#Sue Fisher

[jgroffdaily]

@ericalehman My (very belated) Christmas present to my niece was going to see #merrilywerollalong on Broadway. The play was BRILLIANT and with a little serendipity (me sort of yelling like a maniac), #jonathangroff saw my niece’s sign and was kind enough to take this picture. #auntoftheyear

[darwuzhere]

I have so many video ideas and one of them is 100% doing scene packs of the LPS2012 characters.

[dwobbitfromtheshire]

What if Steve saw Eddie's performance in the Upside Down?

Nancy made sure that Steve stayed with Dustin and Eddie while they were the distractions because she knew why Steve needed to stay even if he didn't. Meanwhile, Vickie would be going with her and Robin. It had been Vickie who tracked them down, looking for revenge for a cousin she never got to know. Thanks to Chrissy's mother, they never got to know each other. Luckily, Vickie had been open to listening and never once believed that Robin would harbor a murderer. So, the three young women marched off to kill Vecna while the three young men stayed behind.

"It's a big step for woman kind everywhere. They're going off to war while the men folk stay behind," Eddie said cheerfully, and Steve gave him a look while they set up the trailer. "What? I mean it. I'm totally down for being the one barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen. Let the women be the badasses they always have been."

"Yeah. I wouldn't mind being Mr. Mom," Steve said. "I definitely love to cook. If I could find the right man or woman. . .I mean. . . Shit."

"You too, huh?" Eddie asked, his eyes twinkling. "Man, can I tell you something, and you promise not to laugh?"

"Yeah, of course," Steve said.

"I've always been a bit envious that women can grow an entire human inside of them. It's like fucking magic," Eddie said, pausing, and before he knew it, he was rambling. "I feel like we should be worshipping at their feet with all the shit they have to go through. I was young, but I remember when my mom was pregnant with my brother, and it was tough on her. It was a rough pregnancy, and my dad was a misogynistic piece of shit. The doctors didn't think they would make it. It was so bad. I was there in the delivery room after begging to be there. The look on her face. . .she was so determined to bring him into this world, and she did. She was a warrior. He died a few months later. My dad was supposed to be watching him. He left him on the changing table and stepped out. . .well, you can guess what happened. She never forgave him, and I didn't either. She died a year later, and her heart had given out. She tried man, really, she did."

Eddie sniffled as he worked on turning the trailer into a cage. Steve stared at him with big eyes, his heart hurting for him.

"I'm sorry, Eddie," Steve said softly.

"He was just starting to get his Munson curls. They were the cutest little things. I think that's why I've gotten attached to Dustin. He would have been Dustin's age right now, and sometimes I wonder if he would be anything like Dustin is now. I try not to compare him to a ghost, but it's hard," Eddie said. "I definitely think of him like a brother, though."

A loud sob came from his left, and before he knew it, Dustin was throwing himself into Eddie's arms. Steve let them have their moment as he finished up, smiling softly as a deep wave of affection hit his chest. Once they broke the hug, they got the amps hooked up on the roof, and then they climbed up with Eddie's guitar. Steve watched as he flipped the guitar around, a look of glee on his face. He ripped his necklace off, his face serious.

"Chrissy, this is for you," Eddie said.

Then he was playing, and Steve watched in amazement. If anything was magic, it was him. Steve’s mouth was open as he watched his fingers move across the guitar and the way he focused. . .the way he put everything into it, he was beautiful. The lightning flashed in the background, enveloped him like it was a radiant light and not shitty weather from another dimension. It was like Eddie owned this world, like he was their God. He threw his head back and exposed his throat, his hair cascading backward. Steve was watching threw heavy eyelids now, and his heart was pounding nearly as loudly as the music. Steve knew he was gaping like an idiot now. Eddie glanced briefly at him and winked. Steve closed his mouth, blushing. Suddenly, he felt like maybe he should throw his underwear at him. Weird. He felt an elbow dig into his side, and he looked over to find Dustin wiggling his eyebrows at him. Steve rolled his eyes.

"You know if he married you, he really would be my brother," Dustin whispered.

"That's illegal," Steve scoffed.

"So, is us harboring a fugitive," Dustin scowled at him. "Why would that stop you both?"

"And your mom never officially adopted me," Steve said rolling his eyes.

"Yet. She's still arguing about it with Sue," Dustin said. "I keep telling them they can both adopt you."

"Sue wants to adopt me, too?" Steve asked.

"Oh, yeah, it's a thing," Dustin said.

"Technically, I'm an adult," Steve said.

"You can adopt adults, Steve."

The bats started coming. They climbed down and rushed into the trailer. Eddie pulled them into a hug, jumping up and down.

"That was ho - awesome!" Steve said, catching himself.

"What's hoawesome?" Dustin asked.

"Yes, Stevie, what is hoawesome?" Eddie asked, crossing his arms.

Suddenly, the bats started trying to get through the vents in the living room.

"Is this the only vent?!" Steve asked.

"My room!" Eddie yelled.

"Got it!" Steve yelled, grabbing his shield and running into Eddie's room.

Once they got the vents sealed, Eddie and Steve helped Dustin through the gate. They stood at the sheet and stared at each other. Eddie bowed, raising his hand to let Steve go first. He rolled his eyes and started climbing up. Eddie watched him with a grin, his eyes focused on his ass. He couldn't help but whistle.

"What was that?" Steve asked.

"Nothing," Eddie said quickly.

Once Steve made it through, Eddie started climbing up when he paused midway. He stared up at Steve, then looked down and looked back up as if he knew what he had to do. Steve glared at him. He knew that self sacrificing look.

"No you fucking don't!" Steve yelled out.

"Sorry."

He jumped down and cut the sheet. Steve cursed as he watched him run out the door. He turned to Dustin.

"For the sake of our mother, stay here," Steve said. "I'll bring him back."

He jumped into the gate, did a flip, and then ran out the door. Eddie was peddling off onto a bike. He knew what that asshole was doing. He was trying to buy the others more time, but Steve couldn't let him do it alone. It wasn't because Steve wanted to be the hero. It was because he was afraid that Eddie might die trying to do it, and he couldn't let that happen. He grabbed a molotov out of his bag. When the bats drew closer to Eddie, they knocked him off his bike. He pulled the cloth out and wrapped it around his spear. He doused it in alcohol and lit the spear on fire. Steve saw them bite into Eddie, their tails wrapped around his throat. He hollered and started waving the spear at them, beating them off Eddie. Suddenly, they all dropped. Eddie stood up shakily, clutching his side.

"Thanks, Ste-"

Steve drew him into a furious kiss. Eddie clutched his waist as he deepened the kiss, not caring that he was bleeding all over Steve or the fact that that he was bleeding. All he cared about was Steve's mouth and slipping his tongue inside. Suddenly, a pair of hands were pulling him away from Steve.

"Hey!" Eddie yelped.

"It's you who's bleeding," Nancy said furiously.

"Jesus, Wheeler. If you didn't want me kissing Steve all you had to do was say something," Eddie said.

"I'm perfectly happy with you kissing, Steve," Nancy said. "I just don't want you to die while doing it."

"It would be so worth it," Eddie replied and then pointed excitedly. "Oh, hey!"

Meanwhile, Vickie and Robin stood behind her with worried looks as they held hands.

"Yeah, we had the same idea, except we did it without the blood," Vickie replied.

"Smart," Eddie said, nodding.

"Alright, let's get the fuck out of here," Steve said.

As they walked towards the gate, Eddie leaned heavily on Steve. He realized something.

"Hey, we match!" Eddie exclaimed.

"Yeah, I think I'd rather we have matching tattoos," Steve said.

"That can be arranged, big boy," Eddie said.

"By the way," Steve whispered in his ear. "Your performance. . .so hot."

"I fucking knew that's what you meant to say," Eddie said. "So, back to those matching tattoos. . ."

"I don't know, I have to ask my moms but they're not going to like that interdimensional bats gave me some piercings, I doubt that they're going to let me get inked with a metalhead that's wanted by the police," Steve hummed.

"That's not a no!"

TWO DAYS LATER. . .

The world had been saved, Max was alright, Hop was alive, Eddie had been cleared of all charges, and Steve had been properly bullied into a hospital bed by both of his moms.

"Hey, moms, I was just wondering, and you can say no if you want, but can I get a matching tattoo with Eddie?" Steve asked.

"Absolutely not," Sue said, fluffing his pillows. "We're happy you found Eddie, but you are not getting a tattoo."

"What if it gets infected and you die?" Claudia asked as she fussed with his blankets.

"Dad -," Steve started.

"You're new to having family that cares, son," Charles said, without looking up from his paper. "Let me tell you something, mothers are usually right about this. Better let them swaddle you. I'm pretty sure that's what Claudia is trying to do now."

Claudia dropped the blanket and gave him a look.

"They said no, Eddie," Steve said to the other bed in the room.

"I heard," Eddie pouted.

[fleursfairiesedits]

editing random ppl

[vicontheinternet]

Good by to the beautiful fancasting of Kedar Williams-Sterling, Jordan fisher, mason gooding and Johnathan Davis and mason gooding as Johnny storm (I would’ve even takes Rudy pankow as Johnny) they would’ve embodied Johnny as well and they had his hotness too now we’re stuck with Joseph Quinn because y’all hype up white mediocrity and went ravenous of a mediocre white mans looks

[galpalaven]

WHAT if… I give my ILITW MC powers after being brought back from being Redfield (canon), and my ILW MC already has powers (canon), AND I give my ILB MC powers after defeating her grandmother and saving the town??

Jaxson has shadow powers and mind control for corruptions

Evie has the power to control water and some amount of sway over corruptions

Nalani has. Whatever bunch of powers Nalani has lol

BONUS: Penny has powers where you can take on someone’s illness/injury and they heal instantly as well as a certain amount of ability to sense the wellbeing of others. She also cannot be killed due to the terms of the deal she made with the Power :3c

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Gig apps trap reverse centaurs in Skinner boxes

Enshittification is the process by which digital platforms devour themselves: first they dangle goodies in front of end users. Once users are locked in, the goodies are taken away and dangled before business customers who supply goods to the users. Once those business customers are stuck on the platform, the goodies are clawed away and showered on the platform’s shareholders:

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

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

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

Enshittification isn’t just another way of saying “fraud” or “price gouging” or “wage theft.” Enshittification is intrinsically digital, because moving all those goodies around requires the flexibility that only comes with a digital businesses. Jeff Bezos, grocer, can’t rapidly change the price of eggs at Whole Foods without an army of kids with pricing guns on roller-skates. Jeff Bezos, grocer, can change the price of eggs on Amazon Fresh just by twiddling a knob on the service’s back-end.

Twiddling is the key to enshittification: rapidly adjusting prices, conditions and offers. As with any shell game, the quickness of the hand deceives the eye. Tech monopolists aren’t smarter than the Gilded Age sociopaths who monopolized rail or coal — they use the same tricks as those monsters of history, but they do them faster and with computers:

https://doctorow.medium.com/twiddler-1b5c9690cce6

If Rockefeller wanted to crush a freight company, he couldn’t just click a mouse and lay down a pipeline that ran on the same route, and then click another mouse to make it go away when he was done. When Bezos wants to bankrupt Diapers.com — a company that refused to sell itself to Amazon — he just moved a slider so that diapers on Amazon were being sold below cost. Amazon lost $100m over three months, diapers.com went bankrupt, and every investor learned that competing with Amazon was a losing bet:

https://slate.com/technology/2013/10/amazon-book-how-jeff-bezos-went-thermonuclear-on-diapers-com.html

That’s the power of twiddling — but twiddling cuts both ways. The same flexibility that digital businesses enjoy is hypothetically available to workers and users. The airlines pioneered twiddling ticket prices, and that naturally gave rise to countertwiddling, in the form of comparison shopping sites that scraped the airlines’ sites to predict when tickets would be cheapest:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/27/knob-jockeys/#bros-be-twiddlin

The airlines — like all abusive businesses — refused to tolerate this. They were allowed to touch their knobs as much as they wanted — indeed, they couldn’t stop touching those knobs — but when we tried to twiddle back, that was “felony contempt of business model,” and the airlines sued:

https://www.cnbc.com/2014/12/30/airline-sues-man-for-founding-a-cheap-flights-website.html

And sued:

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/06/business/southwest-airlines-lawsuit-prices.html

Platforms don’t just hate it when end-users twiddle back — if anything they are even more aggressive when their business-users dare to twiddle. Take Para, an app that Doordash drivers used to get a peek at the wages offered for jobs before they accepted them — something that Doordash hid from its workers. Doordash ruthlessly attacked Para, saying that by letting drivers know how much they’d earn before they did the work, Para was violating the law:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/08/tech-rights-are-workers-rights-doordash-edition

Which law? Well, take your pick. The modern meaning of “IP” is “any law that lets me use the law to control my competitors, competition or customers.” Platforms use a mix of anticircumvention law, patent, copyright, contract, cybersecurity and other legal systems to weave together a thicket of rules that allow them to shut down rivals for their Felony Contempt of Business Model:

https://locusmag.com/2020/09/cory-doctorow-ip/

Enshittification relies on unlimited twiddling (by platforms), and a general prohibition on countertwiddling (by platform users). Enshittification is a form of fishing, in which bait is dangled before different groups of users and then nimbly withdrawn when they lunge for it. Twiddling puts the suppleness into the enshittifier’s fishing-rod, and a ban on countertwiddling weighs down platform users so they’re always a bit too slow to catch the bait.

Nowhere do we see twiddling’s impact more than in the “gig economy,” where workers are misclassified as independent contractors and put to work for an app that scripts their every move to the finest degree. When an app is your boss, you work for an employer who docks your pay for violating rules that you aren’t allowed to know — and where your attempts to learn those rules are constantly frustrated by the endless back-end twiddling that changes the rules faster than you can learn them.

As with every question of technology, the issue isn’t twiddling per se — it’s who does the twiddling and who gets twiddled. A worker armed with digital tools can play gig work employers off each other and force them to bid up the price of their labor; they can form co-ops with other workers that auto-refuse jobs that don’t pay enough, and use digital tools to organize to shift power from bosses to workers:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/12/02/not-what-it-does/#who-it-does-it-to

Take “reverse centaurs.” In AI research, a “centaur” is a human assisted by a machine that does more than either could do on their own. For example, a chess master and a chess program can play a better game together than either could play separately. A reverse centaur is a machine assisted by a human, where the machine is in charge and the human is a meat-puppet.

Think of Amazon warehouse workers wearing haptic location-aware wristbands that buzz at them continuously dictating where their hands must be; or Amazon drivers whose eye-movements are continuously tracked in order to penalize drivers who look in the “wrong” direction:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/02/17/reverse-centaur/#reverse-centaur

The difference between a centaur and a reverse centaur is the difference between a machine that makes your life better and a machine that makes your life worse so that your boss gets richer. Reverse centaurism is the 21st Century’s answer to Taylorism, the pseudoscience that saw white-coated “experts” subject workers to humiliating choreography down to the smallest movement of your fingertip:

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

While reverse centaurism was born in warehouses and other company-owned facilities, gig work let it make the leap into workers’ homes and cars. The 21st century has seen a return to the cottage industry — a form of production that once saw workers labor far from their bosses and thus beyond their control — but shriven of the autonomy and dignity that working from home once afforded:

https://doctorow.medium.com/gig-work-is-the-opposite-of-steampunk-463e2730ef0d

The rise and rise of bossware — which allows for remote surveillance of workers in their homes and cars — has turned “work from home” into “live at work.” Reverse centaurs can now be chickenized — a term from labor economics that describes how poultry farmers, who sell their birds to one of three vast poultry processors who have divided up the country like the Pope dividing up the “New World,” are uniquely exploited:

https://onezero.medium.com/revenge-of-the-chickenized-reverse-centaurs-b2e8d5cda826

A chickenized reverse centaur has it rough: they must pay for the machines they use to make money for their bosses, they must obey the orders of the app that controls their work, and they are denied any of the protections that a traditional worker might enjoy, even as they are prohibited from deploying digital self-help measures that let them twiddle back to bargain for a better wage.

All of this sets the stage for a phenomenon called algorithmic wage discrimination, in which two workers doing the same job under the same conditions will see radically different payouts for that work. These payouts are continuously tweaked in the background by an algorithm that tries to predict the minimum sum a worker will accept to remain available without payment, to ensure sufficient workers to pick up jobs as they arise.

This phenomenon — and proposed policy and labor solutions to it — is expertly analyzed in “On Algorithmic Wage Discrimination,” a superb paper by UC Law San Franciscos Veena Dubal:

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4331080

Dubal uses empirical data and enthnographic accounts from Uber drivers and other gig workers to explain how endless, self-directed twiddling allows gig companies pay workers less and pay themselves more. As @brianmerchant@mastodon.social explains in his LA Times article on Dubal’s research, the goal of the payment algorithm is to guess how often a given driver needs to receive fair compensation in order to keep them driving when the payments are unfair:

https://www.latimes.com/business/technology/story/2023-04-11/algorithmic-wage-discrimination

The algorithm combines nonconsensual dossiers compiled on individual drivers with population-scale data to seek an equilibrium between keeping drivers waiting, unpaid, for a job; and how much a driver needs to be paid for an individual job, in order to keep that driver from clocking out and doing something else. @ Here’s how that works. Sergio Avedian, a writer for The Rideshare Guy, ran an experiment with two brothers who both drove for Uber; one drove a Tesla and drove intermittently, the other brother rented a hybrid sedan and drove frequently. Sitting side-by-side with the brothers, Avedian showed how the brother with the Tesla was offered more for every trip:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UADTiL3S67I

Uber wants to lure intermittent drivers into becoming frequent drivers. Uber doesn’t pay for an oversupply of drivers, because it only pays drivers when they have a passenger in the car. Having drivers on call — but idle — is a way for Uber to shift the cost of maintaining a capacity cushion to its workers.

What’s more, what Uber charges customers is not based on how much it pays its workers. As Uber’s head of product explained: Uber uses “machine-learning techniques to estimate how much groups of customers are willing to shell out for a ride. Uber calculates riders’ propensity for paying a higher price for a particular route at a certain time of day. For instance, someone traveling from a wealthy neighborhood to another tony spot might be asked to pay more than another person heading to a poorer part of town, even if demand, traffic and distance are the same.”

https://qz.com/990131/uber-is-practicing-price-discrimination-economists-say-that-might-not-be-a-bad-thing/

Uber has historically described its business a pure supply-and-demand matching system, where a rush of demand for rides triggers surge pricing, which lures out drivers, which takes care of the demand. That’s not how it works today, and it’s unclear if it ever worked that way. Today, a driver who consults the rider version of the Uber app before accepting a job — to compare how much the rider is paying to how much they stand to earn — is booted off the app and denied further journeys.

Surging, instead, has become just another way to twiddle drivers. One of Dubal’s subjects, Derrick, describes how Uber uses fake surges to lure drivers to airports: “You go to the airport, once the lot get kind of full, then the surge go away.” Other drivers describe how they use groupchats to call out fake surges: “I’m in the Marina. It’s dead. Fake surge.”

That’s pure twiddling. Twiddling turns gamification into gamblification, where your labor buys you a spin on a roulette wheel in a rigged casino. As a driver called Melissa, who had doubled down on her availability to earn a $100 bonus awarded for clocking a certain number of rides, told Dubal, “When you get close to the bonus, the rides start trickling in more slowly…. And it makes sense. It’s really the type of shit that they can do when it’s okay to have a surplus labor force that is just sitting there that they don’t have to pay for.”

Wherever you find reverse-centaurs, you get this kind of gamblification, where the rules are twiddled continuously to make sure that the house always wins. As a contract driver Amazon reverse centaur told Lauren Gurley for Motherboard, “Amazon uses these cameras allegedly to make sure they have a safer driving workforce, but they’re actually using them not to pay delivery companies”:

https://www.vice.com/en/article/88npjv/amazons-ai-cameras-are-punishing-drivers-for-mistakes-they-didnt-make

Algorithmic wage discrimination is the robot overlord of our nightmares: its job is to relentlessly quest for vulnerabilities and exploit them. Drivers divide themselves into “ants” (drivers who take every job) and “pickers” (drivers who cherry-pick high-paying jobs). The algorithm’s job is ensuring that pickers get the plum assignments, not the ants, in the hopes of converting those pickers to app-dependent ants.

In my work on enshittification, I call this the “giant teddy bear” gambit. At every county fair, you’ll always spot some poor jerk carrying around a giant teddy-bear they “won” on the midway. But they didn’t win it — not by getting three balls in the peach-basket. Rather, the carny running the rigged game either chose not to operate the “scissor” that kicks balls out of the basket. Or, if the game is “honest” (that is, merely impossible to win, rather than gimmicked), the operator will make a too-good-to-refuse offer: “Get one ball in and I’ll give you this keychain. Win two keychains and I’ll let you trade them for this giant teddy bear.”

Carnies aren’t in the business of giving away giant teddy bears — rather, the gambit is an investment. Giving a mark a giant teddy bear to carry around the midway all day acts as a convincer, luring other marks to try to land three balls in the basket and win their own teddy bear.

In the same way, platforms like Uber distribute giant teddy bears to pickers, as a way of keeping the ants scurrying from job to job, and as a way of convincing the pickers to give up whatever work allows them to discriminate among Uber’s offers and hold out for the plum deals, whereupon then can be transmogrified into ants themselves.

Dubal describes the experience of Adil, a Syrian refugee who drives for Uber in the Bay Area. His colleagues are pickers, and showed him screenshots of how much they earned. Determined to get a share of that money, Adil became a model ant, driving two hours to San Francisco, driving three days straight, napping in his car, spending only one day per week with his family. The algorithm noticed that Adil needed the work, so it paid him less.

Adil responded the way the system predicted he would, by driving even more: “My friends they make it, so I keep going, maybe I can figure it out. It’s unsecure, and I don’t know how people they do it. I don’t know how I am doing it, but I have to. I mean, I don’t find another option. In a minute, if I find something else, oh man, I will be out immediately. I am a very patient person, that’s why I can continue.”

Another driver, Diego, told Dubal about how the winners of the giant teddy bears fell into the trap of thinking that they were “good at the app”: “Any time there’s some big shot getting high pay outs, they always shame everyone else and say you don’t know how to use the app. I think there’s secret PR campaigns going on that gives targeted payouts to select workers, and they just think it’s all them.”

That’s the power of twiddling: by hoarding all the flexibility offered by digital tools, the management at platforms can become centaurs, able to string along thousands of workers, while the workers are reverse-centaurs, puppeteered by the apps.

As the example of Adil shows, the algorithm doesn’t need to be very sophisticated in order to figure out which workers it can underpay. The system automates the kind of racial and gender discrimination that is formally illegal, but which is masked by the smokescreen of digitization. An employer who systematically paid women less than men, or Black people less than white people, would be liable to criminal and civil sanctions. But if an algorithm simply notices that people who have fewer job prospects drive more and will thus accept lower wages, that’s just “optimization,” not racism or sexism.

This is the key to understanding the AI hype bubble: when ghouls from multinational banks predict 13 trillion dollar markets for “AI,” what they mean is that digital tools will speed up the twiddling and other wage-suppression techniques to transfer $13T in value from workers and consumers to shareholders.

The American business lobby is relentlessly focused on the goal of reducing wages. That’s the force behind “free trade,” “right to work,” and other codewords for “paying workers less,” including “gig work.” Tech workers long saw themselves as above this fray, immune to labor exploitation because they worked for a noble profession that took care of its own.

But the epidemic of mass tech-worker layoffs, following on the heels of massive stock buybacks, has demonstrated that tech bosses are just like any other boss: willing to pay as little as they can get away with, and no more. Tech bosses are so comfortable with their market dominance and the lock-in of their customers that they are happy to turn out hundreds of thousands of skilled workers, convinced that the twiddling systems they’ve built are the kinds of self-licking ice-cream cones that are so simple even a manager can use them — no morlocks required.

The tech worker layoffs are best understood as an all-out war on tech worker morale, because that morale is the source of tech workers’ confidence and thus their demands for a larger share of the value generated by their labor. The current tech layoff template is very different from previous tech layoffs: today’s layoffs are taking place over a period of months, long after they are announced, and laid off tech worker is likely to be offered a months of paid post-layoff work, rather than severance. This means that tech workplaces are now haunted by the walking dead, workers who have been laid off but need to come into the office for months, even as the threat of layoffs looms over the heads of the workers who remain. As an old friend, recently laid off from Microsoft after decades of service, wrote to me, this is “a new arrow in the quiver of bringing tech workers to heel and ensuring that we’re properly thankful for the jobs we have (had?).”

Dubal is interested in more than analysis, she’s interested in action. She looks at the tactics already deployed by gig workers, who have not taken all this abuse lying down. Workers in the UK and EU organized through Worker Info Exchange and the App Drivers and Couriers Union have used the GDPR (the EU’s privacy law) to demand “algorithmic transparency,” as well as access to their data. In California, drivers hope to use similar provisions in the CCPA (a state privacy law) to do the same.

These efforts have borne fruit. When Cornell economists, led by Louis Hyman, published research (paid for by Uber) claiming that Uber drivers earned an average of $23/hour, it was data from these efforts that revealed the true average Uber driver’s wage was $9.74. Subsequent research in California found that Uber drivers’ wage fell to $6.22/hour after the passage of Prop 22, a worker misclassification law that gig companies spent $225m to pass, only to have the law struck down because of a careless drafting error:

https://www.latimes.com/california/newsletter/2021-08-23/proposition-22-lyft-uber-decision-essential-california

But Dubal is skeptical that data-coops and transparency will achieve transformative change and build real worker power. Knowing how the algorithm works is useful, but it doesn’t mean you can do anything about it, not least because the platform owners can keep touching their knobs, twiddling the payout schedule on their rigged slot-machines.

Data co-ops start from the proposition that “data extraction is an inevitable form of labor for which workers should be remunerated.” It makes on-the-job surveillance acceptable, provided that workers are compensated for the spying. But co-ops aren’t unions, and they don’t have the power to bargain for a fair price for that data, and coops themselves lack the vast resources — “to store, clean, and understand” — data.

Co-ops are also badly situated to understand the true value of the data that is extracted from their members: “Workers cannot know whether the data collected will, at the population level, violate the civil rights of others or amplifies their own social oppression.”

Instead, Dubal wants an outright, nonwaivable prohibition on algorithmic wage discrimination. Just make it illegal. If firms cannot use gambling mechanisms to control worker behavior through variable pay systems, they will have to find ways to maintain flexible workforces while paying their workforce predictable wages under an employment model. If a firm cannot manage wages through digitally-determined variable pay systems, then the firm is less likely to employ algorithmic management.”

In other words, rather than using market mechanisms too constrain platform twiddling, Dubal just wants to make certain kinds of twiddling illegal. This is a growing trend in legal scholarship. For example, the economist Ramsi Woodcock has proposed a ban on surge pricing as a per se violation of Section 1 of the Sherman Act:

https://ilr.law.uiowa.edu/print/volume-105-issue-4/the-efficient-queue-and-the-case-against-dynamic-pricing

Similarly, Dubal proposes that algorithmic wage discrimination violates another antitrust law: the Robinson-Patman Act, which “bans sellers from charging competing buyers different prices for the same commodity. Robinson-Patman enforcement was effectively halted under Reagan, kicking off a host of pathologies, like the rise of Walmart:

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

I really liked Dubal’s legal reasoning and argument, and to it I would add a call to reinvigorate countertwiddling: reforming laws that get in the way of workers who want to reverse-engineer, spoof, and control the apps that currently control them. Adversarial interoperability (AKA competitive compatibility or comcom) is key tool for building worker power in an era of digital Taylorism:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/10/adversarial-interoperability

To see how that works, look to other jursidictions where workers have leapfrogged their European and American cousins, such as Indonesia, where gig workers and toolsmiths collaborate to make a whole suite of “tuyul apps,” which let them override the apps that gig companies expect them to use.

https://pluralistic.net/2021/07/08/tuyul-apps/#gojek

For example, ride-hailing companies won’t assign a train-station pickup to a driver unless they’re circling the station — which is incredibly dangerous during the congested moments after a train arrives. A tuyul app lets a driver park nearby and then spoof their phone’s GPS fix to the ridehailing company so that they appear to be right out front of the station.

In an ideal world, those workers would have a union, and be able to dictate the app’s functionality to their bosses. But workers shouldn’t have to wait for an ideal world: they don’t just need jam tomorrow — they need jam today. Tuyul apps, and apps like Para, which allow workers to extract more money under better working conditions, are a prelude to unionization and employer regulation, not a substitute for it.

Employers will not give workers one iota more power than they have to. Just look at the asymmetry between the regulation of union employees versus union busters. Under US law, employees of a union need to account for every single hour they work, every mile they drive, every location they visit, in public filings. Meanwhile, the union-busting industry — far larger and richer than unions — operate under a cloak of total secrecy, Workers aren’t even told which union busters their employers have hired — let alone get an accounting of how those union busters spend money, or how many of them are working undercover, pretending to be workers in order to sabotage the union.

Twiddling will only get an employer so far. Twiddling — like all “AI” — is based on analyzing the past to predict the future. The heuristics an algorithm creates to lure workers into their cars can’t account for rapid changes in the wider world, which is why companies who relied on “AI” scheduling apps (for example, to prevent their employees from logging enough hours to be entitled to benefits) were caught flatfooted by the Great Resignation.

Workers suddenly found themselves with bargaining power thanks to the departure of millions of workers — a mix of early retirees and workers who were killed or permanently disabled by covid — and they used that shortage to demand a larger share of the fruits of their labor. The outraged howls of the capital class at this development were telling: these companies are operated by the kinds of “capitalists” that MLK once identified, who want “socialism for the rich and rugged individualism for the poor.”

https://twitter.com/KaseyKlimes/status/821836823022354432/

There's only 5 days left in the Kickstarter campaign for the audiobook of my next novel, a post-cyberpunk anti-finance finance thriller about Silicon Valley scams called Red Team Blues. Amazon's Audible refuses to carry my audiobooks because they're DRM free, but crowdfunding makes them possible.

Image: Stephen Drake (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Analog_Test_Array_modular_synth_by_sduck409.jpg

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

 — 

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

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

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Louis (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Chestnut_horse_head,_all_excited.jpg

CC BY-SA 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/deed.en

[Image ID: A complex mandala of knobs from a modular synth. In the foreground, limned in a blue electric halo, is a man in a hi-viz vest with the head of a horse. The horse's eyes have been replaced with the sinister red eyes of HAL9000 from Kubrick's '2001: A Space Odyssey.'"]

[rinandsketches]

Still on the train of thought about Blue Eye Samurai. I been seeing people really diss Taigen so...Let's talk about him.

I'm going into a dive into his character cause people only see a bully that might have a toxic relationship to Mizu. I'm going to dive in from start to finish and give my theories and takes on this fisher man's son to where he is know.

Beginning in episode 1-

So..I'm pretty sure everyone's first reaction was like mine. We wanted this guy to be knocked down a peg. Meeting him as that one kid bully who was going to take things to far with a rock. In the adult years he has worked hard and managed to get not only high honors but the love of a princess.

I kinda ship Mizu and Taigen (sue me) but this one episode is where people draw their conclusions to judge off Taigen as mostly irredeemable. He's proud, cocky, a brat, and he openly cheats on Akemi with some girls while celebrating his engagement, he was arrogant, proud of it and had every right to be, this is proof by the size of top not. its bigger then the rest of the students, literally showing his importance as the top samurai in the dojo. Placing my cards on the table here, if Mizu had not shown up, Taigen would have just become like Akemi's father. Its a small hint by the father stating that he also started small and worked hard like Taigen, seeing himself in Taigen.

What saved him was Mizu.

The duel happened and his chonmage was cut off by Mizu. She stripped everything from Taigen. Yet he is a prideful guy, he goes out to try and get back what his. I think the spot where his hair was cut is a way to show he is now ,not only a member of the outcast as a disgraced warrior, but he was ready to regrow again.

during his adventure with Mizu, fighting with her (alongside and against her), his wants begins to change. I don't know how many people noticed this but Taigen's hair does grow back by the last two episodes which is in the span of a few days or Possible a week. It could signal the new change in Taigen, he's softer to Mizu, less arrogant, and despite his feelings towards the fact Akemi is married he still saves her husband. Now he did get mad at Mizu and its kind of understandable, they have been at the forge for a week and she didn't say anything about Akemi and Fowler's plan until much later. Depsite that he fights with her against fowler.

This leads to the final scene with Taigen,

After everything single God damn thing he been through, he's reached this point. As Mizu said, he's not good but he can be great. She was not referring to his combat skills, she was talking about his character. Taigen also comes to figure this out, he doesn't need to be good with a blade to be great nor does he want to. If this had been episode 1 Taigen, I believe he would have thrown a fit if Akemi told him she wanted not be with him instead he must have took her back to her husband before leaving.

To sum up: yes, Taigen was a jackass, and an arrogant one to boot. I believe he was looking for a way to be happy with the options he had. Clearly it wasn't easy for him growing up, as Mizu probably thinks. Speaking of Mizu, the two need to have a conversation. Taigen definitely has regrets about not making her life easy, but Mizu also needs to begin a forgiving process. Its safe to say Mizu has a hard time letting things go..so it might take a while before the two can let their past go and continue to grow as people, and possible companions.

[allthecanadianpolitics]

Fisher River Cree Nation wants class-action status for its lawsuit against the federal government, which alleges the $5 annuities paid to Treaty 5 First Nations over the last 148 years violate the agreement because they don't keep up with inflation. The First Nation wants to represent all Treaty 5 nations and their members who opt in to the class action. Stefan Lorne Cochrane, a former chief and band councillor of Fisher River, would be the lead plaintiff, according to the statement of claim filed at the Manitoba Court of King's Bench on Dec. 12. In the suit, Fisher River claims the Crown breached its obligations under Treaty 5 by failing to regularly increase the $5 annuities to maintain their value at the time of the document's 1875 signing.

Continue Reading

Tagging @politicsofcanada

[jgroffdaily]

Jonathan’s former teacher Sue Fisher reacts to her shout-out in his Tony acceptance speech.

[diceriadelluntore]

Padronanza e Linguaggio

La campagna di trasformazione dei miei pomodori e pomodorini quest'anno, complice la variabile meteorologica (inverno mite, primavera anticipata) è partita esattamente 40 giorni prima del 2023. Lo scrivo perchè mi ha un po' impedito di dedicarmi appieno al blog, soprattutto riguardo le mie ultime letture.

Vorrei segnalarvi, en passant, due libri tra le ultime letture: uno, magnifico, è la ristampa con nuova traduzione di un romanzo, Qui Il Sentiero Si Perde di Peskè Marty, che Adelphi ha pubblicato di recente: il nome dell'autore è uno pseudonimo di una coppia di scrittori francesi, Antoinette Peské e il marito Pierre Marie André Marty. Scritto negli anni '50, ambientato tra la Mongolia e la Siberia, il romanzo racconta le avventure leggendarie dello zar Alessandro I, vincitore di Napoleone, che nel 1825 avrebbe messo in scena la sua morte. Una diceria, quella della fuga dello zar e delle sue successive metamorfosi, che aveva intrigato anche Tolstoj, il quale vi dedicò un racconto (Memorie Postume dello Starets Fëdor Kuzmìč).

L'altra segnalazione è un piccolo saggio scritto da uno dei massimi esperti di Storia Della Musica Classica, Giorgio Pestelli, che ne Il Genio di Beethoven (Donzelli) percorre, attraverso l'analisi non solo tecnica ma anche emozionale, delle nove leggendarie sinfonie del maestro, un ritratto unico e profondo del grande compositore.

Ma approfitto per parlarvi anche dell'ultima, stranissima ma indimenticabile lettura che è questo libro:

Adam Thirlwell fa parte dell'ultima generazione di scrittori britannici, e per due volte è stato inserito nella Lista dei Migliori Autori Emergenti dalla prestigiosa rivista Granta, le cui segnalazioni negli anni mi hanno sempre fatto conoscere autori niente male (Tibor Fisher o Scarlett Thomas, i primi nomi che mi vengono in mente). In Il Futuro Futuro (Feltrinelli) Thirlwell immagina un mondo distopico, dove succedono in maniera non lineare avvenimenti storici che somigliano moltissimo a quelli avvenuti negli anni appena precedenti la Rivoluzione Francese. Qui Celine, Marta e Julia sono tre giovanissime ragazze che, in maniera misteriosa, sono vittima di anonimi pamphlet dove vengono descritte con pruriginosa minuzia di particolari le abitudini sessuali delle nostre giovani protagoniste. Celine, Marta e Julia si confrontano quindi con un problema: come si gestisce il rapporto tra linguaggio, arte e potere? e tra potere e genere? Per controbattere, hanno un'idea geniale: organizzano delle feste, a cui piano piano partecipano intellettuali, scrittori, impresari teatrali, miliardari, persino una potentissima Antoniette (che sappiamo a chi si riferisca). Diventano il momento più importante delle sere cittadine. I libri anonimi scompaiono, le ragazze si faranno nuovi nemici ma soprattutto rimangono in Celine e le sue amiche dubbi profondi sui massimi sistemi, in primis sul grande e a tratti inestricabile problema del linguaggio:

Si poteva immaginare un mondo senza linguaggio, o che il linguaggio diventasse una cosa intima e diversa. Era come se nelle conversazioni vere arrivasse sempre il momento in cui emergeva una voce che non era quella di nessuna delle persone che stavano parlando, ma era la voce della conversazione stessa, e quando accadeva era come se si accendesse una piccola lampada, inondando di luce calda un angolino. Altri se lo immaginavano come un dio che si manifestava o parlava attraverso un'altra persona, ma Celine la vedeva diversamente. Era la voce della conversazione, pensava lei, che apparteneva a tutti e a nessuno […] (p. 67-8)

Celine, Marta e Julia hanno anche un problema con il potere dei maschi: sebbene vivano una sessualità libera, sono spesso vittime del potere che è legato ai maschi. Un potere legato ai soldi e al sesso, che Celine tenta spesso di scardinare:

-Come è che uno crede di sapere qualcosa di qualcun altro? disse Celine

-Una volta ci andavo a letto, disse Lorenzo.

-E questo che cazzo vuol dire? fece Celine. - Vuol forse dire che Julia ti conosce, solo perchè sa quanto ti piaceva leccarle il buco del culo?

Lorenzo rimase ancora in silenzio, un silenzio stavolta più greve. Visto? disse Celine. - Tutti odiano sentir parlare di sè. Panico Puro (208).

Celine avrà una figlia, Saratoga, viaggerà, verrà costretta dalla Rivoluzione a scappare via in America. Lì farà degli incontri particolari. Ritornerà, nel modo più strambo, a ricongiungersi con la figlia, cercando di capire cosa sia il futuro:

Ogni volta che si incontravano, gli scrittori non facevano che discutere ossessivamente del futuro, chi avrebbe avuto ancora un pubblico di lettori o come sarebbe stato il futuro - ma non si rendevano conto di quanto fosse limitato il loro modo di pensarlo, il futuro. II vero futuro, diceva Saratoga, non era ciò che sarebbe accaduto di lì a un mese o a un anno, ma il futuro futuro: alieno e incomunicabile. Ma loro non lo vedevano, perché non erano capaci di scatenare il pensiero (150).

Un libro che attraverso una trama fantasiosa, una scrittura asciutta ma implacabile, una serie di eventi di natura fantasiosa ma forse con salti troppo giganti, con pochissimi particolari sui personaggi che non siano le loro conversazioni o i loro pensieri, spazia dal saggio filosofico al fantasy, dalla semiotica al pulp, senza dimenticare i numerosi incontri delle nostre protagoniste non solo con alcuni grandi della Storia, ma persino extraterrestri (non vi anticipo nulla). Un libro strano, pazzo ma che scalda il cuore, non solo per la sua originalità, ma anche per i temi che affronta, tra cui l'amicizia, i rapporti di potere, la comunicazione. Che stuzzica ed estremizza:

Era uno dei problemi di vivere fra la gente - si pensava di sapere un sacco di cose sui propri amici, ma quasi sempre ci voleva una catastrofe perchè le persone si parlassero a cuore aperto. La natura umana era terribile (100-101).

[healerqueen]

I responded to the booklist question! I'm sure I forgot some but whew it still took forever to write.

What about you? What are some of the books youve read the most?

Good question! I finally started keeping a list, so I have something to work from. That way I won't draw a blank.

My top five or six favorite authors and series are: J. R. R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings, C. S. Lewis's Narnia books, Rosemary Sutcliff's Dolphin Ring series (beginning with Eagle of the Ninth), Enemy Brothers and The Reb and the Redcoats by Constance Savery the Queen's Thief series by Megan Whalen Turner, and The Mysterious Benedict Society (original trilogy and prequel) by Trenton Lee Stewart.

There are many other books and authors I love. I listed several of my childhood influences in this post featuring my 50 favorite children's books (focusing on ones I grew up with as a young person).

Here's my list of favorite books I've read the most or ones I think are worth rereading: The Ordinary Princess by M. M. Kaye (a delightful original fairytale about a princess who refuses to stay in her tower)

The Reluctant Godfather by Allison Tebo (romantic comedy fairytale retelling, with an emphasis on the comedy) Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH by Robert C. O'Brien (adventure about a mother mouse seeking to save her family) The Gammage Cup by Carol Kendall (middle grade fantasy adventure)

Dragon Slippers and Tuesdays at the Castle by Jessica Day George (original fantasy in the style of fairytales) Princess Academy by Shannon Hale (fantasy adventure and coming-of-age story about a group of girls who attend school for the first time)

The Secret Keepers by Trenton Lee Stewart (urban light fantasy with dystopian elements) The City of Ember by Jeanne DuPrau (middle-grade, post-apocalyptic dystopian) The Arrival by Shaun Tan (a wordless graphic novel that conveys human experiences through surrealism)

The Saturdays by Elizabeth Enright (vintage contemporary about a lively family) Derwood, Inc. by Jeri Massi (modern contemporary mystery about another boisterous family) The Westing Game by Ellen Raskin (quirky vintage mystery with an interesting cast of characters) Historical Fiction: Carry On, Mr. Bowditch by Jean Lee Latham Caddie Woodlawn, Family Grandstand, and other books by Carol Ryrie Brink Rebecca's War by Ann Finlayson Understood Betsy by Dorothy Canfield Fisher Knight's Fee by Rosemary Sutcliff

The Lost Baron by Allen French The Wheel on the School by Meindert DeJong By the Great Horn Spoon by Sid Fleischman A Single Shard and Seesaw Girl by Linda Sue Park The Bronze Bow and The Witch of Blackbird Pond by Elizabeth George Speare The Secret Garden and A Little Princess by Frances Hodgson Burnett Wives and Daughters by Elizabeth Gaskell A few books I discovered more recently that are now all-time favorites: Seventh City by Emily Hayse, The Letter for the King by Tonke Dragt, Valiant by Sarah McGuire, Out of the Tomb by Ashley Stangl, the Mistmantle Chronicles by M. I. McAllister, Escape to Vindor by Emily Golus, Chase the Legend by Hannah Kaye, The Key to the Chains by Allison Tebo (sci-fi), Rebel Wave by Tor Thibeaux (undersea dystopian) Historical fiction: Listening for Lions and Angel on the Square by Gloria Whelan, Courage in Her Hands by Iris Noble, Victory at Valmy and Word to Caesar by Geoffrey Trease, historical fiction Westerns and mysteries by author Elisabeth Grace Foley

Mystery/suspense: The Unexpected Mrs. Pollifax by Dorothy Gilman, The Moonspinners by Mary Stewart

[deke-rivers-1957]

Masterlist

Plenty of content to read!

Film Reviews - Will be updated as I go.

Love Me Tender - The first film review and something I might revise one day. GI Blues - Elvis' first film post Army. Loving You - My personal favorite film that I reviewed so far. Girl Happy - The first film reflecting the decline in production quality. Jailhouse Rock - The most iconic Elvis film. Paradise, Hawaiian Style - Drums of the Islands alone makes it worth the watch. Clambake - I still have no idea if this movie is good or bad. Roustabout - This movie had one of the best soundtracks with the worst story which is mind boggling. Wild In The Country - This is the first movie so far that I just had no inspiration when reviewing after watching. Kissin’ Cousins - Somehow the most balanced movie of good and bad elements. Kid Galahad - An underrated Elvis movie that deserves a lot more attention. It Happened at the World's Fair - A great concept that's a nightmare to execute well. Change Of Habit - The final Elvis movie that's very inconsistent in tone and poorly attempts to take on the 1969 political climate. Girls! Girls! Girls! - A very refreshing story even though it's overloaded with poorly spaced songs. Charro! - Very good scenery and character acting brought down by easily avoidable plot holes. Fun In Acapulco - Good premise but just doesn't do enough to stand out at this stage of the game.

ECU Bio Cards/ Fighting Tier List - Canon to the movies only

Clinton Reno Bio Card - The first bio card and has been revised to look cleaner. Deke Rivers Bio Card - Half of this is my profile pic. Vince Everett Bio Card - The hardest one to make a head canon for. Kung Fu Elvis Part 1 - Tier list covers LMT through Girl Happy. Vince Everett's Rank - An individual breakdown of where Vince would rank in a fight. Danny Fisher Bio Card - Experimented with adding color gradients. Rick Richards' Rank - An individual breakdown of where Rick would rank in a fight. Tulsa McLean's Bio Card - The entire background was colored with a trackpad. Pacer Burton's Bio Card - The background was edited using Canva's ai editor. Glenn Tyler's Bio Card - The entire background was edited using Canva's ai editor. Scott Heyward's Rank - An individual breakdown of where Scott would rank in a fight. Chadwick (Chad) Gates' Bio Card - Experimented with layering. Toby Kwimper's Bio Card - My favorite one. Walter Gulick's Bio Card - Stylized like a boxing poster. Charlie Rogers' Rank - An individual breakdown of where Charlie would rank in a fight. Kung Fu Elvis Part 2 - Covers JR through Roustabout. Ross Carpenter’s Bio Card - An attempt to be monochromatic with the color palette. Glenn Tyler's Rank - An individual breakdown of where Glenn would rank in a fight. Josh Morgan and Jodie Tatum's Rank - An individual breakdown of where the cousins would rank in a fight. Walter Gulick's Rank - An individual breakdown of where Walter G. would rank in a fight. Mike Edwards' Rank - An individual breakdown of where Mike E. would rank in a fight. Kung Fu Elvis Part 3 - Covers WITC through IHATWF. Dr. John Carpenter's Rank - An individual breakdown of where Dr. Carpenter would rank in a fight. Mike Edwards' Bio Card - Experimented with filling in the empty spaces based on Sue-Lin having a flower on her hat. Ross Carpenter's Rank - An individual breakdown of where Ross Carpenter would rank in a fight. Jess Wade's Rank - An individual breakdown of where Jess Wade would rank in a fight. Mike Windgren's Rank - An individual breakdown of where Mike Windgren would rank in a fight. Kung Fu Elvis Part 4 - Covers COH through FIA. Mike Windgren’s Bio Card - I experimented with the formatting and color corrected the sky using a trackpad.

ECU High - An installment series that absolutely must be read in order

ECU High School AU Part 1 - Discusses Clint through Jodie. ECU High School AU Part 2 - Discusses Lucky through Dr. Carpenter. ECU High - Clint's Arrival - It's the first day of Clint's freshman year. ECU High - Deke's Adventure - Deke realizes that it's not always rainbows and butterflies in high school. ECU High - Vince's Attitude - Vince is a jerk and no one can stand him. ECU High - Danny's Ambition - Danny just wants to get out of poverty like the rest of the seniors. ECU High - Tulsa's Badge - Tulsa loves authority a little too much. ECU High - Pacer's Bereavement - Pacer and Clint become best friends. ECU High - Glenn’s Books - Glenn goes to therapy. ECU High - Chad's Business - Chad wants to open a Marina but doesn't know what he's doing. ECU High - Toby's Cool - Toby has a natural skill of dealing with highly emotional people. ECU High - Walter's Captaincy - Walter reflects on what makes a good quarterback and whether he's deserving such a position. ECU High - Ross' Challenge - Ross struggles to survive but things are starting to look up for him. ECU High - Mike's Circumstances - Mike Edwards feels wary about babysitting Sue-Lin when he has plans.

Fanfics and One Shots - Includes AI Chats and non-canon stories

Everything that I've written so far can be seen here:

Also if you would like to be tagged on a future movie review and have not yet down so this is the tag list I use as a guaranteed starting point.

[piglet26]

Rey...A Mary Sue?

When it comes to the Star Wars fanbase.....Disney is the maker of many of their own problems. Disney has blown things out of proportion. They've attacked their own fanbase and then hidden behind that very slander to avoid criticism. They haven't honored the very audience they seek to make a lot of money from, not to mention the franchise. They've bounced around between visions trying to please everyone and then pleased no one.

However, the Star Wars fanbase is also to blame for many of their quarrels, grips and dissatisfactions with the franchise. Oh, you don't like the corporatized Disney sequels? Well I remember you didn't like the prequels which George Lucas actually did them. Disney sequels are too comedic? The movies would've been better if there was less humor? Well the prequels were too whiny, political and serious.

It's not enough that Disney films are more diverse, have a female lead and have more females on the production side..... unless those characters are saying, doing and being portrayed exactly how the fanbase would like.......then Disney is still misogynistic and racist.

Carrie Fisher, The Princess, faced sexism, ageism and body shaming from both Disney and the Star Wars fandom prior to returning for The Force Awakens. Since he passing obviously many people would like to forget about this or flat out bury it.

Carrie Fisher tells British Good Housekeeping that she was pressured to lose more than 35 pounds to reprise Princess Leia in The Force Awakens: “They don’t want to hire all of me — only about three-quarters! Nothing changes, it’s an appearance-driven thing. I’m in a business where the only thing that matters is weight and appearance."

She first donned that golden slave bikini when she was 27. Thirty years later, Carrie Fisher’s back as Leia in “Star Wars,” but apparently some viewers thought she’d look exactly the same. The 59-year-old actor was the unfortunate recipient of a barrage of hateful tweets from critics who felt the need to tell her she’s aged badly in the past three decades. She Tweeted, "Men don't age better than women, they're just allowed to age." Meanwhile, Harrison Ford looked old and Mark Hamill looked liked a drunk.

All of this is to say the question of whether or nor Rey is a Mary Sue isn't a simple one. While Disney LucasFilm didn't develop the character as well as they could have.... the audience largely had double standards. Rey, as a woman, had more work to do to win over an audience already suspicious of the feminization of Star Wars.

Let's address the criticism

Why does Rey seem so skilled?

Rey works for Unkar Plott scavenging. It would make sense she understands engineering and mechanics. She has to understand how things work, which parts are valuable and understand that about multiple forms of machinery. How does she fly? Just fly, not even combat fly. If in her introduction she was shown to be flying commercially maybe people would've let it go, I'm not sure. Luke and Anakin by contrast turn out to be expert pilots who fight in combat..... no one questioned a thing and one of them is a child. When she initially flies the Falcon she does an alright job and in the three sequels films we never see her fly in combat. Finn never learned how to fly!!!! He famously needed a pilot, yet, got a crash course in The Last Jedi enough to fly at the end against the First Order. She speaks droid, but all our protagonist in Star Wars do. Someone has to be able to understand them.

Rey has no flaws and she's so perfect.

No, actually she's not. Rey is extremely vulnerable, lonely and requires validation. She fears she's gonna be an old woman cleaning gear on Jakku, but she doesn't leave. The only character she really relates and connects to.... is the villain. Yes, she's likable and she's suppose to be because she's our protagonist. Who the hell finds fault with either the character or the production team for trying to make their main character likeable?! Other characters are attracted to her. It's important to note that most force users come off as charismatic, magical and attractive.

Does Rey have a personality?

Yes. Many people get held up on the fact that Rey seems to be bubbly and happy despite growing up in isolation in a tough environment. Initially, with Finn, she comes off pretty hostile and untrusting. It was only when she assumed he was resistance (something safe) and he went along with the assumption that she relaxed a bit. She responded with anger at him just grabbing her hand, but when he showed concern for her then she reciprocated. Neither Finn nor Rey have proper social development which explains why they latch onto one another. Not to mention both are outsiders thrown into pivotal roles without much concept on how to deal with those roles.

Rey is also very childlike. It's something Kylo Ren tries to push her out of. She waits around for her family for years. She licks plates and plays with the resistance helmet. She latches onto people. She latches onto Finn once she trust him. She latches onto Han perceiving him as an ideal father figure. When she forms a connection to Kylo Ren she latches onto him. She's loyal to the people and things she cares about. There were things that could have helped Rey become a fuller developed character. Rey can fight but we never learned WHY she learned how to fight. Has she been stolen from a lot? Has she been attacked? Was she trained? Rey was taken at a young age, what schooling did she receive? Did she just learn trade work? In the novels, her character is obviously developed more, but Lord! People really act like any oversight of character development was a feminist statement about perfection. In reality, it was a film trying to balance multiple characters in a 2.5 hour film.

Rey doesn't have any training and yet is so magical with the Force.

Rey is assisted by The Force. Force users can use the force with very little understanding of it or training. Anakin as a 9 year old is just winging it. So there's that. Now the first time she encounters Kylo Ren, she's terrified and running/shooting for her life. When he force freezes her she's helpless. When he puts her to sleep with the force, she has to be rescued by men.

Now this is the most important. Her bond with Kylo Ren is one of the reasons she's able to access more of and learn about the force. "A Force dyad, also known as a dyad in the Force, was when two Force-sensitive beings had a unique Force-bond—that was unbreakable—that made them one in the Force. The power of a dyad was as strong as life itself, with the individuals forming the dyad sharing a connection that spanned across time and space."

They don't play this up enough in the movies. In the novels it's clear that their minds bridge. She's able to access Kylo's mind from understanding how he accessed her mind. Their bond boost both of their strengths in the force. It's important to note that Rey's abilities actually terrify her.

Rey knows more about the Falcon than Han Solo.

She explained that Unkar Plott installed a compressor which Rey was aware of and both Han and Rey agreed put stress on the hyperdrive. After her assistance bypassing the compressor Han is firming in control of The Falcon.

She beat Kylo Ren at the end of the Force Awakens despite never holding a light saber.

Well, I agree with this one. Kylo Ren wasn't trying to kill her. He was sparring with him and testing her talents. If he wanted to kill her, there was a convenient cliff he could've pushed her over. He wants to train her and he wants her.

Daisy Ridley is a talented and charismatic actress.... she just isn't recognized for it. The fandom looks for flaws, weaknesses and reasons to complain. I don't want to take away anything from the males in Star Wars. I want them to be great. Honestly A Song of Fire and Ice is how I'd like to see more men and women written. Some are good, some are bad, some are great, some are horrific and all are flawed.

[kicksaddictny]

Look Good, Feel Good, Play Strong: Nike Apparel Honors the Power of Women's Sportswear

Nike is thrilled to announce the upcoming release of “Look Good, Feel Good, Play Good: Nike Apparel,” a visually stunning book that explores the history and impact of women’s sportswear. Published in collaboration with Phaidon Press, this groundbreaking volume highlights the evolution of women’s sports apparel and its empowering effect on athletes throughout the years.

With over 350 pages and more than 575 images, “Look Good, Feel Good, Play Good” delves into the connection between women and the sportswear they wear, featuring five iconic design archetypes from sports history: warm-ups, jerseys, leggings, sports bras, and shorts.

To amplify the voices of athletes, each chapter includes interviews with Nike stars such as Sha’Carri Richardson, Shelly-Ann Fraser-Pryce, Caster Semenya, Joan Benoit Samuelson, Dina Asher-Smith, Sue Bird, Megan Rapinoe, Scout Bassett, and Naomi Osaka. These personal conversations reveal the athletes' favorite sportswear, cherished items, and unique style philosophies. Additionally, newly commissioned essays place Nike's role in the broader context of sportswear history and culture.

The book is authored by writer and editor Maisie Skidmore, with contributions from an esteemed group of writers, including Dal Chodha, Michelle Millar Fisher, Heather Radke, Samantha N. Sheppard, and Natalie E. Wright. Together, they provide a rich narrative that intertwines history, fashion, and sports.

The imagery within the book is as diverse as its contributors, drawing from Nike’s extensive archives and showcasing everything from vintage trade catalogues and advertisements to contemporary photography, design sketches, and fabric swatches. This visual journey not only celebrates Nike's past but also illustrates the brand’s ongoing dedication to innovation in women’s sportswear.

As Amy Montagne, VP/GM of Nike Women, notes, “Whether you’ve followed these athletes' journeys or are interested in the trends shaping women’s sports, ‘Look Good, Feel Good, Play Good’ highlights the incredible work Nike has done over the past 50 years to advance women’s sportswear.”

The book's design reflects its content, with pattern lines and notch markers subtly reminding readers of sportswear's cultural significance. The innovative packaging, featuring an exposed spine and a translucent jacket, further emphasizes the book's archival inspiration.

“Look Good, Feel Good, Play Good” is now available for pre-order at Phaidon.com/NikeApparel and will be widely available in December. This volume is a must-have for anyone interested in the intersection of fashion, sports, and culture, showcasing Nike’s commitment to empowering women through thoughtful design and relentless innovation.