#We are so close to the end of our decline into entropy

[funkyfreshinthebuilding]

hello GAYS!!! I never post my art on this website because my art is horrible and disgusting and I think this guy named Hex really encapsulates that.

He's my oc that's a hybrid of a dragon and a human which is strictly forbidden in dragon society (ANGST!!!!!!!!!!) because dragons and humans have been at war for a really long time. He's picked on a lot by other dragons so he lives in solitude in this mountain at the edge of his village.

He's somewhat respected since he's the most important scientist in dragon civilization as a whole, so he hasn't been butchered or beheaded because of that.

[herinsectreflection]

Entropy is actually a great episode that I don’t think gets enough attention. I totally understand why - it is sandwiched between Normal Again with its unusual concept and Seeing Red with its huge plot events. It’s a connective tissue episode that doesn’t have much of a standalone plot - it’s more concerned with dealing with the fallout from previous episodes (specifically the Xander/Anya and Spike/Buffy relationships de facto ending in As You Were and Hells Bells), and setting up the events of the next episode. But its actually one of my favourite episodes from this stretch of S6.

I think it does a fantastic job as expressing the core themes of the season. That starts with the title. The idea of entropy: the inevitable drifting apart of all things and decline into disorder, is key to the season. That is what we have been seeing all year - the Scoobies drifting away from each other, all hurting and struggling but unable to connect with each other. That is also in many ways an inevitable part of adulthood in this world, where we so often drift apart from people we were close to before, becoming increasingly alienated and detached from community.

This season tracks that theme heavily, through the Scoobies not knowing about Buffy being in heaven, to Xanya keeping their engagement a secret (and their fears about marriage secret from each other), through all Willow's issues, through Dawn's loneliness, etc, etc. There's a reason the season concludes with two people reconnecting and empathising through shared experiences. It is to remind us that even when we feel at our most isolated and pained, we are not alone in feeling that way. We are united by our collective loneliness.

But before that healing can take place, we have this episode, which is arguably the peak of these characters being separated from each other. All three couples of the season are split up, and the people who are still friends are keeping secrets from each other. Xander gets a lot of flack in this episode, and I kind of think that's fair - his actions do come across as being weirdly possessive over Buffy's sex life. But their conversation in Seeing Red casts it into a more sympathetic light for me, framing his hurt as not due to the fact that she was sleeping with Spike, but that she didn't share a part of her life with her best friends. That's understandably upsetting, and it fits with this theme of people drifting apart.

In this sea of entropy, it is inevitable that people will cling indiscriminately to each other. This is what happens with Anya and Spike. It makes perfect sense that they would grab at any brief connection - they both have a habit of latching on to people very quickly and very strongly. Anya is kindof filling the role of Buffy in this episode, using Spike as a comfort fuck. Which is fair enough. People need to get comfort where they can. But even that comfort can end up hurting other people, and so you end up even more alone. There's no ill will there - Anya says herself ("That wasn't vengeance.. That was solace.") - but actions have consequences. It might just be solace with one other lonely person, but others may still be hurt by this.

In a way, that's kind of reassuring. The fact that Xander and Buffy are both hurt by Anya and Spike's connection reminds us that none of these people are in fact alone. It's significant that at the point that Anya and Spike believe they are alone, they are in fact literally being observed by seven other people, several of whom feel the emotional impact of their connection. They cannot avoid having an impact on others. As human beings were are inevitably interconnected, and everything we do affects the people around us, even if we feel completely alone, and the same goes for spurned demons.

That's the messy, ugly, oddly uplifting message that Entropy leaves us with, which is what S6 does at its best. It shows how these characters, drifting apart on emotional islands, still clumsily connect, unavoidably impacting each other. And Willow and Tara's reuniting reminds us that this is always a choice. We can choose to bridge these gaps and connect with each other. We can't choose what happens after that, but that's another story.

[girlcriedwoolf]

✍🏼 On the act of re-reading and Christopher Nolan’s Tenet (2020)

I’m a chronic re-reader. I reread the same books copious times, rewatch the same TV shows over-and-over and find solace in exhausting my own Spotify playlists until the songs become unbearable. I know I’m not alone in this practice - there are thousands of other people around the world that share my comfort of revisiting sources of previous enjoyment, but there are also thousands of people that don’t. It’s always fascinated me - how people can enjoy a book, film or TV show without any desire to experience it again, ideally as soon as possible. I’ve subsequently internalised this as a sign that these individuals live fuller, more exciting (better) lives as they’re able to consume a greater amount and a wider variety of cultural content than I ever will. My tendency to reread Twilight - for, let’s say the seventh time - instead of reading a new book that I know I’d enjoy has been something I’ve become ashamed of. Is it an immature and somewhat cowardly cop-out to revisit a source of comfort from the past rather than engaging with the present? 

At its core, Christopher Nolan’s latest cinematic masterpiece Tenet (2020) is a film about the act rewatching and re-experiencing, both structurally and conceptually. More specifically, a lot of the film rests on the idea of the protagonists travelling to - or existing in - the past, using technology sent from the future, in order to fix the present. It messes with your mind in all the best ways - don’t say I didn’t warn you. The structure of the film lends itself to comment on the nature of time: rejecting a linear, chronological structure of time and instead alluding to at least two other possible shapes that embody the abstract, meta notion of time. 

First, is the illusion to a ‘temporal pincer’ shaped structure (visually resembling an elongated horseshoe shape or alternatively, a hairpin). References to this structure of time are not limited to dialogue alone - instead, a visual reference is seen explicitly in the last part of the film during which a planning meeting for an army drill takes place and a temporal pincer shape is drawn on a whiteboard to convey the operation. In this scene, the protagonist can be heard asking which order the two groups are going to enter the site, to which the commander, Ives, replies that both groups (lines) run simultaneously to each other rather than subsequently, ultimately shattering liner constructs of measuring time. In doing so, Nolan suggests that revisiting the past (or by extension an experience in the past like a book or film) may not be a backwards step but merely a progression in time. In this way, we understand revisiting and experiencing things from the past, not as redundant acts that waste time but instead as signs of time progressing. Tenet embodies the experience of great cinema and the role of film as a medium of storytelling.

True to Nolan’s fascination with ideas of inception, (see: Inception (2010), Tenet itself could be seen to project the experience of watching a film. The audience exists on a different timeline to the film’s narrative and metaphorically ‘catch’ the bullets that are fired the first time around. In watching the film for the first, second, third or fifteenth time, you will start the experience at a different point in time meaning you are going forward but ultimately the nature of rewatching something means you know where you’re going to end up in the future. An aspect of Tenet that draws on a specific interest of Nolan’s is the transformation of scientific concepts depicted through the language of storytelling. The nature of rewatching in itself is paralleled through the scientific concept of inverted entropy, which, in the most basic reduction, is the idea that a system goes from disorder to disorder. In Tenet, the suggestion is that broad systems can go through the process of disorder to order upon the experience of rewatching.

Whilst the scientific aspects of Tenet are largely far beyond my comprehension for obvious reasons, there are other bewildering pieces of the puzzle that raise an infinite number of questions despite seeming simple on the surface. Namely, the character of Kat: devoted mother to a young son and wife of a powerful (corrupt) arms dealer (see: the bad guy). On the first watch, it’s hard to appreciate or understand the role of this character as one of the few female faces in the film. There are some scenes that make you question whether her character’s inclusion is purely veiled misogyny: the idea that men are only capable of making slightly less morally corrupt decisions if they have a beautiful wife by their side, or that a ruthless C.I.A. agent will be immediately thrown off if they so much as a glimpse at a beautiful blonde woman. Yet, after thinking more about Kat’s character I have grown less hostile and more understanding of Nolan’s vision for her as a character burdened with emotional trauma. In relation to Nolan’s toying with time, Kat represents a timeline of autonomy and agency, a dichotomy of an oppressed or empowered woman. The P.T.S.D. that Kat seems to exist with further challenges our understanding of time. Is the trauma something from the past, present or future? Can we ever tell if we have agreed to reject a linear structure for time? Kat appears to be burdened with the emotional trauma of all the characters in the film, whilst they get the privilege of making rational, emotionless decisions; Kat must consider the feelings of not just herself but those around her - like her son - at all times, in turn preparing and recovering from past and future trauma. 

An ambiguous mantra of Tenet comes from Kenneth Branagh’s character, declaring at various points that ‘we live in a twilight world’, a phrase that is initially introduced as the code name for the protagonist’s mission at the film’s opening. This statement garners more meaning at the conclusion of the film as the protagonist and Neil reflect on their wider mission with the protagonist finally becoming aware of the temporal world that Nolan creates. Our protagonist has the revelation that the moment is not the end of their time together as it would be on a linear structure but instead is the beginning of his friendship with Neil on a temporal pincer structure whereby time is not so objectively universal. Though this point does mark the end of Neil’s life, the protagonist is only at the beginning of his experience or rather, re-experience. In exploring the end of Neil’s life, who is played superbly by Robert Pattinson, the idea of twilight reemerges. As Pattinson’s connection with the idea of Twilight runs deep (the start of his career being with the Twilight franchise) it becomes an excellent metaphor for the film’s thesis. Etymologically, beyond the definition relating to the natural process of twilight, the noun holds a second definition of ‘a period or state of ambiguity, absurdity or a gradual decline’. This definition could define the film’s plot as a whole - obscure and ambiguous and seeking to stop the impending event of World War III. Moreover, the natural phenomenon of twilight occurs both at the beginning and end of the day, further rejecting a linear temporal structure. Though devastating, emotionally, for the protagonist to find out about his close friend’s imminent death, it is seemingly not the end but also the beginning of their friendship, impossible to define. In the same way, at the point of twilight, it is impossible - and meaningless - to say whether it is the beginning or end. 

I started my week feeling annoyed at myself for ‘wasting’ time revisiting books I have already read and films I can already recite every line of, but having experienced the cinematic masterpiece of Tenet, I have been forced to consider whether re-experiencing things is a monotonous extension of the past or whether, as Nolan might argue, the act of re-experiencing things is a radical way of bringing the future to the present. 

[radioromantic-moved]

mordecai vs. the universe

word count: 2200

a soulmate au that got way too out of hand. i mostly wrote it when i was supposed to be sleeping or working. please enjoy it. cara is my 1920s-sona

entropy, noun- lack of order or predictability; gradual decline into disorder.

Soulmates are a complicated business. They’re notorious that way. People joke that everyone who ever wanted to study the process of soulmates gave up after a few weeks on the job. The only real concrete thing that’s accepted as positive fact is the simple the first words they say to you appear on your body in their handwriting a few years after puberty; some get them, some don’t. No dates or timestamps, no scientific explanation, no clear-cut pattern. Soulmates are tricky, multifaceted, and chaotic.

Their lack of organization is one of the reasons why Mоrdecai HelIer hates them.

Although it’s certainly not the only one.

He’s been surrounded by marked people his whole life, almost as if they gravitate towards him. His mother and father were soulmates; his mother doesn’t speak about it often, but on the occasion that his father, now deceased, happens to enter the conversation, he’ll catch her adjusting her shirtsleeves to cover up something, fading, written in a neat, flowing font. His youngest sister got her mark remarkably early--a few months before he left home, she was speculating aloud who the mystery phrase scrawled across her neck would be spoken by, in the dreamy tone of someone who can still afford daydreams. 

He can’t escape soulmates at his place of employment, either. Atlas and Mitzi not only flaunt their matching marks, they’ve been known to use them to entertain--Mоrdecai’s witnessed them reenact their first meeting in a floral, overdramatized skit of sorts, culminating in the removal of Atlas’ jacket so the crowd can see the words written on his collarbone and Mitzi dramatically sweeping back her hair to reveal what’s been penned on her cheek and jawline. 

The words aren’t particularly impressive, either; he paid her a casual compliment on her musical skill after a performance. 

Then there’s Viktor, who never reveals anything about his soulmate, but Ivy swears on her life she’s seen ink on his back before when she catches him off guard. Mоrdecai suspects that she just has soulmates on the brain, though; she’s at the age that most marks appear, and she’s constantly fidgeting with her clothes to check if anything’s appeared while she wasn’t paying attention. 

Mоrdecai finds the whole business to be wholly a waste of time. He has more important things to worry about than romantic entanglements, and he certainly does not need a mysterious, undefinable, uncategorizable force attempting to force him into one. Leave the prettiness and fairytales to AtIas and his wife. When it comes to socialization, particularly done with romantic intent, he could arrange an alphabetized, structured list on all of the things that he would rather do.

Which is why he could not be more annoyed when he sees the sentences crawling down his arm one otherwise unremarkable day.

His mark somewhat matches his mother’s--perhaps they do follow genetic lines in some way, he notes, even as his brain is insisting there are more important things to worry about right now--but his seems to take up more space than his father’s organized writing did. One could hardly call his soulmate’s handwriting neat--it’s a messy scrawl, as if they were writing in a hurry. Well, I’ve been worse off, though I guess not by much, claims this permanent, unwanted tattoo of his, and he’s inclined to agree with it.

He let himself get too secure; he was so sure that he was out of the age range of expected mark appearance, but if his studies of statistics have taught him anything, it’s that there are always outliers in any data pool.

There’s also Murphy’s Law to contend with.

But he will make a plan and follow it to the letter, the way it always does. He refuses to let this distract him. He has a job to do, and this mark will not change that. 

If anyone at the Laсkadaisy notices that he’s particularly taken with long sleeves all of a sudden, they don’t say anything about it. Sometimes he thinks he sees Mitzi giving his arm a sideways glance, but a well-placed stony glare often gets her to back off. 

All is well, for a while. 

Until a soaking wet stranger stumbles into the Little Daisy Cafe on yet another day that would normally be considered entirely ordinary.

Atlas, Viktor and Mоrdecai are seated in a booth near the entrance when the door blows open and someone hurries inside, shutting the door behind them and sealing off the fierce rainstorm raging outside. The stranger takes a seat at a barstool and pulls off their jacket, gathering it into a pile in their arms. They must look sufficiently like a drowned rat, because as soon as Mitzi emerges from behind the counter, she hurries over to the shivering would-be customer. “Oh, my--don’t tell me you just came from out there! Are you alright? You look halfway to the grave.”

The stranger attempts a half-shrug. “Well, I’ve been worse off,” they say affably, “though not by much,” they concede with chattering teeth. 

Mоrdecai’s arm burns fiercely. He rubs it, trying to look casual.

“I’ll get you a towel,” says Mitzi, heading to the back room. She turns around and adds, “Although I hope you’ll clean up that mess you’re dripping all over our floors. We just cleaned in here, you know.”

Atlas heads over to the new arrival, who is murmuring to themselves under their breath. Mоrdecai follows, although he has a terrible feeling that he will strongly dislike the outcome of this conversation. 

“What brings you out in this weather?” Atlas asks mildly.

The stranger takes a towel offered to them by Mitzi and sighs. “Job-hunting gone wrong, I guess,” they say in a dry alto. “One rejection too many, suppose I wasn’t paying attention to much anymore. I got lost, and when it started raining I just ended up more turned around.”

They’re dressed for a job interview; they’re wearing an expensive-looking red suit that would probably come off as more impressive if it wasn’t rumpled and soaking wet. They’re holding a stack of papers that seem to have taken less rain damage than the rest of them; Mоrdecai would guess they were shielding the papers with their body. 

Atlas tilts his head and stares at the would-be interviewee with a look that Mоrdecai recognizes as an appraising one. “You seem decent,” he says slowly. “What, if you had to guess, was the common factor in your rejections from your prospective jobs?”

It’s a loaded question, but Mоrdecai has a feeling he knows what Atlas is looking for. 

The stranger pauses a second. “If I’m being entirely honest, sir, I believe I lack the charm needed to succeed in a career when one’s of my particular persuasion.”

There’s something in her eyes. Mоrdecai has never claimed to be good at reading people, but he has a feeling that there’s something more to her job quest than she’s letting on.

“You know,” says Atlas, “we could use someone else to wait tables around here--we’re rather shorthanded as of late.”

This is a lie.

“If you’re inclined, I’d be perfectly willing to take you on--on a trial basis, of course,” Mоrdecai’s employer says, extending a hand to shake. “What’s your name?”

The stranger at the bar counter only hesitates for a second before shaking his hand firmly. “Cara. Cara Bergman. Thank you for the opportunity, sir.”

Mоrdecai makes his exit not long afterwards. No one cares much; they’re used to him disappearing when he pleases.

He has built his career on being unnoticed, and it pays off. No one notices when he starts avoiding speaking out loud in front of the new hire; if he must say anything at all, he says it in low tones to Atlas or Viktor. No one notices that every time Cara happens to get too close to him, he holds his arm as if it’s been burned.

He has successfully adjusted his plan to include every confounding variable, every scheme and trick and twist of fate that the universe, in its cosmic complication, has tried to throw at him.

Or so he thinks. 

Because as it turns out, Cara Bergman is remarkably difficult to predict.

A crisp knock sounds on his office door, and he heads to open it, almost spouting a reflex greeting--but when he sees who happens to be standing outside, he’s glad he didn’t.

“Hello,” Cara says calmly. “I hope you don’t mind the intrusion.”

She takes a seat facing his desk, and maybe he’s just caught extremely off guard by her sudden insertion into his personal time, but he finds himself sitting back down to face her. He doesn’t say a word, and they eye each other for a few moments.    

Cara breaks the silence eventually. “Look, I know you can talk. You and Mr. May are always off gabbing away in your little booth in the cafe. And from the way you always snap to attention when he says anything, I’m assuming your hearing faculties are in order, too.”

He doesn’t say a word, narrowing his eyes slightly.

Cara continues. “I’d write it off as you just being antisocial, but when I bumped into you the other day, the way you flinched--I thought I’d stabbed you or something.”

So maybe he wasn’t quite as subtle as he thought.

Cara folds her hands in front of her. “I don’t want to take up too much of your time. I’m sure you’re awfully busy with bookkeeping or whatever it is you do. I just want to hear one sentence from you. Any sentence will be fine.”

Mоrdecai considers his options and finds himself woefully lacking. He scratches his arm, which is stinging dully. He meets Cara’s eyes, and he can tell that she’s got a fair idea of what’s going on already. 

He sighs, and throws caution to the wind.

“Alright. I suppose it’s best we finish this sooner rather than later.”

Cara grins toothily. “That’s what I was looking for. And may I just say, that’s really the best thing to have tattooed on you for eight years or thereabouts. Are we factory workers? University students? My guess is as good as anyone else’s.”

Even though he wasn’t sure what he was expecting, it’s a grim confirmation when she shrugs her shirt off one shoulder to reveal his own handwriting penned in inky black. 

Suddenly, one of the things she’s said hits him. “Eight years? I’ve only had a...mark--” he hears the contempt in his voice as the word comes out--“for a few months, five at the most.”

Cara snorts. “What, did you expect something involving soulmates to make sense?”

“Fair point,” he concedes. 

He straightens his cufflinks, unsure of where to continue from here. Luckily, Cara saves him. “I know you’re not excited about this or anything.”

“What gave it away?” he deadpans.

“Look,” she states, side-eyeing him, “I know there’s a lot of pressure on people to settle down once they find their soulmates, or at least make a big to-do about the whole thing. But no one’s making us turn this into a production. Just because we’ve got each other’s handwriting on us doesn’t mean we have to go all--” here Cara leans forward and bats her eyelashes in such a dead-on impersonation of Mitzi that Mоrdecai nearly chokes in surprise-- “on each other.”

“I--well.” 

Somehow, he has been struck silent yet again. Cara has presented something that he never considered seriously before. “Well, what do you suppose we do about this, then?” he asks.

“You know, there’s this thing called a friendship that I’ve been thinking about trying out,” says Cara. “I understand the concept might be foreign to you as well.”

“I have friends,” Mоrdecai protests. He doesn’t realize how indignant he sounds about it until it’s already out of his mouth.

“Lovely,” Cara says. “Now you have one more. Here--let’s shake on it.”

She offers her hand, and he takes it. A jolt of something runs through him like lightning (static electricity, he tells himself, common at this time of year) and all at once, he realizes that his mark has stopped stinging. 

“Now, as friends,” Cara muses, looking at the stacks of books arranged meticulously on his desk, “we should probably find some common interests. Do you like reading?”

“When it’s for work,” he says, turning his head back down to the figures he was calculating before she walked in.

“Well, that’s awfully boring of you. If we’re going to be friends, I’ve really got to introduce you to some H.G. Wells. Oh, or maybe Poe. You’d like him; you’re both dark and brooding.”

He doesn’t dignify her with a response, and waits until she’s left, carefully shutting the door behind her, to lean back in his chair and consider things. 

He refuses to give the universe the direct satisfaction of being right, but he will, at the very least, admit that there are worse ways that this situation could have played out. Much worse.

Her eyes were teal, he thinks, with hints of spring green--

He shakes his head and turns back to his calculations. 

[the-constant-project]

Interview with a Magical Girl

What was my childhood like?

I don’t remember much of my childhood. Not due to it being bad or something overtly traumatic, it was just average (Upon discussing stuff with my therapist, I have since learnt this is not true in the slightest.). I was neither particularly skilled academically or physically, though I soon learnt later in life that this was due to how my brain worked. A smart little awkward cookie who just couldn’t handle the pre-packaged Baked Goods that was expected of all younglings. I was bright, devoured what I read and caught my interest, but it didn’t suit what the Adults expected, and thus I was branded an outcast. The interest in cephalopods definitely didn’t help with my peers either, atleast not until my 20s. Eventually the growth hormones kicked in (Fuck being a teenager. Those who miss those days are either incredibly delusional, or they lucked out during their teenage years. Lucky sods.), and changes wracked my form. Some grew interested in the other sex, others were interested in the same but kept quiet about it. Whereas I......just wasn’t interested. There were times when desire would flood my body, but I was lucky that I had read about what hormones could do to me, so I understood what I was feeling would only be temporary. The few who truly did spark something, recoiled from me upon learning so, due to either them having only been faking friendship with my for whatever reason teenagers do so, or preferred us being friends. I was fine with the latter, it was nice knowing how I could interact with them. It was the former that started the process of breaking me, of learning the difference between being a person, and being an object. And it was the loss of all of them at the end of my final high school year that started the cracks in my psyche. I had spent my formative years making myself into someone they all liked, actively avoiding the things that, upon reflection, would define my adult life. The realization I had wasted my formative years on people who had been happy to drop me once they didn’t have to deal with me.............hurt. I had denied myself, and torn myself into the wrong shapes, and it had not been enough for them. I don’t remember the couple of years between High School ending, and starting my stagnant job. I just remember the hate, the rage, the pain and the anguish. Its still there, buried deep. I have long since accepted those parts of me. Those parts of me help when something tries to break me again.

 You may have noticed I haven’t mentioned my family. My mother is a good woman, who has had the world repeatedly try and beat her down and break her. It succeeded, but she refused what it gave her and fought her way back to something resembling normalcy. Atleast, as close as she can manage. My siblings.....I resent them for how they were growing up, but I’ve since come to terms with them and we enjoy a nice peace between us. Not living in the same house helps a lot. We won’t speak of the man who put me in a hospital. He’s lucky my mother and I still, for some unknown and most likely fucking stupid reason, allow him to stay in our lives.

  My stagnant job was just that.....stagnant. I was one of their better employees. But I was neither Good Enough(tm), nor did I perform the needlessly complicated social rituals needed to bypass the Good Enough(tm) necessity required for getting promoted.

 I was secluded, but it helped me start healing. But it stagnated at some point, and I became stuck in a rut, unable to leave.

It wasn’t until my Ikō-ki came that my life truly started.

************ Whats an Ikō-ki, you ask? I’m not sure myself, to be honest. I was alone in my tiny apartment, my own little stagnant marble of reality, when it just appeared with a flickering of the light, a strange dark metallic rod, eldritch tendrils of energy keeping it afloat. The ‘head’ of rod is vaguely bulbous, with 8 undulating bands forming the patterns along its length. Heh, it just occurs to me, but it kind of looks like someone had attached a small octopus to a rod (This is how I knew it was mine.) It called itself an Ikō-ki. The strange mind voice it uses to talk to me is a strange blend of my masculine voice and a Japanese accent I’ve never had, and if it weren’t for the fact I hated how the words sound when they come out of my mouth, I would call it a soothing voice.

They seem to help transition small pools of stagnation, based on the stories it has shown me. My Ikō-ki (I can’t help but claim it as Mine) has shown me multiple stories: a princess become a prince and bring ruin to their prosperous yet corrupt state; a young boy became the Belle of the town and helped reunite the warring clans within falling in love with each of their heirs and tying their futures to one another; an adult who claimed bloody retribution on those who had claimed their body against their will. But those are the Phantasmal stories, the ones meant to bring hope to those who have fallen to despair, to give them the motivation to rise above the masses or to sink deep into their minds and bring forth a new dawn for those who follow their darker paths.

 But that was not meant to be my Story, atleast, that is my hope. I want my story to be a stopover, like the smaller stories of local heroes and vigilantes, of those who guard the dreams and become the nightmare that nightmares fear within the dreamscape, those who sleep the wakeless dream and help heal the minds of their peers, of those whose only job is to look after their Ikō-ki until it comes time for it to move on. I’m getting off track. My mind can’t help but wander when I think about my Ikō-ki.

My Ikō-ki is a strange magical artefact that most likely either originates from Japan, or spent enough time there that it has permanently affected its.....mind? I’m still not sure how its ‘mind’ works. My Ikō-ki definitely has its own mind, since while we share tastes and opinions; it has since developed its own opinions and tastes, which I find fascinating. The small few others we’ve encountered have ranged from nothing more than inanimate magical objects, to semi-autonomous drone-like constructs, to full-fledged sentient beings. They seem to specifically be attracted to women, since I have yet to see any we’ve encountered with a masculine form. But considering they make us physically transform when we use them, I can’t trust what I see, I can only take the words of the strangers who are in similar situations to me. ........did I not mention I can transform? From the sounds of it, My Ikō-ki was surprised at how accepting I was of the concept. I had grown up watching cartoons of girls being able to transform into magical warriors, so this was just my childhood dream coming true.

 My new form.......is too much for my liking. Don’t get me wrong, I love the design of my outfit. The cephalopodan dress is the stuff of eldritch nightmares, all dark blues, greens and browns, endless flowing in non-existent currents, the great red Mantle headpiece towering above me, 4 larges tendrils wrapped together like hair, ready to flare up and be used if needed.. The ammonoid shield stands tall and impassable, its eternal spiral unyielding to any. The strange spraying creature on my right wrist, at time filled with a viscous ink that flows through air as if underwater, yet capable of delivering a highly venomous bite to anyone who isn’t me if they venture to close (This strange symbiote seems to share a link with me, since I’ve recently learnt that, if threatened outside of my magical girl form, my bite can be just as venomous). But as with the strange curves of all cephalopods, my own body becomes much fuller, curves appearing where I typically lacked them. While gorgeous, it’s not my thing. I prefer being on the ‘less filled out’ side of the body spectrum. Though if the only downside to my form is that its curvier than I like, and I get a awesome cephalopod aesthetic as the positive, I’ll take that deal. I’ve seen some of the lingerie others have been saddled with. What do I do with this form?

.......just watch it move and react. Its more cephalopodan than human, and its fascinating watching the eldritch form just.....move. There are times I go exploring the city, and stopping some of the worse crimes if I stumble upon them. But exploring the dreamscape is what I mainly do. Redirecting the mental eddies and currents around me, helping keep their lives just that little bit less miserable. .......I once tried to probe into That Man’s thoughts, to see why he put me into the hospital. I couldn’t handle what I found, and now I fear to dive into anyone else’s mind. If I’m a Magical Girl, who do I fight? Thats a hard question. In theory, The Decline. The literal concept of humanity falling into entropy. But as My Ikō-ki has shown me, The Decline just haven’t been active lately. My Ikō-ki is of the belief that we’ll see a resurgence in the next few years, given the state of the world’s political climate. But at the moment, I’ve mainly been ‘fighting’ other Magical Girls I’ve encountered. Not to the death or anything. Only some of the newer girls try that, due to a rise in darker media. But those of us with experience quickly weeded out those thoughts. At most, We spar and train. As I said, supposedly The Decline is coming, and someone needs to be ready. I’m hoping my shift will be over by then, but it can’t hurt to keep the others who have an active interest in protecting the world on their toes. Also helps keep me fit and in top form, when some of the more ‘morally straight laced’ Girls come and ‘hunt me’.

 Why do I get hunted?

Because I have the Power, yet I don’t do anything obvious with it. Plus, as you can tell from looking at me, they ‘normal’ girls consider me an aberration. I once asked My Ikō-ki if Magical Girls were inherently good. He told me that each magical Girl is different, and we all walk different paths. Most walk the lighter paths, and some are consumed by that light. I walk one of the newer paths. Because it is new-ish, and isn’t inclined towards ‘The Light’, they get it into their heads that theres something wrong with me, and I should be purged to allow my Ikō-ki to pass on. Its not their fault. Society has taught them to fear the alien and the unknown, and one of our baser instincts is to fear what hide in the Dark. But thats why I walk the Darker path. I shall shield those outside of the Dark from their own fears. Luckily, I haven’t had to kill any of them. I almost did once, when I learnt my symbiotic sprayer could bite. The problem with young creatures with venomous bites, is that they don’t know how to regulate their venom. That girl was lucky the Medical Girl was nearby. Five more minutes and her lungs would’ve been paralyzed. *************

[zethyrexchange]

Zethyr Exchange AMA with Scott, Lead Admin of TRONTOPIA

AMA was with Scott, Lead Admin and Development Coordinator of TRONTOPIA in our Official Telegram Community (https://t.me/ZethyrExchange)

Host: Welcome to our AMA Trontopia Admin.

Q: Can you introduce yourself and TOPIA briefly?

Trontopia Admin — Scott: Sure!

My name is Scott and I am the lead admin and development coordinator for TOPIA.

Topia was formed in January of this year. We are comprised almost entirely of Dapp players and community members. We decided to launch our own dapp due to the lack of transparency and fairness in the space.

We are located all over the world, US, Paris, Japan, Singapore, Greece, Australia, Israel, UK, among others.

Our ultimate goal is to build the fairest, most stable, and most transparent gaming platform on any blockchain.

Host: Cool. Hi Scott! Ok let’s start with a simple question first.

Q: What are the key selling points of TOPIA compared to other casinos around the blockchains?

Trontopia Admin — Scott: Everything is open source. We verify our contracts so the plain-English code is visible and verifiable by the public.

With that, we are able to prove that our randomness is just that… Random.

We believe in the power of the blockchain and the ability of the current and future blockhashes provide for random number generation, and do not utilize any Oracle (on Tron, currently IOST operates with an Oracle, but this will be changing very soon).

On top of that, we have one of the most warm communities, and a very active staff that is capable of helping and answering any questions. Most dapps do not provide this level of support.

Host: Wow I have just learnt that you guys do not use Oracle

Q: So everything is on-chain?

Trontopia Admin — Scott: 100%, We use a commit and reveal approach

Host: Amazing 100% blockchain with that comes to our next question which most casinos are concerned

Q: How secured is TOPIA for users?

Trontopia Admin — Scott: We are extremely secure, but we did not get here without first hitting our speed bumps.

We have a phrase we say around TOPIA, and that is that we have hit every branch on the way down the tree so to speak, but because of this, it has given us immense knowledge and insight into possible attack vectors, and has allowed us to become one of (if not the most?) secure dapp in the space currently.

Due to us having these issues, we now not only take extreme care, but have advanced knowledge on the subject and I am confident that our security will always be some of if not the best utilized.

Host: I’m glad to hear that

Q: Could you share more details about what security features you have in place?

Trontopia Admin — Scott: Yes,

Every parameter is controlled and governed by our smart contracts… What does this mean? Things like maximum win allowed, maximum bet, what range you can roll on… These are not controlled by our front end website, they are controlled by the contract itself, and a lot of dapps do not operate this way, which is a huge mistake.

We utilize a commit and reveal system that makes it impossible to predict or exploit our random number generation, this is what allows us to have a fully on-chain rolling experience while remaining secure. Current blockhash as the main source of entropy for the random number generator is widely known to be truly unpredictable.

We have a few other security features as well… Functions in our contracts that keep the vast majority of the balances away from public facing functions

Host: Yes I have to say that randomization is one of the trickiest part in running a fully on-chain casino. I believe that the track record of TOPIA has shown that the platform is secured. So let’s jump to a question from the audience

Q:

Trontopia Admin — Scott: Thank you for the nice words Vinod

Priorities for user acquisition first start with building our platforms so when marketing pushes happen they have a higher retention level, and overall are more successful.

With that, our plan is to focus heavily on development for the remainder of 2019 and the early part of 2020. With that there will be some marketing taking place, but the big marketing push will be saved for when we feel it will have the most positive impact, which is when we have more of the platform up and operating.

We are getting extremely close with Blitz, I know a lot of people have been very excited about that.

Vault is a mini-game that has been mostly ready for a while now, but it has been held back due to the upcoming change to Mining with the implementation of Seasonal Mining. Vault will come into play with the Seasonal Mining update.

We have recently launched our sportsbook on TRON, and we have many upgrades and improvements coming to it as well.

We need to align our platforms so they have the same offerings, as well as get these upcoming games released, along with a couple of surprises coming very soon actually that are not on our roadmap. Once these are complete, we will have many games across multiple chains and we will begin a very strong marketing push to bring fresh and new players to the dapp space.

Host: Wow. Development first I see

Trontopia Admin — Scott: Doesn’t mean we aren’t marketing. Lol, but we have an actual marketing plan we want to execute that we are holding back until some of these soon to launch games and features are released.

Host: That’s an amazing approach given that most dapps are mostly hit and run. OK since we touched briefly on iOST Topia

Q: Why did TOPIA acquire iOST Play?

Trontopia Admin — Scott: Many reasons, I actually recently answered this question for another interview so pardon if it seems like the same answer again

1. IOST is one of the fastest blockchains currently. Our games rely heavily on speed and low/efficient gas costs. IOST is great in this area.

2. The IOST market is young, and untapped. We feel the dapp usage on IOST is going to rise significantly in 2020, and it is important we are at the front of that surge, as our vision relies heavily on crosschain platforms.

3. The foundation support on IOST is incredible. It is the only complaint I have with TRON is the Foundation seems to have a bit of favoritism going on, which I have yet to experience with the IOST foundation.

4. The community is amazing, and growing. It is very much like how Tron’s was this time last year.

It just made sense that it is the next step for TOPIA and IOST be the first chain we branched out to.

Host: Yes I read that interview, but I believe that it will benefit everyone here so no harm repeating. Now talking about iOST Topia

Q: If any differences do/will iOST Topia have compared to TRON Topia?

Trontopia Admin — Scott: Ideally, we want the platforms to mirror each other regardless of which chain. The main differences you will see are slight variations in Tokenomics.

For example, I don’t see there being an ISHARE (like TSHARE), as there aren’t many IRC10/20 tokens yet.

But from a content perspective, we want them to be near mirror images of each other, and over the coming months we will work towards that.

We want it to be as easy as switching which currency you are playing with.

Host: I believe that will minimize confusion. Before coming to the next question, I want to disclose that I’m holding TOPIA tokens as well

Q: How does iOST Topia affect current TOPIA token holders? How about current iOST Play token holders?

Trontopia Admin — Scott: Currently, there is no effect. Both platforms will operate entirely separately for the time being.

Now, in the future, but this is a ways down the road, we are implementing an Umbrella rewards system, and all Topia holders (whether Tron topia, IOST topia, or whichever TOPIA), will receive these Umbrella tokens, the Umbrella tokens will receive dividends from all of the platforms.

This is pretty far off for now though.

Host:

Q: So these umbrella tokens will displace the current tokens? Without getting too technical, if I buy your umbrella tokens on TRON, how do I receive dividend from iOST?

Trontopia Admin — Scott: Well… I can’t really go into too much detail without revealing some plans we don’t want to be too public yet because it’s a very exciting…

But I can say basically yes, eventually TOPIA holders will merge into one… under a new Token or Chain.

But, again, this is Q4 2020 type of stuff.

Host: OK if you can’t reveal for now, it is okay. So next is a question from the audience

Q:

Trontopia Admin — Scott: Thanks for the question kpop

I reached out to David a couple of months back. I saw an opportunity and presented it to him. At first he respectfully declined, but we kept in contact and on friendly terms… and over time I believe he started to see the value in what we were offering, and they accepted.

Events:

- Mining reset

- Seasonal Mining

- iDiamonds swap for iPlay holders

Once we have these implemented, we will definitely launch the mining reset with a large event and marketing push to let everyone know mining has restarted

Host: Clean and clear. Another question from your fan

Q:

Trontopia Admin — Scott: We actually are doing more here than people in the space currently see and realize.

We have been working with @MidEarthCrypto who has been traveling around the country going to universities and speaking about TRON and DAPPS. Part of his presentation is about TOPIA. He was hired by TRON and sponsored by us to travel and spread the word to communities and schools who express interest in blockchain.

We also are working with several non-blockchain, but gaming and gambling related online influencers who are ready and willing to promote and market TOPIA to their respective audiences once we give them the green light.

Alongside the usual marketing tactics:

- Ads, banners

- Twitter/social media marketing

- Articles (cointelegraph, iost-watch, etc)

Host: I see, I believe that given your priority for development at the moment. OK last question, also from our audience

Q:

Trontopia Admin — Scott: We do plan to expand to other blockchains besides just TRON and IOST. We ideally want to be on at least 4 different chains before we implement the Umbrella system, so we got more to go for sure.

And yes, we want it to eventually be seamless to the point where you are going to TopiaNetwork.com (yes, I own the domain, dont go try to steal it), you pick which currency you want to play with, and you play.

Host:

Q: including fiats?

Trontopia Admin — Scott: Unlikely, Maybe USDT

IOST was the one that was going to be probably the most difficult transition though, as it’s contracts are not written in Solidity, so it’s not a direct conversion process… So we are happy to get this one out first

Host:

Q: So I guess the next 2 chains will use the variances of solidity?

Trontopia Admin — Scott: What we are looking at right now, they use Solidity, yes

Host: Wow, that’s a big hint.

Q: Anything else you would like your TOPIA fans to know?

Trontopia Admin — Scott: Firstly, we love you guys.

Second, we are working our butts off to get all of this stuff rolled out

Host: Yes please work hard. Thank you Scott and have a good weekend

Trontopia Admin — Scott: No problem, thank you for having me for this very nice AMA

Audience: TRONTOPIA Is going to buyback and burn Topia’s in november

Q: How many are they planning to buyback and burn?

And What is your team size, how many people?

Trontopia Admin — Scott: Yes, we are starting the buyback program this month, those details will come.

10 Moderators, 9 Developers, my self and a few other owners.

Follow us on

Telegram: https://t.me/ZethyrExchange

Twitter: https://twitter.com/ZethyrExchange

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCxyXOGCPxG8D06opjTSjW8g

[titheguerrero]

More Than Just Dander

First, a sort of meta-comment in the form of a shout-out to HCRenewal's intrepid editor, Dr. Roy Poses, for his just-published analysis of what we might call "blogging: rise and fall." He sees decline reflected in publications long  devoted to health and health policy, yet now flaking off. Methinks, however, despite the usefulness of his overview of recent decades, Dr. P need not fret excessively. Water spilling out of the barrel's lip will slow down once folks come along and punch a whole bunch of little mid-section tweet-holes in it. Information still flows. (Sort of.)  In any case, surely there's overlap between blogs' and tweets' readerships. Surely well-researched and -reasoned long form still has its place. Unfortunately, hard to know for sure: it's hard to measure. Nobody's polling these folks and to my knowledge information scientists haven't published much--a quick search inside Google Scholar bears this out--that's of a quantitative nature. So we're left with admittedly rather unsatisfactory anecdotal reports on people who need blogs like ours and find their way to it. Congressional staffers you know who you are. Rightly or wrongly, I'm hopeful. Maybe we shade this a little by the suspicion that many younger social media users share with me a short attention span. Hence they come to rely more and more on quick hits. In any case, let's hope this is evolution and diversification, not just entropy and a race to the bottom. Now to my theme of the day. Yet again the dander hath risen for I've lost count how many times around what ails our health delivery systems. And so is my lunch: the gorge, too, hath risen. The miscreants' very relentlessness is nauseating. More, then, on two of them that keep cropping up here like those small burrowing insectivores in this tedious yet oddly riveting game of Whack-A-Mole. A. Chicanery at the VA: looking back and looking forward. On balance, and despite its many flaws, VA health's operation in all its enormity is not itself a miscreant. Different story for those folks trying to destroy it from within, on the dubious premise that lest we privatize it it's irredeemable. Search this blog on "VA Cetona" for detail on such matters. Why does this even happen? We've described the VA's Shadow Rulers (search here on that as well) in these pages. The SR's fall in the 0.1%. Why do they need or want the headache of trying, in what's fated to be a futile effort, to upend and hollow out the health lifeline extended for nearly a century to patriots returning from the military? When the left gets power it tries to expand and improve government. (Of course the efforts can unfortunately go awry, viz. Hillarycare in the 1990s, and cast shade on future attempts.) When the right gets power, at least in the two generations since an actor became president in 1980, government is seen as "not the solution but the problem." The response may be to try to rejigger and downsize. "Drown the baby in the bath." Or, perhaps far more likely, something else now happening in the VA and throughout the Trump kakistocracy. Namely, don't seize power to return it to the people. Seize it in order to use it in a third-dimensional play to drain resources. As for the first two dimensions, don't even try to improve--David Shulkin's mistake (see below)--or eliminate (despite Mick Mulvaney's baby drowning proclivities, hugely unpopular) care provided by the VA. Not when there's a third way: divert those resources. In fact, from the earliest instances of frontier exploitation to the newest frontier we have--our heretofore private personal information--despoliation has been the watchword, the core motive, the secret sauce: don't ameliorate. Don't eliminate. (Honestly: viz., Shrub's expansion of guvmint.) Despoliate. It is, as Shrub used to say (maybe), one of our country's most basic pieces of strategery. Such a strategy was discussed (and surely it's as old as the hills) by Times tech reporter Steve Lohr in a recent piece on, of all things, artificial intelligence. ("Elixir of prosperity [or] job killer"?) Lohr makes clear that what's old is new again, linking the asset of private data to all the other assets that've been strip-mined. "In the American model," notes Lohr, "coming from Silicon Valley in California, a handful of Internet companies become big winners and society is treated as a data-generating resource to be strip mined." As Buffy the Vampire Slayer once said, "can you spell 'duh'?" Strip mining started with the earliest settlers, and now ... data, the final frontier. Same deal, though. The American model, and economic maldistribution, and so much of our plight is bound up with this baked-in trait, which seems to've seeped into society's DNA. Or else originated there. Find a mine. Strip it. Let others pick up the pieces. But let's go back to that last credible VA Secretary. How do we know that Shulkin pissed off the strip-miners? Why, just read what he himself wrote in a scholarly publication just a few months ago in the prestigious New England Journal. In a piece entitled "why the VA needs more competition," he and closely-associated Michigan colleague Kyle Sheetz first declared, unequivocally and repetitiously, competition: good!!! Emphasis in the original through repetition. Clever. After reassuring their audience how much they liked competition they let the cat out of the bag in the final paragraph of a long-ish article: "Privatizing the VA by offering unregulated access to private-sector providers is probably not feasible, necessary, or the best way to care for veterans." That's exactly what the quietly-undermining, unelected Trumpsters pushing for strip-mining veterans' health care didn't want to hear. We know (see below) how that came out. Similar in emphasis is a piece just out (January 2019) in the equally prestigious Annals of Internal Medicine, by (no pun intended) veteran federal health official Carolyn Clancy and her own VA/AHRQ colleagues. I'm perplexed at the way Clancy herself has hung in there (and yet she persisted) at the federal agencies to which she's contributed greatly over recent decades. I'm perplexed about how, within these agencies,she's been bounced around, most recently landing as the VA's "Deputy Under Secretary for Discovery, Education and Affiliate Networks." (That top's spinning so fast what I just wrote may already be superannuated news.) In any case Clancy et al. put their shoulders to Shulkin's wheel extolling the May 2018 federal MISSION legislation streamlining VA and non-VA care, and the ostensible role their new Center for Innovation might play in such an effort. They pointed out all the right innovation-cum-research caveats about the need for adequate data: "paying for value could backfire without accurate measurement of costs and outcomes." In this case they were certainly correct: privatizers in this particular world aren't interested in evidence-based anything. They're profiteers. (See: "Department of Education." See: "Department of the Interior." See: Environmental Protection Agency.) Shulkin's words saw the light of day about a month after the MISSION legislation, in the final days of June, 2018. But here's why I put Shulkin having "liked competition" in the past tense. By the time his NEJM piece appeared Shulkin, also accused of what I still deem to've been truly flimsy ethics violations, was already gone from his organization. By the end of March the Orange Man had already fired him. As a personal fiasco this was unseemly, since the VA secretary was a rare bird who both consented to be a hold-over from early administrations, yet managed early on to be a current POTUS favorite. Surprising? In this White House? In none of these events was there ever put forward any really compelling justification either for privatizing VA care or for starting with the assumptions that outside "leaders" and outside doctors could do a better job than--what with all their flaws--VA medical staff. Suzanne Gordon, a distinguished journalist and author, admittedly parti pris as a fellow of the Oakland-based 501(c)3 Veterans Healthcare Policy Institute, has just published an American Prospect piece on "Trump’s under-the-radar push to dismantle veterans' health care." Her central thesis is worth quoting in extenso.

[The Republican] strategy will not only erase what has been the most successful American experiment in government-delivered health care, but will also send veterans out into a private system that is more expensive, less accountable, and unable to meet their particular needs. The key notion underpinning the Mission Act, that the private sector can offer comparable care to the VHA, is deeply flawed. Study after study (after study) has found that the VHA generally outperforms the private sector on key quality metrics, and that private providers are woefully unprepared to treat the often unique and difficult veteran patient population. The most recent evidence came in a Dartmouth College study published in December, which compared performance between VHA and private hospitals in 121 regions across the country. The results: In 14 out of 15 measures, government care fared “significantly better” than private hospitals.

Gordon also has a new book out on this subject, as most supporters of the traditional VA system already know. Worth a look. Meanwhile the Senate and White House and those advising them clearly never really cared about quaint ideas such as "studies," "evidence," or "data." They cherry-pick a few quotes about the brusqueness of some VA care, which often is admittedly more bureaucratic than today's "consumer-facing" and endlessly-polling private-care organizations. You can find those quotes as well as I can--any search engine known to man will do the trick. Recent events on the larger political canvas make it abundantly clear, in the meantime. It's not about quality. It never was. It's about callously starting with a dismissive attitude toward government workers, then back-solving from there. Having worked for years at the VA, I can vouch for its quality as well as its struggle to assist the really needy patients who depend upon it. In fact, this new study shows quite rigorously that the VA was already dramatically reducing wait-times within multiple VA installations, right down to private-sector levels. So this branch of government has listened and successfully striven to achieve a performance level that's not just high-science but also high-touch, as medicine's "customers" (yechhh) have come to expect. The present furlough of federal employees proves the point. If you can dismiss someone as human collateral-damage, you don't start first by examining the good things they've done for you. You're an elephant poacher. Take the spoils and leave the carcass to rot. B. More on the Opiate Eaters Who Eat Very Well. Speaking of despoliators, Dr. Poses and I both wrote here recently on how, in the world of dangerous narcotics, this single family of mostly physicians, the Sacklers, garnered a much more grand market share than they like to let on. Time to add to that and earlier reporting with a few updates. When, in a different venue than the VA I was providing front line medical care to privately-insured patients, I noticed an arresting change. I saw more and more folks arrive in my office in shop-till-you-drop mode seeing opiate renewals. Always OxyContin, Percocet or Vicodin. If I didn't provide the "fill" they'd go next door. The demand built and built. The drug makers kept assuring they were safe and effective. At free dinners they paid an army of fellow physicians to regale us with the same message. Then those patients started to die on me. OD courtesy of "safe" Purdue (and others') product. Then in the past very few years, and I honestly should've seen it coming but didn't, the crisis spilled over from doctors' exam rooms into the political arena. It's actually something, unlike the VA, that's garnering a certain timid degree of nonpartisan interest in finding practical solutions, call it consensus even, starting with decriminalizing measures. But I find it gorge-raising to see the usual suspects continuously fighting the notion that as a society, we blew it with opiates. We blew it. With their help. I've spent a fair amount of time looking at similar medico-legal crises, including the far-reaching tobacco and environmental lead poisoning matters, as well as narrower ones such as evolving surgical and pharmacological approaches to certain diseases. In every case our tort system, combined with the deep pockets of those who are (allegedly) truly guilty, conspire to perpetuate Bleak House-style court battles over culpability. Strip miners seem to believe--or want us to swallow whole the absurdist notion--that they leave the world a better place. In the case of Purdue, this false consciousness is undoubtedly propped up by the Sacklers' prowess as culturati: one can hardly turn around, as I recently did at the Met in New York, without finding their name plastered on this gallery or that institution of higher learning. But the motive, be it within the strip miners' organization or that of a cultural organization, comes down to the same thing: "we need the money." Allegedly. Recent disclosures from "sources," including internal Purdue emails, clarify all this. Fortunately for us it turns out the founder's (Raymond's) son Richard was an early adopter--relatively so--of email. Both were physicians, but Richard was of the first generation to be granted an American MD. Email was barely used at all in 1995 when Microsoft first added a TCP/IP stack to its operating system, with the introduction of Windows 95. Then email really took off, by 2001 having a fair amount of penetration in the business world. So maybe we shouldn't be so surprised that Purdue Pharma was squirreling away some of Richard's pronouncements in an archival time capsule for our delectation nearly a generation later. According to a new court filing recently revealed in the NY Times, Richard Sackler said some, um, fairly incriminating things to say in these internal emails. Still earning his spurs as head of daddy's (and Uncle Mortimer's) company after a couple of years or so in the saddle, and undoubtedly aware of the dramatic uptick in addiction issues that I saw in my own clinic in those turn-of-the-century years, he allegedly blasted everyone else in sight--except, of course, his own ever-so-cultured family. "[T]he launch of OxyContin tablets will be followed by a blizzard of prescriptions that will bury the competition. The prescription blizzard will be so deep, dense, and white...." said Sackler fils. Based on no evidence reps were told to claim a “less than one percent" risk of addiction. As for that small subset of patients who did find themselves hopelessly addicted, the claim was to be made that “We have to hammer on abusers in every way possible.... They are the culprits and the problem. They are reckless criminals.” Now, hot off the press in 2019, the Guardian reports how this overall attitude has been replicated within the lobbyist-influenced government of Messrs. Trump and Azar. Since 2015 (pre-Trump! pre-Azar!) chair of the FDA's own Anesthetic and Analgesic Drug Products Advisory Committee, Kentucky anesthesiology professor Raeford Brown has bravely characterized the rift that now mires down the FDA in tackling this crisis seriously. Admittedly with cover from many in Congress, Brown said this to interviewers.

I think that the FDA has learned nothing. The modus operandi of the agency is that they talk a good game and then nothing happens. Working directly with the agency for the last five years, as I sit and listen to them in meetings, all I can think about is the clock ticking and how many people are dying every moment that they’re not doing anything. The lack of insight that continues to be exhibited by the agency is in many ways a willful blindness that borders on the criminal.

Scott Gottlieb, who's tying your hands? Is it this guy? The FDA seems to be replete with such interlocking-directorate staff, all trying to assure  the "level playing field." And what is that playing field? Who are the players? We can answer this. Talk to the drug reps (I have). Except of course those who wake up and see what they're really doing, burn out and bail out. Talk to the lobbyists and the investors (I have). The watchword is not "safe and effective." It's blame-the-victim and lucrative. Let's get our motives straight here. You can do that just fine without listening to us at Health Care Renewal. Just listen to Richard Sackler in a time capsule from 2001. Ever wonder why the strip-miners need so much of our patients' loot? Well, take a little trip to Davos, Switzerland, where the rich and rich go to rub shoulders and tell each other how smart they are: YouTube offers a hint here. B'bye--too much dander, got to go take a bath. Article source:Health Care Renewal

[mikegchambers]

Baby steps to the cloud: migrating your corporate website

Cloud isn’t just for new projects —migrating an existing application like a website is often the preferred first step

It’s easy to get the impression that the cloud is so alien to on-premise IT that you have to wait until a new project comes along to try it out. Fortunately for patience-impaired like me, we can easily migrate existing workloads across and see immediate benefits.

Getting one migration project off the ground is the key to convincing the Powers That Be that 100% cloud is where the company wants to be in the future. This step is all about building credibility to achieve our ultimate goal of becoming cloud natives.

Quick Recap: Key Benefits of Cloud

While cost savings are usually the hook, that’s not what cloud is really about. At its core, cloud provides three benefits that are either needlessly hard or impossible to do yourself:

Availability: what percentage of time is your application ready for its users? While no system can ever reach 100%, we’re generally trying to do everything we can to be close to perfect. Being unavailable is the tech equivalent of a power outage���— the TV is still on the wall but it’s blank.

Durability: how much of the system (code and data) are you expecting to lose? Hard disks will always fail, tornadoes will swallow up buildings and well-meaning people will always do stupid things. Durability is all about surviving the unholy trinity of entropy, disaster and human stupidity. In my TV analogy, the TV has been stolen.

Scalability: what can the system do to cope with increases and decreases in load? When your product gets a deal on Shark Tank, will it cope with a 10,000 times increase in traffic? This is a ‘chicken and egg’ dilemma with your own hardware because you inevitably end up with too few or too many resources. In real life, this is like having more TVs appear when you want to watch multiple channels, but vanishing when no longer needed.

Basically, is it working? Is it there? Do I have enough resources? Fault tolerance and high availability are snooze-inducing buzzwords for the average human, but flip the words around and they just mean your application can tolerate faults and will be available more than you would expect. In practice, pulling off this magic trick is all about finding bottlenecks and points of failure. In essence, you are creating a plan B for everything, always assuming plan A is going up in smoke.

I was going to say how the most unexpected things fail but a picture speaks 1000 words.

But you also need to determine which website is worth the effort. For a corporate webpage that manages employee’s tennis court reservations, who really cares if it only works 95% of the time running on someone desktop PC? Big deal if it breaks (apologies to tennis fans). But if your site is streaming video for the Game of Thrones finale, you damned well better achieve 100% availability (I’m looking at you, HBONow). This is clearly much better candidate for migration.

Example Project: Your Company’s Website

It’s not new, it’s not sexy, but your company’s website is important and it’s one of the few ways your customers get a glimpse into your internal technology horror show. It’s a good place to start for a cloud migration since the transition is well understood and your glorious success will be highly visible.

There are many ways to build a website on-premise but here is one of the most common approach:

A typical website configuration makes cloud people cry.

Bad, bad, bad. This is a sorry design based largely on the ‘hope and pray’ approach that has a unhappy track record for disappointment. If one piece fails, it all fails. Cue screaming customers, mad executives and pagers beeping at 3am.

Anecdotal personal experience, not scientific.

Apart from the declining availability that happens when you multiply lots of 99% probabilities together, it also cannot be upgraded without downtime. This is just about the laziest setup for a website (though surprisingly common) and while might be fine for a hobby blog — would be a train wreck for anything remotely popular. Let’s make it work properly a la cloud.

Pray that nobody kicks the server and the hard disk lasts forever because it scores low on our Big Three.

Version 1: Just add cloud!

In practice there are just as many ways to cloudify a project but here’s my first sketch at using AWS to lift this website into the 21st century. Marvel at my graphic for a few moments and I’ll explain on the other side…

Fun fact: 90% of the world’s cat videos are stored on S3.

This isn’t as complicated as it looks but it was fun to draw. Piece by piece, this is what we have:

VPC: the dotted line is like the electric fence around your cloud playground. “Virtual Private Cloud” is tech talk for your very own piece of cloud real estate.

Route 53 lets us point traffic at the domain name level wherever we want at massive scale. This is a smart managed networking service that we can later use to do all sorts of cleverness (like routing regional users or fighting off denial of service attacks).

CloudFront is a content delivery network (CDN). These are extremely powerful, very cheap and loaded with kick-ass. Usually 90% of website content is static (e.g. images and video) so with a CDN — quick win alert! — you can offload this and release significant server resources. But wait, there’s more! The CDN can distribute to servers geographically closest to your visitor, so it also helps speed up your site for customers far, far away.

S3: Amazon’s mindbogglingly large storage system can securely store files, feed CloudFront, and even hold machine images for servers. In this example, we’ll keep 90% of our data here because it’s super-reliable, highly secure and cheap.

Regions: the diagram shows one region but it can be duplicated exactly to others. If you open an office in Asia, we can just roll out a copy to this region, update Route53 (so local customers hit their local region) and we’ll be done by dinnertime. Need a third region in Europe? Done.

Availability Zones: each region has at least two AZs. Why? Because power fails, networks go down and life happens. We mitigate this by having our infrastructure across two AZs so our customers will never know when an outage occurred.

Elastic Load Balancer (ELB): this takes every incoming request, determines which instances are available to help, and sends it over. If a zone is down, the ELB will be the piece that switches everything across. ELBs are the unsung heroes in orchestrating most of the cloud dance.

Auto-scaling: this is simpler than it sounds. When our instances get too busy (or freeze or die), auto-scaling steps in, powers up some new boxes, installs all the software we need and tells the ELB that it has more places to send work to. It’s the manager that watches the checkout line and says, ��We need another register open’.

Instances: cloud lingo for ‘servers’. There was just one ‘webserver’ in the first diagram, now we have a fleet of interchangeable machines all doing the same thing. We can add more, take them offline, perform upgrades as needed and generally operate without impacting visitors negatively. We build these instances based off our custom images.

ElastiCache: caches remember the answers to questions and since webservers get asked the same questions frequently (‘hey, what’s the homepage look like?’), they can take the load off the database that would otherwise be doing the work. Caches are much faster than databases and are particularly useful for read-heavy applications like websites.

Database (RDS): scaling databases is hard, replication is scary, and most companies do it badly. RDS is a managed service that does this for you, allowing us to scale quickly with read replicas while also doing its own housekeeping, like backups and maintenance.

This Looks Expensive — and Complicated

I know what you’re thinking. “I just wanted a Honda Civic and you gave me a Tesla delivered by a SpaceX rocket.” I did, but fortunately it’s cheaper and more reliable than the Honda (if that’s even possible, hey Honda fans?).

This is the sort of environment you can build out in a few hours on AWS and might easily have an average running cost of a few hundred dollars a month (depending on your usage). The reason it’s so fast and cheap isn’t because I’m the best cloud guy in the world with extremely reasonable rates and a great can-do attitude, it’s because cloud is code. Let’s repeat that together (the cloud part):

Cloud is code. Infrastructure is code. Build it up. Throw it away.

Nobody is ordering servers, racking hardware or approving purchase orders. We simply build out a CloudFormation template (like a blue print for your house), click “Create” and automation happens. An army of bots builds exactly what we want and we’re done. The hardest part will be migrating files and content, and even that can be fairly simple with a few scripts.

Version 2: Simpler, Faster, Better

Ok, version one solved many of our problems presented in the Dire Stack of On-Premise Failure. It gave us much more availability, durability was effectively solved, and while scalability was impressive, it could still be improved.

Imagine you have a webpage that’s going to get massive amounts of traffic unpredictably across multiple geographic regions. Suddenly you get one million visitors from Australia when a TV ad runs during a national event, and then nothing for 24 hours. And now the traffic hits the West Coast, 10 million visitors during TV ads on cable in the evening, and then it goes quiet. How do you scale up fast enough or make sure the right regions are in place?

In order to accommodate this extreme traffic, I present for your consideration “version 2”:

In the classic website model, you need a web server, database and code to connect it together. In this new version:

Static HTML pages are served on the global CDN (CloudFront). These are just files thrown out to the user’s browser on request.

JavaScript pulls dynamic content through Lambda (via an API). This runs on the client (keeping the hard work on their side).

Lambda connects to ElastiCache, DynamoDB or RDS for the data. This is a massively-scalable tool that runs small chunks of code.

You might remember from last week’s blog post on Mobile Apps that this is a serverless implementation that effectively handles the scaling for you. It’s exceptionally resilient to denial of service attacks and offers blazing performance for a distributed visitor base. It’s also much cheaper to implement than version 1. While it’s not going to work for CMS-based sites that rely on the more traditional stack, it’s an A+ alternative for high traffic landing pages with a spiky demand curve, such as those targeted by TV ads.

What’s the smallest step you can take?

Sometimes the Big Bang migration can be alarming so it’s also worth mentioning a couple of small move alternatives that would greatly improve your overall website infrastructure with just a little cloud.

CDNs can and should be deployed to any and all public-facing websites. CDNs are cheaper than coffee. We’re talking pennies per gigabyte and this single step will have a huge performance improvement for any website. Seriously, it’s a no-brainer.

Lift and shift: if you moved the webserver and database from the first diagram into the cloud, you would expect a slight performance bump (cloud providers’ networks are faster than yours) and it could promote further baby steps to total cloudification. Over time it can morph into the version 1 diagram fairly easily.

Serve a backup site from S3: if your IT people are refusing to budge, one idea is to serve a backup version of the site from S3. This means whenever your site is down, a static version is served in its place. This will only work for certain types of site but it does allow you to handle failure a little more gracefully, and then opens the door to future cloud migration.

Store your code in cloud repositories. It’s a sensible safeguard but this practice also gets your development and IT groups familiar with automation tools. Automation is catnip to developers and it’s the Trojan horse to cloud.

There’s nothing alarming about automation at all.

Imagine the Possibilities for Your Applications

There are many ways to bring cloud into existing applications and workloads in your organization. The ephemeral nature of virtual hardware can be difficult to grasp and somewhat unsettling.

Pre-cloud, we built everything like it was poured concrete, a major production that was hard to change and move. Cloud providers gave us small ready-made pieces that are like Lego bricks. We can add, change, build up, tear down and have this enormous flexibility that takes a while to fully appreciate.

In most companies, getting ‘on premise’ servers versus cloud servers, it’s like comparing communist-era food rationing to Costco.

This simple example is just a website. Imagine what you could do for a distributed point of sale system in retail. You could create cloud-based services that securely support your cash registers, website and mobile e-commerce app. Write once, use everywhere. Mind blown.

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Baby steps to the cloud: migrating your corporate website was originally published in A Cloud Guru on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

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