#endorsement or warning | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

demetriandelibinaryboyfriends · 2 years ago

Text

The Tory Prom Parable: A Fix-It Fic in Polls: Part 3

Part 1: link

Part 2: link

And the winner is:

You walk out of the prom dress rental depot wearing this bombshell. Complete with a big scandalous slit in the side, just because you can! You have never felt more absolutely kickass in your entire life, not even when you nearly stabbed Samantha LaRusso to death with a spike bracelet that one time. Or tried to beat the crap out of her with nunchucks. Those are hard to top, but...well, this is a different kind of kickass. You sort of want to murder someone with poison lipstick tonight. How do the femme fatales in movies do it?

Robby is waiting for you in Sensei Silver's nice-ass rental car. God, this man has resources. Whatever the hell he was up to after the war, he made bank. But hey--who are you to complain? It's nice to get a taste of the good life now and again, even if you'd rather not know where all that cold hard cash is coming from.

Sensei Silver wouldn't like. Blackmail you something to do with your mom's dialysis, right? No, of course not. Sensei Kreese is a good guy. Really got you out of a fix. Any friend of his is also a good guy deep down, right?

As you strut over, Robby wolf whistles at you. He's just messing around, but you decide to play along a bit. This whole night is about pretending to be a dumb bougie rich kid who actually cares about shit like prom, so you might as well commit to the bit.

You do a dramatic spin, and show off some different angles:

WORK IT GIRL

Robby jokingly says you're a knockout. You jokingly ask if he brought any condoms. He jokingly says he did. You jokingly wonder how much you're actually joking.

***

Congrats--you have successfully made it to the prom! You park in an illegal spot because fuck the police. You link arms with Robby Keene and walk into the vapid, B.O.-scented high school dance in the power stance of the century. Maybe it's your egotism speaking, but you're pretty sure everyone turns to look at the both of you.

And there are fucking Miguel Diaz and Sam LaRusso, dancing all around the dance floor like they own the place. Having far too good a time. Fucken show offs. Ugh. Almost like they came here to participate in the popular teenage ritual of dressing up, drinking punch, and grooving to pop music! What losers.

But when you walk in and demand everyone else's attention...what choice do they have but to join in?

Oh nice!!! You already pissed them off!!! Well, that was easy. Should be all smooth sailing from here.

You decide to take a gander at the dance floor and get the lay of the land. Kyler, Piper, and some other Cobras came in a group. That's good--you can hit them up if Prince Traitor Boy and Princess LaRusso decide to start anything. Hawk is sulking in the corner with that lame-ass nerd kid he ditched y'all for. Hell yeah! He looks like he's already having a bad time, along with that Demetri loser. Karma for inconveniencing you, one of (if not the) most important people in the Valley. (Or at least you will be after you win the AVT.) Hawk's ex is also here, partying with a gaggle of girls. Good for her, honestly--she could do better than Hawk's backstabbing ass. Bitches with no dojo loyalty get no bitches.

Some generic Top 40s dance hit comes on. Robby offers you his hand, and you take the floor. Time to be the most obnoxious pair at the West Valley High Junior Prom!

And...damn. This kid can groove. He spins you like it's second nature. He waltzes to and fro with almost perfect rhythm. When you follow his lead, you manage to move in perfect sync, despite having practiced dancing maybe twice in your life and also wearing high heels longer than Hawk's d*ck.

You put your leg around him and yank him toward you, showing off your fine specimen of a leg to the dance floor. Damn right, everyone wishes they had legs like yours!

And--oh, shit! Now he's lifting you clean off the floor! This kid is stronger than he looks, damn. And now he's dipping you like he's been practicing dipping women every night for his entire life???

Okay, that was kinda hot.

No, no, bad Tory. This is a fake date meant to prove a point and aggravate Sam LaRusso and Miguel Diaz. You're doing evil petty revenge--the last thing you need to do is catch feelings for your partner in crime.

Remember what happened last time you caught feelings for a boy??? That's right--he got kicked off a balcony!

By...the same dude who is now your prom date, actually.

Huh. Now that is the height of irony.

Speaking of Miguel, though! It's around this time you decide to check up on what him and his snooty girlfriend are doing. Surely still watching your dance routine in aghast horror, disgusted but unable to look away, right?

Wait, where'd they go?

You notice Robby also scanning the room with a furrowed brow, apparently experiencing the same confusion. He looks at you for answers, but all you can do is give him an agitated shrug.

"Let's check the punch table," he says. Right, yeah. They're probably stuffing their faces with free snacks. How lame. People as rich as Moneybags LaRusso should never be allowed free snacks!

Off to the punch table you go! But alas, no sign of your least favorite couple of all time. You and Robby begin a thorough search and inspection of the prom venue, leaving no hallway unchecked, no storage closet unopened, and no tablecloth unlifted.

People really gotta learn it's useless to hide from you. LaRusso sure tried at the arcade, and how did that turn out for her?

Maybe if you can get that Demetri kid alone, you could totally team up with Robby and break his arm again. He'd just be the Broken Arm Kid forever and no one would ever hire him! Bonus points if you do it in front of Hawk like "hey, remember when you did this that one time? Good times, right?"

How those two boys swept all that shit under the rug is beyond you. If someone broke your arm, you'd probably just kill them as soon as you got better. Eh, you avoided juvie once--you can do it again.

"What are you smiling about?" Robby asks. A little teasing, but genuinely curious.

It suddenly occurs to you that fantasizing about re-breaking a kid's arm is probably...not a great look. Whoops.

Like Robby is down for evil prom revenge and all, but he might draw the line somewhere. Who knows.

"Oh, I'm just reveling in the fact we scared them into a corner somewhere," you tell Robby.

But you double-check and triple-check and quadruple-check every last corner, and...no sign of Cheater Diaz and Princess LaRusso.

It appears they bounced!!! Unfortunately, since this is a fix-it fic, other characters besides you will also be acting in-character and not like they were replaced by cheap imitation doppelgangers who behave completely fucking differently. Which means, of course, that when Sam and Miguel see the people who attempted murder on them twice and paralyzed and nearly killed them, respectively, they're going to want to haul ass out of there as quickly as possible. Since, you know, a panic response would realistically take over and overpower any desire Sam and Miguel have to "show you up."

Uh oh. You definitely forgot to account for the fact that your targets could just fucking leave. And now you're at a dumb high school dance with no one to harass. This is awkward.

But what can I say? Did you really think they were going to just stand around and glare at you all night, without even moving to the other side of the dance floor to try and avoid you? That wouldn't make any sense.

Well...if you want to know where they went, exactly, Hawk and Demetri might know. Except the one problem with asking them is that they both fucking hate you. And Robby. So that's not going to work.

You could try asking Hawk's ex, it's just be uh. Really fucking awkward, because Moon is friends with Sam and probably remembers the whole spike-bracelet-and-nunchucks ordeal. So it's doubtful she'll want to help you out either. But you've got a better chance with her than with Hawk and Demetri, that's for sure.

15 notes · View notes

sam-rothstein · 2 years ago

Text

yknow the only movie i ever watched where the violence was like way more brutal than i was prepared for was casino

#they need to put an endorsement/ warning on the cover like a grindhouse movie

2 notes · View notes

gauntletgirlie · 19 days ago

Text

It’s intense. It’s condensed. At first some of it might not make sense. Lots of names. Players playing games. Messes with your heart and messes with your head. Like that character? Now they’re dead. Worth reading every line. It’s sublime. Once you read it you’ll forever bleed it.

Y’know from the way people talked about it I was surprised that the Silmarillion was only 300 pages long but now that I’m reading it it’s like. Oh it’s 300 pages long but every page causes you 7 different crises and after reading 10 of them you have to go lie down for a few hours

#my endorsement #silmarillion #read it #it slaps #silm #warning:#will make you feel dispair #also disbelief #and rage #if you’re not yelling whilst reading you’re doing it wrong

4K notes · View notes

zanmor · 5 months ago

Text

We are well beyond canary in the coalmine warning levels with the way trans people and particularly trans women are treated on this site.

Maybe you've heard the metaphor of allowing wolves and sheep to share the same space, welcoming everyone. You end up with just wolves because allowing them in that space makes it unsafe for any sheep. Or the story about how a nazi goes into a dive bar and is refused service. The bartender then explains to someone else at the bar that if you serve them once they tell their friends and before you know it you're the nazi bar they all go to and normal customers don't feel safe.

Terfs and other bigots are seeing these targeted harassment campaigns succeed against trans women and rejoicing. They see Tumblr ban them and officially stand by those decisions as endorsement for their harassment. It's a sign to bigots across the internet that Tumblr is a good place for them.

And what's more is that a lot of us probably don't realize just how much trans women contribute to Tumblr. The women banned recently were sources of site-wide memes and posts I wasn't even aware originated from them.any years old memes and references can be traced back to trans women on this site.

How many of these folks have to be removed before this is no longer a site you want to be a part of it? Sure you cultivate your own experience, but you can't follow or interact with people who aren't here. And if I wanted to interact with the nazis and terfs I'd go to reddit.

I encourage everyone to reblog this. Trans women shouldn't have to be the only ones speaking out against the bigotry they're experiencing. They shouldn't be the only ones risking their blogs being nuked by staff. We have to stand with them.

#i didnt want to make this a post about how their being oppressed impacts you too #but honestly trans women contribute way more to this site's culture than pretty much any other single group of people #taking them out #and especially the more well known ones #absolutely destroys community #i think not just the trans community here though it definitely does that #but its also tearing away at the overall site community #if tumblr doesnt get shit under control this will hurt them more in the long run than anything else #protect trans women #thats what youve gotta do staff

19K notes · View notes

mostlysignssomeportents · 11 months ago

Text

“If buying isn’t owning, piracy isn’t stealing”

20 years ago, I got in a (friendly) public spat with Chris Anderson, who was then the editor in chief of Wired. I'd publicly noted my disappointment with glowing Wired reviews of DRM-encumbered digital devices, prompting Anderson to call me unrealistic for expecting the magazine to condemn gadgets for their DRM:

https://longtail.typepad.com/the_long_tail/2004/12/is_drm_evil.html

I replied in public, telling him that he'd misunderstood. This wasn't an issue of ideological purity – it was about good reviewing practice. Wired was telling readers to buy a product because it had features x, y and z, but at any time in the future, without warning, without recourse, the vendor could switch off any of those features:

https://memex.craphound.com/2004/12/29/cory-responds-to-wired-editor-on-drm/

I proposed that all Wired endorsements for DRM-encumbered products should come with this disclaimer:

WARNING: THIS DEVICE’S FEATURES ARE SUBJECT TO REVOCATION WITHOUT NOTICE, ACCORDING TO TERMS SET OUT IN SECRET NEGOTIATIONS. YOUR INVESTMENT IS CONTINGENT ON THE GOODWILL OF THE WORLD’S MOST PARANOID, TECHNOPHOBIC ENTERTAINMENT EXECS. THIS DEVICE AND DEVICES LIKE IT ARE TYPICALLY USED TO CHARGE YOU FOR THINGS YOU USED TO GET FOR FREE — BE SURE TO FACTOR IN THE PRICE OF BUYING ALL YOUR MEDIA OVER AND OVER AGAIN. AT NO TIME IN HISTORY HAS ANY ENTERTAINMENT COMPANY GOTTEN A SWEET DEAL LIKE THIS FROM THE ELECTRONICS PEOPLE, BUT THIS TIME THEY’RE GETTING A TOTAL WALK. HERE, PUT THIS IN YOUR MOUTH, IT’LL MUFFLE YOUR WHIMPERS.

Wired didn't take me up on this suggestion.

But I was right. The ability to change features, prices, and availability of things you've already paid for is a powerful temptation to corporations. Inkjet printers were always a sleazy business, but once these printers got directly connected to the internet, companies like HP started pushing out "security updates" that modified your printer to make it reject the third-party ink you'd paid for:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/11/ink-stained-wretches-battle-soul-digital-freedom-taking-place-inside-your-printer

Now, this scam wouldn't work if you could just put things back the way they were before the "update," which is where the DRM comes in. A thicket of IP laws make reverse-engineering DRM-encumbered products into a felony. Combine always-on network access with indiscriminate criminalization of user modification, and the enshittification will follow, as surely as night follows day.

This is the root of all the right to repair shenanigans. Sure, companies withhold access to diagnostic codes and parts, but codes can be extracted and parts can be cloned. The real teeth in blocking repair comes from the law, not the tech. The company that makes McDonald's wildly unreliable McFlurry machines makes a fortune charging franchisees to fix these eternally broken appliances. When a third party threatened this racket by reverse-engineering the DRM that blocked independent repair, they got buried in legal threats:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/20/euthanize-rentier-enablers/#cold-war

Everybody loves this racket. In Poland, a team of security researchers at the OhMyHack conference just presented their teardown of the anti-repair features in NEWAG Impuls locomotives. NEWAG boobytrapped their trains to try and detect if they've been independently serviced, and to respond to any unauthorized repairs by bricking themselves:

https://mamot.fr/@[email protected]/111528162905209453

Poland is part of the EU, meaning that they are required to uphold the provisions of the 2001 EU Copyright Directive, including Article 6, which bans this kind of reverse-engineering. The researchers are planning to present their work again at the Chaos Communications Congress in Hamburg this month – Germany is also a party to the EUCD. The threat to researchers from presenting this work is real – but so is the threat to conferences that host them:

https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/researchers-face-legal-threats-over-sdmi-hack/

20 years ago, Chris Anderson told me that it was unrealistic to expect tech companies to refuse demands for DRM from the entertainment companies whose media they hoped to play. My argument – then and now – was that any tech company that sells you a gadget that can have its features revoked is defrauding you. You're paying for x, y and z – and if they are contractually required to remove x and y on demand, they are selling you something that you can't rely on, without making that clear to you.

But it's worse than that. When a tech company designs a device for remote, irreversible, nonconsensual downgrades, they invite both external and internal parties to demand those downgrades. Like Pavel Chekov says, a phaser on the bridge in Act I is going to go off by Act III. Selling a product that can be remotely, irreversibly, nonconsensually downgraded inevitably results in the worst person at the product-planning meeting proposing to do so. The fact that there are no penalties for doing so makes it impossible for the better people in that meeting to win the ensuing argument, leading to the moral injury of seeing a product you care about reduced to a pile of shit:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/11/25/moral-injury/#enshittification

But even if everyone at that table is a swell egg who wouldn't dream of enshittifying the product, the existence of a remote, irreversible, nonconsensual downgrade feature makes the product vulnerable to external actors who will demand that it be used. Back in 2022, Adobe informed its customers that it had lost its deal to include Pantone colors in Photoshop, Illustrator and other "software as a service" packages. As a result, users would now have to start paying a monthly fee to see their own, completed images. Fail to pay the fee and all the Pantone-coded pixels in your artwork would just show up as black:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/10/28/fade-to-black/#trust-the-process

Adobe blamed this on Pantone, and there was lots of speculation about what had happened. Had Pantone jacked up its price to Adobe, so Adobe passed the price on to its users in the hopes of embarrassing Pantone? Who knows? Who can know? That's the point: you invested in Photoshop, you spent money and time creating images with it, but you have no way to know whether or how you'll be able to access those images in the future. Those terms can change at any time, and if you don't like it, you can go fuck yourself.

These companies are all run by CEOs who got their MBAs at Darth Vader University, where the first lesson is "I have altered the deal, pray I don't alter it further." Adobe chose to design its software so it would be vulnerable to this kind of demand, and then its customers paid for that choice. Sure, Pantone are dicks, but this is Adobe's fault. They stuck a KICK ME sign to your back, and Pantone obliged.

This keeps happening and it's gonna keep happening. Last week, Playstation owners who'd bought (or "bought") Warner TV shows got messages telling them that Warner had walked away from its deal to sell videos through the Playstation store, and so all the videos they'd paid for were going to be deleted forever. They wouldn't even get refunds (to be clear, refunds would also be bullshit – when I was a bookseller, I didn't get to break into your house and steal the books I'd sold you, not even if I left some cash on your kitchen table).

Sure, Warner is an unbelievably shitty company run by the single most guillotineable executive in all of Southern California, the loathsome David Zaslav, who oversaw the merger of Warner with Discovery. Zaslav is the creep who figured out that he could make more money cancelling completed movies and TV shows and taking a tax writeoff than he stood to make by releasing them:

https://aftermath.site/there-is-no-piracy-without-ownership

Imagine putting years of your life into making a program – showing up on set at 5AM and leaving your kids to get their own breakfast, performing stunts that could maim or kill you, working 16-hour days during the acute phase of the covid pandemic and driving home in the night, only to have this absolute turd of a man delete the program before anyone could see it, forever, to get a minor tax advantage. Talk about moral injury!

But without Sony's complicity in designing a remote, irreversible, nonconsensual downgrade feature into the Playstation, Zaslav's war on art and creative workers would be limited to material that hadn't been released yet. Thanks to Sony's awful choices, David Zaslav can break into your house, steal your movies – and he doesn't even have to leave a twenty on your kitchen table.

The point here – the point I made 20 years ago to Chris Anderson – is that this is the foreseeable, inevitable result of designing devices for remote, irreversible, nonconsensual downgrades. Anyone who was paying attention should have figured that out in the GW Bush administration. Anyone who does this today? Absolute flaming garbage.

Sure, Zaslav deserves to be staked out over an anthill and slathered in high-fructose corn syrup. But save the next anthill for the Sony exec who shipped a product that would let Zaslav come into your home and rob you. That piece of shit knew what they were doing and they did it anyway. Fuck them. Sideways. With a brick.

Meanwhile, the studios keep making the case for stealing movies rather than paying for them. As Tyler James Hill wrote: "If buying isn't owning, piracy isn't stealing":

https://bsky.app/profile/tylerjameshill.bsky.social/post/3kflw2lvam42n

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/2023/12/08/playstationed/#tyler-james-hill

Image: Alan Levine (modified) https://pxhere.com/en/photo/218986

CC BY 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/

#pluralistic #playstation #sony #copyright #copyfight #drm #monopoly #enshittification #batgirl #road runner #financiazation #the end of ownership #ip

23K notes · View notes