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actual-changeling · 1 year ago

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Welcome back to Alex's unhinged meta corner, and today I have something surprisingly not kiss-related—though it is still about the final fifteen because hey, gotta keep the brand image.

I read this post by @goodoldfashionednightingale and began typing a small response. Then I made the mistake of drinking half a litre of coffee on an empty stomach right after taking my adhd meds and my brain began vibrating at the speed of light.

But oh, have I discovered parallels. This, my friends, is about the nightingale, where it comes from, what it means, and what the fuck happened in part 3 of 1941.

Ready? Let's go.

Now, as OP said in her post, s1e3 is important. In the script book, Neil himself says that these flashbacks are where the producers would tell him to cut scenes to save money. They suggested every single one—except for the one he ended up taking out, which was the bookshop opening scene set in 1800. The others are building blocks, you need them to see how their relationship progressed and what kind of important milestones they had.

(side note: author is very miffed that english does not have a separate subjunctive form like german which makes quoting lines way more confusing than it has to be)

The one I want to mention is neither 1941 nor 1967. No, what I want to talk about is 1601. This might be about to get a bit rambly but I will do my best to keep it tidy.

The focus of that flashback is on the Arrangement, yes, but it gives us a lot more information than that.

they both see Shakespeare's plays regularly, maybe even meet in the crowd

Crowley prefers the comedies

Aziraphale does not seem to have a preference, he enjoys the tragedies and presumably the comedies too

there is an oyster woman selling food -> reference to their meeting in Rome when Aziraphale tempted him to try some oysters

Aziraphale reflexively denies their relationship

Crowley might say he is not worried but circles Aziraphale the entire time, keeping watch

they both ask favours of each other and both agree to do them

What stands out to me in relation to what I am about to expand on is the line that Crowley delivers after Aziraphale's little 'buck up'—which Crowley finds adorable btw but that's a post for another time.

"Age does not wither nor custom stale his infinite variety."

Why would he say that? What exactly is prompting this? WHY say that specific line?

At first I thought it might be to tempt Shakespeare because he does commit art theft by just copying that line down, BUT I think there is more to that. So much more, in fact. I am wiggling now because I am very excited about this and my adhd meds are kicking in anyway.

First things first: the line itself.

It appears in Shakespeare's play Antony and Cleopatra, a romantic tragedy, which was first performed in 1607 aka six years after this meeting. Enobarbus is talking about Cleopatra and describing why Antony won't leave her. Her.

Ccrowley uses his—again, who is he even talking about? Hamlet? Shakespeare? Random poetic quote?

No, I think this line is about Aziraphale and it's a code. Right after, the next line from Aziraphale is "What do you want?", meaning that this is their code phrase for 'I have a favour to ask of you'.

Age does not wither nor custom stale his infinite variety

Age will not affect his appearance nor will he ever become boring to Antony. Crowley, who later chooses the name Anthony for himself, tells Aziraphale, an immortal, that he will never age and that he will never grow bored of him.

It's flattery, pure and simple, and it's code at the same time. This establishes the important fact that they might use more of Shakespeare's work as code/already have a system in place (even though he steals Crowley's line for later).

They play their little morality game of back and forth, Aziraphale agrees, Crowley probably manipulates the coin toss, and THEN we find out that the oyster woman is called Juliet.

Why? What is the meaning of that? Why give her a name and that name in particular? Why bring the sexy oysters back into it?

Romeo and Juliet premiered in 1597, so it is safe to assume they have both seen it by 1601, but this is mostly for the audience, not for us-or is it?

Aziraphale gives Crowley puppy eyes until he agrees to make Hamlet popular, and while I don't think Juliet itself is a code word, although it's very interesting that the OYSTER woman is the one with that name (especially adding what we now know about Job), Romeo and Juliet might be.

Yes, the Nightingale song came out in 1940 but the bird has been around for much, much longer, and, as many probably know by now, also shows up in Romeo and Juliet.

This is where I am starting to vibrate at the speed of light because listen to me. Listen.

Crowley is Juliet. Anthony J. Crowley. Antony Juliet Crowley.

(side note: I'm not saying that Crowley chose it based on that—though I am not not saying that—but that it is a clue for us at the audience.)

Why do I think that? In the play, Romeo spends the night with Juliet and then goes to leave as the night begins to end. Juliet tries to stop him and tells him that the birds they are hearing aren't larks, which sing at dawn, but nightingales, which sing at night.

Who is the one always pushing for more? Crowley. He is the one trying to convince Aziraphale it's safe, they're safe to spend time together.

Romeo disagrees with Juliet and says 'I must be gone and live, or stay and die'.

Leave and stay alive, or stay and hell/heaven will punish us. It gets even better though.

We all know how Romeo and Juliet ends: Romeo thinks Juliet is dead, kills himself, Juliet finds him and then kills herself too.

Hey, do you know how Antony and Cleopatra ends?

Antony thinks Cleopatra is dead, kills himself and dies in her arms, then Cleopatra also kills herself—by snake poison; Romeo also died by poison.

The parallels are THERE. They are jumping down our throats! Two tragedies, two sides, several familiar names and phrases, same fear, same ending.

I think by now you can guess how this ties back to 1941.

We do not see how that night ends, but we know it ends. One of them wants to stretch it out, maybe even quotes Romeo and Juliet because look at the setting!

Candlelight, wonderful night they spend together, the threat of Crowley's early demise, and, to quote the play once more, this time Romeo: I have more care to stay than will to go.

Crowley thought it was his last night on earth and went with Aziraphale to his bookshop, to be with him, because he cares more about that than the fact that he will be dragged to hell come morning. Do you remember?

"Expect a legion to come for you first thing tomorrow" THAT is the threat. They have until dawn, just like Romeo and Juliet, which is why she is so desperate for the birds to be nightingales. Fortunately for them, Aziraphale saves the day, BUT there is NO SECURITY. They do not KNOW if a legion will still show up or not. If dawn is a deadline and they will need to fight.

Sure, they improved their chances, but who knows? Maybe they will come for him anyway, it's not like hell is all fair and square.

The best part: it gets even better.

Juliet eventually panics and tells him to go, and Romeo drops a line that huh, sounds oddly familiar, doesn't it?

'More light and light, more dark and dark our woes!'

Remind me, what does Aziraphale say again? Ah, yes. Perhaps there is something to be said for shades of grey.

There is more. Yes, even more. We know the whole rescue relies on a magic trick, a switch. Guess what Juliet yearns for while telling Romeo to go save himself?

Oh, now I would they had changed voices too. While they did not for Romeo and Juliet—they kiss and part—they did for our two. One fabulous switch and we're good.

(side note: Toads? Associated with hell. Larks? Associated with the dawn, yes, but also heaven since Romeo says 'Nor that is not the lark, whose notes do beat the vaulty heaven so high above our heads.')

So, this was a whole lot of information, let's see if I can summarize my thoughts.

I believe the nightingale is a code word that has existed even before 1941 and gained a lot of importance over the years. In 1941, the song is added to the meaning and whatever happened between the two that we have not seen yet, it fundamentally changed their relationship. Maybe they kissed, maybe one of them tried to convince the other to prolong the night but they parted on not-great terms.

The nightingale and the song become a symbol of hope, a goal to achieve, another uninterrupted night, maybe, or an uninterrupted life.

When they part in the final fifteen, it's morning. Crowley points at the sky and says "no nightingales", which at that point has several different layers to it.

No nightingales because their night is over, just like with Romeo and Juliet, and please, please allow me to add another detail, because I am frothing at the mouth over this. The scene I quoted, known as balcony scene, do you know what it is preceded by?

A ball.

Star-crossed lovers defying their sides, falling in love at a ball, getting a hurried, wonderful night together but torn apart by danger of punishment, the nightingale as a dream, as a wish for unhurried time together. Family rejection, torn apart by parents, willing to die for each other so they can reunite in death.

No nightingales. The ball, the romance, is over, their dancing is over, heaven is tearing them apart, and Aziraphale returns to heaven while they are both stuck in a pit of misunderstanding and miscommunication, all bound together by fear for each other.

The thing is, Crowley hates tragedies, he never liked the "gloomy ones", and he does not want them to end in one—luckily, this isn't the end. Yes, they kiss and part, but the play keeps going. We have an entire act 3 to fix what Romeo and Juliet couldn't, to ensure that this is a COMEDY, not a tragedy.

Both Antony & Cleopatra and Romeo & Juliet died out of fear, hurried into making bad decisions because they knew what would happen if their sides were to catch up with them.

Crowley and Aziraphale can reunite heaven and hell with love, not death. This is THEIR story and they are writing the ending. No more day and night, no more deadlines, no more hiding and sneaking about, no more fear of larks and sunshine.

Good Omens will end the way it began: In a garden with two no-longer-star-crossed lovers embracing the song of a lark as well as that of the nightingale.

I hope this made sense to everyone who was no present while my mind started to vibrate itself into a puddle because the thing is I can see Neil doing all of this completely on purpose.

Thoughts? Questions? Additions? Come and join me in my insanity and until next time I have a mental breakdown over this show (probably in like two hours).

#alex talks good omens #good omens #good omens meta #ineffable husbands #crowley #aziraphale #good omens season 2 #go2 #aziracrow #crowley x aziraphale #no nightingales #ineffable divorce #the final fifteen #a nightingale sang in berkeley square

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covid-safer-hotties · 2 months ago

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Also preserved in our archive

I have no clue how this guy hasn't divorced his wife. If my partner looked at me with disgust about anything that wasn't literally disgusting, I'd be googling "divorce lawyer."

by Sam Williams

A week ago, my wife and I went to John Lewis to look at air fryers. As we entered the store, I put on an FFP3 mask because of Covid. My wife looked at me in disgust and said, “Oh, you’re wearing a mask?” I replied, “Yes. There’s a lot of Covid around, and I don’t want it. Do you?”

She responded, “Well, the trouble is, I’m not wearing a mask”.

I said, “Yes, I can see that. I wish you would. The trouble is, every time I’ve caught Covid, it’s been from you. I’m disabled with long COVID, and every time I get reinfected, it makes me really, really ill”.

So here’s my question: does my wife not care?

I want to use this piece to spark a debate about who we are as people. Are we kind and virtuous, or are we selfish and indifferent? Writing an article about what stops people from wearing masks, while I live with the pain caused by my wife not masking, feels like an oddly meta activity.

That’s right, folks: it was probably my wife who gave me Covid in the first place. Although, to be fair, neither of us knew about masking or long Covid back then.

The case for masks amid rising Covid I need people to wear masks or ensure clean air so it’s safe for me to go out—especially in healthcare settings. Yet, most people refuse. I asked my wife why she doesn’t wear a mask, and she said, “There’s no point, because nobody else does.”

I understand the futility in her statement. Many people don’t wear masks simply because they don’t care or because they think Covid is over.

If my wife were a cruel or unkind person, it would be easier to accept her refusal to wear a mask. But in my experience, even many kind people—even those on the political Left—can be cruel when it comes to disabled individuals.

Although my wife has struggled with my disability, she is generally a kind person. In my autistic brain, it seems perfectly logical that she should wear a mask to protect me from airborne viruses. Yet, logic loses when it comes to personal choices and disability.

Misconceptions about Covid and masks People think Covid is “just a cold.” Some even believe masks themselves make you ill. I think people don’t mask because of ableism and because they’ve been conditioned to associate masks with the pandemic itself.

It’s the same conditioning that leads them to blame lockdowns and vaccines for Covid, rather than recognising these measures were designed to mitigate its spread.

When people see me in a mask, they’re reminded of the acute phase of the pandemic. My presence confronts them with an uncomfortable truth: their refusal to mask contributes to the deaths and disabling of others. It reveals they may not be as caring as they like to think.

I wish more people would remember the Covid dead and choose to wear a mask to prevent further loss of life.

Why people don’t mask The biggest reason, I believe, is a failure of public health communication over wearing a mask. The government declared Covid “over,” and most people still trust what they’re told. Many would resume masking if asked, but the government is too afraid of the right-wing media and too indifferent to disability to make that request.

Then there’s the pervasive idea of “health supremacy”:

The belief that only people with pre-existing conditions get long Covid.

The notion that a “healthy” immune system can fight off the virus.

The argument that we don’t need vaccines or other preventative measures.

Some even suggest that “living your best life” and going out for brunch are more important than protecting loved ones. The low mortality rate of Covid is used as justification, with a dismissive attitude towards the elderly and those with long Covid.

Many fail to consider the quality of life endured by those with long Covid or the rising number of children affected. Parents, it seems, don’t care enough about their kids, or they’re unaware that long COVID in children has doubled in the past year.

There’s also peer pressure and groupthink. No one wants to stand out by wearing a mask. “If it were really unsafe, wouldn’t everyone else wear one? Wouldn’t the authorities tell us to mask up?”

When I do convince others to wear masks, it’s usually a flimsy surgical one—barely adequate protection.

The personal cost of not wearing a Covid mask If we continue as we are, everyone will eventually develop long Covid. Those who still mask are only delaying the inevitable because we’re so outnumbered.

I know people who’ve lost friendships and family connections over masking. Others restrict their contact with loved ones to stay safe. Some have even been lied to by family members about masking.

And all because people must have brunch.

It feels grossly unfair to be forced to choose between family and health. For me, it’s not just about Covid. With a weakened immune system, other airborne viruses are just as harmful. Every cold or similar illness sets me back by months.

The fatalist in me whispers: stop masking. If no one else is wearing a mask, why fight it – just let long Covid take me. Every reinfection only worsens my condition.

A systemic failure The government—New Labour or otherwise—has shown little interest in preventing the spread of Covid or developing treatments for long Covid. The societal denial of this reality is overwhelming.

Until we build a society and government centred on community and care instead of selfish individualism, we’re doomed. Is thinking of others really too much to ask?

If only long Covid weren’t an invisible disability. If it caused something visible—like the loss of a limb—perhaps people would be forced to act.

The point of wearing a mask: not just for Covid Here’s why masking matters:

It reduces your viral load if you get infected.

It sets a good example for others.

It shows courage and strength.

It protects vulnerable people, including the disabled, chronically ill, and immunosuppressed.

It proves you have empathy and intelligence.

#mask up #public health #wear a mask #wear a respirator #pandemic #covid #covid 19 #still coviding #coronavirus #sars cov 2

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rmbunnie · 27 days ago

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Something kinda tasteless about the way that alongside the concerns of "Batman needs someone to rein in his aggression/edginess" (mostly a meta concern,) "Robin is a symbol of undying hope right alongside Batman, Superman, and the police system," and "now that the thought's crossed my mind I think being Robin would be pretty sweet actually," one of Tim's points for why he should be Robin at the end of A Lonely Place of Dying is "we need to show the criminals of Gotham that they can't just kill Robin and expect to get away with it!" Because. They can. That's exactly what happened.

Using that line of reasoning, Tim makes the claim that the idea of Jaybin's life as disposable and inconsequential is heinous and bad, his killing something impermissible, but instead of disproving said idea they allow it to become true and devote their energy to making sure it doesn't become widely known as such. By covering his death up, they actually are permitting his murder to go unaddressed and deeming it acceptable, even taking away the opportunity for it to be consequential to anyone outside of Bruce's inner circle by not spreading the news. As much as we say "oh Bruce was a great dad because losing Jason crushed him" and "he almost considered trying to kill the Joker one time," he in all tangible areas did not do anything about Jason's death. Setting aside the question of killing the Joker or not, it's still shown in Batman Year 3 that Bruce's reaction to Jason's death in the time til Tim showed up was to hide away everything Jason owned and carry on with business as usual, a little angrier. Bruce didn't make any changes or actually evaluate anything in a significant way after the warehouse and Jason's death didn't warrant any tangible consequence, that's evident from reading the comic. I know some may disagree, and I acknowledge the room for interpretation, but in order to discuss Tim's reason we have to concede that it is explicitly written into this specific comic as something Bruce and Tim both recognize as fact, because it serves as the foundation that this reason is built on: there is good reason for the criminals to believe there would no punishment for killing Robin based on the actions Bruce did or didn't take in response. The concern about the public realizing there are no consequences for killing Robin wouldn't be reasonable if it wasn't true, if there actually were.

While they recognize that Jason's death came to pass largely without consequence, the fact itself is less of an issue to both Bruce and Tim than letting criminals actually find out that it doesn't have consequence. They know it's unjust, the notion that Jason can be killed without repercussion (and in making an effort to minimize his murder confirm it to be true,) but their concern isn't for what actually happened to Jason or the lack of proper response. At least on the vigilante side of things, the problem is public perception and continuing to uphold an image of Batman as just and diligent while permitting him to ignore injustice against those close to him. There's no efforts taken to actually disprove the idea that killing Robin would lack impact, what Tim proposes is just making it harder to prove right.

I think the best way to word what comes across tasteless for me here (aside from the side commentary on the unstoppable might of the institution of police and how it's an exemplar of heroism) is that beyond Tim's victim-blaming of Jason during his stint as Robin, (discussed in more depth by people who can word it better than me,) in the base text of a Lonely Place of Dying, it is foundational to the initial premise of Tim as Robin that part of his motive for being Robin hinges on accepting what happened to Jason as something that cannot be allowed in their pursuit of justice or go unaddressed for reasons completely unrelated to the actual harm, and then intentionally erasing the event and the way in which it was allowed and did go unaddressed. No matter how much it's claimed in later comics that Bruce was faultless and Jason doomed himself, Tim's Robin came to be at least in part (in-universe) as a cover-up for the lack of action taken about Jason's death, and by extension as an effort to overwrite his time as Robin and an individual entirely. And thought it wasn't the way his character viewed it, Tim wasn't passively complicit in it or going along with a poor grieving man, the intentional and deliberate erasure of Jason as a murder victim and the injustice of his posthumous treatment was part of his opening pitch.

#truly just “we can't let them think we do the thing that we do” at its core #because the thing that we do is bad and not fair like we want to look fair and would have consequences we don't want. so they can't know."#i see too much of people saying Jason took Dick's mantle so he shouldn't be mad at Tim when 1. he wasn't mad at Tim for it. didn't happen #and 2. Jason became Robin because Bruce was lonely and Jason was homeless and Tim became Robin in an effort to minimize Jason's death #Jason worried Dick wanted his job back (implying he would give it up if he wanted) and Tim shamed the dead kid he was hiding the murder of #can we spot the differences?#you can't really say Jason's gripe of “my death changed nothing” was off-base #when one of tim's first points on panel was that they should be giving the consequences of his murder the landlord special #i feel like all of the ways in which they made tim “more likable” were just leaning back into the status quo they branched out from #like “Jason doesn't like cops and believes they fail victims? well Tim thinks they're the good-hearted models for what a real hero is”#“Jason has conflicting opinions about cases with Batman? Tim is trying to bring back the true Batman who works exactly like he always did”#“Tim is nice and sweet and comes from a good family and has been there from the start. he respects what Batman is”#he's nice enough but his character is (meta not in-universe) rooted in a return to the safe classics that bring us good sales #idk why fanon props him up as the sad shunned outsider of the batfam when he is fr designed to maintain the norm and not rock the boat #also it's immensely funny to see Bruce accuse Jason of being needlessly violent over his emotional state as Robin #when not only does Bruce do exactly that and only that when Jason dies but he was doing it BEFORE too!#Oh No! he went from brutal to criminals and forgoing proper investigations to being brutal to criminals and forgoing proper investigations!#jason todd #batman #bruce wayne #robin #dc comics #discussion of tim drake #again not using the character tag because this isn't the most nicies #but i honest don't hate him that much

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fourormore · 6 months ago

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FOUR OR MORE 2024 FICATHON

[Image description: A polyam flag with the words “four or more fic-a-thon” on it. End description.]

AO3 COLLECTION

[CLOSED] THIS EVENT HAS FINISHED. WE ARE NO LONGER TAKING PROMPTS BUT OUR COLLECTION WILL REMAIN OPEN FOR LATE ENTRIES.

It is here! The inaugural event for FOUR OR MORE is live. A ficathon designed to get more fic featuring relationships with four or more people out into the world! Inspired by the Rarest of Rairpairs ficathon, this first event will run from August 15th to October 20th.

GUIDELINES

- Any medium! Any rating! As long as your work focuses on a relationship with 4 or more people, it's allowed! - No minimum or maximum but fills must be complete. - You don’t have to fill something to leave a prompt. The more prompts, the merrier! - Prompts must be for relationships featuring 4 or more people. - You may link to the fill if it is posted elsewhere. Warnings are not mandatory, but you're free to include them if you wish to do so. - You may combine these with other events, as long as the other event allows it. - Small fandoms welcome! - Don't forget to comply with the community guidelines.

Prompts can be found in the comments of the official DW announcement.

FAQ

Q: What kind of works am I allowed to submit? A: All type of fanworks are welcome! Fics, art, podfic, meta, you name it. As long as the main relationship features 4 or more people, it's allowed.

Q: I don't have a Dreamwidth account. Can I join? A: Of course! You don't even need an AO3 account if you wish to post only on tumblr.

Q: My work contains [INSERT WARNING HERE]. Can I still participate? A: Yes. This is a CNTW (Choose Not To Warn) space. Feel free to tag us in your posts #fourormore or @/fourormore and we will reblog your post.

Q: I don't want to see [X] content, can you please remove it? A: No. The only content that will be removed will be that that does not comply with the rules. You can ask us to tag a certain topic for blacklisting purposes and you are more than encouraged to do so, but remember that you can always unfollow if some content upsets you.

RULES

ALL works must feature a relationship with 4 or more people as its focus. All configurations are allowed.

NO LIST

The following posts/comments will be removed from the collection, as they're outside of its scope. - Monogamous relationships (I think this is obvious) - Works that focus on OT3s (may I suggest sharing it with @polyamships instead? - RPF featuring non-famous minors (I will not be checking this because I simply do not have the time, so it'll be on the honor system. Please don't abuse the honor system. I don't want to be removing works just because)

#OT4 #polyshipping #polyships #poly shipping #polyamships #polyam ships #polyam shipping #polyamorous ships #polyamory #OT5 #OT6 #OT8 #writing event #fandom event #ficathon #admin post #fourormore

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iasmelaion · 1 month ago

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I have been afflicted with a terrible curse: tearing through a book series, and upon finishing, seeking out the fandom only to find that most of that fandom appears to be reading an entirely different series than I am, lol. I brought this on myself, to be clear. I think a big part of the mismatch is that it's a genre I'm not that familiar with and that I don't care about/for in and of itself, so I'm coming at it from a different perspective. Also, maybe I'm reading into things too much! But what can I say, a girl needs enrichment in her enclosure, and there's enough meat on this bone that I will be occupied for a while.

All of which is to say, I read through all seven books of the Dungeon Crawler Carl series that are out to date (thanks, free Kindle Unlimited subscription!), and now I have a lot of thoughts and no one who cares about them ;____; I played myself ;_______;

This series is such a hard sell in general, because on the surface it looks like male power fantasy garbage, it's litRPG, and there's a decent amount of mildly obnoxious dude humor at first. But a) it's only slightly male power fantasy garbage, b) it's not tedious litRPG and in fact the genre evolves and shifts into more straightforward SFF the further in you get, which is clever on a meta level and also a relief, c) to the extent it is litRPG, it mostly isn't boring and annoying about it (no stat nonsense for the sake of stat nonsense), d) the mildly obnoxious dude humor is often genuinely funny and to the extent it is obnoxious, there's some in-universe reasoning for that.

Anyway, the premise is as follows: Earth is suddenly and devastatingly mined for its natural resources by aliens. This results in the death of billions: everyone who was indoors is instantly killed. Anyone who was outside gets a chance to enter the "dungeon", which offers a chance for the remaining humans to compete for an alleged chance at freedom and sovereignty if they reach the bottom floor, but it's basically The Hunger Games: a propaganda exercise that's meant to earn money for the aliens running it as a game show, only this is a dungeon crawling RPG rather than a Hunger Games/Battle Royale situation. No one has ever reached the bottom floor. The best result most achieve is to reach the tenth floor, where they can take a deal for some variety of indentured servitude.

Enter Carl, our hero, a former (late 20s? early 30s? don't recall his age, but somewhere around there) Coast Guard technician who is outside when it all happens because he chased after his ex-girlfriend's cat, Princess Donut, a best in show tortie Persian cat. Carl and Donut enter the dungeon, Donut eats a magic treat and becomes a sapient talking cat, and the books follow their struggle to survive and fight back against the cruel and inhuman system they've found themselves in.

Tonally, the series is interesting in that it manages to balance a very bleak, dystopian premise with genuine hilarity and moments of legitimately heart-wrenching emotion. Also, this is not a "lone heroic super cool guy saves and fixes everything" kind of story. This series is interested in teamwork and community in dire circumstances, and the found family of it all is genuinely moving. As a whole, it's just bonkers entertaining. I love when I can tell the author is having a blast, and you can absolutely tell that Matt Dinniman is having an absolute blast.

Anyway, a list of things I enjoy about this series and/or a list of general thoughts, some of which include mild spoilers:

PRINCESS DONUT. i love her. this cat is amazing and hilarious. She's exactly like you'd imagine a prize-winning Persian cat named Princess Donut to be. also, to my delight, she gets to be a fully rounded character. like yes, she's hilarious and often comic relief, but she's also taken seriously, and Carl is absolutely Insane about this cat. He fuckin' loves this cat, and the cat loves him. Also, hilariously, she has higher stats than Carl at the beginning. (In fact, she mostly has higher stats than him throughout, so she's technically the party leader. Which is why their party is called the Royal Court of Princess Donut.)

Donut has A+++++ insulting skills. On multiple occasions, I have lol'd in horror and delight at her savagery. A favorite:

Rezan: Why does that cat always type in all caps?

Donut: WHY DIDN’T YOUR MOTHER DRIBBLE YOU BACK OUT ONTO THE TRUCK STOP BATHROOM FLOOR, REZAN?

lest this give you the wrong impression, Donut is a classy lady. She is a princess, after all. but also she is savage.

Carl! The books are mostly in first person POV, so we're in Carl's head for most of them, and he is a great example of an unreliable narrator. He'll seem fairly generic at first, but stick it out through, like, the first third of the first book and onward for the slow and steady reveal of his Tragic Backstory and also such exciting psychological and emotional issues as: Insane about Donut; claims he "doesn't like drama" while in actuality he is clearly Repressing Everything; secretly an idealist who wants to believe the best of people; deeply committed to protecting people; full of revolutionary, anti-capitalist, anti-authoritarian rage; holy abandonment issues batman; simply Does Not See It when various ladies basically throw themselves at him; generally Barely Holding It Together at all times.

people on reddit, mostly: Carl's stats!! blah blah blah power stuff. me: okay, but why is Carl Like This. let's deep discuss that. Also let Carl have a little breakdown. As a treat.

these books are so wildly, delightfully anti-capitalist, lol. I poked around Reddit and tumblr a bit, but didn't see anyone discussing this series' politics, but that aspect is super interesting to me. The series is very, very concerned with revolution and resistance and the form those things take when very few options are available to the oppressed, plus the ethics of revolutionary violence.

The dungeon AI! This thing is Way Too Online in a gross dudebro way, but frankly, it's still funny with it, and the evolution of the AI's character is fascinating. Also, I regret to inform you that I do find it extremely fucking funny that the AI has a thing for Carl and his feet. This is wholly hypocritical of me: if Carl was Carla, and the AI made the same comments, I'd have bounced. But what can I say, comedy is about subversion, I guess.

PREPOTENTE. MY PRECIOUS WEIRDO GOATMAN CHILD. Prepotente was a goat; upon entry into the dungeon and eating a magic pet treat, he becomes a goat man type thing, and he spends much of the series as one of the most dangerous and skilled dungeon crawlers, along with his "mother", the shepherdess Miriam Dom. he's a total fuckin weirdo who screams a lot for no reason and i love him. he better fucking survive the series, i swear to god.

one running theme of the series that I love so much is that Carl does not give up on people, and he does not write them off. He often runs into fellow crawlers who, if he was being bloodlessly practical about things, he should have bailed on. They're people who aren't prepared, who haven't leveled up enough, who aren't likely to survive much longer. But he doesn't abandon them, and he doesn't assume they can't get better. He sticks with them and helps them, and they help him. It's about found family ;____; they all love each other so much ;______;

MORDECAI!!! he's a changeling skyfowl and the team's game guide and later manager, and is a former crawler who took a deal. This is supposed to be his last season in the crawl, before he's free of his indentured servitude. he is Dad Shaped. automatic dad. there is in fact something quietly devastating about his Dad Shapedness.

There's a whole super interesting thing going on with the dungeon NPCs, and how we start out assuming most of them aren't "real". unsurprising spoiler alert: they may have been created by/for the dungeon, but many of them are very much real, and once they realize the position they've been put into, they're pissed.

i truly have no real idea where the series is going with its running theme about parents and children, and the protection or lack thereof of children. Our most heroic characters are consistently shown protecting and caring for the NPC children, even when it's at great cost to themselves.

everything to do with the Dungeon Anarchist's Cookbook, the secret book with writing from prior crawlers that Carl is given, makes me Emotional. I'm honestly shocked the whole Cookbook was never planned, and that it was a result of Patreon votes. It's hugely important in the seventh book, not so much on a plot level--I can see how Dinniman could have gotten to some of these same plot beats without it--but on an emotional and thematic one. There's something so affecting here about the continuity of resistance, of finding hope and strength in the people who came before you, of planting seeds you water with blood and that you may never get to harvest, and the sheer, furious love of the whole thing.

so apparently Dinniman is a pantser when it comes to writing. Clearly, he's having fun, and it's more or less working out so far, but it does make me concerned about his ability to stick the dismount. I saw in an AMA that he likened it to building a spaceship with legos versus building it with a plan, and that he has fun writing himself out of corners. That's all well and good, but some of the things I'm most interested in this series are the overarching themes, and it makes me wary of those themes not getting a proper payoff. I guess I should just enjoy the ride, and accept that there will almost certainly be many loose ends.

On a meta level, I find it very funny and ironic that when I took a look at the reviews for the seventh book, I saw some people complaining about the absence of the more "entertainment" and "game" aspects of the series: no interviews with the outside, no "character sheets" for Carl, fewer big fights for Carl himself to take on, the AI taking on a more active 'deus-ex AI' role. Because in-universe, the dungeon crawl is no longer entertainment. At this point, the crawl has become an actual war, and the game genre it takes on--4x strategy--reflects that. Carl and the crawlers' choices have increasing ramifications outside the crawl, where actual war is breaking out at least in part as a result of their actions. The AI intervening more and more often to put its finger on the scale is part of the conflict; it's fighting this war as much as the other characters are, if with still inscrutable motivations.

This is in fact one of the central conflicts of the series: to what extent is this still a game? Has it ever only been a game? The crawlers and NPCs are in fact fighting for it to not be a game: they're saying "my life is real, my suffering is real, and if you won't acknowledge that, then you're coming in here with us to fight and die too. Not just a game anymore, is it?" And on another side of the conflict, you have the AI insisting that this stay a game, something with rules and a narrative and at least an attempt at fairness, however much the AI manipulates those things.

It seems like there's something of a genre shift going on with this series. As a reader who's not particularly interested in or invested in litRPG in and of itself, I'm fine with it shifting to being more straightforwardly SFF, and in fact, I think that's an interesting and fun choice on a meta level: the more the crawlers and the AI break and change the game, the more the genre of the series itself shifts.

#dungeon crawler carl

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apollo18 · 1 year ago

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Not enough of the concept of Billy being nerfed by magic/god bureaucracy rather than limiting his abilities for plot alone. Like ex: he’s only allowed to use his abilities to a point that maxes out with the abilities of the most powerful people on that planet to prevent a champion from being OP or disrupting any cultures with a strength/battle based system of government and starting a god war on accident with that planet’s deities.

This is why people confuse him with a kryptonian, he typically has the same strength levels as Superman and gets restricted to some of the abilities they have in common because Superman happens to be the strongest hero he’s around at a given time and doesn’t do magic.

Anyway here’s billy info dumping to unnamed members of the league:

“So you’re not just holding back on Superman when you’re sparing or dealing with him on red K, you physically can’t be stronger than him? Why? What sense does it make to have a ‘champion’ that can’t be stronger than the strongest person in the room?”

“I know you don’t understand my whole deal and stuff and honestly the books plus Solomon’s wisdom is really complicated so I only halfway get it and there’s people present who think the whole ‘gods and goddesses’ thing are bullshit or just metas who were worshipped and don’t understand interplanetary and inter dimensional god politics so… uh?”

Okay, got it! Think of it like this. It’s my biology going ‘hello look at me, I do not threaten your position in the hierarchy or your followers’ but I also will not be subjugated by you.’ But you guys don’t really do that and your gods don’t mess with earth a lot so it kinda hinders me when you need more muscle than- like- Sups can provide and there’s a being without innate or holy abilities causing trouble.”

“Oh man. Is that what your beef with Black Adam is about, biological hierarchy bull shit.”

“Oh no, I was literally built to kill him but I don’t want to do that- but also hitting Adam feels really good because I was designed to kill him so… yeah… ,”

“… designed?”

#billy batson #dc captain marvel #Shazam

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existentialterror · 7 months ago

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ARG notes: ZampanioSim

Okay, a work this metafictional and also that (I think) responds to audience interaction is going to need a high-caliber gimmick. Hang on.

...

Alright. Hey guys, catfishAnabasis (Light) here, taking a moment out of my surprisingly busy day tell you about a weird thing on the internet.

ZampanioSim is an intricate and brainbending ARG. It takes direct inspiration from Homestuck, The Magnus Archives, and House of Leaves, as well as the creator (JR, jadedResearcher/justifiedRecursion)'s previous canon of Homestuck fan-work and games. A major theme is "unreality".

HERE IS YOUR TRAILHEAD.

Feel free to ignore the rest of the writeup and check it out now.

I know very little about JR's other work, right now. However, among my many INTERESTS, I am something of a TMA ENJOYER and an AMATEUR INTERNET INVESTIGATOR, and if I were in a HOUSE I like to think I could LEAVE it pretty easily.

So, yeah. I figured I'd just describe my experience of this rabbithole and maybe you'll want to check it out too. I'm sure this will only scratch the surface.

ZampanioSim is structured as a nested labyrinth. In the same way that:

Homestuck is a webcomic framed as an interactive adventure game about an account of kids playing a video game (Sgrub) that doesn't exist, and

House of Leaves is a novel framed as a found scholarly discussion about a documentary (The Navidson Record) that doesn't exist about a house that doesn't exist,

ZampanioSim is a game-based ARG framed as an attempt to simulate a game (Zampanio) that doesn't exist based on a found FAQ of the game (that only sort of exists).

More concretely, ZampanioSim features a lot of nested browser games, as well as audio, narrative, an actual audience-interactive narrative game (the way Homestuck was originally), external websites, and more.

The starting point is, of course, the House:

ZampanioSim takes full advantage of the browser as medium. There is content accessible via the address bar, developer tools, cookies (I think), the developer console, and probably more that I haven't realized.

Like, to give you a sense of the kind of rabbithole we're dealing with: Here's a map I made of the House outset page today:

...And I say today because the House does change over time. Today (a friday) when I clicked on the EastEast route, for instance, I was greeted by this grotesquely distorted version of Rebecca Black's "Friday":

Okay, let's talk about what we have going on in the House map, starting from the doors and working out. (I've given some of these my own names for clarity.)

North

The Classpect Menu Game:

This, I think, is the main titular "ZampanioSim". It's the part that's intended to recreate the experience of a supposed old computer game, but by and large, you only experience the menu screen, not the rest of the gameplay. You can select attributes (based on Homestuck's Classpecting system + the Magnus Archives fears) gain points and select skills and (depending on your seed) eventually "beat the game". It's glitchy, it's a hellscape, there's an entity or two in the menu system that are trying to talk to you. It's great fun. Contains links to a rabbithole (which you can plug passwords into for more secrets) and + some secrets to you in the credits.

(While mostly the aspects seem to add flavor to the menu options, there's a special class called "Waste". This appears in neither TMA nor Homestuck, but comes from a fan or meta-joke that Andrew Hussie and Toby Fox, the writer and a major composer for Homestuck, are classpected* as the "Waste of Space" and "Waste of Time". By telling it you're a "Waste"you're more likely to get weird glitches and new options in your Classpect Menu game run - there's a fun recurring element in some of these games about the game changing depending on who you tell it is playing. I learned about the Waste trick from JR's youtube channel. Also, setting your birthday as Halloween might also do something.)

I have no idea if the different iterations of games here are substantially different. I haven't checked. There's a lot going on. "There's a lot going on" is a good summary of ZampanioSim overall.

*( Uh, classpecting is this in-Homestuck personality system where game players are a [Role] of [Element].)

Eyedlr: Eyedol Games is the company that supposedly made the original game Zampanio. Eyedlr is their spambot-filled tumblr clone, which also has secrets in it. (Actually, just assume everything has secrets out.)

East

The House Exploration game: It has the same setup screen as the Classpect Menu game, but this one drops you into a game with visuals: An infinite(?) procedural house you navigate with imagery derived from your choices.

Peewee's exploration game: When it's not blasting Rebecca Black's Friday But Weird into your ears, the EastEast route is another procedural infinite(?) maze, except that you type directions to Peewee, a snake guy with goggles who also moves around on his own. This one also introduces named characters we learn more about elsewhere.

Bathroom text: Procredural bathroom maze, unless it's just some text telling you to take a break. ZampanioSim really likes telling you to take breaks and hydrate, so that you can better appreciate and spread Zampanio.

Absolutely not. Also, I'm a busy woman. I have to finish this writing summary first.

South

The Train Game: a game - notably not a maze - where JR walks down a series of train corridors and monologues to you about the game and the "reality" behind it.

The mazecrawler game: You tell a little guy how to navigate an infinite(?) maze - and if you choose right and open up your browser's Console menu, you can learn a great deal more about

West

The only West route is AdventureSimWest, which is an actual text narrative game where readers submit commands that the author incorporates into updates - just like early Homestuck. It's still going. The logs are extensive but it's mostly about the antics of a new employee at Eyedol Games, which is stuck in a time loop.

Other

Then there's some other scattered clickable text -

The truth about alt: An exchange between two shapeshifters.

A transcript: A dialogue between two people who apparently work for Eyedol Games.

The lower left leads you to an apparently rotating selection of other Zampanio-related games. I particularly liked NagaGirlfriend.

None of this is even the stuff you can reach this page exclusively through the Console menu.

And much more

And there's a lot of stuff that's NOT branching directly off of the house. There's other things you find buried in links or by searching - a discord and a wiki that both straddle the line between in-character and -out, Archive of Our Own content, a youtube channel, the Eyedol website...

Is there a "story" to ZampanioSim?

Yes.

Like I said, there's a lot I haven't seen yet. But what's going on is something like this:

JR is attempting to recreate this game, Zampanio, of course, and tap into its fanbase. The game Zampanio is an infectious meme. Eyedol Games is a transdimensional company that is perhaps both trying to spread the meme and contain it, by removing its spores, e.g. the Zampanio FAQ - the thing that inspired JR to make ZampanioSim - from the internet.

Various parts of the game recognize that they are fictional and may identify you the reader/player as "Observers".

There are a few recurring characters who have gotten swept up into the meme, either working for Eyedol or trapped in ZampanioSim or both, and have followed it from variant to transdimensional variant.

(this is an image from homestuck. it's a reference.)

Japes aside, this is a brain-bending, very cool, and completely ludicrous unfiction project which I believe is made mostly by one person with an unparalleled hand for web sorcery, whimsy, and vibes. The vibes are so good.

The host website, Farrago Fiction (which AFAICT is a multi-person project), hosts a number of often-homestuck-inspired weird games and simulators.

I know ZampanioSim is now a few years old and is still actively updating. Consider checking it out.

2024-08-24 edit: Part 2!

#zampaniosim #creepy shit #light's arg notes #arg #unfiction #light writes #homestuck #house of leaves #light listens to the magnus archives #zampanio

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mostlysignssomeportents · 2 years ago

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This is your brain on fraud apologetics

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.]

#pluralistic #victim blaming #fraud #going meta #douglas rushkoff #ad-tech #local search #wix #amex #thai food #business #rent-seeking #entrepreneurship #passive income #chokepoint capitalism #platform lawyers

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astarless-fights · 24 days ago

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For those on tumblr not in the know, Mark Zuckerberg lobbied the United States Congress to ban Tiktok from the United States after proving difficulty to overcome the loss of users to Tiktok. Through gifts and stocks, the House Energy and Commerce Committee successfully banned Tiktok. It needs to be very clear to those who have not been able to pay attention: The Committee interviewed Tiktok's CEO with questions that did not relate to Tiktok but instead to META. This precedent is very alarming. What is fine for one, is not the other- even if the other isn't participating.

Some key points:

Tiktok stores (stored, depending on what day you see this) all United States data on US soil in Texas and gives backdoor entry to the NSA. - This is important for the United States to check for the bad people on all platforms.

Listed members on the committee asked questions of activities Tiktok does not participate in but all of META does. Giving us immediate confirmation our government is fine with domestic platforms selling our data without consent.

An incredibly concerning detail showed its face while this was going down. All META platforms have access to every device's data using the same WIFI you connect to and they use that data.

META has given me the urge to puke for several years but last year was a moment of true question of how I move forward in a world that already seemingly has my data, even if I did not consent to the passing around of it.

When META decided to include AI in their system after investors seemed to require everyone to do so, the question of safety crossed my mind. META had announced the platforms were using everything you produce and have produced (posts, videos, photos) to not just train their own AI system, but they were also sending your information to a 3rd party as well. This included a setting toggle for consent that was default ON.

When the masses found out and toggled it off, META redesigned the Settings page to make it harder for you to find the consent option. They also made it so it wasn't just a "toggle" but now you had to write to them.

When the masses found out again (because we don't want this) how to get there, they redesigned the settings page again, hid the consent deeper, and required you to write to them with proof they even used your information... So that you can consent or not to consent to use their information.

I have been on this app since 2008 and relied heavily on this website when I was 14 while trying to escape the all seeing eyes I was friends with on Facebook. During this, tumblr became an amazing news resource for bills about to pass that endangered every bit of what the internet is known for: free speech and free of choice.

Back then, this site was all I had. I worshipped Tumblr for giving me emotional outlets and outside opinions during a very rough and miserable transition as a teen. So when Tumblr shared Bills trying to regulate our internet that would prevent reaching sites like Tumblr, I campaigned to my 150 student school and the two 1000 student public schools near me to reach out to our representatives, especially those 18 year olds waiting for a new horizon. With this, our representative and our governor in South Carolina, reached out to us at the time, letting us know they didn't realize how loved these spaces were and that they needed protecting. Communicating knowledge is powerful.

Having sites like Tumblr and Reddit circulate incoming bills like this was required to know about it. No one on Facebook saw any of that coming and they definitely won’t find out now with Zuckerberg making sure of it.

I have always seen the importance of internet regulation but for whatever reason (propaganda pushing) the People who work for us (reps, congress, the house, the committees) always wanted to pass bills that prevented people from talking and accessing new information.

The Tiktok ban passed by our government is not a good sign for anyone who uses the internet. The total amount of Americans who use this app to create community, careers, businesses, market their art, is at 102.3 million. That's a shit ton of businesses and communities that just end on the 19th of January.

And you might think, well why wouldn't they backup to another platform and I am sure many will, but Tiktok has such a unique algorithm that actually pushes businesses into the limelight and because of that, there is a massive community there that uplifts businesses that are falling behind. Currently, there is no other algorithm on US soil that compares to just how much it uplifts accounts that don't do well starting out. We lost so many creators after Vine because no other app could translate the humor and creativity. It's going to be a bigger loss after Tiktok goes because of that same issue.

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If they are willing to ban a site that is very minimally connected to China, an incredibly huge resource for Americans for everything and anything and all for an increase in paycheck, what else will they be banning in the future when money is waved in their faces by one entity? They already went for one where the American people are heavily reliant on and one that is supposed to be protected under free speech and free of choice. If META wants something dead, give it a year, and it will die.

The Internet and social platforms have always been protected by free speech and freedom of choice. But these aspects have also been on the chopping block since the wild wild west of internet. I fear, this will not stop with just Tiktok.

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allpiesforourown · 2 months ago

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As a shizun lover i trust your opinion i wanted to play the new infinity Nikki game with my sister is it good??? Does it have coop? She wanted to start it together but then we found out that it is a gacha so we were a bit put off by that.

Omg infinity nikki is a gacha but it's 1000000% not like most others. Most of the clothes are craftable, and there's literally 5 star dresses you can just buy in the game with regular gold. Ulike other games with wishing systems, you can select exactly what you want instead of getting something random

Also there's no need to actually pull. Yeah you can style competitively but there's no meta or anything

My fav thing about it though is that Nikki is completely customizable and she stays that way. No matter what clothes or skin colour you give her, the character model stays consistent during cutscenes. Idk about the co op aspect but the game is VERY free to play friendly

Also they were not kidding about the game being cozy.. cannot tell you how often I have to stop in my tracks to stare at some super small detail. Literally had to stop at this small table off to the side of the room and take a picture because the tea and baguettes made me drool

#infinity nikki

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puffin-smoke · 2 months ago

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Things have been really goddamn negative lately. why are we all arguing. the block button exists. here are some headcanons because i say so and i need to clear out my drafts

Misc Redacted Headcanons!

Hush 👁👁

Doesn't really get kissing, so will normally just nose boop Doc. Like a cat. Does this at random intervals.

Wanted to practice baking one time, so grabbed a cook book and decided to make everything in it. And I mean everything. Doc came home to an apartment with cake on every surface.

Cannot take movies seriously but really likes reading. Will sometimes read to Doc before they go to bed.

Does not sleep UNLESS he's in the sun. Then he'll just stretch out like a cat. He takes up the entirety of Doc's sofa.

Most of my ideas for him is just. He acts like one of my cats.

Really good at puzzles. And lego. Can do a thousand piece puzzle in about twenty minutes

The only man ever actually.

Damien 🔥🖋

Ive said that I think Huxley reads to Damien before bed, but have I said that Huxley reads alot of romance novels??? Well now I have.

Damien will copy some of the stuff that happens in the novels, if he thinks Huxley might like it. He doesn't really get it, but seeing Hux light up when he brings him flowers is worth it. Is trying to branch out on how he shows affection. Very different love languages, these two.

Just thinks "oh, this is what people do in relationships. Should I be doing that?" He's just me.

Also really likes puzzles. Jigsaws to be specific

plays stardew valley HEAR ME OUT

He and Dear have very different playstyles; he tries to optimise efficiency, Dear has the most cottage core farm known to man. So ever since he learnt that they play aswell, they habitually get into arguments over what the best way to play is

"Why are you laying out your trees like that it looks ugly-" "Its to keep away the debris." "But it looks bad." "... you look bad."

Geordi 🧠🕹 (look there was no tetris emoji-)

Cutie patootie.

Listens to asmr rp ALOT because 1- its meta, 2- it helps calm him down.

Gets really freaked out about going to the cinema, so when he watches movies at home it'll be a WHOLE ASS PRODUCTION

He dims the lights, he gets about a dozen blankets, a whole ass speaker system, the nice goddamn popcorn

Cutie has lost him under all the blankets before it was scary

heterochromia :3

One brown eye, one green.

I love him. Cutie get yo ass out of the way

#redacted headcanons #redacted geordi #redacted hush #redacted damien #redacted huxley #redacted fandom #redacted audio #redacted asmr #redacted verse

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gumy-shark · 6 months ago

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ritsu and the divine tree

ok so we mock ritsu for his “i need to raise my blood sugar” moment where he got brainwashed. and we’re right it’s really funny. but also im going to zoom in on it a little- especially since i think he was already partially brainwashed before even meeting up with mob and reigen (or, at the very least, would’ve never made it to the tree, blood sugar or not).

first off, look at his reaction to being asked to help them destroy the Tree (well, we don’t see the question itself, but i think we can very safely assume that’s what mob and reigen asked)

^ on the surface level, ritsu seems Very apprehensive about getting rid of the divine tree because of the magnitude of the task- there’s no way even his brother could lift something that big! and on the surface level, that’s probably what it is- but also, considering what he JUST saw psychic powers do in the s2 finale, and factoring in his otherwise unshakable faith in Mob’s abilities… let’s just mark this one down as a yellow flag.

^ then we see ritsu distracted by someone handing out divine tree candy across the street. neither mob nor reigen notice that interaction, but it catches ritsu’s attention. even when reigen directly talks to him, ritsu is still looking at the people talking about the divine tree.

^ he is also noticeably defensive when reigen gets in his face, but considering his past interactions with reigen i’d say this has a chance of being normal. mostly only just putting this bc it’s ritsu once again reacting defensively to someone aiming to destroy the divine tree, and because it’s a funny screenshot.

^ next, we see ritsu thinking back to his student council meeting, and his confusion at everyone voting for a prayer time. things to note here: the psycho helmet religion is on ritsu’s mind, ritsu asks mob his opinion on the psycho helmet religion (which is how reigen’s brainwashing was revealed/cemented later on), and ritsu was exposed to (and confused by) “the faith of the masses”- one of the vectors of the Divine Tree’s brainwashing. (and looking back, we see this vector affecting him earlier in this scene as well)

AND THEN. reigen thinks about thinks, and concludes that the best course of action is to immediately destroy the divine tree.

^ it is NO ACCIDENT that ritsu’s headache hits right at that moment. reigen says “let’s harm the divine tree”, and the passive brainwashing that ritsu is already falling into reacts to that idea. there is a struggle here, between Dimple, ritsu’s desire to help his brother (and the little bits of respect he has for reigen), and whatever psychic immune system (<- gumy specific term that i will elaborate on if asked) ritsu has at that point, and it’s all happening in his brain.

^ this is the bit. ritsu has a headache, decides, “i need to raise my blood sugar,” and eats the divine tree candy.

Blood sugar? really? as far as i remember, ritsu’s blood sugar has never been a thing before. something’s not right here- especially not with the timing of that headache. not when his first response is to think to eat the divine tree candy.

on a meta level, ritsu’s blood sugar is an excuse for him to eat the divine tree candy and get brainwashed. in-universe, it is still exactly that.

(after all, ritsu’s headache is happening because he’s fighting the divine tree, and the second he gives in to that pressure is the second his headache stops.)

^ after ritsu eats the candy, he immediately seems happier, and hands some to mob and reigen. freaky as hell i love this arc man

#mp100 #mp100 spoilers #divine tree arc #ritsuposting #this is definitely one of my weaker ritsu posts but who give a shit!!!#anyways divine tree arc i love you. what a narrative!!

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stagefoureddiediaz · 10 months ago

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Costume Meta 7x05

Hello, Hey, how we all doing??

Ready for another super long meta post??

There is so much to talk about this week - admittedly mostly Buck and Eddie related, but there is also plenty going on for Hen and Karen as well.

No Bobby this week as we only see him in uniform, and only the one costume for Athena as well. I also want to say that I am not doing any of the costumes from the Madney wedding that we saw at the end of the epsiode - I want to give them the space they deserve and I will probably write a separate pre episode meta for those costumes specifically! All I will say is Maddie looks stunning, Buck in white - hello! and Eddie in a just a collar making him look like a pink priest - hilarious!

The rest is under the cut as always 😎

Let's start with some of the guest characters.

Alien Hand syndrome man continues to prove the check means bad things theme, which makes me happier than you can ever know!!

Then we have Deidra in her very bright pink coat. If you read my promo meta for this episode you will have read a fairly sizeable section at the end on my thinking about the use of pink in this season (going to make a separate post during this hiatus so its all in one place). All of the times we see it in this episode, play into (and I guess prove) my thinking. Deidra is acting with good intentions and while I don't think she's naive or innocent in the strictest sense of the word, she is perhaps continually being naive in thinking that not revealing Mara's past is the right way to go (don't come at me about child protection etc I am fully aware of what the real world laws state, but this story arc really highlights the fact that in trying to protect children who are at risk and in the system, they can also cause ongoing harm if things are not taken on a case by case basis - its a whole other essay that I am not getting into here).

Then we have Mara herself who is never without pink - namely her pink blanket. The pink plays into the theme of innocence especially with Mara and while she may not be innocent of the act of maiming Denny, her innocence goes much deeper. Its meant as a very clear signpost of the innocence of childhood - that pink blanket and her clinging onto it is a symbol of her clinging onto her childhood, despite the fact that she has gone through a terrible loss and trauma. she is still a child and the show is clearly going to play into the idea that as she settles into the Wilson home and is able to work through the trauma, her need to cling onto her childhood in this way will diminish and we'll see her slowly become less attached to the blanket. We already have signs of progress with the colour journey her tops have been on - lavender, pink and then the turquoise one at the end. Lavender is also a colour associated with childishness or lethargy, pink the colour of innocence, and childhood. While turquoise is a colour of calmness and clarity. its signalling HenRen's breakthrough with Mara and that she's growing and beginning to feel secure.

Hen and Karen

Hen and Karen go on a real colour journey this week - I'm doing them together (along with Denny) because they very much work in tandem clothing wise (and also because I was running out of pictures again - whats new there!)

So first up we have Karen in this beautiful dip dye ombre dress in purple, pink and mauve. it also has this drip staining pattern which has deliberately been created during the dying process. The lavender at the top of the dress is representative of hope and serenity, this is Karen in a great place - about to expand her family and fulfil a dream. The pink as I've said is all about innocence and naivety - more innocence in this case - both the new baby being innocent and Hen and Karens innocent hopes for their future. The dark mauve at the bottom of the skirt - eating into the pink is such a choice - gathering storm clouds, foreshadowing the turmoil about to come - taking away the innocent hope. mauve can be standoffish and withdrawn, and in this context those are great descriptors for Mara and her struggles that Hen and Karen will need to help her work through.

Hen's in cyan blue trousers - which is a colour associated with clarity and balance. whilst the cream, black and blue jacket with stars on is the beginning point for a theme that runs through the Wilsons arc this week - black is a power colour, associated with many things, but for Hen and Karen in this arc it is very much about protection and strength. Here for hen it is mostly about protection - protecting this new baby they are about to take in. The cream is warmth and tranquility.

Hen is wearing check - foreshadowing the upcoming struggles with Mara. Karens bronze and black Jacquard trousers are a symbol of strength - bronze as a colour means strength and support, it's also a symbol of faithfulness. It's telling us that Karen will take the lead on supporting Mara and being strong for her.

We see a lot of white on Karen in this episode, white, like pink is a colour of innocence, but it is more associated with purity and balance. It is also a colour of neutral refelction. By this I mean that it amplifies other colours by providing a neutral background - allowing other colours to shine. I find this a really interesting thing when connected with Karen - it amplifies her strength and supportive nature when the Wilsons meet Mara.

Hen adn Karen in bed are in dusty versions of blue and pink - Karen innocently tries to touch Mara and that is when the screaming starts. Putting Hen in blue is about relaying her trustworthiness and sets her up as a soothing and calming presence for Mara - hence the sleeping on the floor of her room!

At the hospital, We see Denny in red - he was wearing it when Mara woke the house up and its an indicator of what is about to befall them (in the same way Bobbys red in the cruise ship disaster adn Athenas red in relation to Harry, or Bucks back in s5 when Eddie broke down).

We again have Karen in white amplifying the other colour she is wearing, which in this instance is this buff/brown oversized sleeveless coat in teddy fleece. The brown is stability, dependability and responsibility - playing into the fact this episode really highlights Karen's position in the family as this stable rock which Hen and Denny lean on when they need support. Karen's unswerving and solid personality is once more being shown off. Its really a key thing for them to show as it feels like a set up for Mara and how she is going to bond and rely on Karen and that dependability as she unpacks her trauma.

The orange jumper is a really interesting choice. I do love the loose threads on the design of it - paying into the idea that Hen and Karen are at a loose end and unsure what to do going forward. But, the orange itself is generally an open minded colour, its energetic and its also a colour of transformation. These are all things we know are true of Hen and Karen and it hints at the fact that they will fin a way forward. Once again we have Karen in white amplifying Hen's orange and the energy and idea of transformation the colour brings.

Denim jacket and white tee. I love the distressed nature of this denim jacket and the way it plays into both scenes we see it in - playing into the distress Hen feels over finding out what Mara has gone through and how it explains why she has become non verbal and incredibly protective over her pink blanket.

Again the white of amplification and purity. Hen has pure intentions and the white amplifies Karens black when they are at dispatch listening to the 911 call.

We also have the Karen necklace back - once more showing this ism't about Hen - its about Karen and their family.

Black on Karen for this scene is such a choice. Black is a power colour, it means strength and protection. Here it is showing Karens determination, as she gains understanding, to protect Mara and support her through her trauma - it is representative of Karen choosing to use the power she has been given through gaining information. The gold highlights hint at success.

I love these lavender pyjamas on Karen - lavender is a soothing and sleep inducing colour (along with its scent which is possibly where the association came from for the colour) along with a Japanese print of mountains and trees, which plays into the idea of serenity and peacefulness.

Hen in contrast is wearing fairly bright and bold black and green. The green is all about that growth and learning once more, the growth of Hen and Karen, learning more about the issues Mara faces and seeking a solution, but also the growth of their family. The black is a reflection of power - much in the same way Karen wearing black when they heard the 911 call Mara made, here it is Hen, representing the protection that Hen and Karen are offering Mara.

Athena in green - again with the mesh open weave knit - this may be a theme for her this season - potentially something to do with feeling caged or caging someone/something - especially children as both scenes we've seen it so far have been to do with young people and the law in some respect - ending up in the system - Harry through is crime and Mara through her parents death.

Chim

This dark bottle green with a fawn brown (what I think is a polo) shirt underneath is Chimneys only non uniform costume this week . This kind of dark green, is as always a signal of growth, but its also a colour of harmony, and right now - everything in Chim's world is harmonious.

Maddie

I don't thinkI've said it yet, but I am so happy to have Alayna back dressing Jennifer - I feel like we're really back on track with Maddie's costuming after last season where they somehow managed to make Maddie look terrible. The costuming overall last year was fine - not as good as Alayna's work, but it was for the most part good - except for Maddie where it was all over the place!

Anyway - Maddie in black here is very much about focussing the attention on Hen and Karen - like with CHimney's muted green, in tandem they are making the viewers eye focus on Hen and Karen - especially Karen - who is the brightest in the room.

Maddie wearing this sage green colour when Buck comes out to her is sheer perfection from my perspective - we, once more have the green of growth and renewal, the green of learning - Maddie learning more about her brother - this new thing that he is realising about himself and choosing to share with her (even if inadvertently). But this green is also sage green - sage as in the play on sage advice - which we see Maddie give him. Buck needs that good advice - he needs to hear that its ok, that he can take the time to figure himself out and that its ok that he's only just uncovered this aspect of himself and that it doesn't invalidate him being an ally up to this point!

Ok not going to lie - I got a little carried away from here on out - so sorry in advance for the rambling mess you're about to read!

Marisol

I'm doing Marisol in a weird order - because I wanted to talk about her date night outfit in tandem with Eddies - because its relevant. So we start of with virgin Mary Marisol! Honestly this outfit is just perfection from the costume department - they saw the brief and went to town and I love it. Its so good to see what they can do when they get to play!

One of the things I really love about this costume is the blue that they chose. Because that blue - that is Bucks blue! the virgin Mary blue is usually a much brighter royal blue. It really helps to place Marisol in parallel to Buck and we get the play on t he fact that Eddie seeing Marisol in this way changes everything for him, whilst later on, whilst Buck is in the same blue, he reassures him that nothing will change between them.

Look, I'm not going to lie, when I saw Marisol in blue and yellow for this scene I laughed because Blue and yellow (as I've gone on a million times about) means queer coding so to blatantly put Marisol in it - in a washed out form, and very much connecting her to Catholicism - genius move. It marks her out as a roadblock, but also puts her into the role of beard (unknowingly on her part) because Eddie is still in the midst of his repression, even if it is beginning to unravel now.

The black top with spaghetti straps is clearly a theme they're going with on Marisol, as are the ditsy prints. The yellow high waisted trousers are interesting because of the specific shade of yellow. Yes the whole communication theme still applies here -and we see it in action, but this shade of yellow is sallow and sickly (one of the reasons its called sickly yellow is because its the colour of a lot of medications!!) - this relationship and its restart are ill and that automatically means its going to struggle to survive.

It plays into the more negative meanings around the colour - uncertainty and idleness and cowardice. For me the cowardice aspect is an interesting one in relation to Eddie - he has behaved cowardly up to this point - hiding out and not having the conversations that need to be had, and even in this scene it is Marisol who takes the lead.

It's really giving us an indication of things Eddie needs to work on in regards to himself - and once more it comes down to communication. Communication has always been Eddies major flaw - that he isn't good at it, unless really really pushed into it - essentially under duress. The other thing with communication is that it plays really well into the catholic guilt aspect - this idea that growing up catholic has taught him to repress part of who he is - to go along with what is expected of him, but that it also taught him not to ask for what he needs, to not communicate. We see it in this episode with his inability to say no to Marisol (the whole hiding out at Bucks so he doesn't have to have sex speaks volumes) even down to suggesting there's a third type of guy - who just needs a minute. Because, while that might be true to a certain extent, the fact that he says this off the back of her expressing her distress and upset about how all guys are one of two things, speaks volumes - its not him saying this because that's how he actually feels, its partly him saying it because he is pushed into a position where he doesn't want to be the bad guy. its really not a good place to be restarting a relationship from.

We also have the ditsy print of doom in play again - like I've said before, ditsy print on Eddies girlfriends - never a good sign - its really playing into this idea of Eddie jumping in headfirst with gay abandon (pun intended) and then regretting his life choices. Shannon wore ditsy print a fair amount - especially in the I think I'm pregnant' and 'we should get a divorce' scenes. Ana wore ditsy print A LOT - she was wearing it when Eddie had his panic attack in the shop and at other key moments that marked the death knell for their relationship. And so this appearance of ditsy print here marks the same - the relationship is not long for this world

OK date night Marisol. The way this outfit played out more or less as I expected, She was very much an 'innocent' bystander in this scene (whilst also creating one corner of a triangle with Buck and Eddie) , and the ditsy print very much played into this. Like I said in my promo meta, both Shannon and Ana were costumed in ditsy print as well as in lots of pink!!!

The other aspect of this outfit that is making me laugh is the fact that the skirt is giving me 1980's/early 1990's teen vibes (not to out myself as old but trust me I had some just like this back then and I wouldn't be caught dead in it now as a grown woman!!) and the baby pink handbag looks like something an 8 year old would have to play dress up with - its all very childish and immature - naive one could say, and while it didn't play out quite how I was expecting, her being a novice nun, sure explains a lot of why she comes over as pretty immature.

The other aspect of this childish style we're seeing on her plays into Eddies narrative of looking for magic and trying to recreate what he had with Shannon. He's attracted to Marisol because she is immature and childish - it reminds him of what he had with Shannon when he was young, and when you're trying to recapture that, its easy to fall into the trap of thinking someone behaving in a naive manner is you finding what you'd been looking for. Eddies journey, along side his catholic guilt, is about learning that he cannot recapture or recreate that magic he had when he was young - that the love of youth - in all its innocence is not something that is sustainable or actually what he wants in the present.

Then we have Eddie in white. I spoke in the promo meta about how the white set him and Marisol as opposites and that remains true - very true on more than one level. What I especially love about it and something I could not have predicted is how it plays into the novice nun aspect of their story this episode - truly this show is a comedy! Because nuns wear black and white this is an obvious play on that, but it is also a play on the fact that Marisol is still a practicing catholic, whilst Eddie is very much not. The other aspect of this white is that of Eddies two non uniform costumes, it is the first one and we get this black and white play on religion - the black and white of nuns and priests - the black and white of being religious or not. Eddie never questions if he wants to become a practicing catholic again - he is lapsed and that is how he intends to stay.

Eddie in uniform, with his green trainers, blue towel and water bottle. the blue towel and bottle play into the buck and Eddie blue green theming we see with them. But what is interesting is though is that Eddie is fulfilling all the colour theming on his own - he is both blue and green - to me this is about Eddies own struggles within himself as well as foreshadowing the Eddie Marisol break up down the line (green shoes suggest a road needs to be to walked before we get there) - it hints at Eddies internal struggles and implies that its will ultimately end in a break up a bit further down the line.

I also think it's only when in Uniform that Eddie can admit to his catholic guilt. Because we all know when Eddie is struggling with some form of emotional turmoil, he wears a black singlet - and he could've been wearing the same here, it would've been totally fitting with the situation - he is going through something emotionally and struggling with it.

But he's in his uniform. Part of it is to have him on a different level to Buck - they are both struggling with something in this scene. When we have previously had Buck and Eddie scenes like this one at work, the one dressed in uniform, tends to be the one offering advice to the one not in uniform. That isn't the case here. Part of it comes back to Buck not actually needing advice, but needing to reveal something about himself - to confess. Eddie is the one who needs advice.

This is a flipping of the traditional narrative for these scenes and is proof that even though Eddie might later tell Buck that nothing is going to change between them, that it has in fact already changed, it is just that neither of them are fully cognisant of that change at this moment in time. It is a key indicator to use the audience that this has happened before but that things are not going to play out the same way this time.

Put it this way - Eddie has form for doing something extreme with his relationships with women in the aftermath of Buck doing something dumb - its one of the manifestations of his repression. This time its asking Marisol to move in with him in the immediate aftermath of Buck going full green monster over Tommy.

Last time it was in the aftermath of Buck begins and then doubling down with Ana after the shooting when Buck had hooked up with Taylor and before that in the aftermath of Shannon's death and Buck suing the department he went and joined a fight club - but he has form. Its completely in character for him to pull this sort of a move. I know he says he's going with his gut but I argue he is in fact ignoring his gut - or at the very least confused about what his gut is telling him, because that would mean actually looking at why his gut reaction to Buck doing something dumb makes him do something dumb in turn connected to these women in his life.

Eddie in black - this is the same shirt as the white one - just the reverse colour - which is important. This shirt has several layered meanings to it. its about the reversal of what Eddie wants - from him being bubbly and excited about Marisol moving in, to the dread of her having moved in and wanting her to move out - his feelings go from white to black - light to dark - happy to unhappy and it all sums up the relaity of that relationship - while it was new and unserious, it was fun and light, when things got real - it becomes dark and oppressive.

I'll go into more detail about this shirt when I get to Bucks costume for this scene - because they are connected!

The other thing about this outfit is that the green trousers have been replaced with jeans. Now I see a couple of reasons for the wardrobe department doing this. Firstly is that it plays into the 'nothings is going to change between us' of it all. Its a visual indicator that in fact things have changed (along with Buck wearing a brighter shirt than we normally get in these buddie heart to hearts that take place in Bucks loft but more on that later) the Buck being bi and going on a date with Tommy of it all aside, this is the first time we've actively seen Eddie hiding out at Bucks to avoid his girlfriend - this was a barrier that had existed between them previously that has now been broken down. Then there is the fact that Eddie does go home to Marisol - and he couldn't be wearing green at that point because she was wearing blue and Eddie in green would've meant break up time - only the Marisol as a plot device arc isn't yet over (it will be soon I promise - all the costume signs are there!) so that couldn't happen.

Tommy

This dark olive green shirt that is almost brown. The brown undertones hint at the stability he represents while the green is hinting at his military past and once more paralleling him with Eddie. One of the things about green as a colour is that its not only a symbol of growth and renewal, but its also a colour of learning, and in an episode titled 'You don't know me' it feels like all the green is very much about education - learning about other people - and the growth that results from it. It feels especially important here for Tommy and Buck - that is after all what going on a date it all about - learning about one another and seeing if you're compatible.

The other fun thing about this green shirt is though that the green plays into the blue green colour theory when it comes to Buck and Eddie and their partners and the end of relationships. This one before its had chance to begin.

For Coffee we have a grey Henley and a blue zip front hoodie with a grey striped undertone to it (I am pretty sure this is actually a hoodie we've seen on Chimney but I can't remember when and I don't think it would be the very same one as pretty sure Lou would not be fitting into Kenneths clothes ever, but Chimney has definelty worn the same style!!). Again Henley's are an Eddie thing, so we once more have the parallel with Eddie being drawn.

The interesting thing here is that the grey blue is the same colour combo Buck wore on their first date attempt - the costume department played a lot with flipping colour in this episode, so to have it done here as well is really fun - the fact there is more grey than blue is also interesting. It's a neutral colour, it is seen as a colour of stability, but is also a colour of uncertainty. It really plays into that theme of uncertainty running through the Buck and Tommy arc. The blue hoodie is actually pretty important because we've had one of Buck and Tommy wearing something dark blue in every scene they've had together - usually the one on the back foot. Tommy in this scene is relatively neutral in terms of position for most of this scene - they are equals - but he is put onto the back foot by Buck asking him to be his date to Maddie and Chim's wedding.

Buck

Where to start with our beloved bi disaster!

I obviously spoke a fair amount about the date night shirt in my promo meta. The navy blue knit bowling shirt with these silver/grey close together pinstripes running down the front playing into the Buck wearing vertical stripes theme we've has running with him for at least the last 2 seasons.

What I said about false starts and this date absolutely played out - in the same way the sperm donation shirt represented a false start on that donation, this shirt also represents a false start on Bucks dating life as a bi man. The white trainers are also carrying on the theme of Bucks Journey towards happiness

What I find most interesting about this outfit though isn't colour theory related. its all about the fit of the clothes. Because these are ill fitting on Buck - not something we see from him very often - in fact I think the only time we see him in anything close to ill fitting to this extent is back in season 1 when he was figuring out who he was and if being a firefighter was the right for him and exploring relationships and what he was trying to find in that arena. The trousers are the most ill fitting of it all, but I'll come to the trousers later on as they are part o a wider Buck costume theme we have going on!

The shirt is a little roomie, but not overly so, it just stands out more because we're so used to his shirts fighting for their life, here this one is baggy and really helps to sell the idea of defeat, but also that h was trying on this new part of himself for size and that it doesn't quite fit. It's the only time this episode we see his clothes not fit him in this way and its a really small but expressive part of costuming that I love to see.

Then we have this blue broadcloth jacket over a white tee and with these plum/brown coloured trousers - they're a bit blink and you'll miss them so its hard to be sure what type of trouser they are, but I think they are essentially smart joggers - jersey material but trousers!

We all know that Buck in white means trouble, I'm putting him outing himself to his sister as the bad thing - along with the fact that the date didn't work out.

I'm really fascinated by the fact that we really seem to be leaning into navy blue and Buck being bi. Navy has always been a colour we've seen a lot of on Buck in general, but there is something about the fact we've seen him (or Tommy) wearing it in every single scene that is about his bisexuality. I'm talking from the kiss scene onwards, not anything before that as Buck wasn't aware of his bisexuality before the kiss. I can't wait to see if it continues!

The green shirt jacket is an interesting one. it obviously helps to play into the buck and Eddie blue green theory, but it does in a smaller way play into the blue green theming we see around Buck and Eddie and their relationships - specifically around issues arising. Both Buck and Eddie wear green when they break up with their significant others and while there is no break up here, there is a break of sorts. This was Buck about to try and tell his Best friend that he was actually out on a date with Tommy and that he's bi

symbol of growth - Buck went in with a goal - to tell Eddie he was on a date with Tommy, but changed tack when he saw Eddie needed to go through something - this is Buck growing as a person - not making something about him.

The other thing about this outfit is that its basically the same as the one Eddie wore at the airfield (even down to the badding of the trousers) - just in reverse - Eddie black trousers, black jacket, green top, and here Buck is black trousers, black top and green jacket - I find this fascinating as a metaphor for where the two of them are on their respective journeys.

Buck is now bi and out (he's told his sister) and has been on a date with a guy (regardless how successful it was - he cannot put it back into the box) - his growth is externalised and therefore expressed through the wearing of a green jacket. We get a lot of storytelling through the various Jackets Buck wears (we've seen him in over 35 at this point!)

While Eddie - who we could say was being taken on a date by Tommy - even if he didn't know it (because who flies someone to Vegas to a sold out fight if its not a date??) wearing a much brighter green that we've seen on him before now (pretty much all of his greens are more army green with a couple of exceptions - much darker greens akin to Bucks jacket in the below picture) - still in the army green wheelhouse, but much bolder. Eddie's queer status is still very much internalised - hence it being underneath the black jacket.

Buck coming out to Eddie from a costume perspective was a glorious parallel that I have already mentioned in the promo meta (I've run out of pictures so you'll have to go watch the scene yourself if you want to see what I mean). Its actually a bit deeper that I appreciated in that promo meta, but that is in part because at the time of writing the meta I wasn't 100% sure it was a coming out scene and I didn't get to see the way it was shot and how that also played into the paralleling.

Costume wise - I already spoke above about Eddies black shirt and how it is reversing him in the episode. But what I didn't mention is that fact that it parallels in colour terms, what he was wearing when Buck informed the firefam that Connor and Kameron were pregnant. Eddie wore a black marl henley - black with flecks of dark grey running through it, and Buck here is wearing a slightly darker blue version of the same top he wore in that same scene. He is standing in the same place at the counter of his kitchen, or sitting very close to the same position and we get similar camera angles. As a whole the parallel is very loud - Buck was happy and proud of something he had done and wanted to share it with his friends - wanted their approval. He was feeling good about himself and confident in his decision.

The biggest thing about the blue - this shade specifically is the way it play into the blue theme we saw last season with Buck - the theme that started in the 5x18 finale at Hen and Karens vow renewal, when he was free of Taylor and moving forward and essentially restarting his search for happiness. We saw it weave a thread through the entirety of season 6, being worn at key moments that played into that theme - after Lev died, at various points in the sperm donation arc, and a key points in the aftermath of his death and rebirth.

The successfully helping create life aspect of this is so interesting. It on a low key level plays into the you don’t find it you make it manifesto that’s been at the heart of bucks arc since s2. the whole year if yes was supposed to be about this very thing - about Buck creating the life he wants for himself - the sperm donation isn’t about the baby it’s about Buck and about him figuring out what he’s missing (which comes back to not only Thomas and Mitchell, but also Lev).

The other thing that ties into this theme is that Eddie isn't really changing but Buck is. Whenever we have a scene at the loft between Buck and Eddie Bucks costume and colour varies, but Eddies stays more or less the same. Bucks colour Palette for these scenes goes - dark grey in the you want to go for the title scene, then we have the grey blue on the balcony and now this much lighter blue. This is highlighting Bucks progression while Eddie who remains in his black shirt and that progression - while Eddie essentially remains steadfast - is key - it’s showing us that while buck is still doing dumb things, he is learning - he is listening to whatever Eddie is telling him - that he’s accepting Eddie’s absolution of his sins more and more - growing and understanding.

It’s building on his long running arc - his fear of being left behind, of not being important enough for people to stick around for - and showing us he’s increasingly understanding that that fear is unfounded - that he’s found his personal- the one who will stay and who is steadfast in that. That’s why we see Eddie unchanging in his black shirt green cargos while buck gets lighter - more unburdened by that fear.

Before you think all is lost on the Eddie front though, we are seeing change - the army green trousers are gone and have been replaced with jeans - perhaps, in the same way Bucks growth into his bisexuality began with his beginning to wear jeans again, Eddies own growth into his own queer identity also begins with jeans - moving him away from Eddie the soldier - fighting for others - being a rock for others and now into a position where he can do his own growing.

In the sperm donation arc, Buck was finally able to donate and was wearing that super pale mint green polo. we don't see the same with the outcome here at this point in the story (although the beige/mint green jacket from the bachelor party is making me👀👀👀 at this moment in time!) - we get this cream open weave linen shirt with black and terracotta and golden brown vertical stripes.

I love that they went with a shirt that has such an open weave - playing into the whole concept of Buck being open and embracing this newly revealed part of him that he's discovered. But what I love most about this shirt is the way it ties back into the Buck learning to accept himself and find his happiness.

Because this shirt is so similar to the one from 6x01 - when he decides he doesn't need a new couch, what he needs is to be ok on his own and with himself.

lets talk Buck and his trousers because the trousers are a whole thing this season and I am truly in love with the long game the wardrobe department have been playing on this one. They know that we have all been out here raising eyebrows at Bucks trousers for the past few seasons as they've gotten shorter and shorter and ill fitting. I know I've made comments in previous costume metas about the fact they must be doing something intentional with them being so short in the leg - that them doing this is giving the appearance of a child who is still in short trousers and isn't fully grown - hasn't moved on to wearing full length trousers yet.

Well it would seem I was right and thats exactly what they were doing, putting him in short trousers to show that he wasn't his fully formed self - that he was growing and learning and figuring things out. because - I've gone back through my spreadsheet and checked his trousers out for all of his scenes and there are only a handful where he has trousers on that are well fitted and the correct length. One of them is at the start of season 6 - at the end of the episode where he moves his armchair instead of getting a new couch - the one time in season 6 we see him most at peace with himself

I remarked in the 7x04 meta that we only saw Buck in his too short trousers in the one scene at the airfield, and from then on, he was was in jeans. Now the jeans are a mimicking thing - Buck hasn't worn stone wash jeans since Eddie appeared on the scene back at the start of season 2, so for him to start wearing them again as soon as he becomes jealous of Eddie and Tommy - and Tommy is wearing jeans - was pretty telling in its own right. It's Buck trying to get Eddies attention (not Tommys - Eddies) because, we do not see Eddie in jeans in 7x04 - but we do see Tommy in them - and in Bucks head he is loosing Eddies attention to a guy wearing stone wash jeans - so if he wears stonewash jeans then maybe he'll get Eddies attention back.

That obviously didn't work out how Buck thought it would, but it did lead to him figuring a new part of himself out.

We can see how his trousers are all now sitting at the correct length, I grabbed this still of the black ones, and you can see in the full length still from the date those are as well (even if they're too big more generally) but the others are all sitting at the correct length as well.

We also see the jeans back for his scene with Tommy - I truly am fascinated by the choice to put him back in stonewash jeans aafter so long as a theming choice for his bisexuality, I really am enjoying this more relaxed looking Buck from a costuming perspective - the journey we've been on with his costumes is great - the increasingly formal style thats just a little too small and tight we've seen over the seasons now slowly relaxing once more into something much more comfortable and well fitted - showing just how far he has truly come.

And thats me out for another week! Sorry it turned into another epic - it would seem `i cant stop myself! Not sure if this has come out longer than last weeks, I think it might've, but I can't be bothered to check! Thank you as always for reading this monster and I hope you enjoyed this deep dive into the costumes for 7x05. I'm off now to hyperfixate on Bucks bathroom door and get myself though this mini hiatus!

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