#and capitalism is to blame
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howtostartarevolution · 2 months ago
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So, let’s face it. One of my special interest ist the French Revolution. Or also revolutions in general, though I mostly stick to the French or American one so basically 18th century stuff. Maybe because todays „western“ world basically got born with that. The fall of monarchy and the slow triumph of democracy which, certain setbacks not withstanding, we still find ourselves on.
Especially as Democracy gets challenged once again by the current events of the world. Or maybe the question can also be asked: How much democracy is still in our democracies?
If we go back and look at the ideas that got formulated at the time „LibertĂ©, EgalitĂ©, FraternitĂ©â€œ or „All men (aka humans not the gender) are created equal“ or „There are certain and undeniable rights“ and so on
 Or we look at the basic idea of democracy that political power is shared equally by every citizen. That they can invest that power of representatives in elections. And that only this act can legitimize a government and therefore its laws. 
Well, one has to ask oneself how much of that is actually still true, when capitalism has basically created a new aristocracy. Wealth is turned into political power and the „american dream“ is dead since long ago and birth and inherited wealth are the only factors who decide about your success in life today.
Of course there are one or two exceptions, just like in feudalism some people managed to rise beyond their station by education, or patronage or marriage. But at the core in todays society the fluidity between „classes“ has gotten very limited indeed. And while the superrich cruise the world fueling the furnace of climate change and throw their special parties where commoners can not reach them, we are getting very close to the mindset so infamously portrayed in the (only alleged) cry of Marie-Antoinette: „Let them eat cake“.
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niccocum · 4 months ago
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So, let’s face it. My special interest ist the French Revolution. Or also revolutions in general, though I mostly stick to the French or American one so basically 18th century stuff. Maybe because todays „western“ world basically got born with that. The fall of monarchy and the slow triumph of democracy which, certain setbacks not withstanding, we still find ourselves on.
Especially as Democracy gets challenged once again by the current events of the world. Or maybe the question can also be asked: How much democracy is still in our democracies?
If we go back and look at the ideas that got formulated at the time „LibertĂ©, EgalitĂ©, FraternitĂ©â€œ or „All men (aka humans not the gender) are created equal“ or „There are certain and undeniable rights“ and so on
 Or we look at the basic idea of democracy that political power is shared equally by every citizen. That they can invest that power of representatives in elections. And that only this act can legitimize a government and therefore its laws. 
Well, one has to ask oneself how much of that is actually still true, when capitalism has basically created a new aristocracy. Wealth is turned into political power and the „american dream“ is dead since long ago and birth and inherited wealth are the only factors who decide about your success in life today.
Of course there are one or two exceptions, just like in feudalism some people managed to rise beyond their station by education, or patronage or marriage. But at the core in todays society the fluidity between „classes“ has gotten very limited indeed. And while the superrich cruise the world fueling the furnace of climate change and throw their special parties where commoners can not reach them, we are getting very close to the mindset so infamously portrayed in the (only alleged) cry of Marie-Antoinette: „Let them eat cake“.
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inkskinned · 2 years ago
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the thing is there's like, a point of oversaturation for everything, and it's why so many things get dropped after a few minutes. and we act like millennials or gen z kids "have short attention spans" but... that's not quite it. it's more like - we did like it. you just ruined it.
capitalism sees product A having moderate success, and then everything has to come out with their "own version" of product A (which is often exactly the same). and they dump extreme amounts of money and environmental waste into each horrible simulacrum they trot out each season.
now it's not just tiktokkers making videos; it's that instagram and even fucking tumblr both think you want live feeds and video-first programming. and it helps them, because videos are easier to sneak native ads into. the books coming out all have to have 78 buzzwords in them for SEO, or otherwise they don't get published. they are making a live-action remake of moana. i haven't googled it, but there's probably another marvel or starwars something coming out, no matter when you're reading this post.
and we are like "hi, this clone of project A completely misses the point of the original. it is soulless and colorless and miserable." and the company nods and says "yes totally. here is a different clone, but special." and we look at clone 2 and we say "nope, this one is still flat and bad, y'all" and they're like "no, totally, we hear you," and then they make another clone but this time it's, like, a joyless prequel. and by the time they've successfully rolled out "clone 89", the market is incredibly oversaturated, and the consumer is blamed because the company isn't turning a profit.
and like - take even something digital like the tumblr "live streaming" function i just mentioned. that has to take up server space and some amount of carbon footprint; just so this brokenass blue hellsite can roll out a feature that literally none of its userbase actually wants. the thing that's the kicker here: even something that doesn't have a physical production plant still impacts the environment.
and it all just feels like it's rolling out of control because like, you watch companies pour hundreds of thousands of dollars into a remake of a remake of something nobody wants anymore and you're like, not able to afford eggs anymore. and you tell the company that really what you want is a good story about survival and they say "okay so you mean a YA white protagonist has some kind of 'spicy' love triangle" and you're like - hey man i think you're misunderstanding the point of storytelling but they've already printed 76 versions of "city of blood and magic" and "queen of diamond rule" and spent literally millions of dollars on the movie "Candy Crush Killer: Coming to Eat You".
it's like being stuck in a room with a clown that keeps telling the same joke over and over but it's worse every time. and that would be fine but he keeps fucking charging you 6.99. and you keep being like "no, i know it made me laugh the first time, but that's because it was different and new" and the clown is just aggressively sitting there saying "well! plenty of people like my jokes! the reason you're bored of this is because maybe there's something wrong with you!"
#this was much longer i had to cut it down for legibility#but i do want to say i am aware this post doesnt touch on human rights violations as a result of fast fashion#that is because it deserves its own post with a completely different tone#i am an environmental educator#so that's what i know the most about. it wouldn't be appropriate of me to mention off-hand the real and legitimate suffering#that people are going through#without doing my research and providing real ways to help#this is a vent post about a thing i'm watching happen; not a call to action. it would be INCREDIBLY demeaning#to all those affected by the fast fashion industry to pretend that a post like this could speak to their suffering#unfortunately one of the horrible things about latestage capitalism as an activist is that SO many things are linked to this#and i WANT to talk about all of them but it would be a book in its own right. in fact there ARE books about each level of this#and i encourage you to seek them out and read them!!! i am not an expert on that i am just a person on tumblr doing my favorite activity#(complaining)#and it's like - this is the individual versus the industry problem again right because im blaming myself#for being an expert on environmental disaster (which is fucking important) but not knowing EVERYTHING about fast fashion#i'm blaming myself for not covering the many layers of this incredibly complicated problem im pointing out#rather than being like. yeah so actually the fault here lies with the billion dollar industries actually.#my failure to be able to condense an incredibly immense problem that is BOOK-LENGTH into a single text post that i post for free#is not in ANY fucking way the same amount of harm as. you know. the ACTUAL COMPANIES doing this ACTUAL THING for ACTUAL MONEY.#anyway im gonna go donate money while i'm thinking about it. maybe you can too. we can both just agree - well i fuckin tried didn't i#which is more than their CEOs can say
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angerydome · 3 months ago
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I told a friend to keep an eye on their banks/cards because people are getting caught up in that recent data breach, and their response was,
“This is all capitalism’s fault.”
And I 
 err 
 is it??
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toughtttz · 12 days ago
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Hate hate the censorship of art. The song says "rape" not "gr*pe" or some of egregious substitute. You shouldn't clutch your pearls and your wallet when someone says "murdered" instead of "unalived".
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mostlysignssomeportents · 2 years ago
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This is your brain on fraud apologetics
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In 1998, two Stanford students published a paper in Computer Networks entitled “The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine,” in which they wrote, “Advertising funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of consumers.”
https://research.google/pubs/pub334/
If you’d like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here’s a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/24/passive-income/#swiss-cheese-security
The co-authors were Lawrence Page and Sergey Brin, and the “large-scale hypertextual web search-engine” they were describing was their new project, which they called “Google.” They were 100% correct — prescient, even!
On Wednesday night, a friend came over to watch some TV with us. We ordered out. We got scammed. We searched for a great local Thai place we like called Kiin and clicked a sponsored link for a Wix site called “Kiinthaila.com.” We should have clicked the third link down (kiinthaiburbank.com).
We got scammed. The Wix site was a lookalike for Kiin Thai, which marked up their prices by 15% and relayed the order to our local, mom-and-pop, one-branch restaurant. The restaurant knew it, too — they called us and told us they were canceling the order, and said we could still come get our food, but we’d have to call Amex to reverse the charge.
As it turned out, the scammers double-billed us for our order. I called Amex, who advised us to call back in a couple days when the charge posted to cancel it — in other words, they were treating it as a regular customer dispute, and not a systemic, widespread fraud (there’s no way this scammer is just doing this for one restaurant).
In the grand scheme of things, this is a minor hassle, but boy, it’s haunting to watch the quarter-century old prophecy of Brin and Page coming true. Search Google for carpenters, plumbers, gas-stations, locksmiths, concert tickets, entry visas, jobs at the US Post Office or (not making this up) tech support for Google products, and the top result will be a paid ad for a scam. Sometimes it’s several of the top ads.
This kind of “intermediation” business is actually revered in business-schools. As Douglas Rushkoff has written, the modern business wisdom reveres “going meta” — not doing anything useful, but rather, creating a chokepoint between people who do useful things and people who want to pay for those things, and squatting there, collecting rent:
https://rushkoff.medium.com/going-meta-d42c6a09225e
It’s the ultimate passive income/rise and grind side-hustle: It wouldn’t surprise me in the least to discover a whole festering nest of creeps on Tiktok talking about how they pay Mechanical Turks to produce these lookalike sites at scale.
This mindset is so pervasive that people running companies with billions in revenue and massive hoards of venture capital run exactly the same scam. During lockdown, companies like Doordash, Grubhub and Uber Eats stood up predatory lookalike websites for local restaurants, without their consent, and played monster-in-the-middle, tricking diners into ordering through them:
https://pluralistic.net/2020/09/19/we-are-beautiful/#man-in-the-middle
These delivery app companies were playing a classic enshittification game: first they directed surpluses to customers to lock them in (heavily discounting food), then they directed surplus to restaurants (preferential search results, free delivery, low commissions) — then, having locked in both consumers and producers, they harvested the surplus for themselves.
Today, delivery apps charge massive premiums to both eaters and restaurants, load up every order with junk fees, and clone the most successful restaurants out of ghost kitchens — shipping containers in parking lots crammed with low-waged workers cranking out orders for 15 different fake “virtual restaurants”:
https://pluralistic.net/2020/12/01/autophagic-buckeyes/#subsidized-autophagia
Delivery apps speedran the enshittification cycle, but Google took a slower path to get there. The company has locked in billions of users (e.g. by paying billions to be the default search on Safari and Firefox and using legal bullying to block third party Android device-makers from pre-installing browsers other than Chrome). For years, it’s been leveraging our lock-in to prey on small businesses, getting them to set up Google Business Profiles.
These profiles are supposed to help Google distinguish between real sellers and scammers. But Kiin Thai has a Google Business Profile, and searching for “kiin thai burbank” brings up a “Knowledge Panel” with the correct website address — on a page that is headed with a link to a scam website for the same business. Google, in other words, has everything it needs to flag lookalike sites and confirm them with their registered owners. It would cost Google money to do this — engineer-time to build and maintain the system, content moderator time to manually check flagged listings, and lost ad-revenue from scammers — but letting the scams flourish makes Google money, at the expense of Google users and Google business customers.
Now, Google has an answer for this: they tell merchants who are being impersonated by ad-buying scammers that all they need to do is outbid them for the top ad-spot. This is a common approach — Amazon has a $31b/year “ad business” that’s mostly its own platform sellers bidding against each other to show you fake results for your query. The first five screens of Amazon search results are 50% ads:
https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/28/enshittification/#relentless-payola
This is “going meta,” so naturally, Meta is doing it too: Facebook and Instagram have announced a $12/month “verification” badge that will let you report impersonation and tweak the algorithm to make it more likely that the posts you make are shown to the people who explicitly asked to see them:
https://www.vox.com/recode/2023/2/21/23609375/meta-verified-twitter-blue-checkmark-badge-instagram-facebook
The corollary of this, of course, is that if you don’t pay, they won’t police your impersonators, and they won’t show your posts to the people who asked to see them. This is pure enshittification — the surplus from users and business customers is harvested for the benefit of the platform owners:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys
The idea that merchants should master the platforms as a means of keeping us safe from their impersonators is a hollow joke. For one thing, the rules change all the time, as the platforms endlessly twiddle the knobs that determine what gets shown to whom:
https://doctorow.medium.com/twiddler-1b5c9690cce6
And they refuse to tell anyone what the rules are, because if they told you what the rules were, you’d be able to bypass them. Content moderation is the only infosec domain where “security through obscurity” doesn’t get laughed out of the room:
https://doctorow.medium.com/como-is-infosec-307f87004563
Worse: the one thing the platforms do hunt down and exterminate with extreme prejudice is anything that users or business-customers use to twiddle back — add-ons and plugins and jailbreaks that override their poor choices with better ones:
https://www.theverge.com/2022/9/29/23378541/the-og-app-instagram-clone-pulled-from-app-store
As I was submitting complaints about the fake Kiin scam-site (and Amex’s handling of my fraud call) to the FTC, the California Attorney General, the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau and Wix, I wrote a little Twitter thread about what a gross scam this is:
https://twitter.com/doctorow/status/1628948906657878016
The thread got more than two million reads and got picked up by Hacker News and other sites. While most of the responses evinced solidarity and frustration and recounted similar incidents in other domains, a significant plurality of the replies were scam apologetics — messages from people who wanted to explain why this wasn’t a problem after all.
The most common of these was victim-blaming: “you should have used an adblocker” or “never click the sponsored link.” Of course, I do use an ad-blocker — but this order was placed with a mobile browser, after an absentminded query into the Google search-box permanently placed on the home screen, which opens results in Chrome (where I don’t have an ad-blocker, so I can see material behind an ad-blocker-blocker), not Firefox (which does have an ad-blocker).
Now, I also have a PiHole on my home LAN, which blocks most ads even in a default browser — but earlier this day, I’d been on a public wifi network that was erroneously blocking a website (the always excellent superpunch.net) so I’d turned my wifi off, which meant the connection came over my phone’s 5G connection, bypassing the PiHole:
https://pluralistic.net/2022/04/28/shut-yer-pi-hole/
“Don’t click a sponsored link” — well, the irony here is that if you habitually use a browser with an ad-blocker, and you backstop it with a PiHole, you never see sponsored links, so it’s easy to miss the tiny “Sponsored” notification beside the search result. That goes double if you’re relaxing with a dinner guest on the sofa and ordering dinner while chatting.
There’s a name for this kind of security failure: the Swiss Cheese Model. We all have multiple defenses (in my case: foreknowledge of Google’s ad-scam problem, an ad-blocker in my browser, LAN-wide ad sinkholing). We also have multiple vulnerabilities (in my case: forgetting I was on 5G, being distracted by conversation, using a mobile device with a permanent insecure search bar on the homescreen, and being so accustomed to ad-blocked results that I got out of the habit of checking whether a result was an ad).
If you think you aren’t vulnerable to scams, you’re wrong — and your confidence in your invulnerability actually increases your risk. This isn’t the first time I’ve been scammed, and it won’t be the last — and every time, it’s been a Swiss Cheese failure, where all the holes in all my defenses lined up for a brief instant and left me vulnerable:
https://locusmag.com/2010/05/cory-doctorow-persistence-pays-parasites/
Other apologetics: “just call the restaurant rather than using its website.” Look, I know the people who say this don’t think I have a time-machine I can use to travel back to the 1980s and retrieve a Yellow Pages, but it’s hard not to snark at them, just the same. Scammers don’t just set up fake websites for your local businesses — they staff them with fake call-centers, too. The same search that takes you to a fake website will also take you to a fake phone number.
Finally, there’s “What do you expect Google to do? They can’t possibly detect this kind of scam.” But they can. Indeed, they are better situated to discover these scams than anyone else, because they have their business profiles, with verified contact information for the merchants being impersonated. When they get an ad that seems to be for the same business but to a different website, they could interrupt the ad process to confirm it with their verified contact info.
Instead, they choose to avoid the expense, and pocket the ad revenue. If a company promises to “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful,” I think we have the right to demand these kinds of basic countermeasures:
https://www.google.com/search/howsearchworks/our-approach/
The same goes for Amex: when a merchant is scamming customers, they shouldn’t treat complaints as “chargebacks” — they should treat them as reports of a crime in progress. Amex has the bird’s eye view of their transaction flow and when a customer reports a scam, they can backtrack it to see if the same scammer is doing this with other merchants — but the credit card companies make money by not chasing down fraud:
https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/rosalindadams/mastercard-visa-fraud
Wix also has platform-scale analytics that they could use to detect and interdict this kind of fraud — when a scammer creates a hundred lookalike websites for restaurants and uses Wix’s merchant services to process payments for them, that could trigger human review — but it didn’t.
Where do all of these apologetics come from? Why are people so eager to leap to the defense of scammers and their adtech and fintech enablers? Why is there such an impulse to victim-blame?
I think it’s fear: in their hearts, people — especially techies — know that they, too, are vulnerable to these ripoffs, but they don’t want to admit it. They want to convince themselves that the person who got scammed made an easily avoidable mistake, and that they themselves will never make a similar mistake.
This is doubly true for readerships on tech-heavy forums like Twitter or (especially) Hacker News. These readers know just how many vulnerabilities there are — how many holes are in their Swiss cheese — and they are also overexposed to rise-and-grind/passive income rhetoric.
This produces a powerful cognitive dissonance: “If all the ‘entrepreneurs’ I worship are just laying traps for the unwary, and if I am sometimes unwary, then I’m cheering on the authors of my future enduring misery.” The only way to resolve this dissonance — short of re-evaluating your view of platform capitalism or questioning your own immunity to scams — is to blame the victim.
The median Hacker News reader has to somehow resolve the tension between “just install an adblocker” and “Chrome’s extension sandbox is a dumpster fire and it’s basically impossible to know whether any add-on you install can steal every keystroke and all your other data”:
https://mattfrisbie.substack.com/p/spy-chrome-extension
In my Twitter thread, I called this “the worst of all possible timelines.” Everything we do is mediated by gigantic, surveillant monopolists that spy on us comprehensively from asshole to appetite — but none of them, not a 20th century payment giant nor a 21st century search giant — can bestir itself to use that data to keep us safe from scams.
Next Thu (Mar 2) I'll be in Brussels for Antitrust, Regulation and the Political Economy, along with a who's-who of European and US trustbusters. It's livestreamed, and both in-person and virtual attendance are free:
https://www.brusselsconference.com/registration
On Fri (Mar 3), I'll be in Graz for the Elevate Festival:
https://elevate.at/diskurs/programm/event/e23doctorow/
[Image ID: A modified version of Hieronymus Bosch's painting 'The Conjurer,' which depicts a scam artist playing a shell-game for a group of gawking rubes. The image has been modified so that the scam artist's table has a Google logo and the pea he is triumphantly holding aloft bears the 'Sponsored' wordmark that appears alongside Google search results.]
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autisticrosewilson · 6 months ago
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Um if you write Jason having to get drugs for Catherine I want you dead btw. Not only does it tell me you assume the average drug dealer would give the hard shit to a very small child and then not supervise them at all (classist stereotype that all drug dealers are inherently evil + lazy writing with no grasp on reality) and you genuinely think that Catherine was CONSTANTLY high, as if that's even possible without overdosing far sooner than she did. That's without even getting into the bad mom Catherine propaganda.
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t4tails · 10 months ago
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i bring a sort of "there would be no problem whatsoever if we lived in a society with a universal income that didnt depend on wild variables to get jobs that are our only lifelines yet are still willing to fire us at the drop of a hat for something more profitable" vibe to the ai conversation that both pro and anti ai people dont really like
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cognitivejustice · 8 months ago
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Fewer than 60 multinationals are responsible for more than half of the world’s plastic pollution, with five responsible for a quarter of that, based on the findings 
The branded half of the plastic was the responsibility of just 56 fast-moving consumer goods multinational companies, and a quarter of that was from just five companies.
Altria [Kraft] and Philip Morris International made up 2% of the branded plastic litter found, Danone and Nestlé produced 3% of it, PepsiCo was responsible for 5% of the discarded packaging, and 11% of branded plastic waste could be traced to the Coca-Cola company.
“The industry likes to put the responsibility on the individual,” says the study’s author, Marcus Eriksen, a plastic pollution expert from The 5 Gyres Institute.
“But we’d like to point out that it’s the brands, it’s their choice for the kinds of packaging [they use] and for embracing this throwaway model of delivering their goods. That’s what’s causing the greatest abundance of trash.”
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bikananjarrus · 5 months ago
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if yord had lived he'd be leading the hunt for qimir and osha and we would've gotten the most delicious tension between him and qimir. qimir would start out frustrated that yord got away, intent on finishing what he started. and yord, once hunted, now hunter, once an exemplary jedi, and now solely focused on revenge disguised as righteous justice (which it is also a bit of that). and qimir starts to enjoy the game, the chase. and in this timeline, sol still dies, osha still goes with qimir, but yord was unconscious, recovering in a bacta tank, so all he knows when he wakes up is that qimir is out there and took osha, his friend, away. so then you also have the tension of that confrontation, the realization that osha has willingly turned, and that maybe yord can't blame her for that, because what has he been doing these past many months, years, maybe, but give in to the selfish desire to finish what he started too?
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hadesoftheladies · 5 months ago
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"men are only bad because they're socialized to be violent :( without capitalism there'd be no patriarchy"
quick! who is doing the socializing! who is doing the socializing! no LOOK AT ME! hey *whistles* hey man just tell me just tell me who is doing the socializing if you could just tell me who is doing the socializing that would be so awesome haha!
"but their mothers don't tell them to put the seat back u--" I'm going to ask you very politely while clasping my hands and batting my eyelashes for you to shut up :)
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uncanny-tranny · 1 year ago
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I despise the idea that you can only do a certain art project once. You can only release an idea once in this world before you can't. You can't re-try, can't ever re-do, can't ever revise the idea or project because, like marble, it is sculpted and could never change.
You're allowed to paint the same subjects. You're allowed to write the same types of stories. You can crochet the exact same bags. Who cares about if your ideas are "unique" and "revolutionary to the art world"? You can do the same shit forever and ever. Art and love on planet earth <3
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soullessjack · 2 months ago
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(seeing an alternative man with eyeliner and emo hair become a painfully normal buzz-faded diet hipster) who did this to you đŸ„ș
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butchford · 9 days ago
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I think we need to blow up the mouthwashing tag on every social media site
Solid fucking agree 🚬🐮
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#asks#anon#can people treat I dunno. really heavy topics with the weight they deserve instead of fandomizing them like everything else. I know the#answer but still. and the way people have done it too is insaneeee like come the fuck on you people are literally ignoring shit for your own#comfort and thus creating some evilass metatextual instances ie using anya as a vessel for your own shit (denying her agency) and ignoring#jimmy on all levels because he makes you so uncomfortable but still wanting to have just one person to blame so villainizing the shit out of#curly when he did very much so fuck up big time but was still a person who did try even if it wasn't enough and also an abuse victim but#nobody likes to acknowledge that because nobody likes the idea that an abuse victim can fuck up big time and still be an abuse victim and#there's also the matter of how people idolize swansea and go oh he would've never let this happen when bro did know what happen halfway into#the months after the crash and didn't formally do anything until daisuke died. and people just act like daisuke can't and never would do#anything wrong when he literally stood there while jimmy rufied swansea. also the whole infantalization by the fandom really takes on a#whole nother tinge when you remember he's the only asian person on the Tulpar. like. guysssss. tears my fucking hair out and kills myself.#there's a reason that the only tag for a media I've found deeply personal I've refused to follow is mouthwashing because from the shit#that's slipped through the cracks alone good fucking god‌‌‌ this is the uncomfortable game about accountability capitalism and sa do NOT#fucking remove the nuance from it. jesus fucking christ😀#anyway. yea.
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dykedvonte · 29 days ago
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I think the most baffling thing about the Tulpar as a vessel to me is the fact that the ship really did only have a one way communication system.
I know it was cheap but even the most basic of vessels regarding major transport would have some way, shape or form for outside communication. Not only that but there was absolutely no form of innate emergency signal to show they may have been offline or in trouble despite clearly having a system to dock credits if they went off course. It's another factor that really shows that bad situations are made to get worse by design. One person who is required to relay all information to the crew and make all the choices without feedback. No way to update or call for help in case of a dire situation. No way to inform of inner personal conflicts and acquire procedures accordingly.
It really is like they are all in some sort of fucked up solitary confinement. They have their own world with strict roles that are meaningless in the end, as long as the cargo makes it, it doesn't matter what happens on that ship to the company. They don't want to hear anything and will come to conclusions on what happened based on how much pay they can withhold from the workers. Even what they do send is short, sterile and corporate to the extent it was likely written and sent out with a command by some random unmanned computer in an office.
There's something to be said about how unfair it is to force absolute power and control onto one person when you as an entity could do so much more to offload it but I've said it many times before so I won't again.
#its just like idk i dont think Curly was a bad captain because we only have this scenerio and I certainly dont think a man like Swansea#would like him or have very little issues with him specifically if he was incompentent or too lienent in the past but I do think the stress#was making him worse and worse as being a present leader as it dawned on him how much he actually had to handle like I really think he#just wanted to do yknow normal captain pilot stuff and fly the ship and yknow the little stuff like make sure things run right and over tim#the constant stress and strain of having to make every major choice started to grate on him and freak him out cause they cant even fucking#eat unless he pulls out the scanner and starts cooking like he has to choose the meal likely or have a vote and i make that part of the#reason he seems so indecisive and inactive is the fact he has to make the choice all the time and he's hoping he can at least make the crew#feel a little more in control of themselves as people by staying out of affairs like the game or disputes because god he literally has to#choose for them all the time like thats a lot of responsibility monitering their sleep their breaks food consumption thats all on him like#it really should be another persons job entirely as thats almost like absoulte contrl over the lives of everyone else that PE forces onto#that title and its also crazy how everyone accepts it even if they dont like it like they broke the food machine open rather than get the#scanner they all waited two months before Jimmy appointed himself leader its so scary how conditioned they all are to the environemnt#cause that sort of mindset is sadly real where people just wait everyone just waited until it was getting real dire and then they still#followed Jimmy without too many complaints like i saw a fic or post where Anya acknowledges they all kinda just let Jimmy do what they want#because he became the captain and it was stupid on all their parts cause they could clearly see how bad he was and yet he was captain so#they just fell in line to their roles and thats a bigger point towards how PE treated them and the complacency capitalism brings to you#just like something that irks me because idk I know Curly is slow to act but he's not as like unopinionated as people make him out to be#like he does try to find solutions but they are still restricted at the end of the day by what PE provides them and I think his biggest c#crime is being in his own head too much and not giving Anya that emotional stability cause like idk man was he supposed to go to Home Depot#himself and install like padlocks? even if the let Anya sleep in medical after she pointed it out she was already pregnant at that point#like we arent seeing the inherent issue that no one not even Anya herself was thinking of the preventative measures because a)there was a#point nothing was happening that necessitated them b) it would've been the responsibility of PE to address them pre and post incident and c#there is only one person on the entire ship given the authority to do anything. You can not make multiple important choices in one instance#in such little time and Curly should not have had that total power like i think the most interesting thing in takes that really blame Curly#is that level of control they give him over the company. Like again i think about the three days we miss between the eval/party and the#convo/crash like i think people switch them around as if those scenes happen in succession when they are broken up and its heavily implied#Curly and Jimmy just havent been talking vs the depiction that she told him and for like three days Curly was just chummy despite the fact#Jimmy and him just had a blow out fight like the next time we assume they talk is during the crash sequence cause he honestly hangs#around Anya more which i think is really important because she trust Curly to defend her himself but not his judgement to give her somethin#to defend herself as she knows he believes her but also knows she's not seeing the danger the same and its heartbreaking and more
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field-cryptobotanist · 3 months ago
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The funniest part about delicious in dungeon for me is that I've gotten those exact reactions from people about eating regular blackberries or wild strawberries I just picked from the forest, like you're not ready for monsters if just foraging is a completely foreign concept
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