#Technical Information Institute

[vintage-ukraine]

Construction of the Technical Information Institute by Samuel Kaplan, 1970

[grison-in-space]

wondering about whether you could rec some "romance is a social construct" texts? ofc it is, but i like having books and articles to reference/learn specifics from/see how these ideas have developed.

Sure! Here's a quick reading list. Bear in mind that I am not a professional historian and my reading on this subject is a little diffuse. I'm not tackling the behavioral ecology stuff right now because a) I don't have a more direct book rec off the top of my head than Evolution's Rainbow, which is not technically focused on social monogamy, and also b) I approach that whole field with my eyes wide open for people letting their own perspectives and cultural views get in the way of their observations of animals, and I do not have the energy to go deal with it right now.

If you're going to read two books, read these two:

Stephanie Coontz, Marriage, A History: how love conquered marriage. 2006. All of Coontz' work, having to do with the social construction of the family, is relevant reading to this question (and I'd also recommend The Nostalgia Trap, because the historical context of how we conceptualize families is a major part of the construction of romantic love), but this one is most focused on the social construction of romantic love specifically and what it has replaced. Coontz is, I will disclose cheerfully, a major formative influence on my thinking.

Moira Wegel, Labor of Love: The Invention of Dating. 2016. Exactly what it says on the tin; focuses more closely on the modern invention of dating and romance.

Other useful readings to help inform your understanding of different ways that various people have conceptualized sex, sexuality, society and long-term connection include:

George Chauncey, Why Marriage? 2015. Chauncey is best known for Gay New York, which also offers a useful history of the way that relationship models and social constructs for understanding homosexuality changed among men having sex with men c. 1900 to 1950. This book, published just before Obergefell v. Hodges, is a discussion of why contemporary queer rights organizations focused on same-sex marriage as an activism plank in the wake of AIDS organizing. I find it really useful to read queer history when I'm thinking about how we understand and construct the concept of romantic relationships, because queers complicate the mainstream, heteronormative concepts of what marriage and romantic relationships actually are. More importantly, queer activist organizing around marriage has played a major role in shaping our collective understanding of romance and marriage in the past twenty years.

Elizabeth Abbott, A History of Celibacy, 2000. In order to understand how various cultures construct understandings of marriage and spousal relationships, it can be illustrative to consider what the people who are explicitly not participating in the institution are doing and why not. I found this an interesting pass over historical and social institutions that forbid (or forbade) marriage with a discussion about general trends driving these institutions, individuals, and movements towards celibacy.

Eleanor Janega, The Once and Future Sex, 2023. This is a very pointed historical look at gender roles, concepts of beauty, and concepts of sex, attraction, and marriage among medieval Europeans with an extended meditation on what ideas have and have not changed between that time and today. I include this work because I think a deep dive into medieval notions of courtly romance is useful, partly because it is an important origin of our modern notion of romantic love and partly because it is so usefully and starkly different from that modern notion! Sometimes the best way to understand the cultural construction of ideas in your own society is to go look at someone else's and see where things are the same versus different.

It's a mish-mash of recommendations, and I'm reaching more for books that have stuck with me over the years than a clean scholarly approach to the subject. I hope other folks will chime in for you with their own recommendations!

[ayeforscotland]

What is Dataflow? Part 2: Diagrams

This is the second part of a couple of posts about Dataflow, particularly why it's important for the world going forward and relating to the Crowd Strike IT disaster.

Read the first part here.

Before I get into this one today, I wanted to address a couple of things.

Firstly, Dataflow is something that nearly every single person can understand. You do NOT:

Need to have a degree in Computing Science

Need to work in IT

Need to be a data analyst / Spreadsheet master

If any of you see the word 'Data' and feel your eyes glazing over, try and snap out of it because, if you're anything like me, Dataflow is much more approachable as a concept.

Secondly, what do I mean by IT?

Traditionally in most of our media the all-encompassing 'IT department' handles everything to do with technology. But every business works differently and there are many job titles with lots of crossover.

For example, you can be an infrastructure engineer where your focus is on building and maintaining the IT infrastructure that connects your organisation internally and externally. This is a completely different role from an Application Portfolio Manager who is tasked with looking after the Applications used in business processes.

Both are technical people and come under the banner of 'IT' - but their roles are focused in different areas. So just bear that in mind!

Now that's out of the way, let's begin! This one will be a little bit deeper, and questions welcome!

An Intro to Diagrams

You probably do not need a history of why pictures are important to the human race but to cover our bases, ever since we put traced our hands on a cave wall we have been using pictures to communicate.

Jump forward in time and you have engineers like Leonardo Da Vinci drafting engineering schematics.

You get the idea, humans have been creating diagrams (Pictures) for thousands of years. Centuries of refinement and we have much more modern variations.

And there's one main reason why diagrams are important: They are a Common Language.

In this context, a Common Language helps bridge a language gap between disciplines as well as a linguistic gap. A Spanish electrician and a German electrician should be able to refer to the same diagram and understand each other, even if they don't know each other's language.

The reason they can do this is because they're are international standards which govern how electrical diagrams are created.

A Common Language for Digital?

Here's an image I've shown to clients from governments and institutions to global organisations.

Everything around us, from the products we use to the bridges we drive over and the buildings we live, work, enjoy and shop in had diagrams backing them.

You would not build a skyscraper without a structural engineering diagram, you would not build an extension on your house if an architect couldn't produce a blueprint.

Why is there not an equivalent for the Digital World and for Dataflow?

Where is the Digital Common Language?

This is the bit where the lightbulb goes on in a lot of people's heads. Because, as I mentioned in Part 1, the flow of data is the flow of information and knowledge. And the common mistake is that people think of dataflow, and only ever think about the technology.

Dataflow is the flow of information between People, Business Processes *and* Technology Assets.

It is not reserved to Technology specialists. When you look at the flow of data, you need to understand the People (Stakeholders) at the top, the processes that they perform (and the processes which use the data) and the technology assets that support that data.

The reason why this is important is because it puts the entire organisation in context.

It is something that modern businesses fail to do. They might have flow charts and network diagrams, and these are 'alright' in specific contexts, but they fall to pieces when they lack the context of the full organisation.

For example, here is a Network Diagram. It is probably of *some* value to technical personnel who work in infrastructure. Worth bearing in mind, some organisations don't even have something like this.

To be absolutely clear, this diagram will hold some value for some people within the organisation. I'm not saying it's completely useless. But for almost everyone else, it is entirely out of context, especially for any non-technical people.

So it doesn't help non-technical people understand why all of these assets are important, and it doesn't help infrastructure teams articulate the importance of any of these assets.

What happens if one of those switches or routers fails? What's the impact on the organisation? Who is affected? The diagram above does not answer those questions.

On the other side of the business we have process diagrams (aka workflow diagrams) which look like this.

Again we run into the same problem - This is maybe useful for some people working up at the process layer, but even then it doesn't provide context for the stakeholders involved (Are there multiple people/departments involved throughout) and it doesn't provide any context for technical personnel who are responsible for maintaining the technology that supports this process.

In short, nobody has the big picture because there is not a common language between Business & IT.

Conclusion

So what do we do? Well we need to have a Common Language between Business & IT. While we need people with cross-functional knowledge, we also need a common language (or common framework) for both sides of the organisation to actually understand each other.

Otherwise you get massively siloed departments completely winging their disaster recovery strategies when things like Crowd Strike goes down.

Senior Management will be asked questions about what needs to be prioritised and they won't have answers because they aren't thinking in terms of Dataflow.

It's not just 'We need to turn on everything again' - It's a question of priorities.

Thing is, there's a relatively simple way to do it, in a way that looking at any engineering diagram feels simple but actually has had decades/centuries of thought behind it. It almost feels like complete common sense.

I'll save it for Part 3 if you're interested in me continuing and I'll make a diagram of my blog.

The important thing is mapping out all the connections and dependencies, and there's not some magic button you press that does it all.

But rigorous engineering work is exactly that, you can't fudge it with a half-arsed attempt. You need to be proactive, instead of reacting whenever disaster strikes.

[ms-demeanor]

I feel like this is missing my point. I'm not rejecting spiritualism [which, to be clear, I am not using 'spiritualism' to describe spirituality as in the general belief in the supernatural or spiritual forces in the universe, but the specific mid-1800s to early-1900s spiritualist movement] because of chiropractic, chiropractic is simply one example of harms that have come from spiritualism. It's difficult to even say that I'm rejecting spiritualism because it's not something I consider enough to even reject it. It is simply not true. It doesn't reflect reality.

The other examples here are pretty bad because we DO reject false premises that lead to real world harms. There has been a decades-long project to rehabilitate sharks in the public eye and educate people about them and if anyone talks about how dangerous or scary sharks are you'll likely get three people popping their heads up and going "actually XYZ was a myth that was popularized by the bad science in Jaws and Peter Benchley and Steven Spielberg have both apologized for the impact that Jaws had on sharks." Look at how the majority of the scientific community treats Charles Murray if you want an example of science rejecting bad information about genetics (I'm not sure what you mean by your reference to modern human x archaic human interbreeding; it is a fact that humans carry some neanderthal DNA and it is a fact that some people use this fact to be racist; i hope you're criticizing people who do second thing in that statement and not dismissing the first part of the statement as true).

The problem at the root of all three of these things - chiropractic, the impact of Jaws on sharks, and people using genetics to justify racism - is people harming others based on falsehoods.

I actually think the line is very easy to draw: you draw the line when harm is done.

i was listening to a podcast yesterday and one of the hosts was talking about how she used new age beliefs to fill a void left by leaving christianity and how when she left the new age beliefs behind she was talking to some friends who were skeptics and asked them about "the great mystery" and if they thought science could explain why we were here and how even as a skeptic now she thinks people need some kind of spirituality to connect them to the universe and seek an answer to that question.

And I cannot explain enough how no, not everyone needs that and not everyone believes that's a question that has an answer or is even a question worth serious consideration. "Why are we here?" Why would there be a reason that we are here????????????? "What is the meaning of life?" Why are you assuming life has a meaning??????????????

I just really dislike the attitude that people are incomplete or are scared or self-deluding or *bitter* if they don't think the universe has a purpose. The universe doesn't! The universe is doing its thing!

I have a purpose because I made one for myself! Because of the people around me who I loved and cared about and who loved me and raised me and are a part of my community and who deserve compassion and companionship and autonomy and comfort and peace and joy and contentment! I learned what I wanted to do and to be because of us! I do not need a supernatural or spiritual or intuitive connection to the universe in order to know what I'm about!

And I'm absolutely not upset that the universe isn't giving me answers or guidance; I don't feel alone or abandoned or adrift. There are eight billion people on the planet! I'm not alone in the universe there are eight billion people why would I want or expect anything else?

It's literally fine?

[so-many-ocs]

Researching as a Writer

Start Broad

begin with a list of more general topics and get specific as you go.

for example, research for a historical fantasy novel might follow a chain that looks like this:

life in the 1700s -> life in 1700s france -> 1700s french etiquette and lifestyle depending on class -> 1720s french fashion for middle and upper-middle class women.

starting with a general understanding of the topic you want to cover and narrowing down to specifics will make it easier to build on your knowledge as you go.

Think Critically

consider the source. if it doesn’t cite primary sources (for example, letters and photographs from a specific era and location), what sources does it cite? follow those sources if possible.

is the information reliable? is it provided by an educational institution or an expert on the subject?

who is the author? do they present any bias? what do they have to gain by promoting a specific mindset or conclusion? has any of their research been debunked?

Anecdotes

in general, anecdotal evidence is not sufficient for academic writing. luckily for you, this is a fiction writing page, and anecdotal evidence is usually fine!

work with a combination of scholarly sources and personal experience. if you’re trying to depict a specific health condition, you might consult medical sources about the technical details of the condition, as well as seeking firsthand accounts from people who have that condition.

remember that people are not monolithic! there are often forums online where people are more than happy to discuss their experiences; cross-consult these for common elements.

Lists

keep track of your sources!! if you ever need to consult something later on, it will be way easier to open a list of resources than go digging through your search history.

additionally, if you come across lists of sources compiled by other people, save those!! you are probably not the first person to research the specific topic you’re looking into, and there are entire websites dedicated to gathering research!

wordsnstuffblog.com/research has compilations of sources for everything from writing injuries to global period pieces by century.

Resources

if you can, check out your school or public library’s websites! they will often compile scholarly resources to access for free.

look for open access or open source sites like project gutenberg that archive and digitize historical documents and other works. scienceopen and the directory of open access journals are more of these. search using keywords!

keep an eye out for websites made specifically for educational purposes (those with .edu at the end of their addresses).

[transmutationisms]

Feel free not to answer this ask so you dont have to step into this particular hornet's nest but do you have any thoughts about people sharing inaccurate science about COVID in order to push for more COVID regulations? I agree that COVID is being neglected and we need better policies but I'm also a biochemist so it pisses me off to see people cite research in a way that makes exaggerated and terrifying claims. Two years ago, I was warning my colleagues against this condescending "just trust the science" approach but now the same crowd pushing that has shifted to pushing "don't trust any of the positive science, only my catastrophic interpretations of it". Can't we mask without also trying to convince each other that COVID is a guaranteed one way ticket to death and permanent disability?

you must be new here haha i swing bats at this hornet's nest like once a month. yeah i think the current state of covid communication sucks a lot. i mean the truth is that "follow the science" is always a disingenuous sentiment; Science doesn't speak, and scientists disagree with one another. and it's naïve to pretend majority consensus is a reliable mechanism to identify truth—anyone who has followed the covid aerosolisation about-face will recall that although linsey marr was not the first researcher to challenge medical orthodoxy on airborne disease transmission, even well into the covid pandemic the idea of aerosol transmission was marginalised by global health authorities because it was politically inconvenient, out of favour with powerful established academics, and reminiscent to some of pre-pasteurian miasma theories of disease. those who would "follow the science" were not presented with a convenient dichotomy between reasonable evidence-backed expert consensus and fringe peddlers of heterodoxy; to evaluate these positions required actually, yknow, reading and evaluating the arguments and evidence from multiple competing positions, and deciding which had the greater explanatory power. which is good epistemological advice only insofar as it's so obvious as to be trite.

fundamentally a huge driving force of this situation is the social, political, and institutional forces that make expert knowledge (a generally good thing) all too often synonymous with inaccessible knowledge. i don't mean inaccessibility caused by knowledge being specialised; obviously this is inevitable to some extent simply as a result of the fact that no one person will grasp the entirety of human knowledge. but the fact that knowledge is specialised, specific, highly technical, and so forth doesn't automatically mean, for example, that it has to be monetarily gatekept from all but a select few with the resources to persevere through a highly punishing, nepotistic, hegemonic university system; this is a political problem, and one that additionally has the effect of enabling and sheltering low-quality work (see: replication crisis) behind the opaque walls of university bureaucracy and the imprimateur of the credentials it grants. in lieu of an ability to actually engage with, read, or challenge much of the academic research being generated on any given topic, the lay public is supposed to rely on signs of reliability like possession of a degree, or institutional reputation. what we in fact see again and again, and with particularly high stakes in the case of something like a pandemic, is that these measures are instruments of class stratification and professional jockeying that don't inherently ensure quality information: MDs can and do peddle anti-vaxx lies and covid / long-covid denialism; the CDC and WHO can and do perpetrate bad and outdated scientific advice, like that masks are unnecessary and isolation periods can be shortened for convenience. many of these are just blatant cases of kowtowing to political pressure, which arises from the capitalist logic that counterposes disease prevention to economic growth.

this all leaves us in a position where it is, in fact, smart and correct to evaluate the information coming from 'official' and credentialled sources with scepticism. the problem is that in its place, we get information coming out of the same capitalist state-sponsored scientific institutions, and the same colonialist universities; the idea that some chucklefuck on twitter is telling you the secret truth just because they correctly identified that the government sucks is plainly absurd. where covid specifically is concerned, the liberalism of academic and scientific institutions is on display in numerous ways, including the idealist assumption, which many 'covid communicators' make, that public health policy is primarily a matter of swaying public opinion, and therefore that it is always morally imperative to form and propagate the most alarmist possible interpretation of any study or empirical observation. this is not an attitude that encourages thoughtful or measured evaluation of The Science (eg, study methodology), nor is it one that actually produces the kind of political change that would be required to protect the populace writ large from what is, indeed, a dangerous and still rampant virus. instead, this form of communication mostly winds up generating social media Engagement and screenshots of headlines of summaries of studies.

meanwhile, actual public health policy (which is by and large determined at the mercy of capitalist state interests, and which by and large shapes public opinion of what mitigation measures are 'reasonable', despite the CDC repeatedly pretending this works the other way round), remains on its trajectory toward lax, open exposure of anyone and everyone to each new strain of covid, perpetuating a society that is profoundly hostile to disabled people and careless with everyone's life and health. this fucking sucks. it sucked that we have treated the flu like this for years, and it sucks that we are now doing it with a virus that we are still relatively immunologically naïve to, and that produces, statistically, even more death and disability than the flu. and it sucks that the predominating explanations of this state of affairs from the 'cautious' emphasise not the structural forces that shape knowledge production under capitalism, but instead invoke a psychological narrative whereby individuals simply need to be sufficiently terrified into producing mass action.

[strangesmallbard]

it’s wild how some goyim w/ trauma related to a christian upbringing will blame jews for that trauma, either under the assumption that judaism is just christianity 1.0 or that jews technically “created” christianity so it’s our fault by proxy. both perspectives are backwards and ill-informed; but more than that, they fail to acknowledge the basic fact that jews do not benefit from christianity as an institution. to put it very fucking lightly

[girlactionfigure]

Here's a story for you about how the news industry works.

Earlier tonight, the group that invaded Israel, massacred 1000+ people, burned families to death in their homes, took hostages back to Gaza, and recorded it all with GoPros – this group announced that Israel bombed a hospital in Gaza, killing hundreds.

Then, instead of waiting for more information from the Israeli side, the editors of the world's most important media outlets said to themselves: "This is enough for us. Let's run with it."

Headlines screamed that Israel bombed a hospital. Push notifications were sent to MILLIONS of people.

CNN push: "Hundreds of people may have been killed in an Israeli strike on a Gaza City hospital, according to the Palestinian health ministry"

BBC push: "Hundreds feared dead or injured in Israeli air strike on hospital in Gaza, Palestinian officials say"

NYT push: "At least 500 people were killed by an Israeli airstrike at a Gaza hospital, the Palestinian Health Ministry said"

Do you see what they did there?

They put the dramatic news in the beginning of the sentence and then they cited the source at the end so that the assertion is technically true. The Palestinian Health Ministry DID say that.

The thing is, the Palestinian Health Ministry in Gaza is a Hamas institution.

What do you call people who amplify Hamas propaganda not just as news, but as the top news story in the world?

There is no way that a professional military such as the Israel Defense Forces can give an instant answer about a catastrophe in enemy��territory during a war. It took around two or three hours for the IDF to share the results of its initial investigation – that the explosion at the hospital was a due to a rocket launched by Islamic Jihad that malfunctioned and crashed back into Gaza. More evidence is coming out as I write this.

The sad fact is that it appears that hundreds of Palestinians are dead at a hospital because terrorists in Gaza tried to fire rockets at Israelis and ended up hitting their own people. It's unbearably stupid and tragic.

None of this is new, unfortunately. Journalists in the Middle East know – they absolutely know – that a significant percentage of Hamas and Islamic Jihad’s rockets misfire and crash into residential areas of Gaza. 

I've attached a famous example. This video is from May 2022. It shows a live broadcast of a rocket being launched from a residential area of Gaza. The rocket malfunctions, turns sideways, and crashes into the city. The overexcited broadcaster tries to pretend that nothing unusual happened and asks the camera man to turn away. The video went viral at the time. There are other known instances where this happened. 

These rockets are designed to kill people. Don't act surprised when they do.

I say all of this to remind you to treat breaking news from Gaza with caution, even if it's unpopular to do so.

Daniel Rubenstein

[basshole-astard]

[AMERICAN POLITICS]

i know everyone is worried about KOSA being a censorship bill, and that's fair. but do you know what really, REALLY concerns me about this bill? the fact they want to install age verification systems at the device/operating system level

(transcript with highlights below cut)

this will almost definitely track your data - note how it doesn't say how much, just that it's going to have to collect some, and that's worrying. to me. best case scenario we need to give our devices our government ID. worst case scenario it's tracking app usage and browser history and who knows what else. they don't say! how convenient.

but, based on Sec. 6(d)(5) "consider indicia or inferences of age of users, in addition to any self-declared information about the age of individuals." and Sec. 10(a)(1)(D) "using indicia or inferences of age of users for assessing use of the covered platform by minors", nevermind Sec. 9(b)(4)'s own admission that some data will be collected, that's.... that's data tracking.

and i know websites already do this, but i feel like a government mandated software for age verification that will track this data is a step too far.....

read the text of the bill here, if you want. genuinely the amount of legaleze is - as far as i can tell - only going to PROBABLY cause censorship, not GUARANTEE it.

but you know what KOSA does guarantee? stated plainly and clearly in their intents of what this bill will do? data tracking.

so if you're contacting your senators about opposing this bill, please consider not only voicing your concerns about censorship, but also about the privacy violations. thank you.

contact your senators here

highlighted text in image bolded

SEC. 9. Age verification study and report.

(a) Study.—The Director of the National Institute of Standards and Technology, in coordination with the Federal Communications Commission, Federal Trade Commission, and the Secretary of Commerce, shall conduct a study evaluating the most technologically feasible methods and options for developing systems to verify age at the device or operating system level.

(b) Contents.—Such study shall consider —

(1) the benefits of creating a device or operating system level age verification system;

(2) what information may need to be collected to create this type of age verification system;

(3) the accuracy of such systems and their impact or steps to improve accessibility, including for individuals with disabilities;

(4) how such a system or systems could verify age while mitigating risks to user privacy and data security and safeguarding minors' personal data, emphasizing minimizing the amount of data collected and processed by covered platforms and age verification providers for such a system; and

(5) the technical feasibility, including the need for potential hardware and software changes, including for devices currently in commerce and owned by consumers.

(c) Report.—Not later than 1 year after the date of enactment of this Act, the agencies described in subsection (a) shall submit a report containing the results of the study conducted under such subsection to the Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation of the Senate and the Committee on Energy and Commerce of the House of Representatives.

[yuurei20]

Hey there! Absolutely love all the work you do here, it's really helped me as a newer fan of Twst get a better grasp on the characters and lore, so thanks a lot!!!

I'm not sure if it's ever specified anywhere, but do we know what exactly the name "Twisted Wonderland" encompasses in-universe? Like, is it the name of the whole planet, or a continent, or some other established grouping?

I know we do have a map that shows a lot of the characters homelands, but as far as I recall, it doesn't include the Scalding Sands. Which beyond it being the homeland of Kalim and Jamil, there was also a whole in-game event there that fleshed out the environment and culture, yet do we even know where it would hypothetically be on a map?

I also remember Sam talking about the cultures of the East during the New Years event, so there is presumably more beyond the map we know, but I just don't know if it has ever been clarified? Madol/Thaumarks are also the only currency we've ever seen, which could make it similar to Euro in how a whole continent uses it, or maybe there's something else to it.

Apologies for the long ask, I just found the implications to be fascinating depending on what little info we may have on the matter!

Hello hello! Thank you for this question! ^^ And you are much too kind!! ♡

From comments like “Twisted Wonderland’s got a number of educational institutions for cultivating magicians” and “Twisted Wonderland would be forever enveloped in winter’s cold, harsh embrace,” I do believe that “Twisted Wonderland” is meant to be the name of the entire place to which the prefect has been relocated! 

There are other times, however, where this can sound odd: the entire world (is it a world?) has the same traditional event (Beanfest)? The entire world has the same kind of fire and police organizations? Halloween is one of the biggest events in the entire world? Icicle mushrooms are one of the three greatest delicacies in the entire world? 

It is not impossible, but it is curious! Is it maybe not literally the entire planet, but possibly just a hemisphere?

(But is it a planet at all? Could it possibly be a dimension? 👀 We know that the dorms exist in dimensions of their own--are those pocket dimensions inside the dimension that is Twisted Wonderland?)

Except, as you say, Kalim and Jamil’s home country is not even on the main “world” map and yet it is still considered a part of Twisted Wonderland (as far as I can tell), so we know that “Twisted Wonderland” consists of more than what is being shown to us!

We have never been shown any borders of “this is where Twisted Wonderland ends and where another place begins,” or even heard that any place besides Twisted Wonderland exists here, so with the information we have at the moment I would say that everywhere we have heard of thus far is within the boundaries of Twisted Wonderland—whatever it is that may be 👀 (Limbo?)

Also as you say Sam does manage having eastern branches of his Mystery Shop, but Sam is very mysterious 👀

We technically do not even know if he is a mage (he does not seem to have a visible magestone, unlike the rest of the staff, and being magicless would tie in well to the character upon which he was based), or anything about these Eastern shops! It does not seem like it would be out of character for Sam to have access to inter-dimensional travel and, as aforementioned, his hometown cannot be found on the map 👀

Is Sam like the prefect, moving in between Twst and the world from which the prefect came (and maybe even Japan itself, hence his "Eastern branches")? I am pretty sure that there is nothing in-game to insinuate that this is the case, but it is fun to think ^^

Also as you say, Madol/Thaumarks seem to be a universal currency! I like your comparison to Euro very much!

While things like having the same traditions/currency/events/etc. throughout an entire planet might be a little unrealistic (in this game about dragon princes and mermaids who do parkour ww), it is possible that things were simplified just for the sake of keeping it all manageable within the visual novel medium ^^

My apologies for not having any answers! I do not believe that there is any information missing from what you already know, and while it is all very vague and curious, I agree it is also fun to think about! ^^

[workingclasshistory]

On this day, 2 July 1848, enslaved people in St Croix (now the US Virgin Islands) rebelled, burned down plantations and besieged the town of Frederiksted. The Caribbean island was at that time a Danish colony, and it had been decreed that slavery would be abolished in 1859, but the enslaved workers refused to wait. After revolutions in Europe led to turmoil in nearby Martinique and Guadeloupe, hundreds of rebels seized the moment and rose up. By the end of the day, only the local military garrison, Fort Frederiksværn, had not yet been overrun. The following day, the governor general, Peter von Scholten arrived. Faced with demands from the enslaved people to immediately abolish slavery, or they would burn the town to the ground, he relented and shouted out: “Now you are free, you are hereby emancipated.” Technically von Scholten had no authority to abolish slavery, and he was strongly criticised by enslavers and Danish authorities. But faced with a fait accompli, Denmark had no real choice but to accept the situation. The agreement achieved by the formerly enslaved people went even further than just immediate emancipation, as the order issued on the night of July 3 also applied to the Danish colonies of St Thomas and St John, and directed that the enslaved had the right to keep their current housing and provisions for three months, and that elderly and ill labourers had to be looked after by the former enslavers "until further determination". The old enslavers subsequently sued the Danish government demanding recompense for the loss of their "property". Danish Parliament rejected their claim, on the grounds that "slavery [was] itself an institution in conflict with religion and justice". But they did then agreed to pay a relatively low compensation figure of $50 per enslaved person. More information, sources and map: https://stories.workingclasshistory.com/article/9191/st-croix-enslaved-revolt Pictured: St Thomas freedom statue https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=654237043416181&set=a.602588028581083&type=3

[smytherines]

I think about Curt's thought process on the staircase all the time. Did he think that Owen fell, was fine, got up and walked away and decided to be evil? In One Step Ahead Curt says things like "what happened to the man I knew?" And "you've lost your mind." This version of Owen is so different to the person he knew that Curt can't bring himself to say Owen's name after the reveal. Not even once. But what does he think happened to Owen?

Technically the Joey Richter tweet about Owen being captured by the Russians and then bailed out and nursed back to health by Chimera to "groom him for future work" is not canon, as it isn't established in the show. But he is one of the three writers, one of the Tin Can Bros, so if anyone knows what happened to Owen after the fall, it would be him. It's sort of a close enough to canon situation.

And realistically... I mean I'm not going to get into the details, but prisoners in the USSR were not treated kindly. We're talking about abuses so horrifying that a lot of prisoners simply did not survive them. So we have Owen, severely injured in the fall, having had a building explode on him, being held captive by a country he just dealt a significant blow to by destroying their weapons facility. The absolute best case scenario is that they don't treat his serious injuries. The worst case scenario is... much, much worse. The kind of thing that can absolutely break someone.

And then Chimera comes along and offers him a way out. Offers to fix his broken body and give him back his freedom (or some semblance of it at least). But their assistance doesn't come for free. He has a debt to pay. And given his injuries he probably can't do the sort of physically demanding work he did as a spy. But he can torture people. He can kill people. He is very good at killing people.

He can't be Owen Carvour anymore, that man died when he fell, when his body broke, when the man he loved left him for dead. Chimera is there during his long healing process, whispering in his ear- this is what your partner did to you. This is what the country you served did to you. This is what being a spy did to you, and wouldn't it be nice to obliterate the whole fucking institution? Wouldn't it be nice to live in a world without agencies, without spies, without secrets?

I imagine that on the staircase, Curt is thinking about how the man he loved, the man he grieved for four years, tortured him. That Owen hated him. That Owen wanted to kill him. That Owen is a monster now, and the kindest thing to do is to put him down. And it isn't until Owen's lifeless body is in front of him that he sees the burns, the surgical scars, the physical devastation of the fall, and starts to understand what happened to the man he knew. That's when he becomes fixated on taking down Chimera. He can't undo what he did, not in 1957 and not in 1961. But he thinks that by taking down Chimera he can make it matter. He can make it right. He has to keep going until he makes it right.

And the more he learns about Chimera, the more he learns about Owen's time with the Russians, Owen's injuries in the fall, Owen's life as the Deadliest Man Alive, the harder he pushes himself to defeat Chimera. Except every new piece of information he learns is like a knife to the gut. His conscience burns at him. He sees Owen everywhere, all the time. Beautiful visions of him, horrifying visions of him, waking, sleeping, wherever he goes and whatever he does. And Owen was right- Curt can never catch up to them. He tries and he tries, but he fails. Whatever promises he whispered to Owen's body, he can't fulfill them. And he knows it. He knows it right up until the moment he dies.

[hobiebrownismygod]

Did Hobie Brown give up his mask/identity as Spider-punk? - ATSV Analysis

from @benio on TikTok ⬆️

During Miguel's speech, we see some of the spiders looking at either their past or future events, and we see Peter's wedding (past), Gwen digging herself out of her grave (future), Jess escaping rubble (unknown) and we also see Hobie looking at his canon event, which was giving up his mask and his identity as Spider-punk.

So its completely plausible that like Gwen's canon event, this is one of Hobie's upcoming canon events, where he'll end up giving up his mask later on. However, I like to think that he had given up his mask prior to ATSV for the following reason:

Hobie wasn't supposed to be in Mumbattan during ATSV

The scene in ATSV where Miles was invisibly watching Gwen talking to Jess and Lyla actually has a second deleted version. This deleted scene was similar, except instead of talking to Jess and Lyla, Gwen was talking to Miguel and various other high-level spider people.

A/N: I know this scene was deleted so it can't really be considered canon, but JUST HEAR ME OUT

While they're talking about Gwen's mistake and Spot's presence in Mumbattan, Hobie's name is mentioned (1:58).

Gwen: "He took time off"

Miguel: "Yeah because he doesn't believe in institutions, or teams. Lyla can't even find him"

Gwen: "He gave me a way to contact him"

At this part in time, prior to his introduction to ATSV, Hobie was not technically a part of the Spider Society. Nobody except for Gwen, not even Lyla, had any way to contact him.

So we've already established that people in the Spider Society usually catch anomalies or are assigned missions to do so, as being a part of the Spider Society would probably mean being willing to work as a team and contribute to the community. If you want to look more into this, @the-cat-and-the-birdie has a really cool post where they explain their views on how the Spider Society works, and I'm kind of going off on that.

If Hobie left, it would mean that he wasn't completing these missions anymore, didn't want to be a part of the community and didn't want anyone to be able to contact him about these missions or anything Spider-man related, unless it was Gwen, who he probably only gave contact information to because she's homeless and doesn't have anywhere to stay, and its been established that she stays with him sometimes.

So why did he leave?

My guess? He experienced an extremely traumatic canon event that led to him deciding to give up his mask. He was so angry at Miguel and the Spider Society for allowing this canon event to happen, that he cut off ties from the community, severed all connections with other spider-people and stayed put in his own universe, only giving Gwen his contact information.

And in this time he "took off", he began to devise his plan to wreak havoc in the Spider Society, and create his own watch. This would explain why he was so quick to help and support Miles, and why he already had watches available for both Gwen and the rest of the Spider-team to use.

The watch he gives Gwen also has the writing "Project Bootleg" written on it.

Bootleg:

the illegal manufacture, distribution, or sale of goods, especially alcohol or recordings.

Hobie already had a plan for what he was going to do. He had already created Project Bootleg to infiltrate the Spider Society himself, and Miles' interjection became Hobie's reveal.

Now to tie back to the first point I made, that Hobie wasn't supposed to be in Mumbattan during ATSV:

The rest of the Spiders were shown coming in through portals, whether it was Miguel's entrance in the beginning of the movie, Gwen's entrance to Miles' room, or even Jess's entrance in Mumbattan where the giant spider-ship came through a portal in the sky. Hobie, Gwen, Miles and Jess were even shown using a portal to get into the Spider Society after leaving Mumbattan. However...we never see Hobie enter Mumbattan through a portal.

He just appeared. But Pavitr was surprised, so there was no way that Hobie had already been in Mumbattan before, and since Jess and Lyla didn't have his location, there was no way that they could have contacted Hobie to come help Gwen fight Spot. So how did he get there?

We have a LOT of unanswered questions about Hobie. He's a complete mystery, from his backstory, to his universe, and to his place in the Spider Society. While the other members are shown as contributors to the Spider Society who all know each other, i.e. Gwen and Jess greeting the Peters in HQ while Hobie doesn't acknowledge any of them and vice versa, Hobie isn't shown having any kind of interaction with any of the Spider Society members except for Gwen and Pav. We know that he knows the other members, because Jess, Peter and Miguel know him by name, but we don't know his place in the Spider Society and we don't know what he does. This is why I think he left the Spider Society. Because if he was still a part of it, the interactions he had with the people in it would've been different. The way he acted in the HQ, his attitude, everything, would've probably been different if he actually was a part of it or even helped out in some way.

Summary, because this analysis was kind of all over the place:

I think that Hobie quit being spider-man before the events of ATSV because of a traumatic canon event. I think he lost someone or something very close to him, and because of that he cut himself off from the Spider Society. I think he blamed the idea of canon events for what happened and that he wants to help Miles save his dad and break his canon because he thinks that by doing this, he's making up for not being able to break his own canon. I think he's been planning this Project Bootleg for a while before Miles showed up and he decided Miles would be the perfect reveal for his plan and he'd use it to prove that canon events can be broken, and that what happened was wrong.

Poor guy.

A/N:

I think this HC overall would be a cool concept for fanfic writers to focus on in their stories, because I've seen a lot of stories where reader/oc was Hobie's canon event, but very few of these go into depth about what his reaction to reader/oc's death would be and how that would impact his identity as Spider-man and his involvement with the Spider Society afterwards. If you do decide to write it, tag me in it! I'd love to read your fanfictions! <3

[blueiscoool]

US Returns $80 Million-Worth of Stolen Artifacts to Italy

It looked more like a museum exhibition of Italian art than a crime scene, but in the Central Institute for Restoration’s offices, located inside a former women’s prison in central Rome, some 600 works of art were put on display Tuesday morning.

Ranging from life-sized bronze statues to tiny Roman coins, from oil paintings to mosaic flooring, the pieces span the 9th century BC to the 2nd century AD and amount to just one year’s stolen and trafficked art confiscated by Manhattan prosecutor Col. Matthew Bogdanos’ team and returned to Italy.

The trafficked works, pillaged from the Italian regions of Lazio, Campania, Puglia, Calabria and Sicily, were sequestered in New York and New Jersey last year.

The returned works, together with 60 items repatriated last year, are worth more than $80 million (or roughly €73.6 million) — but are just a drop in the bucket when it comes to artwork still hidden away in private warehouses and on display in museums in the United States, Bogdanos said on the sidelines of a presentation to the media on Tuesday.

Bogdanos said the $80 million of items does not include a further 100 items his team has just seized in the US.

What makes the seizure and return of stolen artifacts so difficult is that authorities often have no idea what they are looking for, according to Gen. D. Francesco Gargaro, commander of the Carabinieri for the Protection of Cultural Heritage.

“When artifacts are taken from clandestine graves, they have never been cataloged,” he said. That means that, in addition to the items themselves, their historical context was stolen, robbing archaeologists of valuable information. (Instead, investigators work backwards, assessing paperwork and provenance claims for artifacts provided by their owners, as well as undertaking technical tests to best confirm a piece’s true origins.)

Most of the recent items returned to Italy were dug out of clandestine excavations or stolen from churches, museums and private individuals, Gargaro said.

Among the items on display on Tuesday was a cuirass and two bronze heads dating back to the 4th-3rd century BC that were confiscated from a gallery owner in New York.

There was also an Umbrian bronze statue depicting a warrior stolen from an Italian museum in 1962 that was found in a well-known American museum.

And a mosaic floor depicting the myth of Orpheus enchanting wild animals with the sound of the lyre from the mid-3rd to mid-4th century AD was recovered after being stolen from a clandestine excavation in Sicily in the early 1990s. It was confiscated from the private collection of a well-known New York collector.

Italy’s Carabinieri Cultural Heritage Protection unit uses artificial intelligence to search for stolen cultural assets under a new program called “Stolen Works Of Art Detection System” (SWOADS), which searches for taken items by scanning the web and social media for images.

“The return to Italy of cultural assets of such importance, both for their numerical consistency and for their historical-artistic value, is another significant achievement, Italy’s culture ministry undersecretary Gianmarco Mazzi said Tuesday.

“In addition to being works of art of inestimable value, they represent the high expression of our history, our culture and our national identity.”

In 2023 alone, 105,474 pieces of art worth more than €264 million (or $287 million) were found and confiscated worldwide thanks to the artificial intelligence project, according to Gargaro.

By Barbie Latza Nadeau.

[gemmahale]

Here's the thing. I'm in a red state, in a county that went red.

I knew that when I moved out here four years ago. (Yes, it was April 2020 and no, I do not recommend moving during a global pandemic.) I accepted that that would be part of it. I made my peace with it, and I do what I can to mitigate the effects.

I'm not scared for me (minus the bodily autonomy thing since my state now has a 12 week abortion ban, and the general fuckery of facists in power) because tbh, I'm white and cis-het passing.

I'm nonbinary and bisexual. Can't tell any of that unless I tell you, and I don't make it well well known. I use she/her at work, wear skirts and dresses, and respond to Mrs/Ms Gemma or Hale (actually folks use my legal first or last name 😉); though Dr. is preferred if I get the choice.

I fly under the radar as a quirky white woman. I'm relatively "protected."

In the wake of the election results rolling out, I'm apprehensive for:

Kallen, who is white-passing Cherokee and a disabled veteran. I've been party to how he's treated differently than I am - by the same checker at the store not more than 5 minutes apart. He moved out here after I established my career, so he had little to no input of where we moved to (other than "I want to be with you.")

My coworkers who already face harassment for being POC in the community (including foreign exchange students that come to do part of their PhD here because of the proximity to the university system). People have been chased out of their positions here due to the racism they've experienced.

My coworkers who would seek to have an abortion (I'm included in this myself).

The LGBTQ+ community here (remember - I'm not out out).

The immigrant and POC communities here

And folks beyond my immediate viscinity

A lot of the community operates on a "mind your shit" basis. But I have to look people in the eye with Trump 2024 caps on and answer their questions politely. I have to drive by trucks with religious bumper stickers and greet them and give them scientifically sound information.

I wanted to believe in a world that valued competency and skill; and then I remember: I was the only one that applied to this job in the boondocks, and we've struggled to get positions filled out here. And I know part of it is not because of the low cost of living or lack of proximity to major shopping centers/social options. 🙃

I'm poking around into what local groups I can get into and donate my time to. My job puts me in direct access with food security resources, so that's probably where I'll start. Perhaps tie into the LGBTQ community because I know there's an active group out here. (I want to get more involved in the community anyway.)

I have to swallow this fear I have of being connected to causes while in my position. Yes, my employer is technically neutral ground, but that doesn't mean I have to be. I am allowed to be civically involved, as long as I make it clear when I am working in a work capacity (branded gear, name tag, etc.) and as a private citizen.

I admittedly got spooked when I received a few letters (to my private address, mind you) stating that I was a poor representative of my institution because I didn't maintain my yard like I should when I first started. (It was a whole thing and got escalated up higher than it needed to and yeah. I still have those letters in my office.)

But folks are starting to know me, and I'm starting to know them too. I need to cast this fear I have aside and be true to my values - accessibility, inclusivity, equity, and justice.

[pinesorneedles]

season 7 of buffy is so perfectly set up to investigate the true nature of evil, especially off the heels of season 6 really investigating human evil, with the big bad being human evil, willow's turn throughout the season, buffy is never evil but certainly questions her own goodness, the juxtaposition at anya and xander's wedding between the generally nice, well mannered demons, and the really horrible humans, spike's entire character arc.

and with the big bad of season 7 being, well, literally the first evil. like generally i have issues with season 7 for taking attention off the main cast and scoobies dynamic, introducing a bunch of new characters who take up screentime without actually having time to be explored deeply (some of whom I really love! like Robin Wood is SUCH a good character and his existence and perspective could have informed this idea so well), and after the end of season 6 being about the scoobies reasserting their love to one another, really solidifying that family dynamic, it's a shame that doesn't get to be examined, especially with all the fractures that come up in season 6.

but like, there's so much going on in season 7 plot-wise without investigating wider narrative threads that have been building throughout previous seasons. and after a whole season about human evil, completely and immediately doubling down on evil as being tied to the demonic and supernatural just isn't satisfying to me. like, we've opened up a whole side to the narrative that just gets shut down.

Season 7 also just feels really impersonal, so while the stakes are technically the highest they've ever been in a lore perspective, it continuously feels inconsequential compared to previous seasons (at least to me).

Willow, Anya, Spike, even Giles with his dabbling in dark magic, all have these strong and immediate connections to evil, each of them, by the end of season 6, having had completely different perspectives on it. Dawn is still the key, existed for thousands of years, the only barrier for inviting demon dimensions. Buffy has been forced into duty to fight against evil, and has often questioned the institutions that define what that evil is, and personally just spent an entire season questioning her place there. There's just so much there to investigate that gets completely pushed to the side in service of the potentials, which is kinda interesting, lore-wise, but they're either not used effectively, or just completely detract from other, more interesting thematic threads.

Spike getting his soul also just raises a bunch of questions about the nature of the soul and what it actually does that remained unanswered in service of Spike suffering consequences for his actions. Which like, okay that's cool, but it's not necessarily that interesting to me vs the implications of a creature who's evil by nature seeking out goodness. Willow's entire "learning how to work with magic" happens entirely off-screen. Anya becomes a demon again, which presumably means she's evil again? But she's not? And then she suddenly just becomes human again with very little investigating (and Anya is a criminally underused character generally).

anyways, this whole idea is more of a musing on an idea that's so present throughout the series, but is consistently used for as this background setting of "buffy turns towards darkness/is attracted to it/is forced to live with it due to her being the slayer" and i just so wish that idea was actually and actively investigated because it comes up SO many times and season 7 is just not narratively satisfying