#at least from billions' writing's perspective. i legally own the character

[illwynd]

Why have so many people in fandom forgotten that ships don’t have to be canon to be valid? It’s like fandom’s greater acceptance in mainstream culture has led to greater stigmatization of fans with niche interests and less popular ships.

Hey at least that makes it easy to ignore their utterly smooth-brained takes!

fr tho part of me wants to argue that there is no way they legit don’t realize how stupid of an argument that is. There is no way that much of the absolute basics of fandom culture is getting lost. Like this is fandom. Where all we do day in and day out is write about shit that isn’t canon. That is how it works. There is no way that people don’t realize that, and despite their attempt to dress up what they’re saying as some serious, high-minded artistic or social concern, it is still quite obviously three ship wars in a trench coat and the only reasonable response is to laugh them out of the room and/or tell them to go read some Walter Benjamin and get back to us.

But another part of me wants to actually get into it because yeah, you’re right, and it’s an angle that does kinda fit all the pieces. like OK once upon a time but not that long ago, when diverse media was rarer, queer fans (for instance) had to look to fandom if they wanted to see the characters they liked in queer relationships, because it just… wasn’t gonna be there in canon. And as that has become less true, I can believe there may actually be some fans who now consider fans’ versions inherently inferior to canon offerings, something we did to make do when there was no alternative but not to be preferred when you have a choice. Why bother to make your own when you can just get it professionally made from the store?

But to my mind, while things are undoubtedly better—I mean, even frickin’ Disney has given us, like, dozens of “very first” gay characters wow!! And they might even write “sex: fluid” on a form that appears for half a second!!—it is kind of… like, idk how to say, but I feel like one of the weirdo trans queers watching the white-collar gays declare the fight for equality over when gay marriage was legalized, like I’m happy for y’all but no we cannot erase kink from pride because you’ve decided you want to blend; the rest of us are still over here waiting to be treated like people, and hiding our weirdness to be more palatable is not the answer.

And how this equates to fandom… there are so many stories that still won’t get any airtime if there are any corporate interests in play at all, whether that’s studios or publishers or online vendors or anything. Only the most indie of indies doesn’t have to please somebody who’s worried about ad revenue and investors. So, sure, there’s a lot more diversity on paper, but that just doesn’t mean that what everyone wants or needs to see is there to be found. In those terms, it’s… still pretty damn constrained, actually! It is constrained by capitalism, which in the current era means a very sanitized, PG-13 version of diversity that doesn't actually challenge the status quo in any way but sells feel-good individual-focused messages for days. And the rising neopuritan strain of fandom coinciding with the rise of “but you have to ship the canon ship!” seems to be all tied up with this (and completely misses the point: that the noncommercial nature of fandom means it can actually be free of those constraints! and folks want to impose them anyway, as if those constraints are some kind of moral standard we need to emulate rather than an accidental failure, a way in which a system has made things worse for the people within it? good gods why??).

Like so many things, it just makes me want to bash people’s heads together and somehow get them to glimpse even a fraction of the impossibly huge range of experiences and perspectives among billions of people, the impossibly huge range of what people can want from fiction and what they can get out of it, and how utterly foolish it is to think that you, Random McJudgeyfan, have any right to dictate anything about what they should enjoy or spend their time on in this hobby we all do for fun.

(Gah, remember when people would just write a ship manifesto and be done with it? Even when they were overwrought and clearly incorrect, at least they were honest about what they were arguing and why. And at least fewer of us had our lips firmly glued to the butts of TPTB. Something something identity as members of a fandom for a specific story and the fan community around it vs. identity as fans of the corporation that produces the canon... there's that old aura again, ain't it...)

[deliciousscaloppine]

Hot Takes Galore: A brief overview of fandom backlashes that influenced fanfiction writing traditions as I have personally experienced them:

In today’s segment I am going to talk about copyright infringement.

First let me preface this by saying I have only ever been in 3 fandoms, starting from 2008 and I have never been terribly active - like this blog has been the most active I’ve ever been in any fandom ever. I am not going to talk about particular fandom dramas because I am pretty clueless about that. What I am going to talk about is that friction between “reality” and online spaces that brought about changes that are still in effect today in the way fanfiction is written and perceived.

In 2008 as I was entering, nearly every piece of fanfiction had a disclaimer about the author not owning the characters, which were the property of Corporate Entity X, or Author Y, and also not profiting from the work in any shape or form. At the time getting money from writing fanfiction was a gigantic taboo, and almost no one did it, or advertised that they did. 

But as I understand through convention culture printed writing did circulate in exchange for money (zines), and at least in Japan one could sell doujinshis (self-published stories and comics, often within the framework of another work) in certain events. Although this was largely considered “illegal” under copyright laws, and artists could be persecuted or blacklisted from entering the industry if discovered. That’s also why fanartists often to this day may screen where and when their work is viewed, and move to take down reposts, or call others to protest if artworks are circulated without permission outside of the artist’s page.

Older fandom people also hated authors that moved against fanfiction, a big case being Anne Rice, the vampire lady everyone - including me - copies when writing about vampires. And now I am going to talk a little about that.

Usually, writers, just sit somewhere cosy and write, and often they have no idea, absolutely no idea, on how to manage their writing properties - usually a lawyer does that, and lawyers want A Lot Of Money (A brief brush with justice and lawyers over a civil dispute I won, cost me 1000 euros out of nowhere, in a single day, and no I couldn’t avoid it because I was the accused one, so I had to appear with some representation). 

So sometimes, quite often, it’s a lawyer that activates a writer or other artist to move against “smaller” copyright infringements, in order to make bank. And if one suffers such a case, they should make it as apparent as possible to the other party that they have no money, and the pressure will go away immediately. But even MORE OFTEN a small copyright infringement, may lead to a sequence of bigger ones, and ultimately the de facto loss of rights from one’s writing properties, and of course revenue. 

And for a lot of published authors, they just don’t know for how long they can publish things - publishing houses that have them signed can close, book sales can drop, tastes change, personal problems, and anything else may mean that they could find themselves without a source of income at any point in the future, while they are aging and becoming more and more irrelevant. 

A very famous case currently, is that of Alan Dean Foster, the writer who has done some novelizations for movies like Star Wars and Alien, and is no longer receiving revenue from that - while his wife is hospitalized and their family needs the income - because Disney absorbed the company that had signed the contract with him, and chose to not honor the previous contract. To make them pay he will have to go into a huge legal battle with a corporate giant, which he cannot afford. But they still absorb income from these novelizations.

But how does fanfiction tie into that, and Anne Rice’s case (which if memory serves right, also went through a series of personal problems, including her husband’s death during that time). 

So for a lot of writers, fanfiction may be that tiny breach that may threaten their rights in the future from tresspases of distribution networks. Meaning, people write vampire fanfiction based on Anne Rice’s work? What if another publishing house used the template of her works (historical settings, bleeding orifices, religious themes, homosexuality and sexual trauma etc) and produced a royalty free series of such works with a team of professional writers that do not own the work - who often have less rights, like not owning the characters, or the storylines, participating in a very small scale, so their payment goes down etc)

And in this way EVERYONE SUFFERS. Big Name Published Author fades into obscurity and goes into poverty and payroll writers are horrifically abused.  

A lot of hobbyists, and hobbyist writers whose sole dream is to be published in some shape or form, do not really care, and do not concern themselves with the legal aspect of creation, or the technical skill that it takes to produce writing on a consistent basis, which can only happen if you’ve got your basic needs covered. So they might see this type of backlash as inherently privileged. 

But it’s not really a privilege, there has been a global recession in basic working rights for everyone, and lovers of fiction don’t have to condone, of course, attacks against them, but they need to put that kind of backlash in perspective. Someone did write the content you enjoy, THEY ARE NOT DEAD YET, and may have opinions on how it should be managed, especially when it pertains to their livelihood. 

It’s a delicate balance that we all must keep in order to keep corporate regulations out of it.

For instance with the recent danmei explosion The Untamed brought forth, Ao3 was banned in China. Now a lot of you might know that this was caused by some real person fic involving the actor Xiao Zhan, which led to a whole other level of drama. But make no mistake this was a political act to protect the interests of the domestic publishing industry as it prepares to do an international opening that will bring in several billions from foreign markets.

Because Ao3 has been expanding as a platform globally it brings about changes, and in many cases steals readers away from traditional publishing, so it becomes unacceptable economically for a bunch of hobbyists to influence tastes, market mores, and create sensationalism around certain properties out of literally the blue. This is not a good thing for a lot of corporate thinking, they set the product and we are supposed to buy it. We are not supposed to go, it would look greater with a bunch of anal, and then put forth a million words altering the character of the intellectual property.

Why you ask? Again, because another publishing industry might choose to imitate the style of danmei fanfics and produce works that hijack readership, or lead to breach of contracts, making an unsafe environment for workers in this industry (Xiao Zhan’s case.)

Nowadays I see more and more fanfic authors coming out of their shell to ask money for writing in the form of donations, patronage and commissions, as fandom involvement is also becoming vastly monetized. The market of conventions coming into social media platforms. A strange more exists still in which while “legally wrong”, as long as money is not asked on the publishing platform (Ao3), it may not count as copyright infringement. But fanfic authors, may still be treated with hostility for this, for not “deserving” to profit from someone else’s properties, or even worse for “stealing” readership. 

For instance a recent argument I have seen from lgbtq authors, is that they remain unsupported by fandom spaces, who often proclaim themselves as lgbtq or lgbtq friendly (something that is not true), but at the same time they are not looking for published lgbtq stories, or authors, or even treat these with open hostility, or a lot of bias.

Fandom is not comprised from “readers” in the traditional sense, definitely not friends of literature, and it’s free, no one really has to pay anything to read a published fanfic.  So it’s a pretty loose demographic with no set characteristics, and no interest in investing time and money in something for long. It’s an online social activity and not a readers’ movement, highly influenced by peer pressure and branding. It’s basically a gigantic group of people who don’t really do anything for no one, and may develop a parasitic connection to intellectual properties (I am sorry peers, it’s the truth). 

And it’s perhaps the biggest counterculture scene at the moment in the developed world. To this day it treats even its own authors with tremendous suspicion, disregard and dismissal, meaning that even if someone can get some money and recognition locally through writing fanfic they are on thin fucking ice at all times for all the reasons but mostly attracting unnecessary attention to themselves and subsequently the scene.  A pattern that we will see is endemic to all forms of fandom backlashes.

So to this day in contrast with fanart, fan writers may not be compensated for their troubles, but may also be ousted from their domestic professional spaces for writing fanfic that may infringe on their intellectual property. 

The thing is, for me, that fandom culture can become incredibly supportive of corporate practices that harm actual people (writers, they are people too) but when they realize that the same corporate practices may be used against them, it’s too late to realize that it’s not a lottery of who wins by crying more, and by the time that happens, a corporation or industry who has used them to do its dark bidding, can stop catering to them  because ultimately they have become again irrelevant once a well defined demographic of  readers and viewers has been secured.

So if you are going to do counterculture, at least do it right. Be respectful of the writers/authors of the content you consume and mindful of their troubles, do not generate public strife that brings in political regulation in favor of corporate interests. Become interested in writing culture, support your fanfic authors with lasting engagement in their work, even if it escapes the narrow confines of a certain fandom. It’s simple. Eat, live, pray, fuck, or something.

[mindthump]

Language supermodel: How GPT-3 is quietly ushering in the A.I. revolution https://ift.tt/3mAgOO1

OpenAI

OpenAI’s GPT-2 text-generating algorithm was once considered too dangerous to release. Then it got released — and the world kept on turning.

In retrospect, the comparatively small GPT-2 language model (a puny 1.5 billion parameters) looks paltry next to its sequel, GPT-3, which boasts a massive 175 billion parameters, was trained on 45 TB of text data, and cost a reported $12 million (at least) to build.

“Our perspective, and our take back then, was to have a staged release, which was like, initially, you release the smaller model and you wait and see what happens,�� Sandhini Agarwal, an A.I. policy researcher for OpenAI told Digital Trends. “If things look good, then you release the next size of model. The reason we took that approach is because this is, honestly, [not just uncharted waters for us, but it’s also] uncharted waters for the entire world.”

Jump forward to the present day, nine months after GPT-3’s release last summer, and it’s powering upward of 300 applications while generating a massive 4.5 billion words per day. Seeded with only the first few sentences of a document, it’s able to generate seemingly endless more text in the same style — even including fictitious quotes.

Is it going to destroy the world? Based on past history, almost certainly not. But it is making some game-changing applications of A.I. possible, all while posing some very profound questions along the way.

What is it good for? Absolutely everything

Recently, Francis Jervis, the founder of a startup called Augrented, used GPT-3 to help people struggling with their rent to write letters negotiating rent discounts. “I’d describe the use case here as ‘style transfer,'” Jervis told Digital Trends. “[It takes in] bullet points, which don’t even have to be in perfect English, and [outputs] two to three sentences in formal language.”

Powered by this ultra-powerful language model, Jervis’s tool allows renters to describe their situation and the reason they need a discounted settlement. “Just enter a couple of words about why you lost income, and in a few seconds you’ll get a suggested persuasive, formal paragraph to add to your letter,” the company claims.

This is just the tip of the iceberg. When Aditya Joshi, a machine learning scientist and former Amazon Web Services engineer, first came across GPT-3, he was so blown away by what he saw that he set up a website, www.gpt3examples.com, to keep track of the best ones.

“Shortly after OpenAI announced their API, developers started tweeting impressive demos of applications built using GPT-3,” he told Digital Trends. “They were astonishingly good. I built [my website] to make it easy for the community to find these examples and discover creative ways of using GPT-3 to solve problems in their own domain.”

Fully interactive synthetic personas with GPT-3 and https://t.co/ZPdnEqR0Hn ????

They know who they are, where they worked, who their boss is, and so much more. This is not your father's bot… pic.twitter.com/kt4AtgYHZL

— Tyler Lastovich (@tylerlastovich) August 18, 2020

Joshi points to several demos that really made an impact on him. One, a layout generator, renders a functional layout by generating JavaScript code from a simple text description. Want a button that says “subscribe” in the shape of a watermelon? Fancy some banner text with a series of buttons the colors of the rainbow? Just explain them in basic text, and Sharif Shameem’s layout generator will write the code for you. Another, a GPT-3 based search engine created by Paras Chopra, can turn any written query into an answer and a URL link for providing more information. Another, the inverse of Francis Jervis’ by Michael Tefula, translates legal documents into plain English. Yet another, by Raphaël Millière, writes philosophical essays. And one other, by Gwern Branwen, can generate creative fiction.

“I did not expect a single language model to perform so well on such a diverse range of tasks, from language translation and generation to text summarization and entity extraction,” Joshi said. “In one of my own experiments, I used GPT-3 to predict chemical combustion reactions, and it did so surprisingly well.”

More where that came from

The transformative uses of GPT-3 don’t end there, either. Computer scientist Tyler Lastovich has used GPT-3 to create fake people, including backstory, who can then be interacted with via text. Meanwhile, Andrew Mayne has shown that GPT-3 can be used to turn movie titles into emojis. Nick Walton, chief technology officer of Latitude, the studio behind GPT-generated text adventure game AI Dungeon recently did the same to see if it could turn longer strings of text description into emoji. And Copy.ai, a startup that builds copywriting tools with GPT-3, is tapping the model for all it’s worth, with a monthly recurring revenue of $67,000 as of March — and a recent $2.9 million funding round.

“Definitely, there was surprise and a lot of awe in terms of the creativity people have used GPT-3 for,” Sandhini Agarwal, an A.I. policy researcher for OpenAI told Digital Trends. “So many use cases are just so creative, and in domains that even I had not foreseen, it would have much knowledge about. That’s interesting to see. But that being said, GPT-3 — and this whole direction of research that OpenAI pursued — was very much with the hope that this would give us an A.I. model that was more general-purpose. The whole point of a general-purpose A.I. model is [that it would be] one model that could like do all these different A.I. tasks.”

Many of the projects highlight one of the big value-adds of GPT-3: The lack of training it requires. Machine learning has been transformative in all sorts of ways over the past couple of decades. But machine learning requires a large number of training examples to be able to output correct answers. GPT-3, on the other hand, has a “few shot ability” that allows it to be taught to do something with only a small handful of examples.

Plausible bull***t

GPT-3 is highly impressive. But it poses challenges too. Some of these relate to cost: For high-volume services like chatbots, which could benefit from GPT-3’s magic, the tool might be too pricey to use. (A single message could cost 6 cents which, while not exactly bank-breaking, certainly adds up.)

Others relate to its widespread availability, meaning that it’s likely going to be tough to build a startup exclusively around since fierce competition will likely drive down margins.

Christina Morillo/Pexels

Another is the lack of memory; its context window runs a little under 2,000 words at a time before, like Guy Pierce’s character in the movie Memento, its memory is reset. “This significantly limits the length of text it can generate, roughly to a short paragraph per request,” Lastovich said. “Practically speaking, this means that it is unable to generate long documents while still remembering what happened at the beginning.”

Perhaps the most notable challenge, however, also relates to its biggest strength: Its confabulation abilities. Confabulation is a term frequently used by doctors to describe the way in which some people with memory issues are able to fabricate information that appears initially convincing, but which doesn’t necessarily stand up to scrutiny upon closer inspection. GPT-3’s ability to confabulate is, depending upon the context, a strength and a weakness. For creative projects, it can be great, allowing it to riff on themes without concern for anything as mundane as truth. For other projects, it can be trickier.

Francis Jervis of Augrented refers to GPT-3’s ability to “generate plausible bullshit.” Nick Walton of AI Dungeon said: “GPT-3 is very good at writing creative text that seems like it could have been written by a human … One of its weaknesses, though, is that it can often write like it’s very confident — even if it has no idea what the answer to a question is.”

Back in the Chinese Room

In this regard, GPT-3 returns us to the familiar ground of John Searle’s Chinese Room. In 1980, Searle, a philosopher, published one of the best-known A.I. thought experiments, focused on the topic of “understanding.” The Chinese Room asks us to imagine a person locked in a room with a mass of writing in a language that they do not understand. All they recognize are abstract symbols. The room also contains a set of rules that show how one set of symbols corresponds with another. Given a series of questions to answer, the room’s occupant must match question symbols with answer symbols. After repeating this task many times, they become adept at performing it — even though they have no clue what either set of symbols means, merely that one corresponds to the other.

GPT-3 is a world away from the kinds of linguistic A.I. that existed at the time Searle was writing. However, the question of understanding is as thorny as ever.

“This is a very controversial domain of questioning, as I’m sure you’re aware, because there’s so many differing opinions on whether, in general, language models … would ever have [true] understanding,” said OpenAI’s Sandhini Agarwal. “If you ask me about GPT-3 right now, it performs very well sometimes, but not very well at other times. There is this randomness in a way about how meaningful the output might seem to you. Sometimes you might be wowed by the output, and sometimes the output will just be nonsensical. Given that, right now in my opinion … GPT-3 doesn’t appear to have understanding.”

An added twist on the Chinese Room experiment today is that GPT-3 is not programmed at every step by a small team of researchers. It’s a massive model that’s been trained on an enormous dataset consisting of, well, the internet. This means that it can pick up inferences and biases that might be encoded into text found online. You’ve heard the expression that you’re an average of the five people you surround yourself with? Well, GPT-3 was trained on almost unfathomable amounts of text data from multiple sources, including books, Wikipedia, and other articles. From this, it learns to predict the next word in any sequence by scouring its training data to see word combinations used before. This can have unintended consequences.

Feeding the stochastic parrots

This challenge with large language models was first highlighted in a groundbreaking paper on the subject of so-called stochastic parrots. A stochastic parrot — a term coined by the authors, who included among their ranks the former co-lead of Google’s ethical A.I. team, Timnit Gebru — refers to a large language model that “haphazardly [stitches] together sequences of linguistic forms it has observed in its vast training data, according to probabilistic information about how they combine, but without any reference to meaning.”

“Having been trained on a big portion of the internet, it’s important to acknowledge that it will carry some of its biases,” Albert Gozzi, another GPT-3 user, told Digital Trends. “I know the OpenAI team is working hard on mitigating this in a few different ways, but I’d expect this to be an issue for [some] time to come.”

OpenAI’s countermeasures to defend against bias include a toxicity filter, which filters out certain language or topics. OpenAI is also working on ways to integrate human feedback in order to be able to specify which areas not to stray into. In addition, the team controls access to the tool so that certain negative uses of the tool will not be granted access.

“One of the reasons perhaps you haven’t seen like too many of these malicious users is because we do have an intensive review process internally,” Agarwal said. “The way we work is that every time you want to use GPT-3 in a product that would actually be deployed, you have to go through a process where a team — like, a team of humans — actually reviews how you want to use it. …  Then, based on making sure that it is not something malicious, you will be granted access.”

Some of this is challenging, however — not least because bias isn’t always a clear-cut case of using certain words. Jervis notes that, at times, his GPT-3 rent messages can “tend towards stereotypical gender [or] class assumptions.” Left unattended, it might assume the subject’s gender identity on a rent letter, based on their family role or job. This may not be the most grievous example of A.I. bias, but it highlights what happens when large amounts of data are ingested and then probabilistically reassembled in a language model.

“Bias and the potential for explicit returns absolutely exist and require effort from developers to avoid,” Tyler Lastovich said. “OpenAI does flag potentially toxic results, but ultimately it does add a liability customers have to think hard about before putting the model into production. A specifically difficult edge case to develop around is the model’s propensity to lie — as it has no concept of true or false information.”

Language models and the future of A.I.

Nine months after its debut, GPT-3 is certainly living up to its billing as a game changer. What once was purely potential has shown itself to be potential realized. The number of intriguing use cases for GPT-3 highlights how a text-generating A.I. is a whole lot more versatile than that description might suggest.

Not that it’s the new kid on the block these days. Earlier this year, GPT-3 was overtaken as the biggest language model. Google Brain debuted a new language model with some 1.6 trillion parameters, making it nine times the size of OpenAI’s offering. Nor is this likely to be the end of the road for language models. These are extremely powerful tools — with the potential to be transformative to society, potentially for better and for worse.

Challenges certainly exist with these technologies, and they’re ones that companies like OpenAI, independent researchers, and others, must continue to address. But taken as a whole, it’s hard to argue that language models are not turning to be one of the most interesting and important frontiers of artificial intelligence research.

Who would’ve thought text generators could be so profoundly important? Welcome to the future of artificial intelligence.

[cannabisrefugee-esq]

(via The Welfare Gnome! It's Like a Sock Gnome Except This One Can Actually Kill You. Ft. Joker (Again))

The Welfare Gnome!  It’s Like a Sock Gnome Except This One Can Actually Kill You.  Ft. Joker (Again)

Cannabis Refugee, Esq.

Advertising / Media / Cultural Conversation

Capitalistic Patriarchal Medicine

Crohn's Disease Stories

Euthanasia / Suicide

Law / Legal / Benefits

December 20, 2019

According to the internet, a “sock gnome” is a mythical creature that pilfers socks.  Presumably it lives in or around the dryer where you put an even number of socks in and get an odd number out.  Sometimes it gets tricksy and spits out an even number but the pairs don’t match (meaning it’s pilfered one from more than one pair) but the usual evidence that you’ve had a sock pilfered by a gnome is that there is one left over that doesn’t have a mate and the missing sock never reappears ever.  This is a real thing (if not a real gnome) and everyone knows what this means.

Well, there appears to be a similar creature that lives at Social Services and pilfers sick and poor people’s applications for welfare benefits.  Or something, idk.  I assume these creatures are related but maybe not since this gnome doesn’t play games: it’s goal seems to be to drive you insane before it literally kills you.  I wrote here before about an application for benefits that went missing, along with a half a dozen other boondoggles that have wasted my spoons and left me scrambling to repeat some administrative process I was barely able to complete survive the first time.

Because while a sick person’s literal inability to jump through bureaucratic hoops is actually the best evidence that someone is extremely ill, someone has decided that only those who are well enough to sing for their supper (or pursue benefits) deserve to eat, as it were.  The first application that went missing was for food stamps, while today I found out that my application to get on a 4 month waitlist to see a doctor went missing 2 months ago and has not been since heard from: although my disability advocate hand-delivered it, the application was never received.

I didn’t know it had never been received since I was instructed to wait for 2-3 months for a phonecall from them whereupon they would then tell me that I had to wait another 4 months to see a provider.  Now I get to start the whole process over again.  Of course, the clock starts, again, from zero: 2-3 months for the application to be processed and another 4 months before I will be seen. And as both Crohn’s disease and high functioning Autism are untreatable and incurable, the only reason I’m even trying to get in to see a doctor is that I need up to date records of medical compliance (not actual therapeutic medical care since none exists) to support my claims for disability.  As if sick people have the time and energy for that.

Just “apply for benefits” then keep applying indefinitely or forever!   Just get showered, dressed, don’t eat or drink anything though because Crohn’s, get somehow transported across town, pretend to act human for a several hours while you are being humiliated, interrogated, starved and otherwise tortured in public, then somehow get a ride back home.  And do all of that without “acting” sick.  Easy peasy.

And truly, bureaucratic incompetence (or a welfare or Social Services gnome) isn’t even worth writing about and I wouldn’t bother writing about it except that it had an unsettling effect on me: I literally wondered, if only for a second, if I had hallucinated the whole thing and therefore wondered if my new disability advocate who had hand-delivered the applications himself, Dave, was even real.  Jesus Christ that was disturbing.  Around Halloween of this year, Dave had helped me complete numerous applications, some online, while he mailed some hardcopies out of town and hand-delivered the rest; the 2 applications that were both hand-delivered were supposedly never received.  One would be understandable, if not acceptable, but both of them?  I was shook.

Very shortly thereafter I realized that the only proof I even have that Dave came to pick me up several times, completed applications for/with me and took me home again is that one application we did online was actually received and has his name and information on it.  Much to my chagrin, they initially returned that “online” application to me in hardcopy to review, sign and return (WTF) but as it turns out, that bit of bureaucratic fuckery actually saved me from something awful — a literal break from reality — and was the only proof I had that Dave and our interactions were even real.  Also, my old disability advocate told me about Dave in front of another person and they both remember it.  (!)  So yeah, I’m legit losing my mind by now but at least I’m not delusional (that I know of). Everything about this is fucking terrifying.

Wait.  Is Dave even real?  Let’s review.

  At some point, I know my readers are going to get sick to death of hearing about this shit and I wouldn’t blame them.  Hearing about how the system truly victimizes people is unpleasant and predictably leaves those who don’t have to deal with it (yet) with the strong impression that disenfranchised people are “victims” experiencing “victimization” which is always, always read as a character flaw, or it is eventually, especially if it goes on for a long time and it often almost always does.  And this material is about as appealing to read as…idk, a book of vintage recipes where the first and second ingredients in every dish are Jello and fake mayonnaise?  Maybe.  There’s a trainwreck quality that’s hard to look away from, it’s interesting (at first) to see how all the various parts fit together (or ultimately don’t) and I suppose it’s possible to have compassion for the vintage cooks who were trying so, so hard to be resourceful and whatnot.

But eventually that person’s judgement will probably come into question and the blame will fall squarely on them if they consistently choose to participate in such insanity, in that case, preparing and serving Spaghetti-Os and sliced hot dogs suspended in savory Jello, or a canned ambrosia Yule log.  (I just watched a video of someone making a canned ambrosia Yule log from a vintage recipe, you can watch that here). Or in the case of a vulnerable person seeking benefits, choosing to consistently be relieved of their dignity and even being (seemingly) willingly neglected and abused.  The comparison is kind of a reach but what I’m getting at here is that it’s not pretty.  The things I discuss on this blog aren’t pretty.

So do I have an actual point?  Actually I have 2.  The first point I will make via another anecdote and is something I learned as a young attorney who was becoming seriously ill: I had been seeing a chiropractor/nutritionist for months to attempt to treat what was becoming unbearable chronic pain and GI issues when my health insurance company started denying his claims.  The “doctor” wasn’t being paid but I was still in disabling pain and his treatments were working.  Kind of. Until they stopped. We had to have “the discussion” which drew out our competing interests: my interest in continuing treatment without a lapse versus his interest in being consistently paid.  (Really, this is where the myth of the compassionate Western healer is always undone: the issue of money.  But that’s a post for another day.)  This discussion is never pleasant and as I learned, is absolutely meant to be ugly.

As a seasoned provider with decades of experience in the insurance game, the “doctor” calmly explained to me that part of the game is to pit the doctor and patient against each other so that they can’t provide a united front against the real enemy: the insurance company.  The goal is to have the doctor and patient part ways angry so that there is no reason to pursue an appeal and the treatment — whether it’s medically necessary or not — simply ends.  From the insurance company’s perspective, the problem (of exposure to liability) just goes away: if the doctor and patient part ways it doesn’t have to expend resources reviewing appeals and no further claims will be made, their exposure drops to zero, and they win.

Get it?  Bad guys 1, good guys 0.  And this, I think, is the dynamic playing out when people get fed up (and fired up) with hearing about what sick and disabled people go through — regular, relatively powerless people blaming and judging other regular, relatively powerless people for being “victims” instead of providing a unified front against our common enemy.  In this case, against our corporate and governmental overlords who spend billions if not trillions annually on “corporate welfare” and destructive black budget programs while reducing, eliminating or otherwise making inaccessible benefits that real people need to live in this shithole they created, not us.  And Big Medicine torturing sick people and deliberately (or leastwise predictably) making us worse.

We all have a choice, don’t we, to pick the correct side and to not fall into this deliberate trap set by the elite, to not go against our own interests, to decline the invitation to support our oppressors while undermining ourselves and our ilk, our own people.  Choose correctly.  It matters.

My second point is this.  I can only speak for myself when I say that I absolutely never wanted to be a “victim” and I spent my entire life and literally everything I had to try to ensure that didn’t happen.  I have written about that before if anyone wants to revisit that part of my journey, but what I haven’t directly said is this: once I had exhausted every resource I had accumulated over a lifetime (which wasn’t much), after I had asked everyone I knew for help and they all declined, after I had failed to cure myself of an incurable disease, I knew what was coming for me because I had spent my entire life trying to avoid it.

My experience as a benefits attorney only underscored what I already knew, which is that there is nothing there to catch most people when they fall, and there is no bottom to the abuse and neglect one will suffer, and literally endless opportunities to be victimized, once anyone, especially an unresourced, unsupported female, is no longer able to control her outcomes and sick women can no longer reliably control their outcomes.  I knew the benefits system would be inaccessible or inadequate, I knew I would be abused and neglected by doctors if I let them, I knew I could end up sick and homeless at the same time, I knew I could end up sick and homeless and raped and pregnant at the same time if there was nothing I could do to stop it, and I knew that once I got sick there was, in fact, little or nothing I could do to stop it.  I knew there would be no end to my suffering as a sick woman under capitalism and patriarchy.

I saw this coming a mile out, and to avoid that outcome I knew I didn’t want and knew I couldn’t handle (and shouldn’t be expected to) and to fulfill a lifelong promise I had made to myself to never “allow” myself to be victimized in this way, I attempted suicide.  4 times.   Four fucking times I took action against myself that was so incompatible with life that by all rights I should have died at least once if not every time but I didn’t die.  Each time I woke to this nightmare that won’t end and I had to go on, dealing with the same shit and with the same hideous constraints only even more sick and even more traumatized than I was before if that was even possible.  And it is possible, isn’t it — it is bottomless.  There is no end, there is absolutely no end to how bad this can and will get for me and for everyone in my position.

And to be clear, I started this blog after what ended up being my final (well, most recent) suicide attempt which was 2 years ago by now.  Get it?  Every single post on this blog was written after that and therefore was very nearly not written at all.  What I am documenting here, I think, is a fairly common experience that is almost always lost to time and tragedy: what it’s actually like to be this seriously, hopelessly ill, how “the system” works against sick people and sick women at every turn, and what it really looks like to have no options.  And while this surely happens all the time, every force in the universe, it seems, is working against most people actually knowing about it.  In fact, the most relateable thing I’ve ever read, the only thing that I have ever seen address these points and describe an experience nearly identical to my own was left behind by an activist/writer/seriously chronically ill woman in a suicide note.  I wrote about that woman, Anne Örtegren, and her suicide note here.  

In my own case, and this is the only reason you are hearing about it, I happened to be a seasoned researcher and writer with a specialized interest in dissecting the insane system of patriarchy, I had a preexisting platform on which to advertise this project and an audience that was open to hearing about it, and despite my best intentions and efforts, and those of everyone and everything else for that matter, where those intentions and efforts were not compatible with life, my life, I didn’t fucking die.  Not yet anyway.  I suspect that many women who experience what I and Anne Örtegren and others have experienced go down for the third and final time before anyone even hears them scream.  And if any of this sounds a little crazy to you, that’s only because it is.  It is completely, completely insane.

[omniversalobservations]

“The Rise of Mash-Up Cinema”

In the opening minutes of Ralph Breaks the Internet, John C. Reilly’s Ralph and Sarah Silverman’s Vanellope Von Schweetz — stars of the film’s 2012 predecessor, Wreck-It Ralph — sit in a sort of Grand Central Terminal for video-game characters and play a round of “I Spy.” “I spy with my little eye, something that is round, yellow, and eats dots,” one of them says to the other. That something is, of course, Pac-Man. There’s a bit of banter about that fact, all of it only funny if you know who Pac-Man is. The bit is predicated on you being at least a little excited by the existence of Pac-Man in this movie, which is not a movie about Pac-Man. He’s making a special guest appearance, one brand hopping into another. That intended frisson of recognition, of wonder that a thing could cross over with another thing, is the foundation upon which the Wreck-It Ralph franchise is built.

As of 2012, such crossovers were a rarity. When critics praised the first film, they took note of how potent the idea was. “It’s impossible not to feel a strong sense of nostalgic amusement, if not sheer delight, at the comings and goings of all these characters,” said The Globe and Mail’s Dave McGinn in a characteristic write-up. “I don’t own an MRI machine, but I guarantee that just seeing Sonic the Hedgehog lights up the Gen X amygdala like a house on fire.” Not just Gen X, either: those younger could marvel at the presence of the host of Dance Dance Revolution, those older could giggle when the paddles and ball from Pong popped up. Street Fighter’s Zangief and Chun-Li waved hello, Q*Bert played a memorable role, and so on. It was a shock-and-awe tactic: viewers were supposed to sit back and wonder, How is any of this legal?

The answer is: it’s legal because, really, what corporation wouldn’t want to have its intellectual property appear in a cheery Disney cartoon that’ll be in front of the eyeballs of millions of consumers? All the House of Mouse had to do was ask, pay the licensing fees, and put the characters into situations deemed appropriate by the copyright holders. Everybody wins. The idea makes so much sense that it’s becoming increasingly commonplace. Indeed, it’s not unreasonable to expect that branded mash-ups are on their way to becoming a staple aspect of blockbuster cinema. It’s not necessarily a cheery thought.

The past 17 months will have seen the release of no fewer than four movies that fall into this basket. First came The Emoji Movie, a saga in which anthropomorphized pictograms ventured through an array of popular apps inside a teen’s phone. Then there was Ready Player One, the most infamous of these offenders, derided for relying on the weaponized nostalgia of an array of cultural artifacts from the 1980s and beyond. Disney’s Avengers: Infinity War brought together virtually every strand of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, including Spider-Man, a character Disney doesn’t own the film rights to but borrows from Sony. These were all hits of one size or another. The market is speaking.

It’s hard to imagine Ralph Breaks the Internet breaking that streak. It’s a decently written kids’ movie with a constant stream of amusing gags and comforting character beats. It offers up the kind of clean whiz-bang CGI visuals that we’ve come to expect in a post-Pixar animation environment. The voice acting is often delightful. But these factors, on their own, can only take the flick so far. What its creators clearly believe is that viewers will be over the moon at the melange of familiar brands that agreed to throw their lot in with Ralph and Vanellope.

There are appearances from game characters, but the real action this time around is in the tech sector. Thanks to a newly installed modem at the arcade in which they dwell, Ralph and Vanellope leave their respective games and embark on a quest inside the internet. The film’s visualization of the world wide web is a gleaming hyper-metropolis of flying vehicles and impossible skyscrapers, something between Tokyo and Coruscant. As our protagonists venture through it, they find all the behemoth brands made manifest: here’s the endless warehouse of Amazon, there’s a tower that Pinterest calls home, watch out that you don’t crash into the Fandango building — and why not make a little pit stop at Snapchat HQ?

“This is the most beautiful miracle I’ve ever seen,” Vanellope declares upon entering the internet, and we are given no reason to disagree. This is the digital utopia that tech CEOs verbally conjure when they attempt to sell us on their agendas, a marketplace of dollars and ideas where everyone’s free to satisfy their desires and escape the disappointments and inefficiencies of fleshy existence. Sure, there’s a brief excursion to the darknet, where viruses and scams lurk, but no brands appear there, and it’s presented as a marginal portion of the landscape. This is not the Internet as it truly is — Ralph encounters no racist Facebook memes, Vanellope never accidentally wanders into Pornhub — but rather as it is sold to us.

The brands are not strictly bits of set-dressing, either. The instigating conceit of the plot is that Vanellope’s arcade game breaks and, in order to save it from being decommissioned, she and Ralph attempt to purchase a replacement part via eBay. The filmmakers could have chosen a generic stand-in auction site, but going with eBay is a win-win for creators and licensors, alike. In this vision of the company’s service, fast-talking, old-timey auctioneers bark at the avatars of potential buyers in a bustling, capacious work space. Ralph and Vanellope don’t have sufficient funds to pay for the part and have to find the cash within a set time period, during which they’re periodically hit with automated reminders that take the anthropomorphized form of a plucky little bellboy (Ralph calls him eBoy). The soullessness of an online transaction is thus replaced by charmingly anachronistic human faces seeking to engage you as a human being. One can imagine an eBay boardroom erupting in delight at an early screening. There would be nothing for them to complain about.

The same goes for all of these excursions into cinematic corporate symbiosis. The Emoji Movie is a curdled yogurt of perfunctory storytelling and Bible-page-thin characterization, but it sure is nice to its beloved mobile apps. The heroic emojis ride a boat through the “music streams” of Spotify, dance their little yellow butts off in Just Dance, and satisfy their sweet teeth over at Candy Crush — and I’ll be forever haunted by my colleague Emily Yoshida’s description of hearing a child at a screening delightedly bellow, “It’s Instagram!” upon the appearance of the beloved photo app. Ready Player One was a binder stuffed near to bursting with pop-culture love letters: the leads hung out in the world of The Shining, drove around in a Back to the Future DeLorean, and fought a grand video game battle royale alongside the Iron Giant, Voltron, and Spawn, all of which accounts for maybe 1/1000th of all the references in the film. Infinity War was easiest to pull off from a licensing perspective, given that Disney owns the film rights to all the non-Spidey Marvel characters therein, and it is what all of these movies aspire to be: a billion-dollar picture that milks every bit of excitement that can come from having its various pieces of IP hang out together.

It’s long been obvious that studios are trying to ape the Marvel model by building their own cinematic universes in which various characters are established in their own movies and then thrown together for crossover appearances. But crucially, no one has succeeded in their imitation attempts. The DC Extended Universe is moving away from interlinked stories, the Valiant universe is years behind schedule, and only the maddest of scientists would say Universal’s monster-filled Dark Universe has a promising future. All of that leaves the higher-ups with a conundrum: how can you synthesize Marvel’s crossover thrills without going through the trouble of building a shared universe that people give a rat’s ass about?

Brand-synergy movies offer an alternative that’s expensive in dollars but cheap in creative effort. If you can’t build out a pantheon of characters that you convince an audience to become familiar with, why not just rent a bunch of properties they’re already familiar with, duct-tape them together, hoist them aloft before the camera, and declare that movie magic has been made? That way, the viewer gets to feel the thrill of seeing people, places, and things that come from different worlds coexist for a moment in time, but you don’t have to put in the work of establishing these properties.

It’s the next level up from mere cinematic adaptation. We no longer feel any particular elation when it’s announced that someone is making a filmed version of our favorite brand — that’s become de rigueur in the nostalgia economy. If you want to feel that old excitement, now you have to see your favorite brand be adapted in conjunction with another one of your favorite brands, and another, and another, until you have a filmic turducken of corporate interests. The ante has been upped, and as long as the big players in Hollywood can play nice with corporate partners, it will only elevate further.

This trend doesn’t have to be a death knell for creativity in blockbuster cinema. A turducken can be baked and seasoned well by the right cooks. The ne plus ultra of this phenomenon actually predates our present trend by 25 years: Robert Zemeckis’s 1988 Disney flick Who Framed Roger Rabbit? In preparation for Ralph Breaks the Internet, I rewatched Roger Rabbit for the first time since childhood and was amazed by how well it holds up. Sure, it gets its fair share of kicks out of constructing a world inhabited by classic Disney animated characters, their Looney Tunes competition, and a cavalcade of other cartoon stars. But their appearances in this surprisingly daring neo-noir are sparing and clever: Daffy and Donald Duck in an increasingly violent dueling-pianos competition, a black-and-white Betty Boop struggling to prove she’s still got it it in the world of color cartoons, a headline reading, “GOOFY CLEARED OF SPY CHARGES,” and the like.

Roger Rabbit uses these cameos as building blocks for story and world-building, not mere showing-off. Okay, there’s a little bit of showing-off — I mean, how cool is it that Bugs Bunny and Mickey Mouse signed a truce long enough to appear together for a gag in the third act? — but for the most part, these characters are present to help critique show business. The toons, disrespected by humans and isolated in Toontown, are stand-ins for marginalized groups (particularly black people) whose labor has fueled the entertainment economy while being exploited by greedy white people who exclude them from the highest echelons of the industry. When we see Dumbo literally working for peanuts, it’s not just a joke about elephants’ preferred diet, but also a way to make our hearts break at the injustice of one of our most beloved figures being nickel-and-dimed by a crass studio chief. There’s just so much good storytelling and acting — not to mention still-impressive integration of 2-D animation and live action — that you can’t help but get caught up in the ride. These things can be done well.

But it seems all too likely that they will be done poorly. One struggles to imagine brands being okay with Roger Rabbit–level subversion these days. It’ll all be focus-group-approved portrayals that advance the joint agendas of the creators and the companies, alike. The temptation to take a dull plot and spice it up with branded guest appearances is simply too strong. Such a process can create an illusion of familiarity and comfort that masks mediocre workmanship, and lord knows Hollywood will take any chance to spray a new perfume on a turd. To paraphrase Orwell: If you want a vision of the future, imagine Luke Skywalker and Jean-Luc Picard fighting Voldemort — forever.

Source: Vulture

(images via YouTube)

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BUSN 369 Full Class International Business

BUSN 369 Full Class International Business

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BUSN 369 Global Business Considerations and The Legal and Political Environment of Global Business Discussions Week 3 All Posts 72 Pages DeVry BUSN 369 Global Business Considerations Discussions 1 Week 3 All Posts 37 Pages DeVry Name the four primary elements of culture and describe why they are important when marketing products and services internationally…. BUSN 369 The Legal and Political Environment of Global Business Discussions 2 Week 3 All Posts 35 Pages DeVry Criminal laws vary extensively throughout the world. What may be a crime in one country may represent permissible conduct in another location. Why are there vast global differences?… BUSN 369 Ethics in Global Business and Control of Global Business Discussions Week 4 All Posts 74 Pages DeVry BUSN 369 Ethics in Global Business Discussions 1 Week 4 All Posts 40 Pages DeVry

Why are people’s ethical characters so important to business and society? In global operations, how do we know what standard of ethics we should use? Should a firm use a difference code of ethics for differing countries? Why or why not?… BUSN 369 Control of Global Business Discussions 2 Week 4 All Posts 34 Pages DeVry

MNEs try to maximize profits. How could MNEs maximize profits and minimize profit volatility at the same time? Organizational structures can help a company fail or succeed. Why do you think that is the case? Is it all about profits? Why or why not?… BUSN 369 Global HR and Labor Standards for Doing Business Globally Discussions Week 5 All Posts 74 Pages DeVry

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BUSN 369 Managing Global Financial Resources Discussions 1 Week 7 All Posts 36 Pages DeVry

• Explain the main sources of finance for international trade and investment. • Distinguish between short-term and long-term finance sources. • Is there one method that is better than the others? Why or why not?… BUSN 369 Accounting and Taxation in Global Business Discussions 2 Week 7 All Posts 32 Pages DeVry

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(TCO 3) Define culture and explain the impact that a culture has on a business operating in a foreign country. Describe the various costs that a business would incur. Provide at least two examples. (Points : 30)

Culture can have a lot of different effects on a business that has moved to a foreign country. Issues such as language differences, pricing differences, and… (TCO 5) Define expatriate. Describe three challenges when working with expatriates. Include in your response a discussion about compensation. (Points : 30)

An expatriate is a person who lives in another country than the one they legally reside in. An expatriate is different than an immigrant in the… (TCO 6) You have recently been promoted to the position of VP of Marketing for a food products business that is considering selling in India. In India, the retail systems are often fragmented and not user-friendly. In addition, wholesalers and retailers have long-term connections with established food suppliers, which will make the distribution process difficult. Describe an appropriate distribution. Why have you selected this strategy? (Points : 30)

I select the intensive distribution strategy, which aims to provide saturation coverage of the markets through the use of all available… (TCO 7) An international business, like a domestic business, would like to minimize its tax liability. Describe three ethical strategies an international business can implement to minimize its tax liability. (Points : 35)

One way is for the company to operate profitable operations in low-tax jurisdictions while they maintaining the costly operations in their home… (TCO 8) Explain the benefits for adopting international accounting standards for investors and for international businesses. (Points : 35)

One benefit is greater comparability, which means that using the same accounting standards makes it possible to compare companies more… (TCO 1) If you are going to work for a domestic business, explain why it is a good idea to study about international business? (Points : 30)

It is important to study about international business even when working for a domestic business because the world is increasingly becoming… (TCO 2) Describe the two basic types of markets and explain which market encourages economic growth and which one limits economic growth. (Points : 30)

The two basic types of markets are capitalistic and socialistic markets. A capitalistic market refers to an economic system where the… (TCO 4) Describe the differences between an international strategy and a transnational strategy. Why would a business choose one over the other? What are the three challenges in changing from one strategy to another? (Points : 30)

An international strategy is a strategy in which the business sells it goods and services outside their domestic market. The main reason for…