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mostlysignssomeportents · 4 months ago

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Petard, Part III

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/2025/02/01/miskatonic-networks/#landlord-telco-industrial-complex

Last week, Trump's FCC chair Brendan Carr reversed a rule that banned your landlord from taking kickbacks in exchange for forcing you to use whatever ISP was willing to pay the biggest bribe for the right to screw you over:

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/01/fcc-chair-nixes-plan-to-boost-broadband-competition-in-apartment-buildings/

Corporate fascists and their captured regulators are, of course, that most despicable of creatures: they are plagiarists. Like so many of our tech overlords, they have mistaken dystopian sf as a suggestion, rather than as a warning. I take this personally, because I actually wrote this as an sf story in 2013, and it was published in 2014 in MIT Tech Review's Twelve Tomorrows, edited by Bruce Sterling and published in 2014:

https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262535595/twelve-tomorrows-2014/

I adapted it for my podcast, in four installments:

https://archive.org/details/Cory_Doctorow_Podcast_278

https://archive.org/details/Cory_Doctorow_Podcast_292

https://archive.org/details/Cory_Doctorow_Podcast_293

https://archive.org/details/Cory_Doctorow_Podcast_294_-_Petard_04

And, given the new currency of this old story, I thought it was only fitting that I serialize it here, on my blog, also in four parts.

Here's part one:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/01/30/landlord-telco-industrial-complex/#part-one

Here's part two:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/01/31/the-blood-speech/#part-two

And now, onto part three:

One of the early Ftp code contributors was now CTO for an ISP, and they'd gotten their start as a dorm co-op at Brown that had metastasized across New England. Sanjay had been pretty important to the early days of Ftp, helping us get the virtualization right so that it could run on pretty much any cloud without a lot of jiggery and/or pokery. Within a day of emailing Sanjay, I was having coffee with the vice-president of business development for Miskatonic Networks, who was also Sanjay's boyfriend's girlfriend, because apparently ISPs in New England are hotbeds of Lovecraft-fandom polyamory. Her name was Kadijah and she had a southie accent so thick it was like an amateur theater production of Good Will Hunting.

"The Termite Mound?" She laughed. "Shit yeah, I know that place. It's still standing? I went to some super sketchy parties there when I was a kid, I mean sooooper sketchy, like sketch-a-roony. I can't believe no one's torched the place yet."

"Not yet," I said. "And seeing as all my stuff's there right now, I'm hoping that no one does for the time being."

"Yeah, I can see that." I could not get over her accent. It was the most Bostonian thing I'd encountered since I got off the train. "OK, so you want to know what we'd charge to provide service to someone at the Termite Mound?"

"Uh, no. I want to know what you'd charge per person if we could get you the whole Mound — every unit in the residence. All 250 of them."

"Oh." She paused a second. "This is an Ftp thing, right?"

"Yeah," I said. "That's how I know Sanjay. I, uh, I started Ftp." I don't like to brag, but sometimes it makes sense in the context of the conversation, right?

"That was you? Wicked! So you're seriously gonna get the whole dorm to sign up with us?"

"I will if you can get me a price that I can sell to them," I said.

"Oh," she said. Then "Oh! Right. Hmm. Leave it with me. You say you can get them all signed up?"

"I think so. If the price is right. And I think that if the Termite Mound goes with you that there'll be other dorms that'll follow. Maybe a lab or two," I said. I was talking out of my ass at this point, but seriously, net-censorship in the labs at MIT? It was disgusting. It could not stand.

"Damn," she said. "Sounds like you're majoring in Ftp. Don't you have classes or something?"

"No," I said. "This is basically exactly what I figured college would be like. A cross between summer camp and an Stanford obedience experiment. If all I wanted to do was cram a bunch of knowledge into my head, I could have stayed home and mooced it. I came here because I wanted to level up and fight something tough and even dangerous. I want to spend four years getting into the right kind of trouble. Going to classes too, but seriously, classes? Whatever. Everyone knows the good conversations happen in the hallway between the formal presentations. Classes are just an excuse to have hallways."

She looked skeptical and ate banana bread.

"It's your deal," she said.

I could hear the but hanging in the air between us. She went and got more coffees and brought them back along with toasted banana bread dripping with butter for me. She wouldn't let me pay, and told me it was on Miskatonic. We were a potential big account. She didn't want to say "But" because she might offend me. I wanted to hear the "but."

"But?"

"But what?"

"It's my deal but…?"

"But, well, you know, you don't look after your grades, MIT'll put you out on your ass. That's how it works in college. I've seen it."

I chewed my banana bread.

"Hey," she said. "Hey. Are you OK, Lukasz?"

"I'm fine," I said.

She smiled at me. She was pretty. "But?"

I told her about my talk with AA, and about Juanca, and about how I felt like nobody was giving me my propers, and she looked very sympathetic, in a way that made me feel much younger. Like toddler younger.

"MIT is all about pranks, right? I think if I could come up with something really epic, they'd –" And as I said it, I realized how dumb it was. They laughed at me in Vienna, I'll show them! "You know what? Forget about it. I got more important things to do than screw around with those knob-ends. Work to do, right? Get the network opened up around here, you and me, Kadijah!"

"Don't let it get to you, you'll give yourself an aneurism. I'll get back to you soon, OK?"

I fished a bead out of my pocket and wedged it into my ear.

"Who is this?"

"Lukasz?" The voice was choked with tears.

"Who is this?" I said again.

"It's Bryan." I couldn't place the voice or the name.

"Bryan who?"

"From the Termite Mound's customer service desk." Then I recognized the voice. It was the elf, and he was having hysterics. Part of me wanted to say, Oh, diddums! and hang up. Because elves, AMR? But I'm not good at tough love.

"What's wrong?"

"They've fired me," he said. "I got called into my boss's office an hour ago and he told me to start drawing up a list of people to kick out of the dorm — he wanted the names of people who supported you. I was supposed to go through the EULAs for the dorm and find some violations for all of them –"

"What if they didn't have any violations?"

He made a sound between a sob and a laugh. "Are you kidding? You're always in violation! Have you read the EULA for the Mound? It's like sixty pages long."

"OK, gotcha. So you refused and you got fired?"

There was a pause. It drew out. "No," he said, his voice barely a whisper. "I gave them a bunch of names, and then they fired me."

Again, I was torn between the impulse to hang up on him and to hear more. Nosiness won (nosiness always wins; bets on nosiness are a sure thing). "Nicely done. Sounds like just deserts to me. What do you expect me to do about it?" But I knew. There were only two reasons to call me after something like this: to confess his sins or to get revenge. And no one would ever mistake me for a priest.

"I've got the names they pulled. Not just this time. Every time there's been any kind of trouble in the Termite Mound, MIT Residence has turfed out the troublemakers on some bogus EULA violation. They know that no one cares about student complaints, and there's always a waiting list for rooms at the Termite Mound, it's so central and all. I kept records."

"What kind of records?"

"Hardcopies of emails. They used disappearing ink for all the dirty stuff, but I just took pictures of my screen with my drop and saved it to personal storage. It's ugly. They went after pregnant girls, kids with disabilities. Any time there was a chance they'd have to do an air quality audit or fix a ramp, I'd have to find some reason to violate the tenant out of residence." He paused a moment. "They used some pretty bad language when they talked about these people, too."

The Termite Mound should've been called the Roach Motel: turn on the lights and you'd find a million scurrying bottom-feeders running for the baseboards.

I was going to turn on the lights.

"You've got all that, huh?

"Tons of it," he said. "Going back three years. I knew that if it ever got out that they'd try and blame it on me. I wanted records."

"OK," I said. "Meet me in Harvard Square, by the T entrance. How soon can you get there?"

"I'm at the Coop right now," he said. "Using a study-booth."

"Perfect," I said. "Five minutes then?"

"I'm on my way."

The Coop's study booths had big signs warning you that everything you did there was recorded — sound, video, infrared, data — and filtered for illicit behavior. The signs explained that there was no human being looking at the records unless you did something to trip the algorithm, like that made it better. If a tree falls in the forest, it sure as shit makes a sound; and if your conversation is bugged, it's bugged — whether or not a human being listens in right then or at some time in the infinite future of that data.

I beat him to the T entrance, and looked around for a place to talk. It wasn't good. From where I stood, I could see dozens of cameras, the little button-sized dots discretely placed all around the square, each with a little scannable code you could use to find out who got the footage and what it's policy was. No one ever, ever, ever bothered to do this. Ever. EULAs were not written for human consumption: a EULA's message could always be boiled down to seven words: "ABANDON HOPE, ALL YE WHO ENTER HERE." Or, more succinctly: "YOU LOSE."

I felt bad about Bryan's job. It was his own deal, of course. He'd stayed even after he knew how evil they were. And I hadn't held a gun to his head and made him put himself in the firing line. But of course, I had convinced him to. I had led him to. I felt bad.

Bryan turned up just as I was scouting a spot at an outdoor table by an ice-cream parlor. They had a bunch of big blowing heaters that'd do pretty good white-noise masking, a good light/dark contrast between the high-noon sun and the shade of the awning that would screw up cameras' white-balance, and the heaters would wreak havoc on the infra-red range of the CCTVs, or so I hoped. I grabbed Bryan, clamping down on his skinny arm through the rough weave of his forest-green cloak and dragged him into my chosen spot.

"You got it?" I said, once we were both seated and nursing hot chocolates. I got caffeinated marshmallows; he got Thai ghost pepper-flavored — though that was mostly marketing, no way those marshmallows were over a couple thousand Scovilles.

"I encrypted it with your public key," he said, handing me a folded up paper. I unfolded it and saw that it had been printed with a stegoed QR code, hidden in a Victorian woodcut. That kind of spycraft was pretty weaksauce — the two-dee-barcode-in-a-public-domain-image thing was a staple of shitty student clickbait thrillers — but if he'd really managed to get my public key and verify it and then encrypt the blob with it, I was impressed. That was about ten million times more secure than the average fumbledick ever managed. The fact that he'd handed me a hardcopy of the URL instead of emailing it to me, well, that was pretty sweet frosting. Bryan had potential.

I folded the paper away. "What should I be looking for?"

"It's all organized and tagged. You'll see." He looked nervous. "What are you going to do with it?"

"Well, for starters, I'm going to call them up and tell them I have it."

"What?" He looked like he was going to cry.

"Come on," I said. "I'm not going to tell them where I got it. The way you tell it, I'm about to get evicted, right?"

"Technically, you are evicted. There's a process-server waiting at every entrance to the Termite Mound doing face-recognition on the whole list. Soon as you go home, bam. 48 hours to clear out."

"Right," I said. "I don't want to have to go look for a place to live while I'm also destroying these shitbirds and fixing everyone's Internet connection. Get serious. So I'm going to go and talk to Messrs Amoral, Nonmoral and Immoral and explain that I have a giant dump of compromising messages from them that I'm going public with, and it'll look really, really bad for them if they turf me out now."

It's time for a true confession. I am not nearly as brave as I front. All this spycraft stuff, all the bluster about beating these guys on their home turf, yeah, in part I'm into it — I like it better than riding through life like a foil chip-bag being swept down a polluted stream on a current of raw sewage during a climate-change-driven superstorm.

But the reality is that I can't really help myself. There's some kind of rot-fungus that infects the world. Things that are good when they're small and personal grow, and as they grow, their attack-surface grows with them, and they get more and more colonized by the fungus, making up stupid policies, doing awful stuff to the people who rely on them and the people who work for them, one particle of fungus at a time, each one just a tiny and totally defensible atomic-sized spoor of rot that piles up and gloms onto all the other bits of rot until you're a walking, suppurating lesion.

No one ever set out to create the kind of organization that needs to post a "MIT RESIDENCY LLC OPERATES A ZERO-TOLERANCE POLICY TOWARD EMPLOYEE ABUSE. YOU CAN BE FINED UP TO $2000 AND/OR IMPRISONED FOR SIX MONTHS FOR ASSAULTING A CAMPUS RESIDENCE WORKER" sign. You start out trying to do something good, then your realize you can get a little richer by making it a little worse. Your thermostat for shittiness gets reset to the new level, so it doesn't seem like much of a change to turn it a notch further towards the rock-bottom, irredeemably shitty end of the scale.

The truth is that you can get really rich and huge by playing host organism to the rot-fungus. The rot-fungus diffuses its harms and concentrates its rewards. That means that healthy organisms that haven't succumbed to the rot-fungus are liable to being devoured by giant, well-funded vectors for it — think of the great local business that gets devoured by an awful hedge-fund in a leveraged takeover, looted and left as a revolting husk to shamble on until it collapses under its own weight.

I am terrified of the rot-fungus, because it seems like I'm the only person who notices it most of the time. Think of all those places where the town council falls all over itself to lure some giant corporation to open a local factory. Don't they notice that everyone who works at places like that hates every single moment of every single day? Haven't they ever tried to converse with the customer-service bots run by one of those lumbering dinos?

I mean, sure, the bigs have giant budgets and they'll take politicians out for nice lunches and throw a lot of money at their campaigns, but don't these guardians of the public trust ever try to get their cars fixed under warranty? Don't they ever buy a train ticket? Don't they ever eat at a fast food joint? Can't they smell the rot-fungus? Am I the only one? I've figured out how to fight it in my own way. Everyone else who's fighting seems to be fighting against something else — injustice or inequality or whatever, without understanding that the fungus's rot is what causes all of those things.

I'm convinced that no normal human being ever woke up one morning and said, "Dammit, my life doesn't have enough petty bureaucratic rules, zero-tolerance policies, censorship and fear in it. How do I fix that?" Instead, they let this stuff pile up, one compromise at a time, building up huge sores suppurating with spore-loaded fluids that eventually burst free and beslime everything around them. It gets normal to them, one dribble at a time.

"Lukasz, you're don't know what you're doing. These guys, they're –"

"What?" I said. "Are they the mafia or something? Are they going to have me dropped off a bridge with cement overshoes?"

He shook his head, making the twigs and beads woven into the downy fluff of his hair clatter together. "No, but they're ruthless. I mean, totally ruthless. They're not normal."

The way he said it twinged something in my hindbrain, some little squiggle of fear, but I pushed it away. "Yeah, that's OK. I'm used to abnormal." I am the most abnormal person I know.

"Be careful, seriously," he said.

"Thanks, Bryan," I said. "Don't worry about me. You want me to try and get your room back, too?"

He chewed his lip. "Don't," he said. "They'll know it was me if you do that."

I resisted the urge to shout at him to grow a spine. These assholes had cost him his home and his job (OK, I'd helped) and he was going to couch-surf it until he could find the rarest of treasures: an affordable place to live in Cambridge, Mass? Even if he was being tortured by his conscience for all his deplorable selloutism, he was still being a total wuss. But that was his deal. I mean, he was an elf, for chrissakes. Who knew what he was thinking?

"Suit yourself," I said, and went and made some preparations.

Messers Amoral, Nonmoral and Immoral had an office over the river in Boston, in a shabby office-block that only had ten floors, but whose company directory listed over 800 businesses. I knew the kind of place, because they showed up whenever some hairy scam unravelled and they showed you the office-of-convenience used by the con-artists who'd destroyed something that lots of people cared about and loved in order to make a small number of bad people a little richer. A kind of breeding pit for rot-fungus, in other words.

At first I thought I was going to have to go and sleuth their real locations, but I saw that Amoral, Nonmoral and Immoral had the entire third floor registered to them, while everyone else had crazy-ass, heavily qualified suite numbers like 401c(1)K, indicating some kind of internal routing code for the use of the army of rot-fungus-infected spores who ensured that correspondence was handled in a way that preserved the illusion that each of the multifarious, blandly named shell companies (I swear to Cthulhu that there was one called "International Holdings (Holdings), Ltd") was a real going concern and not a transparent ruse intended to allow the rot-fungus to spread with maximal diffusion of culpability for the carriers who did its bidding.

I punched # # #300# # # on the ancient touchscreen intercom, its surface begrimed with a glossy coat of hardened DNA, Burger King residue and sifted-down dust of the ages. It blatted like an angry sheep, once, twice, three times, then disconnected. I punched again. Again. On the fourth try, an exasperated, wheezing voice emerged: "What?"

"I'm here to speak to someone from MIT Residences LLC."

"Send an email."

"I'm a tenant. My name is Lukasz Romero." I let that sink in. "I've got some documents I'd like to discuss with a responsible individual at MIT Residences LLC." I put a bit of heavy English on documents. "Please." I put even more English on "Please." I've seen the same tough-guy videos that you have, and I can do al-pacinoid overwound Dangerous Dude as well as anyone. "Please," I said again, meaning "Right. Now."

There was an elongated and ominous pause, punctuated by muffled rustling and grumbling, and what may have been typing on an old-fashioned, mechanical keyboard. "Come up," a different voice said. The elevator to my left ground as the car began to lower itself.

I'd expected something sinister — a peeling dungeon of a room where old men with armpit-stains gnawed haunches of meat and barked obscenities at each other. Instead, I found myself in an airy, high-ceilinged place that was straight out of the publicity shots for MIT's best labs, the ones that had been set-dressed by experts who'd ensured that no actual students had come in to mess things up before the photographer could get a beautifully lit shot of the platonic perfection.

The room took up the whole floor, dotted with conversation pits with worn, comfortable sofas whose end-tables sported inconspicuous charge-plates for power-hungry gadgets. The rest of the space was made up of new-looking worksurfaces and sanded-down antique wooden desks that emitted the honeyed glow of a thousand coats of wax buffed by decades of continuous use. The light came from tall windows and full-spectrum spotlights that were reflected and diffused off the ceiling, which was bare concrete and mazed with cable-trays and conduit. I smelled good coffee and toasting bread and saw a perfectly kept little kitchenette to my left.

There were perhaps a dozen people working in the room, standing at the worksurfaces, mousing away at the antique desks, or chatting intensely in the conversation pits. It was a kind of perfect tableau of industrious tech-company life, something out of a recruiting video. The people were young and either beautiful, handsome or both. I had the intense, unexpected desire to work here, or a place like this. It had good vibes.

One of the young, handsome people stood up from his conversation nook and smoothed out the herringbone wool hoodie he was wearing, an artfully cut thing that managed to make him look like both a young professor and an undergraduate at the same time. It helped that he was so fresh-faced, with apple cheeks and a shock of curly brown hair.

"Lukasz, right?" He held out a hand. He was wearing a dumbwatch, a wind-up thing in a steel casing that was fogged with a century of scratches. I coveted it instantly, though I knew nothing about its particulars, I was nevertheless certain that it was expensive, beautifully engineered, and extremely rare.

The door closed behind me and the magnet audibly reengaged. The rest of the people in the room studiously ignored us.

"I'm Sergey. Can I get you a cup of coffee? Tea? Some water?"

The coffee smelled good. "No thank you," I said. "I don't think I'll be here for long."

"Of course. Come and sit."

The other participants in his meeting had already vacated the sofas and left us with a conversation pit all to ourselves. I sank into the sofa and smelled the spicy cologne of a thousand eager, well-washed people who'd sat on it before me, impregnating the upholstery with the spoor of their good perfumes.

He picked up a small red enamel teapot and poured a delicious-smelling stream of yellow-green steaming liquid into a chunky diner-style coffee-cup. He sipped it. My stomach growled. "You told the receptionist you wanted to talk about some documents?"

"Yeah," I said, pulling myself together. "I've got documentary evidence of this company illegally evicting tenants — students — who got pregnant, complained about substandard living conditions and maintenance issues, and, in my case, complained about the network filters at the Termite Mound."

He cocked his head for a moment like he was listening for something in the hum and murmur of the office around him. I found myself listening, too, but try as I might, I couldn't pick out a single individual voice from the buzz, not even a lone intelligble word. It was as though they were all going "murmurmurmurmur," though I could see their lips moving and shaping what must have been words.

"Ah," he said at last. "Well, that's very unfortunate. Can you give me a set and I'll escalate them up our chain to ensure that they're properly dealt with?"

"I can give you a set," I said. "But I'll also be giving a set to the MIT ombudsman and the The Tech and the local Wikileaks Party rep. Sergey, forgive me, but you don't seem to be taking this very seriously. The material in my possession is the sort of thing that could get you and your colleagues here sued into a smoking crater."

"Oh, I appreciate that there's a lot of potential liability in the situation you describe, but it wouldn't be rational for me to freak out now, would it? I haven't seen your documents, and if I had, I can neither authenticate them nor evaluate the risk they represent. So I'll take a set from you and ensure that the people within our organization who have the expertise to manage this sort of thing get to them quickly."

It's funny. I'd anticipated that he'd answer like a chatbot, vomiting up Markov-chained nothings from the lexicon of the rot-fungus: "we take this very seriously," "we cannot comment on ongoing investigations," "we are actioning this with a thorough inquiry and post-mortem" and other similar crapola. Instead, he was talking like a hacker on a mailing list defending the severity he'd assigned to a bug he owned.

"Sergey, that's not much of an answer."

He sipped that delicious tea some more. "Is there something in particular you wanted to hear from me? I mean, this isn't the sort of thing that you find out about then everything stops until you've figured out what to do next."

I was off-balance. "I wanted –" I waved my hands. "I wanted an explanation. How the hell did this systematic abuse come about?"

He shrugged. He really didn't seem very worried "Hard to say, really. Maybe it was something out of the labs."

"What do you mean, 'the labs'?"

He gestured vaguely at one cluster of particularly engrossed young men and women who were bent over screens and worksurfaces, arranged in pairs or threesomes, collaborating with fierce intensity, reaching over to touch each others' screens and keyboards in a way I found instantly and deeply unsettling. "We've got a little R&D lab that works on some of our holdings. We're really dedicated to disrupting the rental market. There's so much money in it, you know, but mostly it's run by these entitled jerks who think that they're geniuses for having the brilliant idea of buying a building and then sitting around and charging rent on it. A real old boys' club." For the first time since we started talking, he really seemed to be alive and present and paying attention.

"Oh, they did some bits and pieces that gave them the superficial appearance of having a brain, but there's a lot of difference between A/B splitting your acquisition strategy and really deep-diving into the stuff that matters."

At this stage, I experienced a weird dissonance. I mean, I was there because these people were doing something genuinely villainous, real rot-fungus stuff. On the other hand, well, this sounded cool. I can't lie. I found it interesting. I mean, catnip-interesting.

"I mean, chewy questions. Like, if the median fine for a second citation for substandard plumbing is $400, and month-on-month cost for plumbing maintenance in a given building is $2,000 a month, and the long-term costs of failure to maintain are $20,000 for full re-plumbing on a 8-10 year basis with a 75 percent probability of having to do the big job in year nine, what are the tenancy parameters that maximize your return over that period?"

"Tenancy parameters?"

He looked at me. I was being stupid. I don't like that look. I suck at it. It's an ego thing. I just find it super-hard to deal with other people thinking that I'm dumb. I would probably get more done in this world if I didn't mind it so much. But I do. It's an imperfect world, and I am imperfect.

"Tenancy parameters. What are the parameters of a given tenant that predict whether he or she will call the city inspectors given some variable setpoint of substandard plumbing, set on a scale that has been validated through a rigorous regression through the data that establishes quantifiable inflection points relating to differential and discrete maintenance issues, including leaks, plugs, pressure, hot water temperature and volume, and so on. It's basically just a solve-for-x question, but it's one with a lot of details in the model that are arrived at through processes with a lot of room for error, so the model needs a lot of refinement and continuous iteration.

"And of course, it's all highly sensitive to external conditions — there's a whole game-theoretical set of questions about what other large-scale renters do in response to our own actions, and there's a information-theory dimension to this that's, well, it's amazing. Like, which elements of our strategy are telegraphed when we take certain actions as opposed to others, and how can those be steganographed through other apparent strategies.

"Now, most of these questions we can answer through pretty straightforward business processes, stuff that Amazon figured out twenty years ago. But there's a real risk of getting stuck in local maxima, just you know, overoptimizing inside of one particular paradigm with some easy returns. That's just reinventing the problem, though, making us into tomorrow's dinosaurs.

"If we're going to operate a culture of continuous improvement, we need to be internally disrupted to at least the same extent that we're disrupting those fat, stupid incumbents. That's why we have the labs. They're our chaos monkeys. They do all kinds of stuff that keeps our own models sharp. For example, they might incorporate a separate business and use our proprietary IP to try to compete with us — without telling us about it. Or give a set of autonomous agents privileges to communicate eviction notices in a way that causes a certain number of lawsuits to be filed, just to validate our assumptions about the pain-point at which an action or inaction on our side will trigger a suit from a tenant, especially for certain profiles of tenants.

"So there's not really any way that I can explain specifically what happened to the people mentioned in your correspondence. It's possible no one will ever be able to say with total certainty. I don't really know why anyone would expect it to be otherwise. We're not a deterministic state-machine, after all. If all we did was respond in set routines to set inputs, it'd be trivial to innovate around us and put us out of business. Our objective is to be strategically nonlinear and anti-deterministic within a range of continuously validated actions that map and remap a chaotic terrain of profitable activities in relation to property and rental. We're not rentiers, you understand. We don't own assets for a living. We do things with them. We're doing commercial science that advances the state of the art. We're discovering deep truths lurking in potentia in the shape of markets and harnessing them — putting them to work."

His eyes glittered. "Lukasz, you come in here with your handful of memos and you ask me to explain how they came about, as though this whole enterprise was a state-machine that we control. We do not control the enterprise. An enterprise is an artificial life-form built up from people and systems in order to minimize transaction costs so that it can be nimble and responsive, so that it can move into niches, dominate them, fully explore them. The human species has spent millennia recombining its institutions to uncover the deep, profound mathematics of power and efficiency.

"It's a terrain with a lot of cul-de-sacs and blind alleys. There are local maxima: maybe a three-move lookahead shows a good outcome from evicting someone who's pregnant and behind on the rent, but the six-move picture is different, because someone like you comes along and makes us look like total assholes. That's fine. All that means is that we have to prune that branch of the tree, try a new direction. Hell, ideally, you'd be in there so early, and give us such a thoroughgoing kicking, that we'd be able to discover and abort the misfire before the payload had fully deployed. You'd be saving us opportunity cost. You'd be part of our chaos-monkey.

"Lukasz, you come in here with your whistleblower memos. But I'm not participating in a short-term exercise. Our mission here is to quantize, systematize, harness and perfect interactions.

"You come in here and you want me to explain, right now, what we're going to do about your piece of information. Here's your answer, Lukasz: we will integrate it. We will create models that incorporate disprovable hypotheses about it, we will test those models, and we will refine them. We will make your documents part of our inventory of clues about the underlying nature of deep reality. Does that answer satisfy you, Lukasz?"

I stood up. Through the whole monologue, Sergey's eyes had not moved from mine, nor had his body-language shifted, nor had he demonstrated one glimmer of excitement or passion. Instead, he'd been matter-of-fact, like he'd been explaining the best way to make an omelet or the optimal public transit route to a distant suburb. I was used to people geeking out about the stuff they did. I'd never experienced this before, though: it was the opposite of geeking out, or maybe a geeking out that went so deep that it went through passion and came out the other side.

It scared me. I'd encountered many different versions of hidebound authoritarianism, fought the rot-fungus in many guises, but this was not like anything I'd ever seen. It had a purity that was almost… seductive.

But beautiful was not the opposite of terrible. The two could easily co-exist.

"I hear that I'm going to get evicted when I get back to the Termite Mound — you've got a process-server waiting for me. That's what I hear."

Sergey shrugged. "And?"

"And? And what use is your deep truth to me if I'm out on the street?"

"What's your point?"

He was as mild and calm as a recorded airport safety announcement. There was something inhuman — transhuman? — in that dispassionate mein.

"Don't kick me out of my place."

"Ah. Excuse me a second."

He finished his tea, set the cup down and headed over to the lab. He chatted with them, touched their screens. The murmur drowned out any words. I didn't try to disguise the fact that I was watching them. There was a long period during which they said nothing, did not touch anything, just stared at the screens with their heads so close together they were almost touching. It was a kind of pantomime of psychic communications.

He came back. "Done," he said. "Is there anything else? We're pretty busy around here."

"Thank you," I said. "No, that's about it."

"All right then," he said. "Are you going to leave me your documents?"

"Yes," I said, and passed him a stack of hardcopies. He looked at the paper for a moment, folded the stack carefully at the middle and put it in one of the wide side-pockets of his beautifully tailored cardigan.

I found my way back down to the ground floor and was amazed to see that the sun was still up. It had felt like hours had passed while Sergey had talked to me, and I could have sworn that the light had faded in those tall windows. But, checking my drop, I saw that it was only three o'clock. I had to be getting home.

There was a process-server waiting ostentatiously in the walkway when I got home, but he looked at me and then down at his screen and then let me pass.

It was only once I was in my room that I realized I hadn't done anything about Bryan's eviction.

#pluralistic #aaronsw #science fiction #big cable #telecoms #isps #net neutrality #boston #mit #fcc #National Multifamily Housing Council #NMHC #National Apartment Association #NAA #Real Estate Technology and Transformation Center #petard

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girl4music · 7 months ago

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Fuck it. I'm going to keep uploading them because I keep finding even more amazing validation. I swear I love the creators/cast/crew even more after watching these things. I didn't think that was possible.

"We just want to correct history for women and women loving women" is basically the jist of every single one of these things.

And the loose excuses are bloody hilarious to me.

NETWORK: "Why does Xena have to kiss Gabrielle?"

SHOWRUNNER: "She needs to be awakened."

NETWORK: "But why does it have to be like that?"

SHOWRUNNER: "Because it makes the most sense like that!"

NETWORK: "But... but...-"

SHOWRUNNER: "Look, are you losing viewers?"

NETWORK: "Well, no but..."

SHOWRUNNER: "Then shut up then. We know what we're doing."

Truimphed through 90's censorship? More like bulldozed over it and Xena was the one driving the vehicle, knocking down homophobes as she went. Picking up all her girlfriends on the way. This is great! 😂

I think it's the greatest thing ever that both showrunners are like this. I wonder what Sam Raimi would say. Still haven't come across his commentary. Got shit loads from Tapert and Stewart but no Raimi.

Ted Raimi, yes. but not Sam. Yet he is an executive producer too. 🤷‍♀️

But more showrunners that have a WLW ship in their show need to be this damn brave and adamant. Need to really rally behind their fans. The thing is... if they do... they'll get it right back. I'll make very sure of it because I don't fucking show up for what doesn't show up for me.

#xena warrior princess #the rheingold #cast/crew interviews #the ring trilogy #xena #lucy lawless #gabrielle #renee o'connor #wlw representation #queer representation #queer storytelling #queer narratives #the showrunners #rob tapert #r.j. stewart #exclusive bonus content #you guys need to get these box sets

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cabaretbabe · 11 months ago

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the thing that most frustrates me about thirteen (aside from her obvious suffering from poor pacing/writing) is the potential for a sapphic doctor was RIGHT THERE and instead we got some of the worst queerbait like... ever. like supernatural levels of queerbait.

and it would be one thing if censorship was an issue but its not!! doctor who is and always has been a historically queer show (it was created by a gay man) and has continued to raise the bar for representation in network television over the years. why could the doctor have a relationship with rose, river, missy etc, but as soon as its a queer ship she can't handle it anymore?? it doesnt even make sense in the canon of the show.

no fault to the actors, but yaz and 13 were incredibly bland characters that seemed to be smashed together as a last minute thought for queer rep brownie points. hell, steven moffat even depicted the majority of his main characters as bisexual or gay. if moffat is writing better queer/ female rep than you, youve got a problem.

and of course one could argue that every new who doctor has been fruity so whats the big deal?? captain jack, ten and the master, etc. but jodi being the first female doctor opened up so many new possibilities for sapphic rep that were squashed by overcomplicated, hollow plotlines and unlikeable characters. which is just such a damn shame.

i know nothing im saying here is a particularly hot take, the majority of the fandom feels this way. but having rtd back as showrunner (also a gay man!) and a fantastic m/m doctor in ncuti just really highlights how much we've been missing.

anyway, go watch torchwood and cry if you want proper queer rep in abundance. til then, jenny and vastra and bill and stargirl are about all we get.

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popculturebuffet · 2 months ago

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Since we've had fun with Adult Swim, Fox, and Comedy Central, let's try another animation line up with MTV (mix of adult and kids animation). From their first set, favorite character from the 1991-97 era: Liquid Television, Beavis and Butthead (aka Mike Judge's first show before King of the Hill and which also bounced between various networks between MTV in seasons 1-8, seasons 9-10 on Paramount Plus, and the upcoming season 11 on Comedy Central), The Brothers Grunt (from the same guy who later created Ed Edd n Eddy), The Head, The Maxx, Æon Flux, Cartoon Sushi (also from Ed Edd n Eddy's creator), and Daria?

Just two from this batch as I was a children for most of this. I do want to watch the Maxx and the Brothers Grunt (Now I know who made it). But thankfully unlike other short asks, this one is two bigguns

Beavis and Butthead: Is fantastic. A show I need to revisit again, and a show well worth checking out. Also need to watch the second revivial at some point. But I saw the mike judge collections as a teenager and saw some of it again years ago. The series isn't perfect, some episodes are just eh, but the bulk is just good dumb fun with excellent satire sprinkled in. The music videos could also be god tier paticuarlly the one where beavis plays pantera's abusive father. Favorite character is beavis> He tends to get the best stuff.

Daria: Picking a favorite here was hard till I remembered Jake Morgendorfer exists and is the best. Every scene with him is pure gold and he got the best song of the musical. It's not just because he's also a jake: he's just funny, genuinely sweet and deeply weird traumatized man.

Daria is a show near and dear to my heart as I first watched the two movies I got from FYI and the episodes on them and got the complete series for my high school graduation. Still have it 15 years later. While I haven't seen all of it I geninely love the show and want to cover it again , possibly do a full retrospective to cover all the episodes I haven't seen. Daria is fucking phenominal a show that's funny, witty and somehow both a very specific time capulse of the late 90's and earliest 2000's... and very prescient. Issues like tokenism, censorship by schools, corporations in schools, death, someone you loved nearly dying, plastic surgery and more are covered sometimes heavily sometimes just being damn hilarous. The show is funny, has a fantastic cast, and is layred as fuck. Daria is a great protaganist in that she nicely threads the line between symapthetic outcast and too cool for this shit hipster. She's as annoying as someone her age would be, but you still relate to her and get why she's like this in a world constantly trying to make her something else and not accepting the parts of her that are fine as is. Daria is a fucking masterpiece and well worth your time.

#daria #beavis and butthead #mtv

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grouper · 1 year ago

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@kingdeath000 @pazithigallifreya

honestly this deserves to have its own post made because ive been wanting to talk about this stuff for a bit. a little explanation of what I've been doing recently is under the readmore.

I think we as a generation of creatives feel pretty unanimously betrayed by a lot of the decisions made by the spearheads of pop culture. we're in a space now where we are trying to distance ourselves from the past and move things in a new direction with improved values of inclusiveness, understanding, and sensitivity. This has lead to some really important contributions being made in the field of animation specifically.

At the forefront of indie animation right now we've got what is essentially an "anti-disney". Your vivziepop, the late cartoon network, adult swim, internet-based projects and netflix animated adult specials that directly tackle these issues of censorship, stigma, and challenge our ideals of past years. we are moving into a new frontier of art with the internet allowing people to create their own platforms, much like what we saw occurring with the last large technological innovation of broadcasting, and even that of the printing press.

As we move into what could be a new golden age of art and culture, we as a generation may benefit from scrutinizing and studying works of the past century and learning from them. What works, what doesn't, and what mistakes cannot afford to be made again. Those who do not study history are damned to repeat it. We stand on the shoulders of giants.

As an academic, it is my job to challenge myself and my understanding of my field. the good, the bad, the ugly. But through doing so, I hope we can carry forward what is beautiful and good and enriching for society while continuously improving our morality. And as someone who cares deeply about my work I will bring some levity into it from time to time and allow it to interest me personally.

#a little mission statement ig. hoping the bolded words make it easier to read.#yelling #🤷🏼‍♀️

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fourohfourlifenotfound · 1 year ago

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i finished supernatural. here's some thoughts on the end.

I'm a fan of tragedies, okay? Call me a sick motherfucker, I can appreciate a sad ending. So when I kept hearing about the way supernatural was supposed to end, I thought, "Maybe it's just a tragic ending?" The start of season 15 seemed to reaffirm that, since it basically said "there will not be a happy ending for these characters."

Boy was I wrong.

There's two points that rub me the wrong way:

Destielgate

No one ever told me that half a speech before the "I love you," Cas says this:

The one thing I want… it's something I know I can't have. But I think I know-- I think I know now. Happiness isn't in the having. It's in just being. It's in just saying it.

To me, with how heavy the metanarrative is within season 15, this felt like the writers saying: "we know these characters can't get a happy ever after. but we can at least say their feelings explicitly. we can make it real, for a moment. we can give you canon."

So then to learn that, in the translations, the line after "I love you" got changed to "I love you too" based on what may have been an earlier script? To find out that somewhere along the way, Dean's line of reciprocation, his chance for "being" and "just saying it" was robbed of him? It feels criminal.

Like, I'm a lover of tragedies. If Dean and Cas didn't get a happy ever after together but it was explicit to the audience that they loved each other but couldn't be together? I would have eaten it up! But it's not that. Because Dean's words, the one thing he could have gotten, were stolen from him.

2. Dean's death

Dean died in a moment of absolute character regression. We spent 15 fucking seasons watching him grow out of "Prime Directive: Save Sammy" into a person who can care about his own life and feel like he has a purpose outside of saving his brother. And in his dying breaths, he makes his brother promise that he'll be okay?

It's not just that, too. It's the way that Dean is okay with not having that normal life he always craved. Remember that? How he used to dream of a life with kids and no more hunting, up until season 6-ish when he had that but watched it be ripped away from him because of his need to protect his brother? And how he morphed into saying "I'm going to die fighting" after that, like some kind of mantra that would make him feel okay with it if he just said it enough?

He almost, almost, cut that crap in the end. The scene where he's trading blows with Sam moments before Jack is supposed to kill Chuck in 15x17, he begs Sam to let him kill Chuck because he "can't keep doing this." He can't keep fighting, keep hunting. In that moment we see again a Dean who craves a normal life, and who is so damn close to getting it.

And you're telling me that this guy was okay with dying a hunter? Sure, just erase 15 seasons of character progression.

Again, I. Love. Tragedies. If he had died a hunter but in his final breaths told Sam that he regretted it, that he wanted a normal life, made Sam promise to go get his own normal life? I would have LOVED it. It would have made Sam's ending make more sense than him promising his brother he'll keep fighting and then seeing him basically quit hunting to settle down.

So the show forgot itself, and network censorship seems to have gotten in the way. These were the things that killed Dean Winchester.

#supernatural #supernatural season 15 #supernatural 15x18 #supernatural 15x20 #rubys spn watchthrough of doom

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theculturedmarxist · 1 year ago

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We come to Russia, to Petersburg for a lot more than the pleasures of High Culture. A bigger incentive is people, our good and long time friends here. I already mentioned in passing in my first installment that we met up with friends Masha and Ivan (names changed to protect their privacy) from Moscow who came here expressly for a get-together with us and with still another two-some who live here in the city center of Petersburg, Irina and Alexei.

Whether partly or fully retired from their lifelong professional positions, these people, through their own networks, are upstanding members of the intelligentsia in Russia’s two capitals. Ivan may no longer be president of the Moscow branch of the Union of Journalists, but he remains on the editorial board of their magazine and has administrative responsibilities in the university department of journalism. Irina may publish fewer articles today than in the past, but she performs public relations tasks on behalf of one of the clubs of Petersburg’s international friends headed by Hermitage director Mikhail Piotrovsky. Then there are the publishers of the Russian editions of our books with whom we did not share a meal, but with whom we spent three very pleasant hours in their office talking about the state of the book trade and about a lot more.

The overarching conclusion from spending time with these friends, who could all in the past have been described as pro-Western in orientation, is that what Alexander Dugin and Dmitry Simes were saying in the interview on The Great Game that I described a couple of days ago is borne out: these friends now have very positive feelings about the direction the country is taking.

This is not to say that there is complete unanimity among us about what is going on in public life. On the one side, I heard the remark that ever tighter censorship is being imposed on journalism. On the other side, our publishers say that there is absolutely no censorship in the book trade. Of course, we put to one side the ban on sales of the author of the detective stories Boris Akunin and on the one-time Russian Booker Prize winner Ludmila Ulitskaya. Akunin has publicly stated that he donates royalties from his book sales to the Ukrainians and Ulitskaya has made damning remarks on the ‘Putin regime’ and on the country as a whole. In wartime, their removal from bookstores is something you could expect even in nominally free and open countries.

The impact of the war on the lives of our friends is clearest as regards the Petersburg pair. For the past twenty years they travel each summer to Crimea, where they own a patch of land and a tiny house on a hillside overlooking the port town of Feodosiya on the eastern shores of the peninsula. Last year there were Ukrainian drone and missile attacks on the town and they witnessed the midair destruction of these aircraft. One girl who was spending the night on a hillside to watch the dawn was killed by falling debris. As the countdown begins for their train journey to Crimea at the end of this month, they cannot avoid thinking about a possible Ukrainian missile strike on the Kerch bridge on which their train will be traveling for 20 minutes to reach the peninsula. Then there is the uncertainty about how intense the missile and drone attacks on Feodosiya will be this summer. The risks are low but they do not make for calm nerves, which is what you really want from a summer get-away. Some friends of theirs who are also owners of dachas on the hills above Feodosia have cancelled their travel plans, though others are proceeding to the Crimea as in the past.

*****

I have in previous installments spoken about goods. Now I will turn to services. The one we use daily is taxis and I direct attention to that.

We take taxis around town in Pushkin. But mostly we use them to drive into and from the Petersburg city center.

Back in the bad old days of generalized pauperdom in the 1990s, every jalopy Lada traveling down the street could be hailed and would take you wherever you were going for next to nothing. Forget seat belts! Forget suspension! Forget the rules of the road! The drivers, mostly coming from Central Asia, were free spirits.

Those days are long gone. Nobody today will stop to pick you up if you raise your hand curbside. Unoccupied taxis will not let you in, because they are all radio dispatched, waiting for their next order. And the business has really consolidated in the past couple of years, with many smaller taxi companies having been bought out and with Yandex, the Russian equivalent to Google, having taken a dominant if not monopolistic position in the Petersburg market. I assume Yandex is similarly placed across the country.

One result of Yandex scooping up all the cars and drivers is that when you place your order by phone you have no idea what will be the quality of the car and driver who arrives to pick you up. It may be a proper Yandex branded car in full livery, or it may be just an ordinary passenger car, often quite worn out, operated by a Yandex ‘partner.’ Placing your order via their App is a safer bet, because you see on your telephone what the car and driver look like and have veto power.

Measured in dollars or euros, the taxis operating in Petersburg are cheap. The cars must take in 8 – 10 euros per hour if they are fully engaged. Fares for a given trip are revised up or down depending on the computer projected time of the journey taking into account density of traffic. How much of the gross revenue is passed along to the driver depends on his relationship to the company: his contract may be for rental of the vehicle from the taxi company, or it may be that he provides the vehicle. Our Pushkin based taxi service competes with others when it posts a new passenger call, since any one driver may be under contract with several firms.

In the past, going back a dozen years, when there were only local taxi companies, you could do side deals with drivers to order their services directly, not going through the dispatcher. Back then and until quite recently, I found the drivers to be very chatty and a good source of all kinds of information about local politics, local gripes and so forth. The ride into Petersburg takes between 45 minutes and an hour and a half depending on the weekday and the time of travel, so there was plenty of time to ‘chew the fat,’ as we say.

With the recent professionalization or corporatization of taxis under the Yandex banner, drivers seem less approachable and I rarely strike up conversations with them. However, two days ago, in the last 5 minutes of our late evening drive from Petersburg center to our apartment in Pushkin, I asked the driver what he thought about the fancy and impressive top of the line Geely car we were in. It was as if he had been just waiting for the opportunity to share his concerns as he weighs the possibility of actually buying a Geely, not renting it from Yandex to raise his share of the fares.

The Geely, for those of you who are not familiar with Chinese brands, is one of the biggest Chinese manufacturers, with extensive operations outside China. Inter alia, they happen to be the owners of Sweden’s Volvo cars.

The ride in his Crossover was very comfortable, as you would expect in a car of this type. It was very easy to get into and to get out of. And the interior was up to date, with large a informational screen on the dashboard. However, the driver’s interests lay elsewhere, namely in service life, in resistance to rust (poor) and the robustness of the electronics (poor). Then there is the question of availability of spare parts, which, per his information can take up to two months to procure, and that is a real negative.

You see quite a few Geely cars on Petersburg streets these days, but still more Haval cars produced by China’s Great Wall Motors, Chery from the manufacturer of the same name, and Exeed.

Last night we traveled home from the city in a Yandex liveried Exeed, which also was noteworthy for passenger space and comfort, for good suspension and tight steering. Once again I decided to talk cars with the driver and he was delighted to oblige. By his face seen in profile, it was clear he himself came from one of the Chinese sphere of influence countries. But his Russian was perfect, and he clearly aims to make his future here.

He is satisfied with his Exeed, though he acknowledges there are potential problems with spare parts. We may assume that this will be resolved once the newly arrived Chinese brands build their dealerships and local inventory.

The experience of last night’s driver with his Exeed only goes back a couple of months. Before that he drove a Chery, also in the luxury car category. Its best and endearing feature was safety. He and the car parted company when someone crashed into him at a crossroads and the car was destroyed. However, the air bags worked perfectly and he walked away from the wreck without a scratch.

From this chap I picked up the observation that the Chinese entered the Russian market a couple of years ago with very cheap prices. However, when the South Korean manufacturers left Russia some months ago, the Chinese immediately steeply raised their prices. Chinese cars may still be priced below comparable West European brands like Mercedes, but that is only because Russian consumers pay a premium to import their Mercedes, etc. from third countries in parallel trade.

We may assume that Chinese manufacturers have found their new Russian market to be a boon. Here they can dispose of their internal combustion cars for which there is falling demand in their domestic market now that the Chinese public is turning to Electrical Vehicles in big numbers. In Russia there is virtually no demand for EVs, because there is virtually no charging infrastructure for private cars.

Finally, on the subject of cars and drivers, I say with conviction that the more expensive and comfortable the car, the better the taxi driver follows the rules of the road and shows courtesy to pedestrians. None is ‘racing a traffic light.’ None is flying over speed bumps. None is weaving between lanes. All of these bad habits that raise safety risks were common in the driving public before.

*****

Victory in Europe Day, 9th May, was celebrated this year like last, with only military parades that people watched at home on television. There were no Immortal Regiment parades that brought the broad public out onto the streets in the years leading up to the Special Military Operation. The risk of terror attacks put an abrupt end to the Immortal Regiment and that is sad.

On the positive side, this year it was common for strangers to congratulate one another with good wishes for the holiday. So it was with our taxi driver who took us to the late lunch/early dinner we shared with friends in the city center. This year you could see cars flying the red flag of Victory day with the same patriotic gusto that Americans show on the 4th of July when they drive around their towns.

Finally, I close out these Travel Notes with a remark on the big Russian attack on the Kharkov region that began yesterday and is still underway, said to be the biggest of its kind since the Special Military Operation began.

There is considerable speculation in the West on what this means. Some say the Russians will try to take the city in the coming days. Others say it is just a feint, to draw Ukrainian troops away from other sectors of the front, in particular, from the Donetsk region, where the Russians will stage their real offensive, seeking to capture the strategic town of Chasiv Yar that has been contested for months and open the way to the full liberation of the Donbas.

Following as I do the Russian state news, I emphasize that the Russians are presently not tipping their hand. They only report the names of the villages in the Kharkov region lying between the city and the border with Russia that they have taken in the past 24 hours. Consequently all that we can say at this point is that the Russian forces have de facto created a ‘sanitary zone’ from which the Ukrainians can no longer fire artillery , drones and short range missiles into the residential neighborhoods of the Belgorod region on the other side of the border, killing civilians and creating havoc as they have been doing for months.

#gilbert doctorow #russia #china #ukraine conflict #ukraine #leningrad #yandex #ev adoption

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that-gay-jedi · 1 year ago

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So like. Why is censorship and intentionally suppressing books you don't like okay when transphobes do it but when trans people try to add a shred of context to transphobic propaganda bound in book form it's book-burning and ushering in another dark age?

And yes this is partially about the trans books that were affected by the currently much-discussed review bombing events, but this is far from the first time I've been frustrated by this particular double standard and I WISH I could say it's mainly coming from the religious right but like. Most of the hypocritical behaviour around censorship seems to come from radfems and radfem supporters, who blend in to fandom spaces more easily than most of the religious fanatics you'll encounter online.

The worst part is that I've seen (from the circus that took place a couple years ago when a library in my region began promoting fuckin' Irreversible Damage) that non-trans people, even GNC and LGB ones, genuinely cannot be trusted to think critically about literature relating to trans bodies and have absolutely no commitment to hearing "both sides" of any issue related to transness, and I hate that we can't expect these adults to act like adults but I'm not willing to let trans children and teens suffer forced detransitioning, conversion therapy, homelessness, "corrective" abuse and assault, etc etc for my own beliefs about anything, not even something as important as anti-censorship.

And let me be clear that when this all happened I didn't even say the damn thing should be taken off the shelves, just that it shouldn't be passed around without adequate factual context and that I was disappointed the library glibly gave money to an author who spends it on anti-trans causes.

And all this time it's been our books that are perpetually in danger of being banned, censored beyond recognition, suppressed, restricted, erased, and actually physically burned. Ours that were in the Institut für Sexualwissenschaft. Ours that are still targeted both by organized networks of hate and individual bad actors. Our stories that can still get an author all manner of legal and extrajudicial punishments just for being told. Not the trans-exclusionary "feminist" literature, not the Bible, not whatever damned thing is being protected by people whose desire to be seen as martyrs vastly outweighs any real backlash that expensive square of toilet paper has ever gotten.

But sure call me a woke mob book burner SJW fascist, words don't have any meaning anymore, Earth is the timeout corner of the universe and we're stuck on this purgatory planet together until the cumulative physical effects of holding in my opinions on the subject cause me to instantly drop dead of some kind of record-breaking heart attack.

So yeah forgive me if I'm a little bitter. I swear I'm gonna just filter another dozen or so tags after this and pretend that I'm not losing my hard-won scraps of faith in humanity at an unbelievable rate.

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nokingsonlyfooles · 1 year ago

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PARTIES!

Damn it, I don't have the spoons to go searching for all the pictures I've seen of the private parties while doing research and just hanging around.

Pre-internet, even pre-gay bar, this used to be a significant portion of the queer scene. THIS was how you met people like you and figured out your own deal. Someone threw a party and YOU got invited! No search engines or algorithms or censorship, pure social networking!

I love that, because, even if it all goes away, we can still all go to Phyllis's house and talk to each other, and support each other, and love each other. We can't lose that! We still need it, and we're going to need it even more.

It's hard to connect. The internet is a double-edged sword. It's easier to find things, but then we don't go out and really EXIST with each other in a space. And the spaces where we do exist together are being maintained for corporate profit - if we're not making them enough money, they don't have our backs.

God bless Phyllis and her collection of Gay boys. She cared. I wish like hell I knew someone like that now.

letter from a mother of a gay man. sent to ONE magazine, 1958.

This post was flagged as adult content and the original poster was deactivated so I'm bringing it back.

#lgbtqiia+#queer community #queer history #private parties #know your history in case you need to repeat it!

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ladyluscinia · 4 years ago

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Someone pointed out that showrunners and writers tended to attend specifically the new season promo cons, which makes sense why there are no writers Q&As now (and shows that I don't follow cons at all) but also WHY are writer Q&As informally reserved for promo events where a lot of the burning questions would be spoilers??? The year after the end of a show seems like the best time to ask writer questions??? They can't spoil anything! They can just talk!

#spn #spn con #i know in spn's case the network probably doesn't *want* the writers talking too much #*cough* network censorship. finale killing their plotlines. nepotism. *cough*#but damn it if the fandom could be trusted not to blindly blame the people put in front of them (lol) i'd love to watch them evade answers #writers #spn finale #showrunners #ladyluscinia

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illusory-torrent · 2 years ago

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damn lol why did that person come on a random post and just start being an asshole about the characters you like? like literally they could've just blocked you there was no reason to just hop on and be like "ACTUALLY I think this ship is badly written trash and I'm going to tell you all about why"

[context here for anyone who needs it]

yeah it actually really bugs me, honestly.

like. korrasami is not my favorite tlok ship. catradora is not my favorite spop ship. in fact, i have issues with both ships and criticisms of how they were written.

but to say that "Catradora was well written and satisfying and korrasami was not" is fucking stupid because korrasami walked so catradora could run. korrasami was one of the first mainstream animated queer ships to actually go canon. korrasami wasn't as well-written as it could've been because nickelodeon censored the fuck out of it.

"If we want to see that paradigm evolve, we need to take a stand against it... We approached the network and while they were supportive there was a limit to how far we could go with it, as just about every article I read accurately deduced... Was it a slam-dunk victory for queer representation? I think it falls short of that, but hopefully it is a somewhat significant inching forward... It is long overdue that our media (including children’s media) stops treating non-heterosexual people as nonexistent, or as something merely to be mocked. I’m only sorry it took us so long to have this kind of representation in one of our stories." — Bryan Konietzko

like. it's very clear that korrasami could have been written well and written into the show itself if not for network censorship. to claim catradora is better without looking at both ships from the lens of how queer representation has evolved and how queer representation is more accepted now is disingenuous/ignorant at best, and intentionally harmful at worst.

i'm not saying korrasami is the best representation there ever was. and i'm not saying catradora is the best representation there ever was either. i just made a post to compare two ships i enjoy seeing content of, and got random assholes in my notes calling me a moron for not admitting korrasami is bad writing... for some reason.

but whatever, their stupidity and lack of nuance is none of my business.

#korrasami #avatar #catradora #she-ra #fandom discourse #mona.txt #mona answers #a-real-human-person-not-fake #korra #avatar korra #asami sato #avatar: the legend of korra #the legend of korra #catra applesauce meowmeow #catra #adora #adora she-ra #adora shera

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fourohfourlifenotfound · 1 year ago

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honestly season 14 went wild with the metanarrative. it feels like a punching bag for the network censorship.

"Byzantium" (e8) where The Empty says he'll kill Cas when he finally allows himself to be happy (which we directly know is when Cas lets himself love Dean).

"Nihilism" (e10) where Billie says that the only ending for Dean is something that could be considered torture or suicide, depending on how you look at it. (Plus the earlier seasons with Billie, where she puts a stop to the constant resurrections and tries to make their deaths final).

"Moriah" (e20) where Chuck comes back to call Sam and Dean's lives his "favorite show" and it's basically revealed that he doesn't let them be happy, ever, because he enjoys watching their suffering. And when they fight back against that-- because all of these characters have had their moments of yearning for a happy, normal life-- Chuck say's he's tearing it all down and heralds in the final season.

It's all giving me this big message: "The Powers that Be don't want these characters to be happy."

And damn, if that wasn't exactly what was going on behind the scenes . . .

#supernatural #spn #destiel #rubys spn watchthrough of doom

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homiesondaweb · 2 years ago

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Okay I can't stop thinking about Hobie's siblings and childhood on my head now. So y'all gonna get these OC's and headcanons. I can't draw worth a damn so yall gonna get some face claims I pulled off Pinterest lol.

Starting wit the oldest of the siblings,

Hudson and Hendricks

Left: Hudson Right: Hendricks

While they both are talented with tinkering and such, in the shop Hendricks is the mechanic while Hudson is the technician. They both battle over who has more of an influence on Hobie. (Surprise! Its equal lol)

Hudson is a big flirt while Hendricks is an introvert.

They help put in on the rent once they establish the Shop and (may or may not) have rigged the utilities in their neighborhood so that most community places and homes have free electricity and gas.

The shop is always bumping Cymande, Gil Scott-Heron, and Mandrill

Can't keep away from Jamaican girls to save they life

They are shotgun older brothers. They will mob and grill anybody that shows interest in their little siblings (ESPECIALLY HARLEY, curse of being the baby sister)

Hudson taught Hobie how to take things apart and problem solve to fit them back together. Hendricks taught him how to play with circuits and to hack/program electronics.

The three of them would spend hours a week welding or smoldering shit together.

Their default looks are mostly their natural looks save for Hudson having yellow and orange highlights and tones. Hendricks usually has purple and blue highlights and tones.

Henry

Fits the quiet, sensitive artist stereotype to a tee. Can draw and sew but once Ma got him into film photography and he's been hooked ever since.

Is a fruit fiend. LOVES pies, cobblers, jello, fruity or sour candy. Fuck money, pay him in a ripe mango or some lemon drops yo.

1000% a Mama's boy, lol.

Despite being nearly mute with how precious he is about his words, is a HUGE social butterfly and the most networked out of his siblings besides Harley.

Spends a lot of time at the canal with the rest of the "destitute artists societal leeches" as the PM and Brit News call them. It's when he meets his partner Rembrandt and learns that love is the only label one should abide by.

His camera is his gun, the streets and his warrants for arrest know him as The Moor after the PM runs a censorship campaign and suddenly most art depicting Black, brown, and non-British people was censored with ugly Black cut outs. He first photo flyer protest was adding Othello back to paintings of his play. Newspapers called it "Return of the Moor." So he snagged it for the sake of irony.

He's a people watcher, he sees the art in everybody. Like tinkering with machines, he likes learning how people behave and tick. He learns how to be a soft influence once he sees that is the most effective way to help others and investigate ideals/intention and see if they're genuine. He teaches this skill to Hobie. It wasn't uncommon to find Hobie piggy backed on Henry as they lap the parks, whispering in Kreyòl ayisyen about their observations of the world.

His default look makes him appear reddish with bold black lines due to the amount of time he spends on his dark room developing photos or he is covered on scraps of Renaissance art/script.

Harley

Harley found her first guitar after hiding during a Symbiote raid on an underground concert. She stepped on it when she finally escaped from her spot. The stum was perfect, made a pile of symbiote goop explode. She took it home and got to work perfecting her sound.

She is the people's champ, LOVES meeting new people and networking. Is bold in her care for others. Always down to help the lil man. This has made her very adept at languages and communications. If you need a debater, advocate, negotiator, wordsmith having her on your side is the best choice. In a different life most definitely would have been a lawyer.

The entire family knows she is Pa's favorite and she is very much a daddy's girl lol.

Before it was bombed by the PM she and Hobie were regulars at the library. The two shared a love for reading, Harley makes sure all her brothers are book smart because you never know when you need some knowledge.

She is the designated family hairstylist even their parents. While doing Hobie's hair she would sit her guitar in his lap and guide him in learning how to play. She never had a fuss about him snagging it to play unless she needed it for practice. You can pay her on cassettes or vinyls records. Is a Betty Davis STAN.

Can only grow vegetables. The only flower or regular plant that doesn't die within a week of her possession is an orchid because it is a stick on dirt for half the year. She started the community garden after reading a banned book on the importance of nutrition to recovery from sicknesses

Here and her band led many youth heavy protests be it marching, pop up-concerts, vandalizing, or taking over a news station or council meetings full of Oscorp puppets and gained notoriety for it. When music wasn't enough, when words weren't enough, and every resource she could produce was nothing. Harley was never afraid to fight. She never claimed to be, but she is very much Hobie's hero.

Her default look has a lot of bold and swooped lines with sepia filters and graffitied sold English styled literature quotes and newspaper clippings cut outs. Her hair accessories are usually her pops of bright colors.

This is my theory piece on astv Hobie's Backstory.

Despite the whole Punk lifestyle, living on a repurposed canal boat, minor rock star status, and having active warrants out for both his civilian and Spidey persona thing he's got going on. Hobie had a pretty normal childhood for a bit.

His Pa managed the local radio stations and his Ma was a lead writer for the newspaper. Hobie found himself the baby out of 5 siblings and their 4 bedroom flat was just a bit too small for the 7 people family but it was great.

The neighborhood was always lively with community get-togethers, music rattled the bricks and the air was always savory with smell of jerk. Hobie used to eat himself sick with coconut candy and orange cake every weekend. He liked going to 'school' which meant being crammed into Ms. Ngozi and Ms. Freedman's flat with the other neighborhood kids then being taught from books Ms. Freedman had smuggled in when she partnered with Ms. Ngozi. Reading, writing, history, debate, arithmetic, ethics, journalism, all kinds of science but Ngozi loved when Hobie would take a machine apart and remake it.

His eldest siblings by about 12 years, twin brothers Hudson and Hector ran the 'Shop'. If you needed something fixed within their 6 block neighborhood you took it there. Cars, big appliances, medical equipment, radios, tvs, his brothers could fix it all. They'd fix it good, cheap or free and in a timely manner. (And they greatly encouraged their Little Bart brother to tinker)

Next was is other older brother, Henry. He was only 9 years older than him. A photographer and worked under their mother getting dynamic shots for any article she posted. He introduced Hobie to a lot of artists and taught him how to observe the world around him. How to sneak in and out of it.

Then there was his only sister, Harley. She was closest in age to him, only 5 years older. She was a badass on the guitar and even slicker at the mouth. She debated anyone under a table and had a right hook to back it up. You never would have pegged her to be the one to run the community garden. Not with her self-done piercings, bleach painted jackets, head fully of bantu knots and black lipstick. But she did, she taught Hobie everything to know about growing orchids and tomatoes.

Life was good. Despite the rising police violence, cost of living, and the fumes of Oscorp rising. 11 year old Hobie didn't know it to be anything else.

Then, he turns 12. Ma and Henry don't come home.

He's 12 and the Ngozi-Freedman homeschool is raided. He never sees them again but Harley fills her stage trunk with their books and records.

He's 12. Someone reported the shop and President Osborne new "certificate enforcement" squad torches the building. Hudson gets away but the Symbiotes bail out Hector to them and he only has one arm.

He's 12. The government has taken over the radio station, firing Pa. The house becomes cramped with the equipment Pa had smuggled out. Hudson shows back up and he's as ghost as Hector.

He's 12 and half his friends are just faces on murals and the other half is sick from the water. The garden is sabotaged and the city fines Harley (how the fuck do you fine a 17 year old?)

And there's a protest. Pa has taken over the radios in the city and rallies the people, he repeats Ma articles over and over informing the people about the propaganda, the contamination, the disappeared people, the injustice. He repeats them and repeated them as the twins litter the city with flyers using Henry's photos of the truth.

And there's a protest.

There's hundred of protests of all sizes, all over.

There's a riot.

There's riots.

There's fire and panic and Symbiotes spill into the neighborhood like oil and-

Hobie turns 13, it's just him and Harley.

Hobie turns 14, it's just him and Harley's guitar.

Hobie is 15, he's just some punk kid bit by a radioactive spider while trying to find shelter from a Symbiote raid. He uses this to his advantage.

He turns 16 and instead of blowing out birthday candles he's smashing Harley's guitar through a fascist dictator head with his fellow super powered punks. (He can't think of a better wish)

He's 17 and Miguel makes a mistake in showing up to his dimension with an offer to join his 'society'.

#hobie brown headcanons #original character #Hobie Brown's siblings #Hobie Brown #spider punk #spiderman into the spiderverse headcanons #spiderman into the spiderverse #spiderman across the spiderverse #hobie brown #spiderman across the verse #spidersona #black punk

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