggings-1/products/the-augsburg-legging

And a DIY crotcheted knight's helmet:

https://www.etsy.com/listing/590854477/knights-helmet-w-detachable-visor

Tor Books as just published two new, free LITTLE BROTHER s tories: VIGILANT, about creepy surveillance in distance education; a nd SPILL, about oil pipelines and indigenous landback.

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/2024/10/05/farrago/#jeffty-is-five

[dashcon-two]

An Important Notice for Panel and Vendor Applications!

We’re very excited for Panel Applications to open tomorrow, and wanted to share some more information about the application process! 

Panel applications open February 10th, 9 am EST, and will close February 15th, 9 pm EST. Shortlisted panellists will be contacted to arrange an interview and discuss further details at a later time. Shortlisting is not a guarantee that you will run a panel. 

For those unaware, panels kinda like convention breakout rooms. They’re typically lecture-style presentations to a small audience of guests! Think ‘powerpoint night where I yap about my hyperfixation’ but on a larger scale, with topics ranging from professional artists giving advice, to in-depth breakdowns of specific media. There’s a lot of diversity, and panels can take forms beyond what we’ve outlined: a trivia show, an art trade, a skill-building workshop, et cetera. We’re open to all your wildest and whackiest ideas!

Initial applications are pretty basic: all you need is a description. Tell us about your panel idea in 1-2 paragraphs at most, and how long you’ll need to run it. A maximum of 7 people are permitted to panel together, but 1-2 people are standard. Applicants may discuss their qualifications or attach a partial or completed slideshow to their application, but these are both optional. 

Our guidelines for panel content are available on the Panel Applications of our website. All panelists will also have to follow our Convention Policies. Please know that DashCon 2 will not permit 18+/Adult content to be discussed or presented during panels. Any violation of these rules will result in the immediate cancellation of a panel, and the offending panelist’s pass being revoked. 

Panelists will not have to pay for a convention pass, but we encourage all applicants to purchase tickets on February 22nd as we cannot guarantee spots in advance. Panelists who have purchased a ticket will be offered a refund. Unfortunately, DashCon 2 cannot refund the processing fees taken by Simpli Events nor those of their transaction processing service Stripe. We do not offer compensation for travel or other expenses occurred as a result of volunteering for DashCon 2. 

Since panellists are considered volunteers, they are free to explore the convention outside the bounds of their panel. However, panellists are expected to have signed in and to be on-call 30 minutes before and after their scheduled panel time. Panellists who do not check in before or show up to their panel will have their pass revoked.

Vendor Applications Will Close Soon!

This a reminder that Vendor applications are still open!! Thank you to everyone who applied to be a vendor, we’re really excited to host so many incredible artists. We’ve decided to close applications on Wednesday, February 12th at 9PM EST. We will be contacting successful applicants before the 22nd, so others will still have the option to buy tickets!

As always, you can find more at www.dashcontwo.com, or subscribe to our mailing list over on substack!

[prettiestofpisces]

Breanna Stewart x Reporter

💋: smut, fingering

-personally i wouldn’t know how to act if she looked like THAT around me

- i’m posting this on an airplane but autocorrect is always against me so if you see an error lmk ( ex. stewie turns to steve lolll)

-as always any and all feedback is appreciated…muah

─── ･ ｡ﾟ☆: *.☽ .* :☆ﾟ. ───

standing up you fixed your pale blue blouse and tight black skirt, strutting through the libertys tunnel doors.

the new york liberty now stood at a new record of 17 wins, the number one best in the eastern conference.

questions cascaded your mind to ask the panelist, breanna stewart and jonquel jones yet none of them sounded good enough.

you practice with yourself still strutting down the empty stadium hallways.

“how did losing in the commissioners cup fuel the fire tonight to win by almost double digits?”

you scoff, kicking yourself at the originality…no.

“looking back at your previous loss to the lynx, what part of their game did you study coming into this one?”

this time a sigh exited your mouth.

hm a little better, but still no. you needed an obscure question for this post press.

you like to pose questions to athletes that bring out a side of them no one’s seen. whether it be excitement or vulnerability.

your companies sports articles offered rarity to sports news and discussed various, taboo topics, outside of ball.

wanting to impress your boss, this conference was to be no different and you needed a fun statement for this upcoming article.

as you entered the room voices could be heard everywhere. chatter was ambient, fellow reporters waiting patiently for the athletes to make their appearance.

looking around for a seat you find one in the front row off center to the left.

ten more minutes pass and suddenly complete silence takes over the room. shuffling in is breanna stewart and jonquel jones.

amungst the tallest in the meeting their prescence is almost intimidating.

sitting down right in front of you is stewart who’s expressionless. that is till her large dull eyes connect with yours and somehow it feels like it’s just you and her.

the two of you were fimiliar with each other, performing interviews here and there, but a true discussion was never held.

you take a deep breath looking around the room once more, and the press conference begins.

after thirty minutes or so the mediator announces.

“yes, final question coming from the front row, satin blouse.”

painfully boring questions had been thrown at them both left and right, now, finally it was your turn to do the talking.

you wiggle in your seat and inflate your chest to instill confidence. first introducing yourself and your company you lock eyes with breanna for a countless time and speak.

“…after a tough win, stewart i see you’ve changed into something more comfortable…” you look stewie up and down.

she he wore black sweat pants and a wife beater so tight her nipples, hard as ever, poked through perfectly.

“…fitting since you recently released new lounge wear to go with your new shoes color way. is it everything you envisioned and where is your brand going?”

stewie takes her hands and drags her palms down her chest and chuckles.

“yea it uh- doesn’t leave much to the imagination now does it” smirking directly at you.

“no, it doesn’t” shaking your head, you biting your bottom lip seductively.

jj takes notice of your flirtatious encounter, deciding to interject. “man if y’all don’t get a room or answer the question, we trying to get out of here!” stewie whips her head to her teammate laughing with her hands on her face.

“sorry…yea no the collection is called city of love and i’ve been dying to talk about it so thank you that’s a great question.”

stewie finishes up her statement as she watches you finish up your notes and record her the rest of her statement.

“alright, if that’s it we’re all free to go” the woman over the conference says.

breanna and jonquel thank everyone who attended and you place everything in its designated area in your purse.

feeling eyes on you, you take one more look around the entire room catching stewies bolted on your skirt.

you glance down and rush to pull down the fabric that had bunched exposing more of your bottom half than you’d like.

walking over to the exit where stewie stood you place yourself right infront of her. standing tall to her ear and whisper a quick message, “stop being a pervert.”

not taking another look at you she rubs her face with her hands as the other draped her side.

you roll your eyes and walk out into another empty hallway.

on your trek to leave the stadium you gaped, appreciating the structure now that it was almost vacant.

all that could be heard were the clicks of you heels against the tiled floor.

while nearing the exit, the ache in the balls of your feet were enough to need to sit down for a quick minute.

spotting some bar chairs you throw your purse and the rest of your belongings on the table before deciding to take a seat.

relief infiltrating your body, especially your feet.

kicking your heels off you huff “jesus christ.”

suddenly hearing footsteps behind where you sat, you can’t help but to turn your head.

the women behind you catching your eye, rightfully so. still in her lightly worn wife beater and sweats, breanna stewart appeared.

she took it upon herself to sit at your table and you watched as she did so.

“figured you could use some company.”

“i don’t but you’re welcome to sit..” you joke.

“ouch” she laughs.

there’s a pause of silence with you both looking at one another.

“you uh- with someone, single?” breanna blurts.

“what- who’s asking?” the questions catching you by surprise.

breanna points at herself signaling she wants to know, and in the blink of an eye she’s standing, towering above you in your chair.

you waste no time to stand up yourself as two can play that game.

“is there an issue stewart?”

you put a finger in her chest, pushing breanna outwards.

“you tell me” she says snarkily.

“honey you’re the one looking up my skirt” you counter argue.

“who’s to say you didn’t do it on purpose?” stewie shrugs with a toothy grin.

“ugh please” your bickering coming to an end as you turn on your toes and slip your heels on to head out.

that is till stewie pushes you against one of the surrounding walls. flipping you around to then face her. “oh shit-“

stunned, she left you pinned, arms by your side.

stewies grin gone, she gets just centimeters from your face

“listen, honey, not a single word leaves these lips while we’re here”

your breath hitches “okay..” eager for breanna to do whatever she wants to you, you comply.

“thank you baby” she says beginning to kiss on your neck, each sloppier than the one before.

you lightly close you eyes and in mere minutes she trails the hand that was once pinning yours up and down your thigh.

lifting your left leg to cradle her waist she then brings the hand to the hem of your skirt toying with it before reaching under.

your mouth agape ready for her digits to explore your cunt. moans escape your lips as grunts escape stewies.

she pauses removing her hand from to skirt to simply hold your leg in place.

your eyes flutter open to reveal breanna studying you and your face, the dimly lit stadium behind her.

“what’s wrong?” you whine.

she shakes her head. “nothing, i just wanted to make sure you wanted to do this” letting your leg fall. her accent being so thick made your pussy throb all the more.

you nod you head. “yes, i want you right here, right fucking now, no one’s here this late.” the corners of your mouth pull upward.

breanna pulls you off the cold wall for just a moment only to slap your ass.

“stewart!” you giggle, once again liking how rough she was being with you.

she returns the smile, her gums showing.

“even if there wasn’t i know you’d like a crowd”

you playfully slap her chest. “who’s the pervert now” she teases.

ignoring her comment you eye breanna, shimming off your panties and reaching for her hand, yearning to be touched. you place her hand back on your hips as you hoisted your leg over breannas waist again. she does the rest pecking your ear, then your jaw.

gliding her hand over your clit you groan at the sensation. “stewie go faster, or put your fingers in me, now-.” stewie cuts you off with a demanding kiss. no longer wanting to hear the attitude you were giving her.

stewie continues to rub your clit in agonizingly slow circles.

feeling how slick your hole was, she then knew you were ready for her fingers, her long, slim fingers.

you drag out a load moan as she inserts not one but two, her middle and pointer.

pumping her fingers in and out of you, you become more and more vocal.

“shit”

“mm fuck, just like that!”

“stewie baby, i’m sooo close” tears running down your face.

you felt drunk, spiraling with how good your body felt, tingles radiated all over.

her two fingers sped up and she rubbed your clit vigorously with her thumb. the new friction sending you over the edge, orgasming.

the audible gasp and sloshing of your pussy’s juices were all breanna needed to come herself.

your knees buckled forcing you to collapse.

you would’ve hit the floor if breanna wasn’t there to catch and pull you in.

whimpering you regain your balance and embrace stewie in a hug, tired but in bliss.

she kisses your temple.

“you’re so beautiful”

with your head buried in her neck, stewie feels you smile against her pale skin. “you did so good for me”

the praise erupting butterflies in your stomach.

you finally look up her eyes glazing your face and the tear that stained your makeup.

you release from the hug, putting everything back in its place, your skirt, your hair and…

“you forgot something” stewie says, holding your underwear in front of her face

“oh- you’re sick” you say as she shoves them in the pocket of her sweats. you throw your head back in laughter.

“call me” she says nearing exit of the stadium.

you laughed “why so you can start a collection of my panties?!”

“exactly.”

─── ･ ｡ﾟ☆: *.☽ .* :☆ﾟ. ───

breanna stewart i hope both sides of your pillow are cold

[mariacallous]

Sarah Milgrim was someone who knew “exactly what she wanted out of life,” according to people who knew her well. She was an idealist who invested herself in Jewish life, and in the future of Israel. At her high school, in the suburbs of Kansas City, she was a member of the Jewish Student Union; as a senior, she was interviewed by a local news station after someone spray-painted swastikas on a school building. “I worry about going to my synagogue,” she said. “And now I have to worry about safety at my school.”

Later, at the University of Kansas, she was on the board of her campus Hillel chapter and went on a Birthright trip to Israel. In graduate school at American University and the U.N.’s University for Peace, where she focussed on sustainable development, she got involved in Tech2Peace, an N.G.O. that brings together young Israelis and Palestinians for training in Israel’s high-tech industry. She later joined the American Jewish Committee’s young-professionals program. She considered working for U.S.A.I.D. Shortly after the October 7th attacks on Israel, though, she went to work for the Israeli Embassy in D.C. “She felt really strongly about improving the world and leaving it better than she found it,” Dana Walker, the director of the American Jewish Committee program, told me.

Milgrim’s boyfriend, Yaron Lischinsky, worked alongside her at the Israeli Embassy. He was idealistic, too, though his life had followed a different path. Lischinsky grew up in Israel and Germany. He was an Israeli citizen and he served in the Israel Defense Forces. His father was Jewish, his mother Christian. “Even though my parents had different beliefs, the internal struggles I faced mostly stemmed not from their cultural backgrounds or different religions, but from the tension between, on the one hand, growing up in a religious home and, on the other hand, living in a secular society,” he wrote on an application to a yearlong conservative liberal-arts program at the Argaman Institute, in Jerusalem. He hungered to understand the political and moral thought of the West. Lischinsky was Christian, not Jewish—“a man of belief,” Ronen Shoval, a political philosopher who has been one of the intellectual architects of Israel’s sharp turn toward right-wing Zionism, and who taught Lischinsky at Argaman, told me. Lischinsky “was willing to bond his future to the future of the Jewish state,” Shoval said. “This was a person who was willing to actually change his life.”

On Wednesday, Milgrim, who was twenty-six, and Lischinsky, who was thirty, attended a reception for young diplomats, hosted by the A.J.C., at the Capital Jewish Museum, in D.C. Panelists spoke about increasing aid for the humanitarian crises in Gaza and across the Middle East. At around 9 P.M., the couple left the event, walking out of the museum alongside two other people. According to the F.B.I., video surveillance shows that, as they prepared to cross the street, a man named Elias Rodriguez, wearing a blue raincoat and a backpack, walked past them. Rodriguez then allegedly turned around, pulled a gun from his waistband, and fired at their backs. They fell to the ground. He walked up to them, his arm extended, still firing. Milgrim attempted to crawl away. He followed her, and fired again. She sat up. Rodriguez reloaded, and fired again. Milgrim was transported to D.C.’s chief medical examiner and declared dead at 9:35 P.M. Lischinsky was pronounced dead at the scene. Rodriguez did not enter a plea at his first appearance in court, the next day.

Rodriguez had bought a ticket for the A.J.C. event three hours before the shooting. He later told police officers, “I did it for Palestine. I did it for Gaza.” He expressed admiration for Aaron Bushnell, a U.S. Air Force serviceman who set himself on fire outside of the Israeli Embassy in D.C., in 2024. As police escorted Rodriguez from the museum, video shows, he shouted, “Free, free Palestine!”

There is no evidence that Rodriguez was targeting Milgrim or Lischinsky specifically. It is not clear whether he even knew that they were employees of the Embassy. But their work for the State of Israel has become the dominant fact of their deaths. “I was really upset when I saw the news and all the mainstream news channels said, ‘Two Israeli Embassy staffers shot and killed,’ instead of, ‘Two young people murdered in an antisemitic attack, coming out of a Jewish event in a Jewish museum in Washington, D.C.,” Sharon Brous, the rabbi of IKAR, a prominent synagogue community in Los Angeles, told me. “This person was looking for Jews to kill.”

There is constant debate about where the precise line between anti-Zionism and antisemitism falls. In this case, Rodriguez spoke in the language of anti-Zionism, but he acted with the logic of antisemitism, which has as its foundational myth that all Jews are collectively to blame for the policies of the Israeli government and, often enough, for the ills of the world. Rodriguez allegedly found two people, whose lives he knew nothing about, and made them die for Israel’s sins. That he killed a Christian and a Jew, one Israeli and one American, only underscores that their particular lives and histories and beliefs did not matter.

Members of a group of Americans who have worked for the Israeli government told me that in the past day and a half their WhatsApp chat has been flooded with messages. “Everyone is shocked and horrified and heartbroken,” Miri Belsky, who worked at the Israeli Embassy in Washington a little more than a decade ago, said. “It feels very close to home for all of us. The Americans who choose to take these roles are principled and strong-willed and are trying to forge a better future.” Aaron Kaplowitz, another former Embassy employee, who is currently visiting Jerusalem, found out that Milgrim was murdered while he was sheltering from a missile strike from Yemen. “Why should someone who works for Israel be murdered at an event in D.C.? This is where we are?” he said. “It’s crazy that, in the nation’s capital, someone took it upon themselves to murder two people who were going to an event that was based on unity and peace-building and just shot them, and ended these amazing lives so early.” Lischinsky had reportedly been preparing to propose to Milgrim in just a few days, having recently purchased an engagement ring.

Kaplowitz met Milgrim in September, when they travelled to Morocco on a fellowship with the A.J.C. and a local N.G.O. called the Mimouna Association. The trip brought together Jews and Muslims from America, Israel, France, and Morocco. The group visited synagogues and mosques and sought to build closer relationships with one another. Yasmina Asrarguis, one of the Muslim participants, is a French Moroccan researcher who studies diplomatic efforts such as the Abraham Accords and “the people who work to make peace,” she said. “Sarah was one of those people.” Asrarguis and Milgrim became close during the trip; Asrarguis felt that they were allied in their vision for the future of their countries. “She believed another Middle East was possible, where Jews and Muslims can live side by side and not kill each other for land,” Asrarguis said.

When we spoke, Asrarguis had just got off an informal memorial call with a group of Milgrim’s friends, who all shared stories about her sense of a better future. Even though Milgrim was young, “she did a lot to make her vision become something. She did what she could at her own level,” said Asrarguis. It’s a recognizable profile—the American Jewish kid who threw herself into Muslim-Jewish dialogue and the project of creating peace in the Middle East. “You can’t do justice with injustice,” Asrarguis said. “You don’t rebuild Gaza by bringing more injustice into this world.”

[tomorrowusa]

The media double standard which overlooks Trump's deteriorating mental state. (from PBS Washington Week - 8/30/24)

JEFFREY GOLDBERG (host and editor of The Atlantic): Here's the thing. I'll make this observation. I'll own it. If Kamala Harris went from bacon to wind in her interview with Dana Bash, she would, this morning, not be -- the next morning, she would not be the nominee of the Democratic Party. That would have been a very, very strange -- people would have been like, what is going on? Do we just have an absurdly low standard now for the things that Donald Trump says and does? DOMENICO MONTANARO (panelist and senior political correspondent at NPR): I think that there is definitely a double standard, and I think part of it is how each side's voters interpret their candidate. And someone like Donald Trump, Republicans have had the opportunity for years to say this is not the guy we want. Instead, they've continued to get behind him. In every primary that Donald Trump weighs in on, he wins, and then the general election a lot of those candidates tend to lose. I think that from reporter's standpoint, we do have to be careful about how we -- what level we hold both of them to. When I fact-checked Donald Trump's hour press conference, he told 162 lies and distortions within that time period, 2.5 a minute, compared to Kamala Harris' DNC acceptance speech, where she had 12 statements that I found were contextually misleading or needed more.

Here's the entire episode.

The media has mostly shrugged off Weird Donald's unhinged rantings as Trump being Trump while holding Democrats to a higher standard.

We need to be more vocal about the double standard. When Trump has another crazed rant about sharks, windmills, electric batteries, and bacon which gets brushed off by a media provider, ask that provider: What would you be saying if a prominent Democrat conducted a similar unhinged rant?

[mrs-stans]

Sebastian Stan and Fernanda Torres Join Ariana Grande, and More at Santa Barbara Tribute (Exclusive)

Under executive director Roger Durling, the Santa Barbara International Film Festival (SBIFF, February 4-15, 2025) has thrived by not only mounting an eclectic film festival but riding the awards season waves by programming prestige interviews with Oscar contenders.

All the festival’s popular panels are held at State Street’s capacious Arlington Theatre. The festival is adding two new tributees, Oscar nominees Fernanda Torres (“I’m Still Here”) and Sebastian Stan (“The Apprentice”), to TCM host Dave Karger’s popular Virtuosos tribute on February 8th at 8 p.m. They will join panelists Karla Sofía Gascón and Selena Gomez (“Emilia Pérez”), Harris Dickinson (“Babygirl”), Ariana Grande (“Wicked”), Clarence Maclin (“Sing Sing”), Mikey Madison (“Anora”), and John Magaro (“September 5”). The festival may not have foreseen that Torres might be rubbing shoulders with rival Oscar nominee Gascón in the wake of her recent scandal. Netflix may opt not to send Gascón. (Netflix had no response at press time.)

Every year, screenwriters, directors, and producers promote their films on panels, with past speakers like Mark Ruffalo, Robert Downey Jr., Da’Vine Joy Randolph, Kristen Stewart, Cate Blanchett, Christopher Nolan, Ben Affleck, Brad Pitt, Bong Joon Ho, and more submitting to in-depth tributes.

The panels, tributes, and special screenings lure not only local cinephiles but the area’s few hundred Academy members eager to hear Oscar contenders talk about their creative process. Most of the tributes and panels are held in person at the historic Arlington Theatre, and they’re posted online.

SBIFF 2025, the 40th edition, will open with the U.S. premiere of “Jane Austen Wrecked My Life” and will unspool 12 days of film programming from 60 countries, including 32 world premieres such as Maxim Derevianko’s “Ai Weiwei’s Turandot,” as well as red-carpet tributes to filmmakers and talent including Colman Domingo, Angelina Jolie, Ralph Fiennes, Zoe Saldaña, Timothée Chalamet, Adrien Brody and Guy Pearce. The closing night film is the U.S. premiere of “A Missing Part.” Tickets are available here.

[i-wanna-study]

Okay, there's a lot to share. I have to give two entrance exams and attend six university interviews in June, and I have so much to study that it's really overwhelming. Also, I did two mock interviews — I did very badly yesterday, but I was told I improved a lot in just one day. They even said, "If you give an interview like this and they still don’t select you, consider those panelists mental" (lol).

[sungjinhos]

LOVE TRANSIT S01EP01 - TEASER

♥ SYNOPSIS: Soonyoung is a man on a mission to get his ex back, even if this means enduring watching her going on dates in a reality TV show - ok maybe he didn't think it through when he thought it was a good idea to go on said tv show. Alternatively; Soonyoung love transit episode. ♥ GENRE: (this is me trying to do) comedy, romance, a little dash of angsty because they are exes and because it is me writting I guess. ♥ TEASER WORD COUNT: 437 words, FIC WORD COUNT: around 25k? I don't know it is getting out of hands ♥ FEATURING: Wen Junhui as Soonyoung's number one enemy, Xu Minghao, Lee Chan, Boo Seungkwan as a cranky panelist, Seo Changbin as a normal panelist, Girls Day Yura just because I love her, Pi Cheolin as a panelist that nobody knows why he has been cast but he makes it work. ♥ PLAYLIST: 1. VINTAGE - NIKI, 2. LAS JORDANS - TINI, 3. CALL ME - RENGGA JONES, 4. STILL INTO YOU - PARAMORE, 5. LOVE LIKE THAT - SAM KIM, 6. TENTA ACREDITAR - ANAVITÓRIA, 7. URS - NIKI ♥ LOVE TRANSIT MASTERLIST

[INTERVIEW ROOM][CAMERA 2]

“Do you know you have to think about other options too, right?” The producer asks him. The giant camera is way too close to his face and the producer is sitting just under it - in a little stool that looks utterly uncomfortable. Soonyoung wanted to face her, but she begged three different times to stare right at the camera. He is sitting so still that he can feel the energy accumulating on his body, making him almost quick in his seat.

“I am not interested in that,” Soonyoung answers - staring at the camera and trying to not blink too much even if the lights of the studio hurt his eyes. 

“But the point of this program is that you are open to dating other people and letting her date other people as well,” the producer insisted, and Soonyoung almost laughed. He knows that, for fucking sake he only got his date because he is a master in rock paper scissors and his ex went on a date with fucking Junhui. He knows the point of everything, he just doesn't really care.

“Like I said, I am not interested in that, my goal with this,” He tries to explain, using his hand to point at everything, the set actually looked way better on camera and it was very flimsy in real life, and every time he thinks he will break a fake wall. “Is that we get back together,” he grins confidently, “Sorry pd-nim but we will get back together before this end.” 

He hears the producer groan, he is pretty sure she shouldn’t be groaning and this won’t go to the final cut. He thinks the audio people will handle it, they probably will put a fade in music or whatever, they are professionals. 

[PANELIST CORNER - XX FLOWER SHOP][CAMERA 3]

“I mean,” Seungkwan starts with his broadcast voice, “does he understand the point of the program?”

“I don’t think he does,” Changbin answered him, “He still has feelings for her doesn’t he? Like he talked about her the whole date,” he said laughing.

“I am sorry,” Seungkwan pipes up again, “PD-nim are you sure that this guy is even trying? Are you guys even doing your job picking guys like this one?” 

“This one is definitely unique, he is not even trying,” Yura laughs, “But I really did like her dynamic with Jun, the date was super cute.”

“Me too, me too,” Pi Cheolin says, a little way too enthusiastic, “But I don’t think Soonyoung will let us see more of them together.”