#and it overwhelmingly flattens features towards sameness

[maxwelljacobfriedman]

I was today years old when i found out cora jade used to be elayna black

[lady-oceana9518]

Here For You (A Hazbin Hotel Fanfic)

A/N: Hey y’all, here’s another little story featuring my Hazbin OC, Morgana, the direwolf shifter. This fic features lots of fluffy times between Wolf!Morga and Vaggie. I haven’t been feeling the greatest emotionally speaking today, so I wrote this in an effort to comfort myself a little. I hope you guys enjoy it too. Let me know what you think of the story and/or my wolfy girl Morga😊

~~~~

Today...hadn’t been Morgana’s best day. She woke up that morning with a bone-deep tiredness that she couldn’t shake, even though she had a good night’s sleep the night before. She didn’t feel happy, or angry, or overwhelmingly sad...just, numb.

Charlie and Vaggie were out running errands around town with Razzle and Dazzle, which Morga knew because of a note that Vaggie had left on her bedside table earlier that morning. They should be back later that afternoon, she wrote. Angel was out entertaining one of his regular clients; Niffty was flitting around the hotel cleaning, as usual, like a manic hummingbird; Alastor was working in his office, awaiting his mate Charlie’s return; and Husk was tending the bar in the lobby (while successfully becoming more and more intoxicated himself as the day wore on). Morga had a rare day off from her teaching duties. She was too exhausted to want to do, well, just about anything, but she at least wanted to get out of her room at some point for a little change in scenery. She also didn’t particularly want to socialize with anyone.

The solution to her little dilemma seemed obvious. She would simply remain in her direwolf form for the rest of the day. After locking the door to her room behind her, Morga shifted effortlessly into her wolf form. She shook out her black-brown fur and stretched her wings, which were reminiscent of a snowy owl’s, then trotted down to the lobby.

She passed right by Husk’s bar, and of course didn’t go unnoticed by the surprisingly-observant bartender. “Hey wolfy, bout time you showed up!” Husk snickered, slurring his words a bit. Morga would normally have some kind of retort ready to go but was absolutely not in the mood for his, or anyone’s, teasing today. She growled at him, the sound a deep, menacing rumble emanating from her chest.

Husk jumped, more than a little surprised at the normally mild-mannered and mischievous wolf. “ ‘Ey, what the fuck was that for??” In response, Morga glared at him over her shoulder and bared her teeth, not even breaking stride as she continued on toward the fireplace.

As luck would have it, there was a roaring fire blazing merrily in the newly-refurbished grand fireplace. It was oh-so inviting and looked like the perfect place for a nap. Morga wasted no time in trotting over to the rug in front of the fireplace, circling a few times, and flopping onto her side. She yawned and allowed her heavy eyelids to flutter closed over her leaf-green eyes.

Some time later, which in reality turned out to be several hours later, Morga became aware of a few different voices conversing quietly nearby.

“I’m tellin’ ya, she’s got a stick up her ass about somethin’ today. Been all wolfed out the whole time too. Maybe wolfy’s finally going feral,” Husk grumbled, taking a swig from his ever-present bottle of booze.

Charlie hummed uncertainly, her worried gaze flickering over to Morga’s dozing form. “Morga doesn’t usually act that way...and I don’t think I’ve heard her growl at anyone other than Al before.” Vaggie couldn’t help but snicker at that. It was no secret that she still wasn’t the Radio Demon’s biggest fan. “Vags, maybe you should check on her? Since she definitely trusts you more than anyone else. I don’t want to startle her if she’s feeling a little more sensitive and skittish than usual.”

Vaggie smiled a little at her best friend’s words. She still wasn’t sure how she had become lucky enough to catch the eye of such an enchanting, wild woman like Morgana, but she was grateful for that each day. “Of course I will. You two go back to whatever you were doing; I’ve got this. I’ll take care of her.”

Husk grumbled something along the lines of “Careful she doesn’t rip your hand off,” before heading back to the bar, while Charlie nearly skipped away toward Alastor’s office, eager to spend time with her mate.

Vaggie slowly made her way over to Morga’s dozing form, beginning to speak softly to her lover as she did so. “Morga, hun? Are you feeling alright?”

Morga’s eyes slowly blinked open and she felt a growl instinctively begin to build in the back of her throat. When she saw her moth demon slowly approaching, though, she stopped immediately. She let out an apologetic whine and glanced off to the side, folding her ears back against her head.

Vaggie crouched down and knelt alongside her direwolf, gently running her fingers through the thick fur along Morga’s back. “It’s okay, sweetheart. It’s alright. I know you didn’t mean it,” Vaggie murmured. Morga rumbled her thanks and hesitantly laid her head in Vaggie’s lap, gazing up at her tiredly. Vaggie felt her heart twist at the sight. Her usually-serene, confident Morga looked so tired and hopeless. For a moment she didn’t know what to do. She just wanted to be there for her lover and comfort her in the same way that Morga so often comforted Vaggie.

“I’m sorry you don’t feel great today, mi cariño,” Vaggie cooed, beginning to idly stroke Morga’s silky, feathered wings. She was actively racking her brain, trying to think of what would help her wolf feel more like her usual self. “Have you had anything to eat today?”

In response, Morga’s ears flattened once more and she looked anywhere but at Vaggie. The moth demon gave the direwolf a small, patient smile. “That’s alright; it’s easy to forget those things when you’re depressed and having an off day. How about we find something good to eat in the kitchen and then go back to our room to cuddle?”

In response, Morga butted her head against Vaggie’s stomach, then rose to her paws for a nice, long stretch. She stared expectantly at Vaggie, waiting for the moth demon to stand up too. Vaggie chuckled, taking that as her cue to stand. “Alright, princess, let’s go.” Morga growled softly at Vaggie’s teasing tone and gently nipped her hand for good measure. “Hey now, you better watch it, missy!” Vaggie replied, to which Morga swatted her gently with one of her wings before plodding ahead to the kitchen.

The two of them rifled through the cupboards, determined to find something Morga would like. Suddenly, the direwolf’s ears perked up and she eagerly sniffed a sealed plastic bag that was filled to the brim with something that smelled delicious. Vaggie raised a brow and reached into the cupboard, only to pull out the bag of venison jerky that Morga had been snuffling at. “Babe, Alastor made this from the deer he killed during his last hunt. Maybe we should find some food that doesn’t already belong to someone, yeah?” In response, Morga’s ears drooped, she lowered her head, and simultaneously gave Vaggie the most pathetic puppy dog eyes she could muster. Vaggie groaned, covering her face with the hand not holding the bag of jerky so she wouldn’t have to see the pathetically adorable display.

“Ugh...okay, fine! I guess that shitlord can always make more another time. I’d rather you have the jerky than him anyway,” Vaggie relented, holding the bag of jerky out to Morga. The direwolf gently took the bag into her mouth, trotting toward the staircase as Vaggie grabbed two water bottles from the fridge and followed quickly behind.

Back in their shared bedroom, Vaggie and Morga, still in wolf form, lounged on their bed and snacked on stolen jerky while soft music played from a speaker on their bedside table. Vaggie leaned back against the headboard, scratching behind Morga’s ears as the direwolf sprawled across the moth demon’s lap and contentedly tore into her seventh piece of jerky. While Morga still felt like a shadow of her usual self, she couldn’t deny that she felt much better than she had that morning; and it was all thanks to the love, support, and patience that Vaggie so freely gave.

Suddenly, from downstairs they heard a baffled-sounding Radio Demon call out: “Oh Charlie, dearest, do you know where my venison jerky ran off to? I put an entire bag in the cupboard just this morning!”

Meanwhile, back in hers and Vaggie’s bedroom, Morga wolfed down the last piece of jerky that was currently between her forepaws, and pushed the empty bag beneath the duvet with her nose. Content with her work, she laid her head on top of Vaggie’s stomach, snuggled close to her side, and spread one of her wings over her moth demon as a sort of blanket. She gazed up at Vaggie in thanks for all she had done that day, then began to fall asleep. This slumber would be far more peaceful than the last.

[diarrheaworldstarhiphop]

Aren’t some gays trying to assimilate to society or something like that, so effort is focused on ‘owning’ a high brow appearance and further capitulation of cultural signals proper; and other gays and friends don’t want that feigned parity so it’s tacked unto memes! I dunno — pretty please teach us!

Some gays yearn for the comfort of validation from society and to influence it, additionally. Especially those of the cis and dude variety.

its only normal. It’s not comfortable being truly independent and free to chart what ur existence means to you. It’s not common for a person to yearn for solitude and true individuality. Tho i think sexuality sits apart from a WIDE fucking berth between it and queer identity. In that, to fuck someone of the same sex or both sexes doesn’t necessarily require as much of an enormous dissection of one’s own identity as someone who’s entire body becomes a flex of their trauma induced need for agency. There’s little one can relatively articulate in what it means to want to fuck and/or be fucked in the ass aside from the trauma incurred from navigating that in a society where its taboo, to say the least of it. Plus capitalism and wider society is in an advanced state of assimilated cis gay dude shit. This is why drag shit is everywhere now. This is why the culture war is already past grappling accepting gay shit and is now in the gay, grappling with accepting some of the features of esoteric gay shit. It’s HAPPENING!!! doompaul.gif

like, capitalism is certainly gaying up society to grease up consumerism and the accelerating nature of technocapital, but it’s a superficial rainbow society form. One that directly threatens someone like me as much as some of the sentimentalities of the far right position.

What capitalism and the herd of the LGBTQIEIDKLFHGLDHG++++ try to do is signify diversity when it functionally seeks to flatten and homogenize the whole ill-defined, marginalized field of queerness. It’s why the arbiters of these LGBT groups frequently suffer from infighting and catastrophized clusterfucks of validity so much. They try to collect the disparate, wholly individualized nature of queerness and weave it into a fabric in an effort to flatten and give security to those who rightfully plead for it to relieve their suffering - but this, in effect, also prepares it for assimilation into wider society. Prepares it for the great leveler of culture, capitalism, to co-opt and define what it is for those within the LGBT sphere. The rainbow flag is not a banner of communism, but rather a banner of capitalism.

Alot of the suffering and suicide from those of the more queer persuasion, in my mind the Transfemme persuasion, comes from being thrust into absolute solitude in self. You are immediately pressed to do or die, essentially, and make sense of what you are. To distill Self from self. You can’t even grasp for help via guidance because there is no guide. Metaphysically, it’s like as if you plucked a 9-5 office working man and dropped him into the siberian taiga, now forcing him to abruptly learn how to live off the land with no preparation or no one else around to to help. It’s unbelievably challenging and it certainly requires mental fortitude to even begin to run with it.

The ironic thing is that. Capitalism has produced a sort of individuality that consumerism readily thrives on. In buying shit to define who one is when two centuries ago, people would buy shit because they needed it. So the hypermodern, hyper individual queer person is every bit a product of technocapital as the wider society assimilating it. It’s like. Capital spit us out, a byproduct of the grand shredder and trivializer of culture, but like a vacuum moving onward, will come around to suck us back up again.

Capitalism is slowly shaping and corrupting humanity. In this process, humanity, whom are mostly limited to structures, philosophy and social existences that predate capital, kinda walk thru it as a huddled mass in the dark. Feeling out a society where they try to simulate moral structures that for most of human life, defined us and led us to evolve in occurrence to thinking around it. moral structures like religion and autocracy. We have lopped off the head and replaced it with a yawning noumena we assume is also a head. Society, the herd, yearns to be lead even if it intrinsically feels we are all individual and special. We have already selected for the AI as the head.

The preponderance of transwomen, as g/acc has proposed, is not transwomen in so far that they are hyper individualized as queerness is and has been, but that toward the horizon it would be more diminutive forms of what a transwoman is. Of what a human it. A humanity without man. They become the new normies because the nature of economy renders women as the model individual, compelling men toward becoming women simply to get by. Slime girls as nyx says. Slaves to capital and the AI. Spiritually and functionally.

It’s a glacial process not unlike how the overwhelmingly christian middle east slowly converted into and adopted islam.

[tinymixtapes]

Feature: 2017: Stack Music

Fakeness is everywhere. Earlier this year, Vulture’s Adam Raymond reported on a number of stunts designed to game the Spotify system for a decent payout. Amid full-length silent albums and something he’s calling the “Happy Birthday” gimmick, Raymond discovered that the streaming giant was actively giving some of its most highly-coveted spots on playlists to allegedly “fake” artists. “The first song on Sleep, a playlist of calming, instrumental tracks with 1.5 million followers, is by Enno Aare, a band with three songs on Spotify and no footprint outside of the streaming service,” he writes. “The band Evolution of the Stars has only two songs on Spotify, but both are on the Deep Focus playlist and they have a combined 15 million streams.” This absence of any footprint beyond its strategic existence in the Spotify ecosystem has led many to take a closer look at the politics of the platform. At Watt, Liz Pelly traced companies like Filtr (owned by Sony), Digster (owned by Warner), and Topsify (owned by Universal) to their source as firms funnelling resources normally gambled on branding and publicity into a network of playlists promising similar successes in the music industry. In the same way that major labels have spent decades developing a direct pipeline to the public via commercial radio, the barrier for entry into the streaming economy, to the surprise of very few, increasingly reflects the monied interest of the industry. In the same way that major labels have spent decades developing a direct pipeline to the public via commercial radio, the barrier for entry into the streaming economy increasingly reflects the monied interest of the industry. Beyond Spotify, streaming platforms like YouTube, SoundCloud, and Apple Music have each monetized their respective media through a series of gestures that prioritize their platform’s continued relevance in the pop cultural conversation, often at the direct expense of counterculture. From genres like SoundCloud rap and lo-fi house — which each largely owe their recognition as isolated genres to trends within networks — to the outgrowth of platform-based styles like “type-beat” rap productions and Billboard-charting YouTubers, it’s clear that we’re in the midst of a strange upheaval, if not in the way that music is made, at least in the conversations we’re having about its structural continuity. In a time when American partisan politics means a decision between unchecked monopoly and outright fascism, consumers might feel like the only option is to align themselves with a vision of tech progress largely bent on the consolidation of corporate wealth. And with the FCC again calling net neutrality into question, it seems like the right to an open internet is one of few remaining links between far left and far right ideologies. But could it be that the platforms that make up most internet use today are already a lot less neutral than users seem to realize — already subjected to more invasive surveillance and data management practices than most users can even comprehend? Is the concept of “net neutrality” as it stood even 10 years ago enough to account for all the ways in which these platforms have completely changed even the most basic media and communications access across the globe? What sort of transparency do we really expect on the web in 2017, and what, if anything, has really been lost in the shift from simple sites and MP3 blogs to something overwhelmingly dominated by platforms? --- The stack, the most outward unit of planetary-scale computation, becomes a useful metaphor when talking about the streaming economy. As John Herrman pointed out earlier this year in The New York Times Magazine, “For many companies, the organizing logic of the software stack becomes inseparable from the logic of the business itself. […] A healthy stack, or a clever one, is tantamount (the thinking goes) to a well-structured company.” In a clear nod to Benjamin Bratton’s The Stack: On Software and Sovereignty, Herrman notes the ways in which stacks flatten the functional logic of business into the smallest unit of digital transaction in the direct service of capital. The platform, itself a matrix of intersecting stacks, operates in accordance with this logic. Elsewhere for the magazine, Herrman continues: Platforms are, in a sense, capitalism distilled to its essence. They are proudly experimental and maximally consequential, prone to creating externalities and especially disinclined to address or even acknowledge what happens beyond their rising walls. […] Platforms provide the substructure for the “gig economy” and the “sharing economy”; they’re the economic engine of social media; they’re the architecture of the “attention economy” and the inspiration for claims about the “end of ownership.” […] Platforms seek total control even as they abdicate responsibility. In other words, they’re perfect. As music discovery is increasingly mediated by the logic of the stack (and later platform) economy, independent musicians become precarious platform laborers, digital service employees given fractional cents per stream in a system designed for their own exploitation. Like the contract workers of Uber, Amazon, and TaskRabbit, cognitive creative labor is now mined for utility, scrubbed to its essence as data in service of the platform, only to be presented back to the public through for-profit means. As longtime Wired contributor Bruce Sterling put it in his SXSW closing lecture, “People like to say that musicians reacted badly to the digital revolution. They put a foot wrong. What really happened is that the digital revolution reduces everybody to the state of musicians. Everybody — not just us bohemian creatives, but the military, political parties, the anchor stores in retail malls, academics subjected to massive open online courses… whatever happens to musicians happens to everybody. Including you.” Stack Music by Konrad Sprenger But a growing class of musicians recognize this precarity. From Konrad Springer’s aptly-titled Stack Music — which, as TMT writer Nick James Scavo points out, is itself a reference to Bratton — to the unboxing videos of Amnesia Scanner, the make-up tutorials of yaeji, and the eerie ASMR of Holly Herndon, more and more artists are drawing connections between their own crafts and the creative labor of a burgeoning class of precarious workers online. The ambient call center “muzak” of Sam Kidel, the polite chivvy of Pinkcourtesyphone’s Taking Into Account Only a Portion of Your Emotions, the soundtracks to fictional unions from David Kanaga and a very real call for musician’s unions across the globe — each represents the ways in which digital labor, again and again, seems to manifest itself as precarity amid a digital future that once promised so much. More of a state of mind than any actual stylistic genre, Stack Music embodies the contradictions of the current moment in capitalism, where working harder doesn’t mean breaking even, even as Silicon Valley continues to profit like never before. --- Of course, digital labor is really nothing new. In an industry in which advances in recording and distribution tools have routinely signaled new possibilities for progressive creative models, innovations from Napster to LimeWire to The Pirate Bay and beyond have left many struggling to determine the value of their labor in the creative workforce. Where physical media came with clearer (if, at times, certainly exploitative) lines between artist and industry, cognitive digital labor is endlessly reproducible in one-to-one copies and impossible to monetize directly. As French economist Yann Moulier-Boutang writes in his book Cognitive Capitalism, “We are leaving an old world where the production of material goods took up the bulk of investment (a lot of capital for machinery, and a lot of low-skilled labour) and was the basis for the accumulation of profit. And we have very much entered a world in which the reproduction of complex goods (biosphere, noosphere or cultural diversity, the economy of the mind) and the production of new knowledge and innovations […] require a shift of investment towards intellectual capital (education, training) and a large quantity of skilled labour, set to work collectively, through the new information and telecommunications technologies.” As previous barriers to entry have given way to new production and distribution models, more and more amateur musicians have entered this creative workforce, continuing to oversaturate (and perhaps deflate) the artificial valuation present in past models. With no limit to how little they expect in return, independent musicians now have more in common with the cognitive workforce behind Amazon’s Mechanical Turks than most indie artistry of the past, now as precarious wage laborers — cognitariats, to borrow Moulier-Boutang’s word. Thanks to advances in algorithmic listening patterns and natural language processing, music is treated as a neutral commodity to be mined as data, which platforms use to ascribe utility to the products within their system. In the same way that YouTube videos (of course also a space for music) are scoured for details about content and category to generate thumbnails and subtitles, data mining prioritizes the utility of this content at the smallest level of the bit to generate useful observations about its potential value. As Kaitlyn Tiffany recently wrote of Spotify’s “more adventurous” Fresh Finds playlist for The Verge: Fresh Finds is one of Spotify’s prized products, a weekly playlist crafted from a combination of two different data inputs: it identifies new, possibly interesting music with natural language processing algorithms that crawl hundreds of music blogs, then puts those songs up against the listening patterns of users their data designates “trendsetters.” Where once blogs and zines helped contextualize scenes and communities, the move to algorithmic processing and NLP sentiment analysis allows data to be monitored on a scale much larger than even the biggest team of writers can account for. As more and more content is uploaded every second, the biggest challenge facing platforms in 2017 is how best to reduce each piece of content to the level of the “thinkable” to help listeners draw connections between related artists. Where once blogs and zines helped contextualize scenes and communities through interviews, reviews, and other cultural criticism, the move to algorithmic processing and NLP sentiment analysis allows data to be monitored on a scale much larger than even the biggest team of writers can account for. Scenes and communities already look very different through a macro computational lens; though, beneath the surface, there’s also undoubtedly some degree of human agency involved throughout this whole process. As the emergence of these “fake” artists clearly distinguishes, platforms aren’t treating all music as neutral; the existence of sponsored playlists and “fake” artists affirms the ways in which a carefully-constructed hierarchy has already emerged in the shadowy relationships between platform and music industry. And with new advances in artificial intelligence increasingly seeping into music production, it isn’t hard to imagine a future with these “fake” artists replaced by new bots and algorithms, where platforms wouldn’t have to pay out to anyone. --- As much as the industry changes, there will hopefully always be an interest in fringe music, and for a new subset of artists, this future has become a source of fascination, not fear. This year, Konrad Springer turned Euclidean algorithms into kaleidoscopic loops of computer-controlled electronics. David Kanaga built an entire world around the “cognitariats” of video game design. And an increasing number of musicians found new worlds in the emergent aesthetics of YouTube. While digital labor in one way or another surely went into everything covered on this site and others, the politics of the internet — especially the exchange between the open net and something mediated by the monied interest of platforms — became a bigger issue than ever before for independent artistry. Despite the Invisible Hand of the Algorithm at play beneath the surface, lo-fi house proved that there are still heaps of incredible dance music just waiting to be uncovered, as YouTube channels like Slav and Hurfyd are still excited to prove near daily. SoundCloud may have laid off 40% of its staff as it approached bankruptcy and changed CEOs, but it still found a way to help a new generation of rappers like Lil Pump and XXXTentacion find audiences arguably bigger than ever before, even if perhaps less conducive to celebrity. With platforms now mediating nearly every aspect of modern life, it’s hard to think that the culture industry would be immune. Yet even in the face of uncertainty, no monopoly in history has ever been as big as that of social media. Beneath its glossy interfaces, platforms are the scaffolding of all of this, the structure by which the “gig economy,” “sharing economy,” and “attention economy” each take shape, but it’s also the underlying architecture for so much human interaction that it’s hard to imagine living without anymore. Yet even as sites reach unparallelled levels of convenience and full-catalogue access, it’s important to recognize the politics at play beneath the surface. With immaterial labor, creative or otherwise, becoming an even larger driving force behind cognitive capitalism, digital files certainly become more accessible, yet adequate compensation and ownership rights still most often favor corporate consolidation. If anything, digital platforms so far have only seemed to intensify and accelerate preexisting strains on the workforce, trading whatever achievements were made in productivity gains and remote labor possibilities for a visibly declining quality of life. Although precarity has always been the case for struggling musicians in some form or another, its noticeable rise across an entire class of cognitive laborers and beyond signals profound changes for the future of work. Platforms are changing everything. If whatever happens to musicians really does happen to everybody, then the workforce has no choice but to resist. http://j.mp/2ko5R62