#OP did not provide credits so I included those too

[iron-sparrow]

Michelle Yeoh The Sunday Times Style Magazine

photographed by Giampaolo Sgura styled by Dena Neustadter Giannini

I --

[nexyra]

RWBY's Love Language - Part 2

Hello friend ! I'm back at it with a second part and whatever character I can think of ! (Among which best boy Oscar because he deserves it, and also more adults)

Let's go !

***

Oscar Pine

So ! While I love Oscar with my whole heart, honestly guessing his Love Language is no easy feat. One thing for sure : touch isn't is thing even if it's how everyone else chose to communicate their love.

I saw a post a while back detailing how Oscar is always putting his hands up as a barrier when he's scared or uncomfortable and that makes me cry a little instead but it's true TT. Anyway...

In the latest volumes we've got quite a bit of comforting Oscar-talks but I have to wonder how much of that is due to Ozpin's influence really. As a result I've decided to settle on... Acts of Service or Quality Time ! This is based on a few details : when people are upset with him in one shape or form, Oscar was always very eager to prove himself useful, give some aspect of concrete help (such as cooking a Casserole, ringing any bell ?). Plus I imagine that's the exact brand of help his Aunt would have needed most on a farm. Added to that, he always seems fairly happy to be included, be with the others no matter what's going on. Training ? Yay ! A movie with Jaune & Weiss ? Smiling puppy look. Fancy party ? Shenanigans together ! So yea, I love seeing my boy loved and hugged but please everyone settle for the loving he's most comfortable with <3

“She made a choice! A choice to put others before herself! So do I.”

“Oh, uh, yeah. I thought you guys would appreciate a hot meal after... spending all day looking for me, apparently.”

“No, it's okay. These past few days, I've been scared of the same things you were. I don't know how much longer I'm going to be... me. But I did some thinking, and I do know that I want to do everything I can to help with whatever time I have left.”

- - - - - - - - - -

Ozpin

For our favorite immortal wizard aka not quite dead Headmaster... I think the answer is rather obvious. When you're so careful with your words, but also so fiercely devoted to humanity, Words of Affirmation is a must. Ozpin constantly does his best to calm, to reassure. He's good at controlling the conversation and getting people where he wants... Except he more often than not use it to make them think and help them reach an healing ore motivating conclusion. This man is so insisten on giving and cultivating hope, so painfully aware of just how much words can change... There's no doubt in my mind that it's through these very same words that he tries to fight the darkness in others' mind, even when they don't want to let themselves be persuaded. And with some help from the farmboi, Ozpin is gaining in honesty and earnestness. And that can only help in giving comfort.

But to be honest... If you offer him a hug I doubt he'd refuse, and he definitely deserves one. Also therapy. For Oscar too. Everyone in therapy 2k21.

“Ruby. I've made more mistakes than any man, woman, and child on this planet. But at this moment I would not consider your appointment to leader to be one of them. Do you?”

“It's not every day that friends are able to come together like this. Time has a way of testing our bonds, but it's nights like these that can help keep them stronger than ever. Nights like these are ones we'll never forget.”

“Don't worry, Mr. Arc. Your journey is far from over, and the same might be said for all of you. Unlocking your Semblance isn't the end. It can still grow and evolve. Providing you are willing to put in the work, who knows what could happen?”

- - - - - - - - - -

Emerald Sustrai

Now here I'm gonna go ahead and say that the way Emerald has been taught to express her love and the way SHE would rather preffered to be loved most likely do not align. At the side of someone like Cinder, and even Mercury who isn't exactly the most emotionally vulnerable person; the only brand of love that gets an easy pass is Acts of Service, and that's probably what Emerald is the most used to. I can go on a mission with you. I can help. We go right back to the "I can be useful" mentality and I'm not sure she's been shown any other way honestly. Let's be real though : if someone offered a hug or some gentle words ? She'd probably pout & fuss but I hardly doubt she'd object.

“I don't care about Salem! But I owe Cinder everything. You want to fight her that bad? Be my guest.”

“I just... Cinder was the only family I ever had. She cared about me, taught me things... But without her here, I don't know if what we're doing--”

“I've been working on my Semblance. I can help. I won't tell anybody.”

- - - - - - - - - -

Pyrrha Nikos

What's with everyone and dedicating their whole love toward just helping their teammates anyway they can ?! Stop ! But any way, you guessed it. I'm pretty sure one of Pyrrha's top way of showing love is Acts of Service, and nothing means quite as much to her as Quality Time. For someone who's been put on a pedestal and has a hard time relating to people; both touch and words can be a bit awkward. But if they're wrapped up neatly in a training session or semblance explanations ? Well that's already a more familiar area. Pyrrha gives her whole to her friends and those she cares about. And in exchange, if anyone can simply... be there and spend time with her... May it be at the ball or simply sitting in the courtyard... I'm sure our girl would be delighted.

“Jaune, you know if you ever need help, you can just ask.”

“I'm constantly surrounded by love and praise; but when you're placed on a pedestal like that for so long, you become separated from the people that put you there in the first place. But thanks to you, I've made friendships that will last a lifetime.”

“I'll do it. If you believe this will help humanity, then I will become your Fall Maiden.”

- - - - - - - - - -

Qrow Branwen

If I say Gift Giving for the corvid, is someone gonna hit me ? Come on it's fun ! Okay, more seriously... I think this kind of love conversation is kind of a necessity for Qrow. With a semblance such as Bad Luck, making everything complicated... Qrow tries to keep his distance from those he cares about. And since he's an emotionally repressed (but caring) asshole on top of it... Well that kinda narrows down his option. You know what DOESN'T put anyone at risk but can still bring smiles on their face ? GIFTS. Shiny things, souvenirs from his missions all over the world to give to 2 smol nieces. Sounds safe right ? That said, as any good emotionally unavailable character in this show, I gotta say Qrow probably has a thing for helping out and making himself useful in relation to Oz, Tai or the rest of the inner circle. So you know what that means *whisper* Acts of Service.

That said ! When it comes to receiving some love back... Qrow probably likes everything he doesn't allow himself to have. Soft touches, loving & comforting words, spending time with a friend without his semblance making everything complicated... We know that's all he wants.

“You idiot. I know you didn't do this.”

“Look, pal, I'm not sure who you are, but you need to leave my niece alone.”

“No one wanted me... I was cursed... I gave my life to you because you gave me a place in this world... I thought I was finally doing some good...”

- - - - - - - - - -

Clover Ebi

And among our newbies (and gone too soon) friends we have Clover ! Clover was a very good contrast to our dusty old crow but also a great help. Kind-hearted, perceptive and honest; he knew just how to put Qrow's self-loathing in his place and push him to give himself some credit. He always had a nice word or a joke for everyone, and visibly the rock of the Ace Ops : an expert a keeping the moral up and the mood companiable. Evidently, Words of Affirmation was his expertise. Had things gone differently, I'm sure we'd have had time for many more earnest and helpful conversations with this teal-eyed fisherman.

“It's a good thing they had someone to look up to and get them through it. Not everyone is so lucky.”

“I meant deflect a compliment. Those kids wouldn't be where they are without you. You've had more of an effect on them than you realize.”

“We don't have to fight, friend.”

- - - - - - - - - -

Winter Schnee

And today in the "emotionally unavailable" category we have... Winter Schnee ! TALK ABOUT YOUR FEELINGS PEOPLE ! Just - I would say look at Ruby but even she doesn't talk about her bad vibes... Nor does any of the "Words of Affirmation" peeps. Honestly what's wrong with y'all people ? Anyway Winter cares so much. Is it hidden behind professionalism and a stern *big sister* demeanour ? Sure. But it doesn't negate just how much she loves her closed ones. She's fiercely loyal, and even if she doesn't let her personal feelings get in the way of her duty and doing what needs to be done, no one is allowed to say she doesn't care. Countrary to Weiss, Winter doesn't seem as good nor as aware of the love that exists in simply *being* with people. Rather, she's dutiful and ready to help any way she can when given the chance. You guessed it, yet another Acts of Service kind of love... Maybe I'm doing this wrong XD. I'm on the fence about Words of Affirmation as well. Despite her standoffish looks, Winter has always been very open & reassuring during her discussions with Penny. But she's more stern when it comes to Weiss so I dunno x)

“I don't recall asking about your ranking, I'm asking how you've been. Are you eating properly? Have you taken up any hobbies? Are you making new friends?”

“You've grown up a bit, haven't you? You're not the little girl clinging to the family name anymore.”

“You can't just buy trust like everything else! You have to earn it!”

And that's it for Part 2 ! I might do some other characters if people suggest some but I don't have a pressing need to right now. I have many ideas of songs to apply to various characters however so that's prob what my next posts will consist of (or fun templates)

If anyone has tips to create RWBY gifs or links to download the eps in good quality I'll take it ! Good day everyone !

[outbythehighwind]

Tifa’s Fighting Style

One of the things that impressed me most about FF7R is Tifa Lockhart’s combat. Her mechanics were dazzling. Her combos left me awed. Her style was so realistic, but... what was it? Naturally, I did some digging, and happened to stumble across a blog where most of the work had already been done. So this post is courtesy of Flowerslightning, with thoughts and elaboration on my part. THANKS AND CREDIT TO THIS WONDERFULLY INSIGHTFUL BLOGGER (do check out her tumblr for more fantastic content).

First, let’s note that Tifa’s combat design is very much in the field of fighting games. To some degree at least, developers take inspiration from real-life arts. The style of Tekken’s Lei Wulong, for instance, is based on the Drunken First. Street Fighter’s Chun Li uses the model of Chinese Kenpo.

The FFVII devs - to my knowledge - have revealed nothing on Tifa’s inspired martial arts background. She adopted the monk style (the fisticuffs of FF-verse) from a traveler named Zangan. That’s all we know. She trained (obviously very hard) as his pupil for the 2 years between Cloud leaving Nibelheim and Sephiroth burning the town. Zangan then brought her to Midgar and continued his travels. The only path for discerning real-arts inspiration is through observing Tifa’s fights - though even such attempt is limited. Her style is not as straightforward as Lei’s or Chun Li’s. She seems to employ a mix of martial arts, specializing in the offense and using speed and dexterity to her advantage.

Here are the main styles that Flowerslightning deduced, supported by some of Tifa’s abilities.

1. Muay Thai [demonstrated by Somersault].

This is the known as the “Art of Eight Limbs” and is commonly referred to as “Thai boxing”. It differs from traditional kickboxing (which has its roots in Japan) most notably in being an 8-point instead of 4-point striking system. In other words, Muay Thai employs elbow and shin strikes in addition to kicks and punches. Tifa’s kicks, I would say, are actually more akin to kickboxing, for Muay Thai places emphasis on heavy kicks involving the shin bone. Yet her acrobatic style is very akin to the latter.

In addition to the key boxing techniques of both the Thai and Japanese art, Tifa’s elbow maneuvers provide further evidence for the former. This is most evident during her fight with Loz, where she uses her elbows for offense and defense. One could say she expanded her Thai-based skills during in the 2 years that followed saving the world.

Running a new bar and raising two under-10-year-olds would have left at least a... smidgen of free time, right?

2. Muay Thai [demonstrated by Refocus].

Some may suggest this move of Tifa’s is a Taekwondo technique (we’ll get to that lovable sport soon, don’t you worry), but I agree with Flowerslightning in that her jumping style is more Muay Thai. Almost all Muay Thai techniques use movement of the entire body, rotating the hip with each kick, punch, elbow and block. This to me is the obvious discerning factor. Tifa exquisitely throws her whole body into the majority of her combos and limit breaks, ground and aerial alike. Specifically through that neat hip rotation. Refocus is but one example of many.

PS. Don’t you just love her boots? The gloves are really something but, those red boots... Just look at them.

3. Taekwondo [shown in Overpower].

Literally the “Way of the Hand and Foot”, this is a Korean martial art set apart by its emphasis on kicks. Head-height kicks, jump spin kicks, swift kicks, the list goes on. (But of course, there’s plenty of hand blocking and take-downs too.) Did you know that Taekwondo is part of South Korea’s military training program as well as their national sport? Its skillset is heavy in self-defense.

Tifa is mostly an offensive attacker (and wow, do her strikes deal devastating damage). Yet her aerial maneuvers and acrobatic footwork certainly have elements of Taekwondo. What makes the Taekwondo kick-style unique is its elaborate, advanced forms. Xtreme 720s, for instance, are underpinned by precise technical soundness and accuracy.

Yes, these are literal 720° mid-air turns with a SERIES of kicks timed in utmost precision. They require extraordinary strength. Something Tifa deceptively pulls off with ease, no?

4. Hēi-Hǔ-Quán [displayed in Starshower].

Flowerslightning deduces this ATB ability to be a Boxing combo. Though to me it looks more like Hēi-Hǔ-Quán (lit. ‘Black Tiger Fist’, a Shaolin striking art from China). Watch her hands closely: the thumbs are curled like the fingers rather than wrapped around them to form a fist. Tifa’s wide stances and acrostic kicks are a little less tiger-esque than Hēi-Hǔ-Quán, but there is definitely resemblance of the style there too.

All in all, she seems to employ a mixture of Shaolin arts and Boxing. Her finger-positions for fast jabs (as in Starshower and the Loz fight) are predominantly of the Tiger Fist. Her more powerful strikes, meanwhile, include Boxing crosses, hooks and uppercuts. The sewer cutscene demonstrates this clearly, when Tifa & Cloud encounter the Sahagin.

And damn, do we love the back-to-back Cloti in that scene. Surely I’m not just speaking for myself here.

5. Boxing [displayed in Unbridled Strength].

Tifa’s aforementioned fist moves and powerful finishing punches are no doubt reminiscent of boxing. Also, she always enters a fight with her fists closed in a boxing stance (whether she will employ Shaolin or other hand techniques is irrelevant). Take her cutscene against the Whispers where she, Cloud and Aerith arrive at Sector 7. She begins with a cross and follows with a rotated hook - one of the most basic boxing combos.

BONUS FACT: Rather than orthodox, Tifa always employs a southpaw stance (right hand and right foot forward). This is the preferred stance of a left-hand fighter. Is Tifa left-handed? Considering her fighting alone, yes is the plausible assumption. Here are a few examples:

     - Unbridled Strength has her delivering a finishing blow with her left hand. We would expect such a move to be done with the power hand.

     - Her single strike that hurls Loz across the church is also with the left hand. This punch is not part of a combo; she could have used either hand.

     - In guard position, her left is the rear hand, to both attack and protect herself.

     - And of course, in southpaw stance, she always begins with a left-hand strike.

However, all of Tifa’s general actions (to my observance) - like bartending, catching Aerith in the sewer, carrying the Buster Sword into Corneo’s quarters, etc. - suggest that she is right-handed. So why use the left, the weaker, as her dominant hand in fighting? Could she actually be ambidextrous? That is a possibility. But weighing up the evidence in addition to Tifa's ingenuity, this could well be out of fighting strategy.

Southpaw can give Tifa a strategic advantage, you see, because of the tactical and cognitive difficulties her enemies would have of coping with a fighter who moves in a mirror-reverse of the norm. In other words, she takes advantage of the fact that most fighters lack experience against lefties. Doing this:

     - opens up chance for a variety of surprise combos;

     - puts her human enemies in danger of KOs by what would otherwise be ordinary strikes; and

     - enables her to trick her opponents should she unexpectedly convert to orthodox during fights.

Pretty damn awesome, huh?

6. Gymnastics [dodging maneuvers].

Gymnastics, like fighting arts, enhances balance, strength, flexibility and agility - the four areas Tifa excels at. Now, we’ve talked a lot about her strong points. But what of her weaknesses? Players will have noticed immediately that Tifa has a major setback. She can accurately be described as a glass cannon, due to her low HP and defenses that counter-balance her speed and dexterity. That is precisely what makes playing as her so compelling; you get that sense of life or death intensity. The fight feels REAL. She is the least OP character in the party, in addition to by far being the most difficult to master. Utilized properly, she can be the strongest of them all. And wow, is that rewarding or what?

Because of her weak defenses, Tifa must constantly remain on the move, and gymnastics is the quintessential means in doing so. Hand springs, aerial cartwheels - you name it, she’s got it. As if those kicks and uppercuts don’t scream epic enough already. Doesn’t it just make her even MORE amazing?

So I’ve added Hēi-Hǔ-Quán to Flowerslightning’s conclusion: that Tifa’s combat is Mixed Martial Arts, with her dominant skills as Kickboxing, Taekwondo and Muay Thai. And of course, the interweaving of Gymnastics, which adds an elegance to her epic kickassery.

Tifa lost her teacher after just two years, and spent the last five managing & running a bar, serving as AVALANCHE’s funder & treasurer, and effectively solo-raising Barret’s little daughter. Add two more years, and we have a completely absent Barret, a very sick child in addition to the one she is (now permanently) raising, and a depressed, distant Cloud who has left her to struggle as a solo barkeep, full-time nurse and single mother. How on earth did she find the time and will to master her fighting techniques?

Yes, we are talking about fiction, but this woman is nothing short of incredible. Not simply as a fighter - that isn’t even the start of it. Tifa is, to me, the character who has had it the hardest. Yet she perseveres. And not only that, but she gives. She gives and gives, and doesn’t give up, even when everyone else around her has. In addition, she is the only ‘ordinary’ member of the party: Cloud, on top of military training, had his senses enhanced with Mako & Jenova cells; Barret literally has a gun for an arm; and Aerith as the last Cetra possesses exceedingly strong magic. Tifa, like with everything she does, worked hard to hone her skills. And that, to me, is incontestably admirable.

As Flowerslightning put it, she was “ready to go through hell and yet still remain soft”. And those virtues she held to, where most people would have quit. Compassion and perseverance to the end, the two traits that uphold her - to me - as the most inspiring hero of fiction.

[twolonesomestars]

(Shirt anon here~) Thank you for your long answer! Do you have any photos of them wearing the same clothes? I've seen XZ with a motorcycle jacket but I don't think YB was ever seen wearing the same jacket publicly. People seem convinced they share the same wardrobe, but the only things I've seen them share is two pairs of pants. I feel like I'm missing something... O_O

Motorcycle jacket? 👀👀👀

This got insanely long, once again, so I put it under the cut. 

Warning: This is all fake. Don’t take what I say to heart. These are just my random thoughts.

I don’t think there are any pictures of WYB with the motorcycle jacket (Iceberg jacket); and, I don’t think we’ll get any anytime soon. But, the main thing with the jacket is that only a professional racer could have gotten it. In August 2019, WYB competed in the Asia Road Racing Championship as a professional racer on the Yamaha China Racing Team (and actually won first place on the last day)! The jacket was part of the Spring 2019 collection. WYB was supposed to race back in May 2019 but had to withdraw in the middle of the race because of issues with his bike (a video if you want to be sad); I’m not sure if this race would have been his first as a professional or not. XZ wore the jacket for the first time at the airport in October 2019 and then in January 2020. More details about the selling restrictions of the jacket here.

Of course, we still have the tiny possibility that one of XZ’s friends or family members is a professional racer... but it’s a pretty dismissible percentage. I also don’t think XZ knows anyone else in the industry who’s a professional racer, at least not publicly. Even if he did, I honestly don’t think a typical friend (or even a family member really) would let him wear something that rare/ of pride so causally. I also don’t think XZ’s the type of person to wear something like that unless he was convinced extremely well.

I’m going to give another side to this because I can’t find any official post or proof that says that some Iceberg clothes are limited to professional racers. (If anyone has this, please let me know!) It would make sense if the company does limit some clothing to professionals because it was founded in Emilia-Romagna, Italy, which is where many famous motorcycle companies are housed (including the one WYB’s motorcyclist idol, Valentino Rossi, uses in races) and many races take place. However, if it turns out that there is no restriction in the selling... the jacket was, at the very least, limited edition. It’s a motorcycle/rider jacket and hip-hop style—the style both WYB and XZ started wearing in 2019. Taking the history into account, I place my bets on WYB knowing this particular company more than XZ.

Take from these two possible scenarios what you will.

-

This black coat one is another I think they share: clothes & explanation

I mean the fact that the company even confirmed it was the same... and that it was discontinued a while before XZ showed up with it the first time...

-

For those of you who don’t know about it, here are the shared pants that anon mentioned at the end: 1, 2

The replies on those tweets pretty much say it all: they fit differently on them. XZ has longer legs than WYB, so the jeans fit perfectly on him but WYB had to fold them. The black pants fit to XZ’s ankles, but go past that for WYB.

-

I know people say XZ’s shirt in his 2019 520 post is the same as one of WYB’s airport shirts, but I don’t think so. Look at the pockets. In WYB’s one, the black horizontal strips reach the button, but the black horizontal strips on XZ’s don’t reach the button. Not to mention, this checkered style on shirts is very, very common. Even I have one like it 😂

-

I keep attacking ones that have a pretty good following, sorry. As consolidation, I’ll link the shoe-lace switch one: here

I had to take several double-takes when I first saw this. I don’t know enough about shoes to say whether or not the laces match with each other perfectly, but what are the odds huh? Why would they take the time to change the laces on one shoe if it didn’t indicate something meaningful, whether they switched laces or not? Both their left feet have black laces and both their right feet have white laces. If they did indeed switch them: XZ gave his right lace & WYB gave his left lace.

(If you can’t tell, I really like this one 😂)

-

I also really, really like the pink jacket theory... here’s a post that gives a great background for it. Essentially, WYB used to be /practically/ allergic to the color pink. You would never catch him wearing the color casually. (I think there may have been one or two photoshoots where he wore pink, but they weren’t his clothes, obviously.) To be fair, XZ doesn’t wear pink too often either, but he has been seen at the airport (casual outfit) wearing a different, light pink hoodie:

I don’t know why the photo credit is blurred... if someone has the original or knows the fan site, please let me know so I can credit properly :/

It’s super cute to think that maybe XZ let him borrow his or bought it for him... or even WYB bought it for himself cause loveee~ 😘 

He’s worn it twice now! Here’s the second time on a recent DDU episode (clip):

- - -

So, yeah, I don’t really think they share as many clothes as some people indicate. Though, they do seem to have clothes that are very similar to one another (i.e. one is a shirt with lettering and the other is a jacket with the same lettering), which may actually be more telling... possibly shopping at the same store. And, I already mentioned the same hip-hop style emerging from both of them starting in 2019.

Here are a few examples via this post:

-

To round all that up, I have a few detailed explanations for some of the clothes they share, but not all of them. Some of the posts I linked have a few more. Most of them look to be general similarities with coloring and type of clothing (i.e. both wearing some sort of red coat, both wearing a black beanie, etc.) along with a few pairs of shoes from the same company in different colors, which is where I think a lot of people get the same wardrobe idea from. However, there are one or two clothing items here and there that look to be the same (the hands emoji was edited in by OP to point to the white star!):

- - -

Those are my thoughts on the same wardrobe theory. But, be aware that this is only one side. I’m sure people who are more into the clothes sharing than me have better explanations for other clothing pieces.

You decide what to think; remember, there’s no right or wrong here~

-

As you can probably tell, I like to focus on the ones that have more evidence than same style and dates backing them up… like the black coat not being sold anymore and the Iceberg jacket only being sold to a certain group of people/ limited edition (I like the meaning behind them), but it’s still pretty fun to look at other similarities. 

Keep in mind that XZ & WYB are very sly and enjoy playing around, so who knows, maybe all the things I talked about here were pure coincidences and the things I didn’t talk about here or tried to debunk were real.

I also believe their clothes-sharing is at a far lower level of importance, as compared to other things the two have done to show their love for each other. It kind of shows how daring they are. As much as they try to keep their relationship discreet, they don’t mind giving hints once in a while.

-

Overall, I don’t think you’re missing too much anon~ (But, I hope this post provided you a few more clothes-sharing instances to further help you form your opinion on the whole thing.)

[jackawful]

OKAY SO this is gonna be long and involve a lot of context. Bear with me.

There's been an ongoing Discourse for the past few months wherein people argue about whether to vote for biden in light of him supporting israel's genocide of palestinians, directly, by providing the weapons and funding that enable them to do war crimes. The argument is that he's Better Than Trump, and that led to a moment where, uh, just skim this knowyourmeme page I guess. That's the "voting for 99% hitler" bit.

Of course being less than a year out from an election means we're also at the start of Vote Blue No Matter Who posting season, but a handful of this season's picks have had a distinctly rancid flavor that I am kind of losing it over. The one that seems to have kicked it off is this post and its first two reblogs, advocating for "calling out performative radicalism" while framing electoral action - voting and campaigning and calling reps - as effective. OP responded to me & others pushing back with this:

So here's the thing: most leftists, especially anarchists, draw a line between violence against people & "violence" against property, so equating the two is already a red flag. But then there's the insistance that only fox news would report on leftist property destruction when it's mainly anarchist outlets (like crimethinc & It's Going Down) that do that, and they do that in a positive light. Heck, Fox did pick up on the Jane's Revenge arson/vandalism campaign post-2020, they've run negative press on the Stop Cop City movement, and they've done stories on how scary it is that trans people are buying guns. Fox News was terrifyed when mostly-anarchist leftists started guarding drag queen story hours with guns instead of just letting proud boys do vigilante violence. There's not much cop murder, but there are leftist radicals doing shit that sometimes includes physically fighting cops and getting national media attention all the time - assuming good faith, this person clearly just doesn't believe it's real because they haven't seen those stories, or assuming bad faith, they don't want others to believe it's a real and possible thing.

And then there's this post which...it's clearly inspired by the first one and it's coming from a non-american who's barely an adult, so I don't want to be too harsh, but it also means they're missing a TON of context around why americans have stopped expecting voting to change things, AND contributes to the denial of existance of radical direct action. Without really intending to (I hope, anyway) they seem like they're goading people into talking about specific illegal things they've done in order to have credibility talking about radical tactics. Which, as I've explained in the linked posts, is a huge security risk. If you hear from people taking credit for shit on the level of firebombing walmart, it's either completely anonymously or from prison with lawyer supervision.

But saying all this post-2020, when plenty of people smashed cop car windshields & there was more public approval of burning the third precinct than there's been for most presidents? Maddening and infuriating to me. If you're in a major city in the US, the likelihood that you know someone who has done the kind of radical direct action being flattened into "firebombing a walmart" is higher now than its been since roughly the 60s.

It's really obvious this is all people getting vaguely mad at online anarchists for talking about and encouraging direct action while trying to convince said anarchists to vote democrat AND claiming that no one talking about radical direct action is actually doing it. The "knitting" is arson and graffiti and smashing windows and physically fighting cops/fascists. And I think it's important to understand that these things are happening, and will happen more when the US has its next riot season, and that you can talk about how and why people do these things without being specific because being vague is safer.

On a different level it upsets me because social movements tend to get the most gains when radicals and liberals work together instead of denouncing each other. That's another reason I hope everyone nodding along to OPs here reads up on the Stop Cop City movement - that's a wonderful example of using all tactics, from local electoral politics to (impressively frequent) sabotage and arson, and not denouncing each other, and construction only being delayed because of all tactics being employed at once where just one would've been more likely to fail.

If you don't know about Chris Dorner or Willem Van Spronsen or any number of still-anonymous cases of leftist political violence and property damage, you should probably stop talking as if it doesn't exist. Instead of denying that revolutions and uprisings happen, you can research ones that did & look for similar news items happening now. You don't get to know who's planning to firebomb walmart. If you think you don't know anyone who's done political violence or property damage, it's probably because they know you're not down and won't tell you, not because it Doesn't Happen.

Can you imagine if knitting was illegal and assholes on tumblr were like "you have to vote for 99% hitler because I know y'all aint knitting baby blankets" and encouraging people to talk about their clandestine knitting circles where the cops can see. I will point you toward patterns and publically state that knitting is good and should be decriminalized and more people should learn to knit. but you, internet user, do not get to know whether I or anyone else owns knitting needles while knitting is still illegal.

[kathleen-meyer-lyme-survivor]

DISCLAIMER:  I have signed a waiver and become a contributor to an upcoming book by a fellow, healed Lyme patient. Some or all of this story may be published in the coming months. I have added and updated some of this information 9.12.2020, so hopefully I will not violate any copyright laws. 

 

NOTE:  Do not assume everything I write here or on my Facebook Lyme page will help. Everyone heals differently. Working with a knowledgeable, sincere doctor and finding the right combination of medication, herbs, personal lifestyle and diet changes will help. One size doesn’t fit all for Lyme disease treatments. Don’t be afraid to research and consult with your doctor. Get a notebook and write down EVERYTHING; diet, exercise, symptoms, dates, times, and ANY physical or emotional stress-causing events. Stress seems to be the biggest culprit of all diseases. Hypocrites stated, “All disease begins in the gut”. HE WAS RIGHT!! 

 

NAME:  Kathleen Meyer 

I live in Northern VA. I am a retired, 60+ year old Grandmother. I am widowed, and I was living alone when Lyme hit. Symptoms began between September 12-14, 2012. 

 

BACKSTORY:  September 12, 2012. I felt something prick my lower back. When I reached around to check, the area was very hot to touch. This was in my car in Reston, Virginia, on a 90+ degree day. I had left the car windows open slightly during the work day. 

The previous two weeks, I had been on vacation to the Pacific Northwest, to visit my Sister. While there, I visited a national park, which is highly populated by deer and other furry animals; large and small. There was hiking and a few photo ops while sitting on a rock wall. Deer roam around freely in the town where my Sister lives. 

After going to my family doctor almost daily between 9/14-10/12 to complain of strange symptoms, I was finally tested for Lyme, West Nile virus and Rocky Mountain Spotted fever. My doctor was skeptical at first, but I kept insisting the symptoms weren’t normal for any flu I had ever had. When I mentioned living by woods and recently spending time in a national park, I was taken more seriously.  

 

I was diagnosed with Lyme on October 12,2012, (clinically by relating symptoms) and blood work. Side note: Because I had Mono at age 18, I was also diagnosed with Mono “exposed”. I was instructed to go home, stay on bedrest and get clearance from an infectious disease doctor, before returning to work. I was on sick leave and coworker’s leave donations between 10/15-11/13/2012. I was also instructed NOT to work or look at work email while out sick; which I now understand completely. The philosophy seems to be, “Being out on sick leave means you’re too sick to be at work, so don’t try to do any work at home”. Never mind that after two weeks of bedrest, going stir crazy and wanting to do something, is very normal. 

 

TREATMENTS:  I was immediately placed on Doxycycline 200 mg, by the family doctor, for 20 days. That didn’t work. Then Doxycycline 200 mg for 10 days. When that didn’t work, there was 30 days additional. When I ran out, I waited between prescriptions about a week or two, to see if symptoms would come back. Symptoms kept coming back. I was on/off Doxycycline for a total of 60 days. My insurance company wouldn’t authorize more than 60 days, so I was given Cefuroxime 500 mg for 30 days. 

 

NOTE:  At the beginning of the Cefuroxime prescription I doubled the dose for the first 4 days, just to see what would happen. I realize that wasn’t a very smart thing to do, but I wanted to kill what was making me so sick. After the 4 days, I used the prescription correctly. At the end of the 30 days, no symptoms returned.  

 

NOTE:  I always eat yogurt in between any oral antibiotic dose. The reason is because all antibiotics kill all bacteria, including the beneficial bacteria we need in our gut, where the main part of the immune system is located. The other part of the immune system is our brain. The brain and gut communicate with each other UNLESS we have an illness like Lyme. The brain is affected and doesn't communicate correctly with the gut during Lyme, and probably during other autoimmune illnesses. 

 

MYSTERIOUS SYMPTOMS BEFORE TREATMENT:  High blood pressure, cardiomegaly, chronic bronchitis, prolapsed mitre heart valve, GERD, Barretts esophagus, large hiatal hernia. Other symptoms; short term memory issues, difficulty with vision, floaters, reading, sensitive to bright light and sunshine. Difficulty walking, bumping into walls, problems with grip and dropping things. Insomnia, sometimes several nights in a row. Constant buzzing, tingling, pain throughout my entire body. Chest pain, head and neck pain, difficulty with bowels, difficulty swallowing and anxiety from feeling so ill for no known reason, except Lyme. I was able to swallow correctly again, after an endoscopy and scraping of webbed growth (non-cancerous). 

 

WHAT THE WORLD NEEDS TO KNOW:  ALL doctors, nurses including E.R. personnel need to be made aware of how many hundreds of symptoms Lyme can have. It is known to mimic at least 400 other illnesses and syndromes. Millions of people worldwide are being mis-diagnosed or given catch-all diagnosis out of frustration. Doctors have about 15 minutes per patient and don’t have time to research and address everyone’s symptoms. More research is needed and the patient’s symptoms need to be taken more seriously. The phrase “The customer is always right”, needs to apply to patients as well. Haphazard treatment of symptoms and covering up symptoms DOESN’T WORK FOR LYME!! 

 

NOTE:  Most medical schools are funded by big pharma. They do not provide enough education to upcoming doctors about Lyme and similar illnesses. They don’t stress enough on nutrition or healthy eating as a benefit to patients. I have asked my doctors and chiropractor about this, and they said the same thing. 

Do NOT listen to any doctor who tells you your child has “Growing Pains”. Find a doctor who is knowledgeable about Lyme, preferably a young doctor with a growing family of his/her own. My family doctor diagnosed and treated me correctly, was THAT doctor, not a specialist, a general practitioner. 

 

HOW HAS LYME CHANGED MY LIFE; GOOD AND BAD:   Lyme caused me to be bedridden for over 3 weeks, afraid to drive for fear of getting lost, and feeling like I had early onset Alzheimer’s. I now feel that it was an eye-opening experience, which awakened me to how poorly I had been managing my diet and exercise on a daily basis. I also believe the 2012 influenza shot might have been flawed, because I never felt healthy after that, and it possibly weakened my immune system so Lyme and Mono could sneak in.  

I went from quick and easy meals and very little exercise to self-improvement. I learned from the Lyme pages on Facebook from reading other people’s stories. It was almost like putting a really large jigsaw puzzle together, very slowly and not having all the pieces in front of me. 

 

SOMETHING I DO NOW THAT I NEVER DID BEFORE LYME:  I now pay closer attention to my physical and emotional health, what foods I eat and the amount of daily exercise I get. I also developed pre-diabetes type 2 during the Lyme period. I am now eating real food and watching my weight in order to keep the pre-diabetes under control, without medication.  

 

NOTE:  Doctor’s won’t tell you unless you press them, that medication for everything is NOT the best way to control anything, because you’re stuck on the medication for the rest of your life. Our bodies are capable of healing, with help by US.  

 

THE MOST FRUSTRATING PART OF LYME DISEASE:  I would have to say, lack of compassion for what patients are going through on the part of medical professionals, insurance companies, news media, and the general public. “Take these pills and you’ll feel better”. This doesn’t work with Lyme disease; trust me. However, I know many people who believe everything their doctor says and I hear, “My doctor says it’s__________. More research is needed and the actual CAUSE should be researched and treated instead of pills to cover up underlying symptoms. 

 

MY BIGGEST SUPPORTER(S):  I have a private Facebook page called “Where is Lyme Disease”, which has 249 members. I consider all of them to be my supporters; we support each other. I have been posting there since March, 2015, before any of us realized Lyme is EVERYWHERE!! I HAVE POSTED HOW I TREATED, HEALED AND WHAT I AM DOING NOW TO STAY HEALTHY. Those answers were not readily found using an internet search in 2012. Everything I post on the page is from what I went through. I am trying to help others with Lyme get through it and not give up. 

I give all credit to healing to authors of books about Lyme struggles. There are too many to mention, but “Cure Unknown” by Pamela Weintraub was the best one. I read it several times, because the first time I tried to read, the words ran together and blurred because of Lyme. I am now able to read again, and have re-read several books I couldn’t comprehend before. If there’s a diagnosis of ADD or ADHD, suspect Lyme!!  

 

BIGGEST DAILY STRUGGLE:  Praying it never comes back and thanking God for every day which I am granted. Experimenting with different diet plans and keeping healthy. Getting away from white sugar, white flour and other overly processed, easy to fix foods and getting real food into my body is a daily challenge. 

Continuing to learn about and helping others deal with Lyme. I have helped quite a few people NOT give up. I wish I could help everyone or was a millionaire so I could donate money for a cure.  

[oneshipress]

We’re counting down the to the end of the Kickstarter campaign for Mr. Guy, Act 1 and the Origins Anthology! So we had our pal DeusNova42 talk to Mr. Guy’s creator, Jayel Draco, about both collections! They also chatted about why Oneshi Press values collaboration over competition, how we select submission for our anthologies, and what’s coming next for Mr. Guy!

What inspired you to publish comics anthologies that feature the work of other creators alongside your own?

Well, originally we were hoping to get our projects, like PACK and Tracy Queen, published by one of the larger traditional companies. After a lot of shopping them around and talking to people in the industry, we realized that coming in hot like that with projects that don’t fit the mainstream wasn’t really feasible. We also realized that there are a lot of fantastic creators out there whose work breaks the mold, but doesn’t fit the heavily gated shelves of the industry. Not being easily discouraged, we decided to build our own platform for our properties and share it with others who have stories that we believe need to be told and don’t fit with what’s being sold.

What is it about “collaboration over competition” that means so much to you, and why?

As far as the anthologies are concerned, the idea of working together with other creators to fill a worthy collection is a co-op model. As such, it requires a collaborative spirit. The thing is, we can tear each other down to beg for scraps from giant empires who are stuck in their ways from times of old…or we can join forces on these creative endeavors and together be big enough to pull our own weight and carve out a space for ourselves on those shelves. As far as the ideas of larger ongoing team projects like Children of Gaia, for example, I’ve always believed that together we can create far more than the sum of what we can create on our own.

Can you tell us more about Oneshi Press Comics Anthology (OPCA) #10—the Origins Anthology?

OPCA #10 is what we’re calling the Origins Anthology. The loose themes that we play with are often interpreted in pretty fun ways. For example, a story that tells about how something literally began could fit the theme just as well as a story that explores the cyclical [nature] of the greater universe. I don’t want to give too many spoilers about OPCA 10, but there are 13 shorts altogether, featuring a complement of over 2 dozen creators, which provide quite a good mix of takes on the concept of origins. Some are ongoing stories that have been in previous anthologies of ours already, and some are one-off shorts.

What are the most rewarding and the most challenging parts of working with other creators to bring these anthologies into the world?

The most rewarding part of working with so many different creators on these projects is knowing that we helped these creators all grow their audiences by sharing ours with them, as well as them all sharing each other’s audiences with one another and with us. The fact that our contributors keep the rights to their contributions and Oneshi Press foots the cost of printing, giving contributors a chance to buy printed copies wholesale and sell them full price, is a sort of vicarious wish fulfillment. When we started off, we wished someone could have done that for us, but no one did… “Be the change you wish to see in the world,” right?

The most challenging part is honestly administrative tasks, keeping track of what’s coming and going, getting creator bios from everyone for crediting everyone appropriately. Making sure that every page from over a dozen different stories all conform to the same standards for printing. Keeping track of sales versus cost of goods sold. This isn’t our forte, nor is it something we ever wanted to do. It’s just necessary for us to do this for now until we can get some magical unicorn to do it for us one day… Long story short, it’s just so much administrative work.

What do you look for in submissions to the anthologies?

What we look for in submissions to our comics anthologies, aside from the obvious skill in technique from the creator(s), [is] the heart of a contribution and [whether] it feels like it matches our tone. That said, we’re looking for progressive stories that tell things from a different angle than the common tropes. We love stories that aren’t just clever, but also try to give the audience a meaningful takeaway. Expanding one’s perspective is a path to inner peace and peace with others; art has that power. Sometimes that means exploring kindness and compassion; sometimes it means exploring pain and even the concept of wrath. It’s not always what you’re used to or what you like; we’re not providing lip service for the masses. We’re exploring ourselves together. We’re providing catharsis for the masses.

That said, we’re not into shock for the sake of it, we are not into punching down, and we will never accept bigotry of any kind. We’re sex-positive feminists who believe love is equal, black lives matter, trans rights are human rights, and being a jerk isn’t cool. If all that fits with you, you’re who we’re looking for—let’s share our stories together.

How can creators apply to be featured in your anthologies, and what is the selection process like?

Everything you need to know about submitting a contribution to our comics anthologies has been carefully curated and posted on our submission page here. Lynsey and I both receive mail from the contact page and are happy to answer any additional questions.

The selection process is done in three columns:

We consider the skill level in techniques employed both for writing and visuals, and for our preferences there, for column one.

The second column is the heart of the story, how important do we feel the story is, are we going to feel right knowing that we chose to include this story over that one? The heart of the story is broad and difficult to quantify in simple terms: Does it portray an underrepresented character? Does it convey a moral that fits with our values? Does it explore something that is often neglected in the mainstream?

The third column is the theme of our anthology. How well does the submission fit the overall collection? We do always try to round this out and not be too redundant. However, we also try to avoid being too far-reaching.

At the end, the projects that are highest in all three columns are prioritized over the projects that are lowest in all three columns. Sometimes we might have a project that’s high in the first two but really just doesn’t fit the theme we’re going for as well as some of the other submissions, in which case we may consider it for future anthologies.

You mentioned in your last interview that your latest venture, Mr. Guy, is an “art-thology.” Can you explain what that is and how it differs from an anthology?

Typically, a comics anthology is a collection of short comics from multiple series and often from various creators, which are generally bound together under the common theme. For example, our 10th Oneshi Press Comics Anthology is the Origins-themed anthology. Mr. Guy: Zombie Hunter, however, is one continuous narrative all written by myself, but each chapter (or arc) is illustrated by a different artist. So it’s really only an anthology where the art is concerned. Hence the word art-thology!

Did you always envision Mr. Guy as an art-thology? What influenced that decision?

If you’d have asked me 20 years ago, I’d have said that one day I’d illustrate the whole thing myself. I made some early attempts and, having no idea what I was doing, put them on ice. About 10 years ago, I was toying around with the idea of Kickstarting a pilot episode for a Mr. Guy cartoon. Chris Covelli, my long-time creative partner and co-founder on Children of Gaia, even did some CGI of Mr. Guy walking around and toon-shaded. At the time, though, even the workload for a pilot was a bit beyond our scope, and the more we looked into Kickstarter, the more we realized we didn’t quite have the internet reach we would need, nor the understanding of how to run an enticing campaign.

All these years later, as co-founder of Oneshi Press, I’ve helped put out 9 anthologies, and the 10th one is on its way. Mr. Guy was already written in 8-page arcs, each one with a different vibe. It just felt right to want to see each arc done by a different artist. Sort of like a DTIYS (draw this in your style), but for a whole chapter.

How did you approach creators about working on Mr. Guy, and will there be opportunities for other creators to participate in similar projects in the future?

So, the first artist for Mr. Guy, Act 1 is me! That was easy. I just turned to myself and said yes. The next 3—Walter Ostlie, Diana Camero, Jacey Chase—were already on our roster of people we’ve worked with in the past for the Oneshi Press Comics Anthologies. Depending on how well the campaign for Act 1 goes, we’ll decide when to start nailing down the details for who will be working on Act 2, and then eventually Act 3. We do have some artists tentatively penciled in for Acts 2 & 3, but those may change depending on availability as we get closer, and there are still a few open anyway. For most future projects where I need to hire artists in general, I’ll probably start with asking people who have already contributed to our anthologies before doing an open call.

Where can people find Oneshi Press anthologies and other publications?

Oh, I know this one! People can find Oneshi Press Comics Anthologies and our other works right at oneshipress.com.

Visit the Kickstarter campaign to support our creators and Jayel Draco with a pledge or a share! 

Mr. Guy Creator Jayel Draco on Collaboration, Art-thologies, and Indie Comics We're counting down the to the end of the Kickstarter campaign for Mr. Guy, Act 1…

[homebrewsno1asked4]

2B 2

Welcome! Today’s subclass – inspired by 2B of Nier Automata, for those who just walked in – is the Planar Adjudicator.

What and why is a Planar Adjudicator, you may ask? I didn’t just want to make the 2B class a construct-killer; unless your DM’s world is teeming with robots, that won’t be particularly useful. So I reflavored the androids’ crazy superhuman combat maneuvers as laws of physics they’re allowed to break. And YoRHa as like interdimensional hitmen of balance.

Kinda like “if the Horizon Walker Ranger joined a Paladin order.”

I don’t remember the exact thought process, tbh.

Commence!

Clearances

As Planar Adjudicators climb in rank, they’re allowed to bend certain laws of reality, or waive them altogether.

When you first gain access to these clearances at level 3, you may take three. You may take two additional clearances each levels 7, 10, and 15. At these levels, you may also replace a previously-established clearance with another one of equal level.

See list of Clearances at the end of the class.

Save vs. your Clearances is 8 + proficiency bonus + your Intelligence modifier.

At level 3, the fighter usually gains multiple features with their subclass: 1) Each archetype's primary mechanic; 2) a coin toss between an exploration or interaction feature, usually packaged with an extra skill proficiency.

To fit with the Planar Adjudicator's "spacetime cop" theme, I made the main mechanic Clearances - or laws of reality that the Planar Adjudicator's allowed to break to better hunt their quarry. In an earlier draft, I tried to directly base these Clearances on the various Pod abilities; but after a few false starts, I realized that most of the Pods either don't translate well into D&D mechanics, or would provide game-breaking stat increases/extra attacks. So instead, I looked to the Warlock's Eldritch Invocations for inspiration, and the Clearances scale/stack similar to the Eldritch Knight's spellcasting. (I think... I'm sorry, I really need to be more careful about crossing out my design notes, not deleting them entirely.)

The Clearances are supposed to reflect Nier Automata's flashy combat; encapsulate more of 2B's skills and android abilities not covered by my earlier choices of Race, Background, etc; and beef up the Planar Adjudicator's flavor.

Basic Planar Knowledge Database

Take proficiency in either Religion or Arcana.

As an action, you detect the distance and direction between you and any creature involved in your goal, such as a person you seek vengeance against or someone you pledged to defend. You must be familiar with this creature – i.e. have met them personally, or you know more than passing knowledge about that creature. If the target is on another plane of existence, you instead discern the distance and direction of the nearest portal to that plane, though you don't automatically know which plane it leads to.

The Planar Adjudicator's other starting feature - Basic Planar Knowledge Database - bundles one of two lore-intensive Intelligence proficiencies with a barely-changed version of the Revenant's Relentless Nature. I don't think it's too OP because it's mostly for flavor, but Hey! I've been wrong before.

(Maybe BPKD should at least be 'use x times between rests’?)

Database Upgrade

You hone your insight into your extraplanar quarry by level 7, analyzing your deep repository of lore for weaknesses.

Your melee attacks (not ranged, not spells) now count as magical for the purposes of overcoming resistance.

You gain proficiency in Religion or Arcana, whichever you did not choose from Basic Planar Knowledge Database. Except for critical failures, you can treat any Arcana or Religion roll of 9 or below as a 10.

Fighters' level 7 abilities usually go one of two ways: an attack/defense buff; or an exploration ability packaged with a new skill proficiency. The Planar Adjudicator's Database Upgrade is bit of a mix of both.

This is a melee-only version of the Arcane Archer's Magic Arrow, as well as the other half of the Basic Planar Knowledge Database - while also borrowing a little of the Rogue's Reliable Talent. I'm hoping that's not too much, as religion and arcana are mostly fun roleplay skills anyway. Who knows; the way you run your games, this might be OP.

Executioner’s Clearance

At level 10, you gain two types of Favored Enemy. One is always humanoids. For the other, choose from aberrations, celestials, elementals, fey, fiends, or undead. You gain a +4 bonus to damage rolls with weapon attacks against creatures of both types. Additionally, you have advantage on Wisdom (Survival) checks to track your favored enemies, as well as on Intelligence checks to recall information about them.

When you gain this feature, you also learn two languages of your choice, typically one spoken by your favored enemy or creatures associated with it; for example, elvish for humanoids and deep speech for aberrations. However, you are free to pick any language you wish to learn.

You also have advantage on saving throws against the spells and abilities of both these enemy types.

Fighters' level 10 features are exclusively combat-focused. Usually, they're an improvement to a pre-existing feature.

I borrowed the Ranger's Favored Enemy + Greater Favored Enemy for Executioner’s Clearance. Since even the stacked version of Greater Favored Enemy is still conditional, and it's already only a level 6 ability, I thought it fair to throw the Planar Adjudicator another bone.

Hammerspace

You can equip up to three weapons at a time, in any combination of weight class or ranged/melee. You can swap these weapons in and out as a free action, including in between attacks.

You stow any of these three weapons you cannot feasibly hold in a personal void not unlike a Bag of Holding.

Hammerspace adds a bit more Nier Automata-ness to the Planar Adjudicator's playstyle, what with the giant weapons floating behind you and switching between these giant weapons in an instant.

I can't for the life of me remember what I used as a base for Hammerspace. Honestly, I might have made it from scratch, but I wouldn't give me that much credit.

Unchain Protocol

Against your favored enemy types, your weapon attacks score a critical hit on a roll of 19 or 20.

While the planar adjudicator is at half their hit points (rounded down) or below, they score critical hits on 18-20 for all enemy types, not just favored enemies.

While the planar adjudicator's hit points equal 10 + Constitution modifier or below, your criticals gain a damage bonus equal to your level in this class.

At level 15, Fighters gain a variety of types of combat features. Attack spells/spell-like abilities and attack/damage buffs are common.

I think this is another weird fusion of a couple different class abilities. Like Champion/Barbarian’s Improved Critical plus one of the Brute’s abilities, maybe?

The first part of Unchain Protocol stacks with Executioner's Clearance. The second and third stages of the Protocol affect all critical hits, for the trade-off of inching closer and closer to death.

Evasion System Overclock

When an enemy misses an attack against you, you may incur the effects of Time Stop as a reaction. All restrictions of Time Stop still apply. You take the turns afforded by Time Stop immediately upon using this ability. You may use this once a day.

I know 2B has the whole slow-time-when-you-dodge ability from the beginning of the game; but there’s no way to give the player its D&D equivalent at an early level without tipping the game balance like the fucking Titanic.

My thinking is, assuming the player tries to use this ability to hit or run, Evasion System Overclock only affords them one extra strike, or a get-out-of-combat-free card if the player’s okay with ditching the rest of the party and appearing 1000 feet away. Hopefully, this forces your Planar Adjudicator to be a little more creative and strategic with their extra turns.

Clearances

Law of Applied Force. All ranged attacks have a maximum range of 300 ft.

Law of Auras. You can cast Detect Magic at will.

Law of Darkness. You can see normally in darkness, both magical and non-magical, to a distance of 120 feet.

Law of Healing. Whenever you regain hit points from a potion, spell, or ally’s class feature, treat any dice rolled to determine the hit points you regain as having rolled their maximum value for you.

Law of Inertia. Whenever you successfully deal damage to a creature, you can push the creature up to 10 feet away from you in a straight line.

Law of Interspecies Communication. Although limited by the intelligence of the beast, you can understand and speak with beasts.

Law of Linguistics. You can read all writing. You can comprehend any written word or symbol, should it hold any linguistic meaning.

Law of Natural Cycles. Within a minute of its death, you may ask a recently deceased creature one question. The dead creature’s spirit provides the answer to the best of its knowledge, translated into a language of your choice.

Law of Resilience. Your AC becomes 13 + your Strength or Dexterity modifier while not wearing armor. You can use a shield and still gain this benefit.

Law of Rest. You no longer need to sleep and can't be forced to sleep by any means. To gain the benefits of a long rest, you can spend all 8 hours doing light activity.

Law of Vitality. You can cast False Life on yourself at will as a 1st-level spell.

Law of Warfare. Over the course of 1 hour short rest, you can bond a weapon to you. You can bond up to two weapons at once. These weapons gain a +1 to attack and damage rolls. You can summon or dispel these weapons as a bonus action.

Prerequisite: Level 5

Law of Conservation of Energy. For one minute, you can double your speed, gain +2 to AC, roll advantage on Dexterity saves, and take an additional action on each of your turns. The action can be used to attack (one weapon attack only), dash, disengage, hide, or use an object. You can use this feature once every long rest.

Law of Elemental Order. Every long rest, pick a type of elemental damage. When you hit a creature with a melee or ranged attack, you can use a bonus action to unleash an eruption of this damage type. This eruption is a 20-foot-radius sphere, focused on the target you just hit, and deals 8d6 of your chosen element. You are immune to this eruption. You can use this feature once every long rest.

At level 11, this feature recharges with a short or long rest, and the extra damage increases to 9d6.

At level 17, you can use this feature twice between rests, and the extra damage increases to 10d6.

Law of Proportional Might. Once per turn, when you hit a creature with a melee weapon, you can add 4d8 force damage to your attack, and you can knock the target prone if it is Huge or smaller. You can use this feature once every long rest.

At level 11, this feature recharges with a short or long rest, and the extra damage increases to 5d8.

At level 17, you can use this feature twice between rests, and the extra damage increases to 6d8.

Prerequisite: Level 7

Law of Opacity. Once per rest, you can use an action to gain the ability to see through solid objects to a range of 30 feet. Within that range, you have darkvision if you don't already have it. This special sight lasts for 1 minute. During this time, you perceive objects as ghostly, transparent images.

Law of Motion. For one hour, you are unaffected by difficult terrain, and spells or magical effects can't reduce your speed or cause you to be paralyzed or restrained.

You can spend 5 feet of movement to automatically escape from nonmagical restraints. Additionally, being underwater imposes no penalties on its movement or attacks.

Prerequisite: Level 9

Law of Gravity. At will, you can rise vertically up to 20 feet. While suspended, you have no momentum of your own and you may grab on to other objects in order to move as if climbing. You can change your altitude as part of your movement each turn.

Whenever you deactivate this clearance, you drift safely to the ground per the spell Feather Fall.

Law of Proportional Athleticism. Your jump distance is tripled.

Law of Spirit-Mortal Communication. You can speak to spirits - per the Speak with Dead spell - at will.

Prerequisite: Level 15

Law of Physicality. As an action, you and everything you wear and carry become invisible for up to an hour. If you drop an item or remove it, the item is no longer invisible, and if you try to attack or cast a spell, you're visible again. You can activate this clearance at will.

I don’t have an ending besides thank you for reading, hope it doesn’t suck!

[mushroomhedgehog]

Update on Universal Orlando’s potential third park.

One of the big things I love is theme parks, especially those with heavy themes based on some really great films and TV shows. So it’s no surprise that I’m heavily anticipating the potential third park (fourth if you include the Volcano Bay water park) at Universal Orlando Resort. This has been rumored ever since Universal Parks and Resorts was reported to have acquired some more land near the resort not too long ago. Orlando Park Stop has been providing multiple leaks, which began with this first one last month at the end of January. It’s an image featuring a prominent character and confirms that Super Nintendo World is coming to this third park:

Of course, the image also shows that the third park will be called Universal’s Fantastic Worlds. Based on the name, it sounds like this park will take a similar approach to Islands of Adventure, with a focus of immersing guests within the worlds of various characters and franchises. A second leak was recently revealed earlier today, and claims that the Universal Monsters, specifically those from the 1930s such as Dracula, Frankenstein’s Monster, The Wolfman, and The Mummy, will be featured in their own themed area. The leak supporting this is the image below, which features what appears to be Dracula’s castle:

Having found this report from Orlando Park Stop as well, I looked back at the article of the previous leak, which had a few more images. OPS was even kind enough to combine the photos the best they could to piece together as much information as they could. Here’s what they came up with:

Take note of the copyrights section at the very bottom of this image. A lot of notable franchises are mentioned, including Jurassic World, Scooby-Doo, Beetlejuice, Fantastic Beasts (indicated by a fragment of the word “Grindelwald”), and as the previous leaks have mentioned, Nintendo and the Universal Monsters. It’s very possible that these could be hints of what is planned for Fantastic Worlds. However, it’s also possible they were merely mentioned in the document and had to be credited to their respective owners, and nothing more. However, there’s some factors I’d like to point out in regards to each of them.

First off, Beetlejuice and the main characters of Scooby-Doo are featured at Universal Studios Florida (the resort’s primary park) as meet-and-greet characters. They were featured in previous attractions that have since been closed, but unlike Beetlejuice, Scooby-Doo was not in a starring role in said attraction. I highly doubt those franchises were mentioned merely for the photo opportunities associated with them. Another major argument to consider is that Beetlejuice used to be the star of the Beetlejuice’s Graveyard Revue stage show, which featured the Universal Monsters. In short, I think it’s possible this show could return at the Universal Monsters area of Fantastic Worlds. As for Scooby-Doo, there’s a lot of possibilities for what could happen with that franchise. Maybe the meet-and-greet will also be moved over to the same area, as Scooby-Doo is heavily involved with monsters and supernatural much like Beetlejuice is, despite both being owned by Warner Bros. rather than Universal. Personally, I would love if Scooby-Doo recieved a new shooting ride similar to Men in Black: Alien Attack at the Fantastic Worlds. Various shooting rides themed to Scooby-Doo previously existed at numerous Six Flags and Paramount Parks, the latter of which are now owned by Cedar Fair. Following Cedar Fair’s acquisition, Scooby-Doo was removed from those rides, while the Six Flags parks later replaced their rides with new ones. If Universal were to make their own version of this ride with better tech due to a larger budget, it would be amazing.

In regards to Jurassic World, elements of those films are already featured at Universal Orlando. In the Jurassic Park area of Islands of Adventure, Owen Grady’s raptor Blue is featured as the star of the Raptor Encounter attraction, where she meets guests and poses for photos with them. That’s the only attraction with emphasis on the Jurassic World films though. It’s possible that Universal was aware that fans would be upset at Universal Studios Hollywood retheming Jurassic Park: The Ride to a Jurassic World update, and expected similar backlash would occur if the area at Islands of Adventure would receive a similar update. Building a separate area at Fantastic Worlds would not only allow for different kinds of attractions, but also keep the existing Jurassic Park open without a long wait to refurbish it. For instance, I would love a ride based on the geospheres, hopefully with animatronic dinosaurs rather than projected images of them. Furthermore, once this park is complete, perhaps Universal could still allow guests to experience the Jurassic Park franchise at Fantastic Worlds while they perform some maintenance on the Islands of Adventure area. Some of the animatronics could use a technical upgrade, and having a separate area themed to Jurassic World would be a great way to provide guests that happen to visit when the other area is down. Finally, much like the Hogwarts Express connected Hogsmeade to Diagon Alley at the two current parks, perhaps a monorail based on that in the first JW film could be featured to connect the Jurassic World area of Fantastic Worlds to the Jurassic Park area of Islands of Adventure.

Finally, we have Fantastic Beasts. As of right now, Fantastic Beasts has not been featured much even in the gift shops of either Hogsmeade or Diagon Alley. That is, until recently. In addition to the replica wands of Harry, Dumbledore, and other characters, replica wands of Newt, Tina, and Grindelwald have been available for purchase. But other than that, there’s been little presence of the franchise, compared to how much attention to Jurassic World was given in the Jurassic Park area of Islands of Adventure. This may be due to Jurassic Park being one of Universal’s own properties, as Harry Potter is a franchise licensed from Warner Bros, and the agreement did not include Fantastic Beasts. I would imagine this area would feature at least one thrill ride similar to those at the current areas based on The Wizarding World but with Newt, Tina, and others facing off against Grindelwald. I’d also expect a gentle ride involving a tour through Newt Scamander’s suitcase of creatures, complete with animatronics of various wacky characters.

At the end of the day though, all of this is speculation. Universal hasn’t even officially announced the park, so all we can go off of is speculation and any leaked information if we’re lucky. I would expect this park to open sometime before 2025 at the very least. But based on the fact that it took Universal two and a half years after announcing they would be building Hogsmeade back in 2007, and it opened in 2010, that means this park could take possibly more than twice than that long to build. And with other projects like Hagrid’s Motorbike Adventure set to replace the Dragon Challenge later this year at Hogsmeade in Islands of Adventure, and another unannounced (but teased on social media) coaster for the Jurassic Park area of the same park, it’s not clear when construction will begin or an announcement will be made on this park. Hopefully one of those two will be soon, as we’ve already had a bit of a wait for Super Nintendo World after that was announced, and the first incarnation of that is scheduled to open next year at Universal Studios Japan. Either way, we’ll probably be waiting a while before we hear more information, especially if said information is confirming anything, rather than being speculation or rumors.

[natsthinkitythinkthinkthonk]

Sarazanmai - Thoughts

I’ve been hearing so much hype about the ending, and I just watched the end. I’m just going to voice some candid thoughts. That’s why I call it “thoughts”; it isn’t a proper review or anything.

Long story short: 

It was a pretty good series! It wasn’t amazing or anything, but it was fun to watch for the most part. I couldn’t take it seriously at times, but I still found myself invested in it at some points. The art was nice, the music was great, and the voice acting was pretty good too! I would recommend this series to people who like kappas, drama, and butts.

Kunihiko Ikuhara is credited with directing many masterpieces (that I haven’t watched) including Revolutionary Girl Utena (which he also created), Sailor Moon R, Sailor Moon S, Mawaru Penguindrum, and more. His work is praised by a lot of people in the anime community, and he does have a lot of talent. He incorporates themes that aren’t usually seen in anime which is fully present in Utena where childhood idealism, illusions, ambition, adulthood, sexuality, abuse, and identity are all prominent themes. Many regular tropes are known to be deconstructed. When people heard he was making Sarazanmai, a lot of people were excited! A stacked cast, Ikuhara himself, and the MAPPA production team? It was already set up for greatness.

But after all that hype, what’s left? I found myself a little disappointed after getting myself a little too excited. It wasn’t like other series where I went in with no expectations or other series where I actually did go in with high expectations that were delivered. I went in with these expectations, it delivered somewhat, and now I find myself with a slightly unsatisfied feeling.

Three boys accidentally break a statue then are tasked with becoming kappas and fighting zombies. They do this to return to their human form. At first, these three seem unconnected, but over time, secrets are revealed. They eventually accept the risks to collect dishes which can grant a wish. This is the sarcastic fantasy of three boys who don't feel connected to their important ones, getting to realize the real meaning of bonds.

[Paraphrased from MAL]

It came off as being completely weird and bizarre, and it stays that way. In a way, it’s quirkiness was its strong-suit, but it finally got down to the drama and conflict in the story, I found myself not finding it seriously. The writing itself wasn’t bad, but with its art style and with its already outlandish plot, it ultimately made me feel a bit confused. When they had scenes that were supposed to evoke emotions, I couldn’t quite feel it right.

Especially when there’s a kappa in the frame. I kind of thought, “How am I supposed to feel when there’s this staring at me?”

I found that the only emotional scenes that even slightly hit the mark were the ones where all characters were in human form. Yeah, that’s right. I just said kappas ruin the mood. 

Character: No! Don’t die! Me: *chuckles* he’s a fricking kappa.

Everything towards the end felt a little melodramatic. Don’t get me wrong, I can be down for melodrama. I’m that person who enjoyed Kiznaiver. I just felt like this series was episodic for the most part with a bit of sprinkling of the main story, and I couldn’t have done it any differently. I just felt like something was missing. Reo and Mabu’s storyline was only riveting towards the end. For the majority of the series, they are shrouded in mystery then we get a wham of backstory and stuff over the last few episodes before the climax with Hosoya and Mamo hit.

Speaking of voice acting, they kept Kouki Uchiyama to play the kid version of his character, and I didn’t mind that. The main trio was okay! Shun Horie, Ayumu Murase, and Kouki Uchiyama did great jobs! Ayumu does a great job voicing the darker and lighter moments (as expected since watching 5 episodes of Devilman). I feel like Ayumu and Kouki didn’t really do a role that was that much out of their zone. Kouki plays another edgy “cinnamon roll” while Ayumu plays another energetic boy (like Hinata from Haikyuu). I don’t know what Horie did in other anime though.

Mamo and Hosoya surprised me towards the end, but surprisingly, I would’ve directed one of Mamo’s lines differently during episode 10. I won’t say which one, but I felt like the character didn’t portray emotion properly. Besides that, those two have acted in so much together. The music they provided was great (even though there were only two songs).

The art was okay! It was very out-there, new, and fresh, but it wasn’t stand out enough that when I watched it, I went, “HOLY MOLY GUACAMOLE”. It was nice, fluid, and it was definitely... sexual. I haven’t seen so much butt and a**s (b-hole) stuff.

The music was really catchy! I know Yukari Hashimoto for composing the music for Toradora, 3-Gatsu no Lion, Gekkan Shoujo, and a few other things. While I can’t always say that her music sticks like glue, I can say that there are certain tracks that still resonate with me. I gotta admit, the quality of the overall series affects how much I like an OST. This one was repetitive enough (with its episodic nature) to be catchy.

Oh yeah, the ED by the Peggies was better (for me) than Kimi no Sei from Seishun Buta Yarou (which I didn’t really like... please don’t kill me). The opening was so much fun. I really liked it. It ranks up there with that Naruto OP. I can feel its significance growing, and I listened to it more than once (which is rare for me)

Anyways, I can’t be the only one who had a hard time really getting with the drama of this series. It was pretty good... it wasn’t great, but I still enjoyed watching this. Unlike most anime series, this ends on a good note.

I would rate this a 7.5/10 (rounding it up to an 8 on MAL)

Spoiler Part:

Toi went to a juvenile detention centre for three years but for which crime? If you murder someone and tried as an adult, that’s an automatic 20+ years. If it was truly self-defence, he would’ve been pardoned. So, what was he exactly charged for?

Reo and Mabu were great, and I didn’t realize their greatness until the end because their side plot was put off until the end. Mamo mostly did a good job. Hosoya’s role wasn’t as tasking as maybe some of his other ones. I’m just glad to see Hosoya singing and working together with Mamo. I think we all wanted to see that.

I still can’t take kappas seriously. Have we learned anything from Arakawa Under the Bridge?

The ending was great though. I found that saved its rating because some anime end so badly that it goes from a 9 to a 4 real fast (nothing beats reading what happened in Usagi Drop which continues to be a scar on my mind that bursts out bleeding whenever remembered)

[warehouse13pod]

Show Notes 103 "Magnetism"

Agents, you are getting sleepy… Very sleepy…

Click play on the player above to listen to this week’s episode while you read, if you so choose.

Wow! We covered so much this week! Where to start… Where to start…

Well, first of all, we had a lovely Warehouse Agent from our Patreon page where people can be Patrons for our show (Hey, did I mention we have a Patreon) introduce us!

This week’s Warehouse Agent was a representative from Emp-RSS.com, an online presence dedicated to empowering women to find their voice and providing mentors for young women entering the workforce. I can’t think of a Patron more appropriate to Myka’s arc this episode.

So, the first thing we had questions about was what all the jurisdictions were for the Secret Service, CIA, FBI, and NSA. I linked the answers above, They’re pretty dry, BUT—

The interesting thing I found—as a person who is decidedly NOT a law enforcement agent or a lawyer—is that basically the Secret Service’s jurisdiction is basically whatever protects presidents, vice presidents, former presidents and their spouses and children. Unlike other agencies that have geologically defined jurisdictions, the Secret Service’s jurisdiction seems pretty vague. I can definitely see how that could be exploited by the Warehouse. Pete and Myka are technically protecting those people but also protecting, like, literally everyone else in the world. LOL.

The episode opened with Pete and Myka in France taking the blade of the guillotine that took the life (and head!) of Marie Antoinette. Want to know more about Marie Antoinette and her grizzly end? Boy, oh boy do the History Chicks have you covered! They have an amazingly detailed and informative two part episode dedicated to her fascinating life—there was much more to her than a beheading and a misquote about some cake (Part 1, Part 2). The link to each part links to the audio for each episode as well as the show notes for each respective section. Don’t worry about the fact that the episode is called a “reboot.” You’re not missing something. The first episode of the History Chicks ever recorded was about Marie Antoinette, and it was very poor audio quality. They deleted the original file, re-recorded the episode, and included new information the second time around—hence, reboot.

Still not enough Marie? Don’t worry! There’s more! On the History Chicks’ side podcast, The Recappery, they recap the 2006 film, Marie Antoinette. That episode is also a two-parter (Part 1, Part 2).

There are so many emotional moments in Marie Antoinette’s life that could have led to the creation of artifacts. The History Chicks cover those and anything else you want to know, too! They did a series of Biography Channel mini-documentaries on famous historical women. Three(!) of them focused on Marie Antoinette: a general one about her life, one about the scandalous but rarely discussed affair of the diamond necklace, and one about her small house called the Petit Trianon on the grounds of Versailles.

Moving on, we talked about the famous Mission Impossible scene that Pete was attempting to imitate with perhaps, ahem, a tad less grace. This is the image we were talking about:

Miranda brilliantly discussed the importance of Affect Theory to the Warehouse and its artifacts. Here’s a very brief overview about that.

Miranda made a reference to the purple goo shower that Artie inflicted on Myka and Pete being like slime. For those who didn’t grow up watching the American television network, Nickelodeon, here’s what you need to know about getting slimed. It was a huge thing when we were growing up. On kid/family game shows on Nick (the affectionate slang name for Nickelodeon Network), contestants who lost or got a wrong answer or who won a prize were punished/rewarded with being slimed—i.e. having green goo rained down upon you from above. Why were punishments and rewards both related to slime??? 1) Because it’s always funny to see adults have copious amounts of green goop poured onto adults heads. 2) It supposedly tasted like vanilla pudding!

To this day, adults attending or presenting at the Kids Choice Awards (presented by Nick) should be wary…anybody can be slimed.

We also mentioned that Myka and Jill share a love of True Religion flap-pocket jeans. Here’s what those are.

We talked about the collaborative involvement between M.C. Escher, Nikola Tesla, and Thomas Edison in the early days of the Warehouse.

Tesla and Edison didn’t like each other very much. And the internet is full of links that can fill you in as to why. I wouldn’t even know where to start. So, instead, please enjoy this rap battle between Tesla and Edison from the legendary Epic Rap Battles of History YouTube channel. (I can’t speak for Miranda, but I am totally #TeamTesla).

We also went into a little more detail on M.C. Escher. In particular, we discussed his art works, Relativity and Drawing Hands.

We also discussed his vital contributions to science and to mathematics (Math Link 1, Math Link 2).

Jill also talked about how much second-hand embarrassment she felt when Myka started talking about how much she hated men to Father Braid. Here’s actual footage of Jillian watching that scene.

That scene and earlier discussions of Myka’s feminist rage led to a discussion about the Bechdel Test. The test is a huge part of feminist theory, media studies, and film studies. And, honestly, it’s a super low bar that you’d be astounded how few pieces of media even reach. Want to see if your favorite movie passes the test? Click here! There’s actually a film festival dedicated to celebrating films that pass the test. The theory is not without its critics, however. Many people think that the bar of the Bechdel Test is not high enough and we need to expect more of female representation in media than their mere existence in scenes together and the absence of discussions about men. I’m inclined to agree that we should expect more, but I also think that the Bechdel Test is still a great way to assess if a piece of media is able to do a basic job of representing women on screen. Interested in the criticism? There’s an op-ed from The Washington Post and The Verge that might pique your interest.

When discussing magnetism, with Jill and with our incredible and intelligent guest, Kameron Sanzo, Miranda mentioned her (not really) favorite song (LOL). Here’s that song that asks the ever important question, “Fuckin’ Magnets. How do they work?!”

If you’re actually interested, this is how magnets work.

Anyway…

Other things Miranda discussed with our guest, Kameron Sanzo, include animal magnetism and mesmerism as well as hypnosis. Some cursory information about the founder of Mesmerism, Anton Mesmer, can be found here. A fun exploration of mesmerism can be found in the eleventh episode of the Audible original podcast, Stephen Fry’s Victorian Secrets, which has been linked before in a previous episode’s show notes, because of its relevance to Spiritualism. You can purchase the podcast from Amazon or with an Audible subscription.

Of course, this episode would not be complete without addressing the creator of this week’s artifact, James Braid. There was some discussion of the similarities and differences between hypnosis and mesmerism especially before and after the development of the scientific method.

Now, I’m not a doctor.

(And yes, I know that fans of Brooklyn Nine-Nine and Parks and Recreation just said “Not a doctor” in the voice from the end credits. Don’t worry, Internet. I’ve provided a clip of that for you, also)

Now that we’ve got that out of the way…

I’m not a doctor and don’t want to seem like I know too much about the evolution and modern usage of hypnosis/hypnotherapy in a medical sense. But what I can say is that—while mesmerism is widely understood by scientists to not be a real thing—hypnotherapy is actually still quite relevant to modern medicine. Its origin may share the outlandish nature of mesmerism. However, there is apparently a difference between traditional and modern hypnosis. There is also a difference between hypnosis and hypnotherapy. The Mayo Clinic goes into more detail on the topic as does Psychology Today.

Kameron Sanzo also compared mesmerism and hypnosis with Reiki. Here’s a couple links that provide more information on what Reiki is (Link 1, Link 2).

Finally, we also discussed the use of filmic language and angles and how they can induce feelings of fear and anxiety. No one was better at this than Alfred Hitchcock. Here’s some information on the filmic language he created (high-angle shots, other techniques).

Now, let’s delve into some ~Heavy Themes~

We gave a shout-out to Eddie McClintock to celebrate his 18 years of sobriety! A monumental achievement!

Addiction is a serious issue and if the themes covered in this episode of the podcast or show regarding addiction affected you in any way and you need or want help, here are some links that may provide what you’re looking for.

For substance abuse, please consult Alcoholics Anonymous or Narcotics Anonymous. If you are a loved one of someone who struggles with alcoholism, there are resources for you, too! Please check out Al-Anon—not to be confused with Alcoholics Anonymous.

The episode also with issues of suicide, abuse, and gun violence. Please, please reach out if you are struggling with trauma or mental wellness as a result of abuse, mental illness, or any other reason.

Some resources that may help (where possible, phone numbers are listed beside links to resources in case your web usage is monitored and you don’t feel safe clicking links):

The Suicide Prevention Lifeline: 1-800-273-8255

The Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration: 1-800-622-HELP (1-800-622-4357)

For LGBTQIA+ listeners who are struggling, here is a whole list of resources.

The Domestic Violence Hotline: 1-800-799-7233

Finally, if you are non-verbal or are deaf/hard of hearing/unable to use a phone for any reason: THERE ARE STILL RESOURCES FOR YOU!!!!

Please, don’t give up hope.

Check out the Crisis Text Line: Text HOME to 741741 

We love you. Stay safe, Agents.

[lookatthisdork]

Setting the stage, filling the supporting roles

Happy New Year! I’m starting off 2018 with yet another attempt at writing because while I thoroughly enjoy me a good reblog and comic panel shitpost, I do dabble in fanfic. Once again, this is intended for the Bruce and Clark are brothers AU.

Martha had originally toyed with the idea of forging the documents necessary for a convincing second pregnancy (prenatal checkups, sonograms, birth certificate, etc), but she'd known from the get-go that that wasn't a practical avenue to explore. While Dr. Wayne spent the bulk of his days toiling away in the OR of Gotham General, far from the view of even the most driven of paparazzi, Dr. Kane split her time between Wayne Industries' R&D labs and its board room; she had meetings with staff, meetings with shareholders, meetings with city contractors, and of course, meetings with the press. Then there the socialite events, the charity dinners, the planned photo-ops. Unless she specifically arranged for privacy, there were always at least three camera lenses and a microphone pointed her way.

Granted, she usually didn't mind being in the public eye - not nearly as much as Thomas minded, the poor man. But all the attention did make pretending to have hidden a second pregnancy for a full nine months...challenging at best.

There had also been the option of faking a surrogacy - she certainly had the money, means, and potential motivation to hire and provide for a surrogate - but Thomas had put his foot down. He was willing to indulge in the subterfuge necessary to safeguard a very-young child from less scrupulous authorities, but her husband was a law-abiding citizen at heart. Making up a fictional woman's entire life history - social security number, work history, medical records, proof of residency, credit reports and all - was well and truly out of his comfort zone.

Martha could respect that. She definitely could have made it work, but she had backed down all the same.

In the end, they'd decided to "find" Clark. It hadn't been terribly hard to stage - Thomas had signed himself up for a conference on emerging stem cell research in Philadelphia, and Martha used the opportunity to make a proper "vacation" out of it, renting a cottage at the Delaware Water Gap for herself and Bruce to stay at while Thomas was away.

Once there, Martha had muddied up a cheap baby-carrier, dressed Clark in a chain-store onesie and diaper, and "stumbled" upon him on a walk through the woods. One 911 call later, the cottage was hosting multiple local police, FBI, and social workers with no one being any the wiser.

Finding an abandoned infant within the confines of a national park had turned into a media circus, of course. They'd had to hire extra security for both the manor and Wayne Industries in the short-term, lest they be completely overrun. Still, it was the easily-controllable media circus of an innocent mother-of-one and her toddler finding a child in need. Eventually everything died down when no leads were found. Predictably, no one came forward to claim Clark, and no one batted an eye when the Waynes applied for emergency custody.

Now, it was simply a matter of time until the "emergency" part of the deal passed and they could draw up more permanent custody papers. Martha figured three, maybe four months would have to pass until she could start vigorously pursuing that. Until then, there were plenty of other things to attend to. Setting up a second nursery, buying (yet more) baby clothes, sorting through Bruce's hand-me-downs, setting up trust funds, updating hers and Thomas's wills.

And the press. No one expected much news out of a four-month old (or the alien equivalent). Still, sculpting public opinion early was was just common sense. Thomas's family may enjoy Gotham's good will to a greater extent than her family did, but people could always be counted on to be fickle. Power - the ability to change things, for better or worse - fell to those with money and those with influence.

Between the two of them, Martha and Thomas had plenty of money and plenty of influence. And if Martha had anything to say about it, Bruce and Clark would be better off than the two of them.

(Especially Clark. She didn't like to dwell on the consequences of someone who couldn't be bribed or blackmailed discovering Clark's history. Better to make that potential pool of people as small as possible.)

Given that a three-year old and a newly-acquired baby would have to be involved in her PR event, Martha had gone with a family photoshoot. Firstly, it would demonstrate to anyone watching - authorities included - that she was wholly committed to involving Clark in Wayne events, same as Bruce. Secondly, it would give celebrity gossip rags something (ultimately insubstantial) to chew on, hopefully dissuading people form trying to sneak photos of the kids without permission. Thirdly, and most importantly, Martha wanted baby pictures and a photoshoot gave her an excuse to dress Thomas and the babies in matching outfits.

(Just because the photos would serve a practical purpose, didn't mean she couldn't enjoy the end result.)

"Marty, exactly how many costume changes are we planning?" Thomas asks, looking at the portable clothes racks next to the shoot as if they were about to bite him.

"Oh, about five or so," she says as she plucks the last of Bruce's next outfit from one of the racks. "Less, if Clark kicks up a fuss." From another rack, she grabs Clark's suit and lays it over her husband's arm.

Thomas, demonstrating just how much he loves dressing up, openly grimaces. Still, he heads over to the side-room where Alfred is giving Clark his bottle without comment.

Martha shakes her head a bit before turning to Bruce. The next series of photos is set to look like they're on a yacht; Bruce and Clark get matching blue-and-yellow sailor suits, Thomas gets the classic navy blue blazer with white pants, and Martha is already dressed in a white sundress with yellow embroidery at the hem.

It's easy enough to hold Bruce still long enough to finish tying his ascot; even when he's bored, her little boy is a fairly low-energy toddler. Prone to wandering away if left alone for any length of time, sure - he'd given a one-time babysitter a near-heart attack after he'd walked away and fallen asleep in an infrequently-used linen closet. But generally speaking, as long as you were paying attention, Bruce was perfectly content to stay put.

"Mommy," Bruce says, bouncing ever so slightly in his patent leather shoes. "I wanna hold Clark this time."

"He's a bit big for you, sweetheart," she says back. She straightens his shirt one last time, then leads him over to the seating set up in front of a drop of Gotham harbor.

The photographer, Jeanine (a consummate professional and regular hire for Wayne functions), takes the opportunity to discreetly adjust the lighting. Bruce spares her a glance before looking back. "I can hold him," he says. "Daddy said I could."

Martha hums a bit, tucking some errant hair behind his ear. "When did Daddy say this?"

"At dinner."

"That was yesterday, Bruce. Not today."

The expression on Bruce's face is a small copy of his father's scowl; it's hard not to find it cute. "But I wanna hold him today!" he exclaims.

"Indoor voice, Bruce." She's careful to keep her voice even, patient, but firm. It's the same tone she used on her brothers when she has to talk them down from an ill-fated decision. "You can hold him when the photographer leaves - if you behave - but not before."

She has to swallow a sigh at the way Bruce's pout deepens. Its easier to talk down her now-grown brothers than it is her small son, unsurprisingly, and Bruce has been more prone to tantrums ever since they'd brought Clark home. Alfred and Leslie assure her that it's all part of the acclimatization process - that Bruce will mellow out as the novelty of having a new baby in the house wears off. Martha certainly hopes they're right.

The two of them have a bit of a stare-off while Bruce decides whether or not he's going to start shouting. Fortunately, Thomas takes that moment to walk back in, Clark held up and away from his chest. "He spit up on his vest," he says by way of explanation. And yes, Clark has, in fact, dribbled drool and old milk all down his front - though he doesn't look any worse for wear, gurgling contentedly in his father's arms.

Bruce next to her lets out a loud "Ewwwww!", twisting so that her arm and some of her bulk is between him and the baby - clearly, his previous ire has been forgotten in lieu of avoiding getting any puke on him. Thomas, meanwhile, isn't quite smiling, but he does sound a touch too gleeful about this discovery. After all, they can't take pictures of Clark in a ruined vest, and one of the key points of this venture was to get pictures of the four of them. Ergo, baby puke means less time that Thomas has to spend in front of the camera.

"That's okay, Mr. Wayne," Jeanine pipes up from where's she's finished checking the last of the extra floodlights. "I brought two sets of everything for the boys, just in case."

"Oh...good. Thank you." Martha has to bite back giggles at her husband's expression as he goes to get Vest #2. Poor man, he thought he'd dodged a bullet there.

Turning back to her still-hiding son, Martha grins. "So Bruce, do you still want to hold your brother?"

"No!" he shrieks, curling further behind her. Ah, the fickleness of youth - and here he'd been not even a minute earlier, getting ready to throw a fit over Clark.

"It's only a little spit-up," Martha teases.

"Nooooo! Gross! Don't wanna!"

"Well then, I guess we'll just have to let Daddy hold Clark." She pulls Bruce into her lap, resting her chin on the top of his head. He struggles a moment to stay behind her before surrendering to her hold with a quiet huff. "Thomas," she calls across the room. "Quit stalling. You're not going to get out of this any faster."

"I wasn't stalling," he says as he comes back over and sits to her right. Clark, once in range, makes a grab for Bruce's sleeve, which Bruce dodges. ("Eww, Clark, no!") "I was just straightening out his vest. His new vest. Because Jeanine has two of everything."

"Of course, dear." She just smiles at the adult version of Bruce's pout. "Remember, smile for the camera. We still have four more shoots to go."

You should all be aware of the fact that in an earlier draft of this, Martha did fake the hired-a-surrogate-for-Clark thing. Ultimately, I decided that was unnecessarily convoluted, but Martha definitely could have pulled it off. Bruce has to get his sense of Drama from somewhere.

[hola-mundo-adios]

Kamala Harris

With her inauguration, Vice President Kamala Harris has made history: She’s the first woman — and first Black and South Asian person — to serve in the role, and now the highest-ranking woman in US government.

But beyond these firsts, Harris is poised to have a vice presidency unlike few others, in large part because of the singular role she’s expected to take on.

Harris will be one of just a handful of vice presidents to preside over a 50-50 Senate, making her a pivotal tiebreaker in the upper chamber. And given her expertise as a lawmaker, she’s set to be an impactful voice as the US continues to combat ongoing public health and economic crises. President Joe Biden has also said Harris will be his top adviser — “the last person in the room” — with the ability to strongly influence White House policy.

“The way she’s approaching the vice presidency is very similar to the way Joe Biden approached the vice presidency with Barack Obama,” Harris press secretary Sabrina Singh previously told USA Today. “She’s walking into this office as a full governing partner to Joe Biden and is completely aligned and supportive of his priorities.”

In the Senate, Harris’s 51st vote could be a key one: On everything from resolutions rolling back Trump-era rules to confirmations for Cabinet nominees to legislation that’s approved via budget reconciliation, her vote may well be needed to reach a simple majority. And while breaking tie votes is nothing new for vice presidents — Mike Pence did it 13 times during his tenure — it’s typically less common, with Democrats’ incredibly narrow margins suggesting that Harris could be doing it a lot more often.

“Vice President Harris will be in a relatively unique role among modern vice presidents,” Joel Goldstein, a St. Louis University law professor and expert on the vice presidency, tells Vox. “The even division of the Senate, the polarization of the parties, and the demise of the filibuster regarding appointments means that she may have occasion to cast some important tiebreaking votes.”

Harris could be a major tiebreaker on key votes

Prior to this term, Dick Cheney was the last vice president to preside over a 50-50 Senate — though that split only lasted for a few months in 2001 before Sen. Jim Jeffords (R-VT) decided to switch parties.

At the time, Cheney only broke two ties while the Senate was divided in this way — both of which were on budget amendments.

Harris could have to do the same much more frequently, both because the Senate has grown more partisan since then and because the threshold for approving Cabinet nominees and most judges has been reduced to a simple majority.

“If there’s going to be a tie vote, it could easily come during nominations,” says George Washington University political science professor Sarah Binder.

And though Pence never presided over an evenly divided Senate, his tiebreakers could provide a glimpse into the subjects Harris may have to step in on: His vote helped confirm now-former Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, advanced multiple judges, and allowed Republicans to roll back Obama-era regulations that enabled abortion providers to receive federal grants.

In general, Harris could potentially break ties on a few types of votes:

Cabinet nominees and judges: These nominees require 51 votes to be confirmed, and depending on how much GOP support they garner, they could need a tiebreaker to move forward.

Congressional Review Act votes: Using the Congressional Review Act, Senate Democrats are able to undo agency rules made within the last 60 legislative days if they have 51 votes to do so, and support in the House. Democrats could take this route to roll back Trump-era regulations, including changes to environmental protections.

Budget resolution: A budget resolution, which could be used to pass more ambitious legislation, including more Covid-19 relief, only needs a simple majority of votes to pass — rather than 60 votes, the threshold most legislation must clear. The process for approving this measure is known as reconciliation.

Just how many times Harris may have to use this power will depend on the opposition Senate Republicans put forth on issues like Cabinet picks and efforts to use the Congressional Review Act to undo the policies of the Trump administration. One factor is how united Democrats stay across legislative priorities and nominees: Because of the Senate numbers, every Democrat in the caucus will be needed to approve pretty much anything that requires a simple majority for it to be successful.

“The two variables are the reaction of the Republicans and whether the measures on the floor can garner [moderate support],” says Binder. If Democrats can consistently hold their caucus together and peel off one or more moderate Republicans, tiebreaking may be less necessary, for instance.

And while this procedural role is one that vice presidents have long held, Democrats’ bare majority in the Senate — and the expansive goals they’d like to achieve under the Biden administration — could put a spotlight on Harris.

“It certainly underscores the importance that she brings to the legislative agenda and will showcase her role,” former Sen. Tom Daschle, who served as minority leader in the last 50-50 Senate, told Vox.

As a tiebreaker, the vice president’s focus is more to aid the party to get to a particular vote threshold than to shape the legislation itself — though Harris could potentially also take on the latter job.

Harris, in a recent op-ed in the San Francisco Chronicle, said she would embrace this responsibility but urged lawmakers to find common ground. “Since our nation’s founding, only 268 tie-breaking votes have been cast by a vice president. I intend to work tirelessly as your vice president, including, if necessary, fulfilling this Constitutional duty,” she wrote.

There are different policy areas that Harris could prioritize

Much of the role of the vice presidency will depend on how Biden and Harris opt to structure their partnership, and his comments so far suggest that she could be quite influential.

“Different presidents structure the responsibilities of the vice president in different ways,” former Democratic Senate staffer Jim Manley told Vox. “Both Joe Biden and Al Gore had a seat at the table for every major decision.”

Biden has spoken about being how important it was for him to be the “last person in the room” when Obama made key decisions on everything from the Recovery Act to troop withdrawals in Iraq, and he’s committed to having the same type of relationship with Harris.

“I told him I wanted to be the last person in the room before he made important decisions. That’s what I asked Kamala. I asked Kamala to be the last voice in the room,” Biden has said. Harris, too, said she looks forward to being a “full partner” to the president.

“Vice presidents are only as powerful as their presidents let them be,” says Jody Baumgartner, a political science professor at Eastern Carolina University and expert on the vice presidency. This means the dynamic between the two leaders is often a deciding factor in how they coordinate governance responsibilities.

Exactly how Biden and Harris will share labor isn’t yet clear. But given Harris’s work as a senator — and her position as a tiebreaker — one role she could fill is as the administration’s liaison to Congress. When he was vice president, since he’d served in the body for decades at that point, Biden worked heavily with legislators. “Whenever [then-Senate Majority Leader Harry] Reid had a problem with Republicans, one of his phone calls he would make would be with the vice president, who had good relationships with Capitol Hill,” says Manley.

Because of Biden’s background in Congress, this could be a continued focus for him as well. Harris has extensive experience she will bring on the legislative front and on specific issues. She was a leading author of the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act, the Senate’s anti-lynching measure, and the LIFT Act, which would expand tax credits for middle-class households.

During her four years as a senator, Harris served on the judiciary and intelligence committees. Before that, she spent more than two decades as a California prosecutor, both as the state’s attorney general and as San Francisco district attorney.

She comes into her new role with deep expertise and a broad skill set. And as the first Black woman and first South Asian woman in this role, she’ll also be in a position to elevate the voices of women of color on different policy subjects.

“I am interested to see whether and how her identity shapes her approach to this partnership,” Howard University political science professor Keneshia Grant told Vox. “I am hopeful that she is able to translate her lived experience at the intersection of race and gender into policies that are sensitive to the lives of everyday people.”

With her background in criminal justice reform, this could be among the areas that Harris continues to focus on, with progressives likely to keep pressuring the administration on their stances.

Spokesperson Symone Sanders previously told the Associated Press that the Biden administration hopes to take advantage of Harris’s wide-ranging expertise by having her be involved in every major issue the administration tackles. The four pillars the new administration has laid out so far to focus on are Covid-19, economic recovery, racial justice, and climate change.

“She has a voice in all of those. She has an opinion in all those areas. And it will probably get to a point where she is concentrating on some of the areas more specifically,” Sanders said. “But right now, I think what we’re faced with in this country is so big, it’s all hands on deck.”

[shirlleycoyle]

A Roundtable of Hackers Dissects ‘Mr. Robot’ Season 4 Episode 1: ‘Unauthorized’

It’s been one year, nine months, and 23 days since the sizzling season 3 finale of Mr. Robot, and the show is back for its last season.

This week, we discussed [SPOILERS, obvs] the probability of getting an envelope with a ringing dumb phone with a hacker on the other end of the line, dead man’s switches, hacking cameras at Grand Central Station, and honeypot houses. (The chat transcript has been edited for brevity, clarity, and chronology.) This week’s team of experts include:

Emma Best: a former hacker and current journalist and transparency advocate with a specialty in counterintelligence and national security.

Bill Budington: a long-time activist, security trainer, and a Senior Staff Technologist at the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

Jason Hernandez: Solutions Architect for Bishop Fox, an offensive security firm. He also does research into surveillance technology and has presented work on aerial surveillance.

Harlo Holmes: Director of Digital Security at Freedom of the Press Foundation.

Micah Lee: a technologist with a focus on operational security, source protection, privacy and cryptography, as well as Director of Information Security at The Intercept.

Freddy Martinez: a technologist and public records expert. He serves as a Director for the Chicago-based Lucy Parsons Labs.

Matt Mitchell: a hacker and Director of Digital Safety & Privacy at Tactical Tech. He founded cryptoharlem, which aims to teach basic cryptography tools in the inner city.

Christina Morillo: a New York City-based information security and technology professional working as an information protector on Microsoft’s cloud & engineering security team.

Zachary Julian: Security Associate at the security consulting firm Bishop Fox.

Freddy and His Package

Yael: Are there instances where you get a package with a ringing phone, or is that just in TV/the movies? Like has that happened in real life?

Harlo: I don’t know about in real life, but this is a thing in Black Mirror, and American Vandal.

Micah: For it to happen, Elliot would have had to be tracking the package and waiting outside the building to know exactly when to make the call. Which he was.

Emma: If the phone had GPS enabled, Elliot could have tracked it and known when it arrived, assuming there wasn't already a webcam compromised in there. Elliot also could have been listening in through the phone’s microphone in real-time. He hears the phone arrive. Hangs up. Dials back.

Bill: I'm assuming Elliot had either delivery confirmation or a GPS unit to know when the phone and video was delivered.

Micah: I don't think he would have needed GPS. He could have just watched delivery person enter the building with the package, and as soon as they left the building made the call.

Emma: True, Micah. Even simpler, he had an in-progress call to the phone going.

Jason: There are Android apps that will trigger sending a text or whatever when they're in proximity to a given Wi-Fi access point or at a certain latitude / longitude. It's pretty simple to set up.

Matt: Tasker app does this.

Harlo: It doesn't seem to be Android. It's a dumb phone (probably a Tracfone or something similar). So it's likely Elliot has it tracked via… maybe skip tracing?

Bill: Yeah, it looked like a dumb burner phone.

Micah: I think it was like a pay-with-cash Tracfone, which is the smart way to do it anonymously anyway.

Freddy: The simplest explanation is that he had someone else watching him and tracking the dude and reporting back.

Yael: What's a Tracfone?

Harlo: It's a brand of pay-as-you-go phones you can buy from pharmacies, 7-11s and other places. it has only mobile text and voice; no data.

Micah: It’s just one of several types of cheap phones you can purchase at corner stores in cash. You don't need ID or credit card or anything, and they have fairly cheap options with old flip phones, even today.

Matt: Buying a Tracfone with cash, buying service for it with cash, and then not talking when you call the service number to set it up is a pretty anonymous way to get a U.S. cell phone.

Harlo: I agree with Emma that the easiest way might be keeping a live call on during delivery, then listening for the pick-up. Or having actual surveillance on the office. Or maybe even tapping into any video surveillance on premises.

Yael: He had access to Freddy’s screen too, right?

Bill: I don't think he had access to the screen… maybe he just saw via binoculars that he was watching the video.

Yael: Okay so flash forward to the call. So then Mr. Robot/Elliot is trying to get Freddy to click on a phishing link (which he thought was ransomware, but it wasn’t)—and to copy the .pst file in his inbox to the thumb drive. How does that work?

Micah: Since Freddy was copying the .pst file himself, and not the malware, my guess is clicking the phishing link was simply to get malware on the law firm's network for future use.

Harlo: Maybe this is either 1) a diversion for the IT admin to not notice the immediate export/download of an employee’s entire inbox, or 2) one of those things where you gotta hack the admin to complete the exploit.

Zach: It seems like the malicious link was just to provide an excuse as to why the inbox was compromised.

Freddy: If he had network access, he would just dump the active directory [a Windows service that controls access to shared resources on a network, like user logins and credentials], but the point of the plot was to incriminate the lawyer. It wasn’t about getting the emails. It was about incrimination.

Jason: Owning active directory usually takes a while and it can be kind of a hassle.

Micah: Elliot did need the emails to find all the banking details he needed.

Harlo: But if you want to hide your involvement, you're also pinning it on the mark who "clicked a link, oops totally not an orchestrated op by Mr. Robot."

Freddy: The way to get the emails isn’t really how you would do it if you already have malware on the network.

Micah: PST files are an Outlook inbox. A lot of the big email leaks that get reported on start out as a PST file. He was using a cool tool to import them and search through them, "Expansion Inbox," which I've never heard of.

Yael: So shout out to Iceweasel! We saw it on Elliot’s laptop on the train.

Bill: Debian's Iceweasel had resolved its naming issues with mainline Firefox in early 2016 but remember this is still in late 2015. So they're staying true to the time period.

Yael: Is Iceweasel like an open source Firefox? Wait, isn't Firefox open source?

Micah: Firefox is open source, but there was a trademark conflict for use of the "Firefox" name and logo inside Debian. Debian handled it by just renaming it to Iceweasel and providing their own logo.

Dead Man’s Switch

Yael: Elliot said he could get the videos to send to Freddy’s kids and the FBI… like a dead man's switch…

Micah: OnionShare has a dead man's switch feature. You can set a time in the future to start sharing files, and it gives you the Tor onion address right away. It wouldn't work for this exact use case, but you could, for example, tweet an onion address and a date, and if you don't manually close OnionShare before that date, it automatically starts sharing whatever data you want.

Emma: A dead man's switch would be super easy to set up. Have a couple of computers running a check every 10 minutes on a data file, see if it's been 24 hours yet. If it has, send the emails. If not, check again in 10 minutes. The email doesn't have to have the data, just a key and instructions on how to access it. The data can be anywhere. Elliot could check in with infected machines via a command and control system and reset the clock in the data file. The data could be stashed on some random server. The email to the FBI could contain the target’s IP address, user/password and decryption key. The files would be too large to just send to the FBI directly, and if they were forcibly dropped on an FBI system, they wouldn't touch it. But of course, Elliot didn't need a dead man's switch. He just needed the mark to believe he had one.

Bill: I mean I don't think Elliot really wants Freddy to formally do something incriminating, it would be easy enough to frame Freddy, and Elliot doesn't care about laws. Maybe he just didn't have time to code the malware that would do all this email-copying for him. After all, he mentions to Mr. Robot that they only had two weeks to prepare for this target.

Harlo: Two weeks, and everybody's on drugs, so subpar performances all around.

Yael: Haha so much coke.

Freddy: Lawyers reading this chat: please don’t do illegal drugs.

Bill: Clearly you've never been in a 1980s law firm before.

Yael: It’s… not illegal if you don’t get caught?

Harlo: ALSO, it WAS SENT as a DVD. Which he left in the player. So the FBI will see the evidence when they go to his office anyway.

Zach: Perhaps Elliot was expecting him to clean up the evidence instead of killing himself ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. I think eventually it would become public that this law firm's emails were compromised, and Elliot/Mr. Robot needed a plausible excuse in place about why that happened to take the heat off of them.

Image Credit: Micah Lee

Grand Central Station

Bill: I like how Elliot mentioned to Freddy to turn off and leave behind anything "with an on/off switch"—but Elliot forgot about the fact that an RFID ping can also be used to determine location.

Harlo: It’s Bluetooth, actually!

Yael: I saw the Bluetooth symbol.

Bill: So is it actually Bluetooth? I mean, cheap RFID cards might have that symbol anyway.

Jason: Most access cards don't support Bluetooth, but you can buy access cards that include Bluetooth low energy (BTLE) beacons. They're a little more expensive and I wouldn't expect a law firm with what looks like kind of cheap IT and security to go for them, but they exist (about $10/unit on Alibaba).

Emma: It could be both RFID and Bluetooth. The presence of a Bluetooth connection is annoyingly used as a layer of security verification by some systems. -_-

Jason: Yeah, the cards I found have RFID and BTLE.

Image: USA

Zach: It’s interesting he left all electronics behind to go to the station, but I assume he would still be trackable through Tracfone pings to the cell towers.

Yael: Even with a dumbphone.

Zach: Those phones will still ping the cell towers.

Emma: That's not super precise, though.

Yael: Yes, it still pings but is not as precise, at least according to Serial podcast season 1.

Jason: You have to consider the setup time to follow a brand-new mobile phone with a fresh IMEI [device serial number] and IMSI [user identifier].

Micah: Those phones still ping cell phone towers, but I don't see how Dark Army would know which IMSI to try tracking in crowded NYC, assuming they had no idea about this phone thing ahead of time.

Bill: You could use something as simple as this Bluefruit LE sniffer to triangulate the location of the badge.

Jason: There are a lot of apps that scan Bluetooth for navigation. there's even one by Amtrak that is designed to help you navigate Penn Station (it might also support Grand Central now). if you had access to an ad network that fed back Bluetooth MAC addresses within range, you could get pretty accurate tracking.

Yael: How did Elliot get eyes inside Grand Central Station? Did he hack into a surveillance camera or something?

Zach: Seems that way.

Harlo: With an app that I think is made-for-TV. I can’t find it. CamSec Pro? Anybody? But I guess it's worth noting for the audience that, you don't have to restrict your Kali Linux setup to what comes pre-installed. You can totes outfit your Kali USB with persistence [preserving the filesystem instead of wiping everything every time the OS shuts down] and other cool things.

Fred: It’s movie magic for sure, most of those networks require some kind of VPN access and username / password. Hard to believe it’s hacked that quickly.

Jason: There are plenty of internet connected cameras with default credentials.

Micah: I would assume he pre-hacked the Grand Central Station cameras in anticipation of this operation, so he could have spent a few days on it.

Freddy: But to be able to get that level of access and to be able to move PTZ (pan-tilt-zoom) you would need access to the network operations center (NOC) for Grand Central.

Jason: A lot of these cameras are administered through simple web apps that might not be particularly locked down, even the pan-tilt-zoom controls.

Harlo: What if it were 2015/16? What exploits would we have used? Like, any NOC web app exploits that have been long since patched?

Zach: I saw this online from 2006: stationary Bluetooth devices throughout Grand Central Station. Something like that could be exploited by the Dark Army for Bluetooth tracking.

Bill: Who knows, there could be networks that don't advertise with beacon packets that are protected only with WEP [a weak and outdated security protocol for WiFi networks] or something that can be easily cracked. And the cameras often don't have any authentication layer at all, since it's assumed that the network will provide the security layer. I've seen a lot of these in stores, access points that don't send beacon packets but have devices authenticated with them.

Zach: I think IRL, though, the Bluetooth tracking would be difficult to set up. Either stationary devices in advance or some sooper-leet mass phone ownage to turn their devices into trackers, similar to FSociety's FBI hack. I would think the webcams in Grand Central Station are secure but honestly, who knows. That may be the most realistic part of this scene. Like Bill says, it could be a hidden Wi-Fi network secured with WEP and a bunch of security cameras.

Yael: I guess no cameras on the train that Elliot has evil Freddy meet him at?

Christina: I found that super odd. Like cameras everywhere but there, hmm.

Micah: Maybe there were cameras on the train. Elliot did have his hood up; maybe he didn't care.

Jason: Cameras on the train might not be internet-connected, if they exist. You'd have to figure out the network backhaul for that and it would be expensive and tricky (lots of dead zones in cellular coverage) for limited benefit.

Honeypot Houses

Yael: Did Mossack Fonseca have a distress signal/honeypot house where they torture people? How realistic is this?

Emma: As realistic as a hostile actor wants it to be. Formations House (#29 Leaks) wouldn't have. Some of their clients would, though.

Micah: I don't think it was a Mossack Fonseca-like company with the honeypot house, I think it was more like the Dark Army with one.

Yael: Hmm, do we know any IRL cases where people had a honeypot house? I guess they've kept them secret…

Harlo: Whitey Bulger.

Emma: The mob. Escobar, I think.

Micah: It would be really expensive to run a honeypot house. Like, even just having a normal house is expensive.

Bill: Well, when you own the world's currency it turns out you can buy a building in Manhattan.

Yael: With e-coin.

Emma: Well, the building would have served more purposes. It's fake addresses and mailing points. It's full of safe houses and temp housing. It has no prying eyes.

Yael: I know people have owned buildings for sketchy things but I'm not familiar with the process to get folks there via social engineering as opposed to, like, brute force. Do we know any IRL cases where people had a honeypot house? I guess they've kept them secret…

Christina: No but Jay-Z had a stash house on State Street, Brooklyn.

Harlo: Trump Foundation; I’m just throwing it out there.

Yael: I mean there was that newspaper that owned a bar in the greatest act of undercover reporting of all time…

Harlo: Something I dig about the honeypot house: cellular dead zone. Essentially a SCIF.

Emma: That can be done with the right paint, or even tape. DoD used to have its own special tape that could basically Faraday any surface. Make sure radio signals can't penetrate, soundproof, all panels secure. Often it has entrances guarded. It's usually in a government building of some sort, but Rockefeller had one in his barn IIRC.

Yael: “This doesn't feel right! The building is owned by E-Corp!" (Jump, Elliot, jump!)

Christina: Or like, don’t fucking go in, Elliot.

Bill: They couldn't get out the window. That's why you should Always Carry A Bat.

Harlo: Or a tactical pen?

Yael: And a ladder!

Harlo: Oh also, Christian Slater says something like "be careful, you're on the owner's Wi-Fi," which… hey hackerman: turn your radios off when not in use.

Micah: Did you all notice that at the end, when the Dark Army people were forcing Elliot to overdose, that he has a very old school rotary phone?

Harlo: IT'S A CLASSIC WHITEROSE FLOSS MOVE.

Micah: Man, in season 1 they were all like, "Let's get the Dark Army to help us with the China data center backups," and by season 4 I think they're understanding that was probably a bad call.

A Roundtable of Hackers Dissects ‘Mr. Robot’ Season 4 Episode 1: ‘Unauthorized’ syndicated from https://triviaqaweb.wordpress.com/feed/

[parentsperspectivetest]

Original article can be found here

“Thomas the Tank Engine had to shut the hell up to save children everywhere”

So, this is, effectively, the title of this piece. It was written around the time Martin T. Sherman, the voice of Thomas since 2009, quit his job due to a salary dispute and this is what the title is referring to. I’ll give that it’s fairly attention-grabbing (it made me read the damn thing), though I can’t ignore that it’s also clumsily worded and deceptive. Sherman did not quit his job to “save children everywhere”, (nor did his departure slow the success of the franchise, if I’m honest) he quit his job because the company refused to pay him the amount he sought and felt was apropos for the growing popularity of the franchise. He made it quite clear in the follow up of this development that he lamented having to leave the show and blames HiT entertainment for their lack of professionalism, not the Thomas franchise itself (which he still seems to admire for the very themes Van Slyke will go on to criticize); “I find it ironic,” Sherman said, “that most of the shows that Hit Entertainment puts out are about worlds where good people get rewarded, justice happens, and bad things happen to bad people. They themselves don't live up to that world in any way.”

What’s more, Van Slyke only takes the first few sentences of this piece to comment on Sherman’s departure, yet she’s using it as the pulling point to read her article. Already she’s put herself in a less-than reputable position for capitalizing on a very disappointing moment in an actor’s career, while simultaneously refusing to expand on it past its attention-grabbing potential.

My son, now three-and-a-half years old, thankfully never never went through a manic train fascination like so many other children. But once in a while, he'd get a bug in his brain to watch Thomas, and every time I sat and watched with him, I winced and groaned almost as much as Percy.

We have to commend Van Slyke on her heroic amount of patience to sit down and watch something her child enjoys despite the lack of personal entertainment she might find in his choices (such is the life of a preschool parent). That does seem to be the accolade she’s seeking, along with one for her child that he “never went through a manic train fascination like so many other children”. Evidently Van Slyke Jr. is already on the path to moral sainthood and social enlightenment nirvana just like his mother. I’m sure his being spared the Thomas fascination (as the spawn of the rest of us peons so often fall prey to) was just a happy coincidence, a result of his superior breeding and not due to a controlling parent that upholds the values of fascist-like censorship in the household.

When I heard the news this week, that the voice actor behind Thomas's incessant whinging quit the series because he was underpaid, I remembered all of the reasons that I cut my kid off from the show in the first place.

Having read this article already I can promise you that Van Slyke does nothing to connect Sherman’s departure from the show with her reasons for banning Thomas and his steam engine friends from her morally pure, socially enlightened household (begs the question why she had to “cut [her] kid off” from a show that she claims he never really cared for anyway). This makes one wonder why a contract dispute between an actor and a company made Van Slyke remember her own desperate reaching. I’m going to guess that the news simply gave her relevant leverage to alert everyone to her own parental martyrdom- after all, what is an act of heroism if there’s no one there to pat you on the back for it/and or feel inadequate in comparison?

Thomas and those friends are trains that toil away endlessly on the Isle of Sodor – which seems to be forever caught in British colonial times –

This odd little non-sequitur continues to haunt me. While I won’t deny the given fact that the rest of Van Slyke’s points in this article are varying levels of ridiculous, this assertion that the comings and goings on the Island of Sodor are like that of British colonial times is a special kind of strange. What colonial period in British history is Van Slyke referring to? In my US-centric mind I immediately think of our 1700’s colonial period, but that, for obvious reasons, is completely inapplicable. I looked deeper into it and realized oh, of course, British imperialism, how could I forget? “The sun never sets”, the time with India and all of that. And yet...literally nothing about the world of Thomas alludes even indirectly to imperialism or the colonial period (of any country’s history), so far as I can see. Of course, Van Slyke doesn’t mention this again, much less explain where and how she came to this conclusion. Maybe she’s thinking of Misty Island and how Topham Hatt basically helped himself to it after the discovery of the Logging Locos. And, yet, he didn’t really at all. Crash, Bash and Ferdinand pretty much continue on their island as usual and TH occasionally appeals to them for Jobi wood, which they’re happy to provide. Sometimes they come and help out on Sodor which, again, they’re happy to do. Seems like a pretty symbiotic relationship to me. The point is moot, anyway, because I’m willing to bet serious money that Van Slyke is basing this entire op-ed piece off of two or three haphazardly watched episodes from the dismal 15th or 16th seasons and has no idea the Misty Island/Logging Locos thing even exists.

It should be noted, ‘colonialism’ is one of those shock-factor buzzwords people sometimes throw into an argument to make something sound worse and more socially irresponsible than it is, whether it actually applies to the object in question or not (it usually doesn’t).

For one, these trains perform tasks dictated by their imperious, little white boss, Sir Topham Hatt (also known as The Fat Controller)...basically, he's the Monopoly dictator of their funky little island. Inevitably, the trains get in a fight with or pick on one another (or generally mess up whatever job they are supposed to be doing) until Hatt has to scold one of them about being a "really useful engine", because their sole utility in life is their ability to satisfy his whims. Yeah, because I want to teach my kid to admire a controlling autocrat.

Where I will -half heartedly and with much reluctance- concede to understand the point is the troubling nature of the steam engines’ sentience and their devotion to working without pay. There have been nights I, too, have laid wide awake wondering at the moral responsibility of this in a children’s show...and then I remember that we’re watching a show about steam engines. Locomotives. Literally, working and performing tasks is what they were built to do and this doesn’t change just because they’ve been made sentient for the sake of telling a story (how boring would the show be if the engine characters didn’t have personalities just to avoid any allegories to slavery? The show would instead have to be about humans and that defeats the whole purpose of Thomas entirely- unless the show were like my human au fanfic where all the engine characters are, instead, human...but I digress). To the franchise’s credit in this respect, they make it pretty clear that the engines are usually given the choice of whether or not to go work where they get slated to work (in terms of location, like Thomas got to choose to come work on Sodor, Victor received the same offer, when Hiro wanted to leave and go back to Japan he was permitted to do so without argument- even in the very early stories when Topham Hatt first goes and gets Percy, he asks him if he’d like to work for him). Yes, there are the occasional complaints, but such is true in most jobs. The concept of, ‘you don’t always get to do the jobs you like’ is a very universal truth of life and prevalent in Thomas, however bitter a pill that is to swallow for those living in idealistic dream worlds (as I suspect Van Slyke is).

Van Slyke is also wrong in that the steam engines’ “sole utility in life is their ability to satisfy [Topham Hatt’s] whims”. Sir Topham, for all the villain that he apparently is, is as much bound to the duties and obligations of the Sodor economy as the rest of his fleet. Yes, it is true he tasks them with the personal missions of transporting his mother, family members and so on, but most of the jobs we see the engines tasked with are public transportation and shipment of goods- much the opposite of Topham Hatt’s whims.

But, really. If you take honest personal offense with steam locomotives being used for their constructed purpose, I really don’t know what to tell you. Take the protest to an actual railway, I guess.

James is mortified that he has to travel while pink and proceeds to hide from all the other trains along the way. When he's caught, the other trains – including Thomas – viciously laugh and mock him.

Van Slyke is speaking now of the episode where James is tasked with picking up Topham Hatt’s granddaughter while covered in his pink undercoating. James is vain (which Van Slyke also naturally takes issue with- a bit ironic, considering) so he feels embarrassed to have to tool around Sodor while painted such a silly color, a color that is inherently feminine, Van Slyke will later attest: “You think a little boy watching Thomas is going to file away the lesson that pink is OK for boys? No, what kids remember is that James was laughed at, cruelly, over and over again, because he looked different and was clad in a "girly" pink color.” “Girly” is not a label that any of the trains place on James, even during their “vicious mocking” (vicious for Van Slyke apparently equates to good-natured, mild ribbing between friends at the expense of all-too fragile ego) but rather one that Van Slyke invents on account of the fact that Topham Hatt’s granddaughter happens to like pink. Van Slyke’s logic is infallible, folks: if one girl likes pink, then they all must like pink right? What’s more, the fact that girls like pink must indeed be why the engines thought James looked silly and not because, as is evidenced in the episode itself, being that shade of pink means an engine is only half-painted (the steam engine equivalent of moving around in one’s underwear) or that, as an undercoating, this particular shade of pink looks flimsy and dull and unremarkable. No, no, Van Slyke insists, the explanation just couldn’t be that simple.

I think we also need to commend Van Slyke on knowing exactly what each and every child is going to take away from this episode- which is, without a doubt, the fact that pink is not okay! It’s not for boys! Despite the fact that by the end of the episode James accepts his pink proudly because it made someone happy and he doesn’t care what anyone thinks of him, even if they do continue to poke fun. What a terrible message for children.

(For the record, all the "villains" on Thomas and Friends are the dirty diesel engines. I'd like to think there was a good environmental message in there, but when the good engines pump out white smoke and the bad engines pump out black smoke – and they are all pumping out smoke – it's not hard to make the leap into the race territory.)

No, it’s not hard at all, not when you’re explicitly looking for a white versus black allegory, to the point that you’re more than willing to invent one. Once again, Van Slyke’s ignorance of this franchise shows; only two of the many diesels in the show have ever been portrayed as villains and not even entirely shameless or irredeemable ones at that. Diesel is shown to have a heart when he goes to great lengths just to make some school children happy, Diesel 10 (for as Snidely Whiplashian as he can be) only ever acts of malice when he wants equal treatment for the diesels, which he always gets in the end when he makes amends. Most of the time the antagonist role either falls to one of the steam engines or, in the most recent film, Legend of the Lost Treasure, an old white guy. A white guy, Van Slyke! A white old guy who was, without a doubt, one of the most irredeemable and shameless villains the franchise has ever produced (in canon- let’s not forget the ill-fated PT Boomer that was cut from the final version of The Magic Railroad, another old white guy villain though I’m not sure if he counts).

Also, steam engines don’t pump out smoke, they pump out steam (the clue is in the name, Van Slyke, come on). Diesel engines puff out exhaust. If an engine or a diesel were pumping out smoke something would be seriously wrong so, no, they are not “all pumping out smoke”. (Also, there technically is no such thing as “white smoke”)

It’s rather unbelievable how adamantly opposed Van Slyke was to doing any research into any of this whatsoever, despite feeling this article deserved publishing. The future of journalism, everyone.

And that's not even to get started on the female trains. Well, actually it's hard to get started on them, because they barely exist. Take a quick scan of the more than 100 trains and characters in the Thomas universe – it spans multiple books, toys and continents in addition to a TV show – and you can quickly count on two hands the number of lady trains that populate is Isle of Sodor. Emily – the only lady train to get name checked in the opening credits and the only one who regularly hangs out with the boy trains – is said to "know her stuff." That's the sole description of her personality. What does that even mean?

I imagine it means exactly as is written on the packaging, that Emily is knowledgeable about her job. Is that really so hard of a blank to fill in, Van Slyke? The other male engines don’t get much better descriptions in this roll call song either, for whatever that’s worth (apparently nothing). In fact, I personally think Henry and Toby are the ones that get the bum deal as their only character description in this song is “toots and huffs and puffs” and “well, let’s say, he’s square”, respectively. At least Emily’s lyrics give us some insight, however shallow, into her character’s personality. Since Van Slyke is so good at making leaps, I’m gonna go out on a limb here and guess that if all the main characters had been made female her critique would be that their 2 second description line in a roll call song was too vague, because characterization in the actual show means nothing in the wake of a minute long theme song. Apparently.

Now, I do have to give that the female presence in Thomas was sorely lacking for awhile. Yes, even in the first few books the cast is entirely male! What Van Slyke doesn’t mention is the effort the franchise has made to introduce more and more varied, colorful female characters to the line up; Marion, the endearing, upbeat, talkative steam shovel with a very active imagination; Caitlin, the lively streamlined engine that can best the speed of the fastest engines on Sodor; Mavis, the stern, matronly diesel engine that even the most fearsome engines on the island fear and respect; Belle, the powerful but kind fire engine that everyone admires (just to name a FEW) and that says nothing of the incoming swath of female characters being introduced in The Great Race later this year.  Last year, we saw the airing of “The Best Engine Ever” which features Emily and Caitlin deriving strength from one another and turning envy into a respectful friendship while realizing their own individual talents and merits (not to be left out is Marion’s cameo encouragement for Emily to be proud of herself and lift her metaphorical shovel high). This 10 minute episode did better at responsibly writing female characters and their relationships than most hour long adult shows I’ve seen recently.  

What I can’t agree with is the assertion that the show is somehow undeserving and lacking in any other value just because the male cast outnumbers the female. The fact that Van Slyke ignores all the things the show does right with the female characters, however small in number, makes this probably the weakest way someone could’ve brought the argument forward. Such can be said of the rest of this article.  

When it comes to female characters with regard to feminist ideals quality is always more important than quantity- after all, what good is an entire cast of female characters if they’re all bland and stereotypical and one-dimensional?

Last year, the British Labour shadow Transportation Secretary even called out Thomas for its lack of females, saying that the franchise setting a bad example for girl wannabe train engineers everywhere.

Though this is one of the only times Van Slyke makes an effort in this article to back up her sources (the first being, simply, the article about Sherman’s departure from the show) she still completely disregards Mary Creagh’s mention of a whole host of other children’s shows that are also, in her opinion, falling behind in female representation. Creagh also commends the Thomas franchise for having “wonderful stories”, something that was suspiciously left out of this mention. Gee, I wonder why Van Slyke so conveniently skims over that part and otherwise colors Creagh as bitter about the Steam Team as she is? For that matter, why would the Transportation Secretary go to the trouble of trying to improve a show that was just an irresponsible, irredeemable garbage heap, like Van Slyke so desperately wants us to believe Thomas and Friends is?  She also neglects to mention the part of the article where HiT entertainment weighs in: “Hit Entertainment, the company which owns the rights to Thomas & Friends, admitted there was a "historical imbalance", but said more female engines are "in development". A spokesman said: "Every engine has a job to do whether that's hauling materials aroudn the Island of Sodor or pulling passengers - gender is irrelevent."

And so it should be. When we start valuing characters more for their decided gender identity rather than the quality of their writing, the integrity of the story and the character falls apart, making it meaningless whether they’re male or female or otherwise. Either way, they’ll still be shoddy.

At first blush, Thomas and his friends seem rather placid and mild. And there are certainly a lot worse shows in terms of in-your-face violence, sexism, racism and classism. But looks can be deceiving: the constant bent of messages about friendship, work, class, gender and race sends my kid the absolute wrong message.

I suppose it depends on what your definition of ‘wrong’ is. Let’s briefly dissect each of these themes into how they pertain to the show, according to someone who is actually familiar with the Thomas universe:

Friendship: No, this is not a show where all the engines are consistently sweet and patient and generous with each other, like in some children’s programming. To do so would mean to water down the Thomas characters to the point of unrecognizability, to make them bland and one-dimensional and boring just in the name of being inoffensive. It wouldn’t make sense for a character like Gordon, for example, to be nice and sweet all the time. Gordon is a haughty, serious, but secretly vulnerable engine that takes a lot of pride in his abilities. To be kind and friendly, to him, means weakness and so he often employs defense mechanisms in the form of boasting, bragging, teasing, etc. For this reason, it’s all the more satisfying when he does humble himself, when he shows avid concern for his friends, when he defends their honor. Gordon is an interesting, well-rounded, well-written character because of his pride, because he’s also an extremely loyal friend with a soft underbelly. The fact that the characters are so layered and unique and well-written is something that sets Thomas apart from many other children’s shows where supporting characters have a tendency to be interchangeable, flat, forgettable, more prop than character...mostly because they always agree, are always sweet to their friends and lack vital conflict. Personally, I’d rather my son see examples of well-written characters at an early age than bland character after bland character just to shield him from the very natural personality conflicts people run into with each other in real life, even with their friends. This kind of complex writing shouldn’t just be reserved for adult-oriented shows. What’s important is that, in the end, Thomas and his friends find ways to work around their differences and continue being amicable. To me, that’s more helpful for developing children and their sense of relationships with people than an unrealistic ideal of everyone being sweet and considerate all the time.  

Work/Class: Van Slyke has already made it pretty clear to this point that she doesn’t appreciate the kind of work ethics that Thomas is promoting. She also doesn’t appreciate that Sir Topham exercises his perfectly legal right to have his engines transport him for personal outings. How dare he be a successful businessman, I guess? How dare he use his steam powered locomotives for exactly what they were built to do! He should just let them run freely out in the track-less fields! (I’m trying to play along, Van Slyke, I really am) While I can sort of understand taking issue with the blind loyalty to the boss thing (and I certainly take my own halfhearted issue with Sir Topham’s lack of professional boundaries in the live action snippets with Perkins- seriously, dude, you were hired as an engine driver, why are you making cakes for this guy? Babysitting his mother’s parrot? Putting on magic shows for him?) I still don’t really agree that caste systems and class discrepancies on Sodor really even play that big of a part. As far as the humans are concerned, Sodor seems to have a thriving economy with a strong middle class. The ‘rich’ characters, the few that there even are, are never depicted treating anyone as inferior or even getting that much more privileges. It bears mentioning that the Earl of Sodor, Sir Robert, only ever takes public transport (apart from his first appearance, in which he seemed pretty uncomfortable in Spencer’s coach), always hangs out with the locals (even rallies and tailgates with them before a soccer match), and made his castle open to the public, for everyone to enjoy. Again though, I don’t think Van Slyke bothered to watch King of The Railway or anything past the handful of episodes that so deeply offended her, so she’s blissfully unaware of the facts outside her own echo chamber. Engine-wise, no one is ever above doing menial tasks. Even Spencer, the private engine of the Duke and Duchess, is occasionally given railway jobs like being a back engine or helping to transport freight. I don’t see the alleged glorified class discrepancy in Thomas, but then again I’m not reaching for it with my football field length pole either.

Gender: For someone like Van Slyke who believes that a feminist narrative is only as good as the amount of female characters rather than the quality of their writing, Thomas is indeed a disappointing show. It really doesn’t matter that the female cast is ever expanding, that each of the lady characters are unique and strong and endearing in their own way, it only matters that there’s simply not enough female character filler to fulfill her arbitrary quota, I guess. For someone that likes to see well-written, important female characters with no specific concern to the exact number, Thomas is a great show. There’s strength and pluck to be found in all of them, along with the same flaws that all of the male characters have too. They’re all factoring in more prominently to the plots, taking on the same tasks as the boys, and are often even seen as smarter and more capable than. Thomas and Friends deserves every accolade for what they’ve been doing to add a female presence and Van Slyke really has no room to be commenting one way or another as Emily seems to be the only female character she’s aware of.

Race: It really takes a special sort of person to find race issues in a show that focuses on steam locomotive characters with grey colored faces but, god bless her, Van Slyke has defied the odds. To put it plainly, the engines do not have assigned races (nationalities, sure, but that’s not the same thing)- and if, for some reason, they do and I missed it, it literally plays no role in how the engines are treated or how they treat each other. As Van Slyke briefly mentioned through that rather silly allegory about the ‘smoke’, there are tensions between the diesels and the steamies (though it’s almost non-existent in the more recent episodes and movies, as the diesels and the steamies seem to get along fine). This is not a race thing, not even in metaphor; it’s a result of the natural progression of diesel engines replacing steam-powered locomotives, a thing that happened in real life. This is something of a moot point anyway because, as stated previously, Sodor has achieved some kind of peaceful, amber-stasis utopia where time doesn’t move in a productive way and the steamies and diesels coexist without much incident anymore.

Listen, I firmly believe a parent is well-within their rights to choose the best programming for their child. A parent is perfectly entitled to not like some of the shows their children do. A parent is also allowed to decide that a certain show or movie or game or toy etc is not conducive to how they’re choosing to raise their child and keep their child from being exposed to that thing. My motive here is not to deny Van Slyke her right as a parent, but rather to challenge her weak, publicly-posted argument that Thomas is a poorly written, irresponsible narrative that encourages things like racism and sexism just because she doesn’t like it.. The fact that she would drum up such an argument with so little of an understanding for how the Thomas universe works is offensive in and of itself.

There are many good, valid reasons not to like something, even Thomas. This article doesn’t present any of them.

And really, that theme song makes me scream. Thomas can just go bust my buffers.

Ah, there it is.

[nigeiadigitalmarketingcompany]

Restoring the Commons

Digital Elixir Restoring the Commons

Yves here. Even though this article implicitly accepts the idea of growth, which too often turns out to be groaf, relying more on commons-type structure is likely to become more and more important in an era of resource scarcity and relocalization.

By Douglas Rushkoff, host of the Team Human podcast and author of Team Human as well as a dozen other bestselling books on media, technology, and culture, including, Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus: How Growth Became the Enemy of Prosperity. He is Professor of Media Theory and Digital Economics at CUNY Queens College. Originally published at Evonomics

The economy needn’t be a war; it can be a commons. To get there, we must retrieve our innate good will.

The commons is a conscious implementation of reciprocal altruism. Reciprocal altruists, whether human or ape, reward those who cooperate with others and punish those who defect. A commons works the same way. A resource such as a lake or a field, or a monetary system, is understood as a shared asset. The pastures of medieval England were treated as a commons. It wasn’t a free-for-all, but a carefully negotiated and enforced system. People brought their flocks to graze in mutually agreed- upon schedules. Violation of the rules was punished, either with penalties or exclusion.

The commons is not a winner-takes-all economy, but an all-take-the-winnings economy. Shared ownership encourages shared responsibility, which in turn engenders a longer-term perspective on business practices. Nothing can be externalized to some “other” player, because everyone is part of the same trust, drinking from the same well.

If one’s business activities hurt any other market participant, they undermine the integrity of the marketplace itself. For those entranced by the myth of capitalism, this can be hard to grasp. They’re still stuck thinking of the economy as a two-column ledger, where every credit is someone’s else’s debit. This zero-sum mentality is an artifact of monopoly central currency. If money has to be borrowed into existence from a single, private treasury and paid back with interest, then this sad, competitive, scarcity model makes sense. I need to pay back more than I borrowed, so I need to get that extra money from someone else. That’s the very premise of zero-sum. But that’s not how an economy has to work.

The destructive power of debt-based finance is older than central currency—so old that even the Bible warns against it. It was Joseph who taught Pharaoh how to store grain in good times so that he would be able to dole it out in lean years. Those indentured to the pharaoh eventually became his slaves, and four hundred years passed before they figured out how to free themselves from captivity as well as this debtor’s mindset. Even after they escaped, it took the Israelites a whole generation in the desert to learn not to hoard the manna that rained on them, but to share what came and trust that they would get more in the future.

If we act like there’s a shortage, there will be a shortage.

Advocates of the commons seek to optimize the economy for human beings, rather than the other way around.

One economic concept that grew out of the commons was called distributism. The idea, born in the 1800s, holds that instead of trying to redistribute the spoils of capitalism after the fact through heavy taxation, we should simply predistribute the means of production to the workers. In other words, workers should collectively own the tools and factories they use to create value. Today, we might call such an arrangement a co-op—and, from the current examples, cooperative businesses are giving even established US corporations a run for their money.

The same sorts of structures are being employed in digital businesses. In these “platform cooperatives,” participants own the platform they’re using, instead of working for a “platform monopoly” taxi app or giving away their life data to a social media app. A taxi app is not a complicated thing; it’s just a dating app combined with a mapping app combined with a credit card app. The app doesn’t deserve the lion’s share of the revenue. Besides, if the drivers are going to be replaced by robots someday, anyway, at least they should own the company for which they’ve been doing the research and development. Similarly, a user-owned social media platform would allow participants to sell (or not sell) their own data, instead of having it extracted for free.

Another commons-derived idea, “subsidiarity,” holds that a business should never grow for growth’s sake. It should only grow as big as it needs to in order to accomplish its purpose. Then, instead of expanding to the next town or another industry, it should just let someone else replicate the model. Joe’s pizzeria should sell to Joe’s customers. If they need a pizzeria in the next town, Joe can share his recipe and let Samantha do it.

This is not bad business—especially if Joe likes making pizza. He gets to stay in the kitchen doing what he loves instead of becoming the administrator of a pizza chain. Samantha may develop a new technique that helps Joe; they can even federate and share resources. Besides, it’s fun to have someone else to talk with about the pizza business. They can begin to develop their collaborative abilities instead of their competitive ones.

Bigger isn’t necessarily better. Things in nature grow to a certain point and then stop. They become full-grown adults, forests, or coral reefs. This doesn’t mean they’re dead. If anything, it’s the stability of adulthood that lets them become participating members of larger, mutually supportive networks.

If Joe has to grow his business bigger just in order to keep up with his rising rent and expenses, it’s only because the underlying economy has been rigged to demand growth and promote scarcity. It is this artificially competitive landscape that convinces us we have no common interests.

We know that nothing in nature can sustain an exponential rate of growth, but this doesn’t stop many of our leading economists and scientists from perpetuating this myth. They cherry-pick evidence that supports the endless acceleration of our markets and our technologies, as if to confirm that growth- based corporate capitalism is keeping us on track for the next stage of human evolution.

To suggest we slow down, think, consider—or content our- selves with steady profits and incremental progress—is to cast oneself as an enemy of our civilization’s necessary acceleration forward. By the market’s logic, human intervention in the machine will only prevent it from growing us out of our current mess. In this read of the situation, corporations may be using extractive, scorched-earth tactics, but they are also our last best hope of solving the world’s biggest problems, such as hunger and disease. Questioning the proliferation of patented, genetically modified seeds or an upgraded arsenal of pesticides just impedes the necessary progress. Adherents of this worldview say that it’s already too late to go back. There are already too many people, too much damage, and too much dependence on energy. The only way out is through. Regulating a market just slows it down, preventing it from reaching the necessary level of turbulence for the “invisible hand” to do its work.

According to their curated history of humanity, whenever things look irredeemably awful, people come up with a new technology, unimaginable until then. They like to tell the story of the great horse manure crisis of 1894, when people in England and the United States were being overwhelmed by the manure produced by the horses they used for transportation. Luckily, according to this narrative, the automobile provided a safe, relatively clean alternative, and the streets were spared hip-deep manure. And just as the automobile saved us from the problems of horse-drawn carriages, a new technological innovation will arise to save us from automobiles.

The problem with the story is that it’s not true. Horses were employed for commercial transport, but people rode in electric streetcars and disliked sharing the roads with the new, intrusive, privately owned vehicles. It took half a century of public relations, lobbying, and urban replanning to get people to drive automobiles. Plus, we now understand that if cars did make the streets cleaner in some respects, it was only by externalizing the costs of environmental damage and the bloody struggle to secure oil reserves.

Too many scientists—often funded by growth-obsessed corporations—exalt an entirely quantified understanding of social progress. They measure improvement as a function of life expectancy or reduction in the number of violent deaths. Those are great improvements on their own, but they give false cover for the crimes of modern capitalism—as if the relative peace and longevity enjoyed by some inhabitants of the West were proof of the superiority of its model and the unquestionable benefit of pursuing growth.

These arguments never acknowledge the outsourced slavery, toxic dumping, or geopolitical strife on which this same model depends. So while one can pluck a reassuring statistic to support the notion that the world has grown less violent— such as the decreasing probability of an American soldier dying on the battle field—we also live with continual military conflict, terrorism, cyber-attacks, covert war, drone strikes, state- sanctioned rape, and millions of refugees. Isn’t starving a people and destroying their topsoil, or imprisoning a nation’s young black men, a form of violence?

Capitalism no more reduced violence than automobiles saved us from manure- filled cities. We may be less likely to be assaulted randomly in the street than we were in medieval times, but that doesn’t mean humanity is less violent, or that the blind pursuit of continued economic growth and technological progress is consonant with the increase of human welfare—no matter how well such proclamations do on the business best- seller lists or speaking circuit. (Businesspeople don’t want to pay to be told that they’re making things worse.)

So with the blessings of much of the science industry and its collaborating futurists, corporations press on, accelerating civilization under the false premise that because things are looking better for the wealthiest beneficiaries, they must be better for everyone. Progress is good, they say. Any potential impediment to the frictionless ascent of technological and economic scale— such as the cost of labor, the limits of a particular market, the constraints of the planet, ethical misgivings, or human frailty— must be eliminated.

The models would all work if only there weren’t people in the way. That’s why capitalism’s true believers are seeking some- one or, better, something to do their bidding with greater intelligence and less empathy than humans.

Excerpted with permission from Team Human by Douglas Rushkoff, Copyright © 2019 by W. W. Norton & Company.

Restoring the Commons

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