#even if i dont like that theyre technically exploiting others

[softness-and-shattering]

There are landlords that exist who are serious about their responsibilities and are good to their tenants. Ive never had one, but Im sure they exist. The point is that conflicting class interest doesnt make someone inherently an asshole, though I suppose that depends on your definition of asshole. The point is that they can be the kindest human ever, but they will very likely still put their class intetest above helping you. Its possible for them to be class traitors and eg stop charging rent. The point is that theres nuance, its not as simple as 'anyone with different class/political interests to me is inherently Bad'. Theres still choices. There still multiple factors involved. Morality is not black and white.

Im not defending shitty landlords, which is most landlords. Im defending nuance and complexity, and not seeing the world as black-and-white.

The same is true about employers and police.

[wygolvillage]

the way the warrior code has always been presented in the books is so fascinating to me because... its unjust and always has been. the books simultaneously seem to know this and deny it. i have Complicated Feelings about it

even from the first arc, we’ve got silverstream tragically dying and graystripe’s crisis of loyalty due to the couple being technically illegal, half-clan cats being injustly targeted during tigerstars reign, firestar breaking the code to feed yellowfang, who herself broke the code, and going behind bluestars back to do whats right. bluestar and her kits, too, were victimized by the restrictions of the warrior code. even firestars unresolved feelings for spottedleaf apply. and sympathy almost always falls upon the codebreakers and half-clan cats. theyre almost always in the right. and yet still the subtext of always having faith in starclan, the code being just and honorable and what seperates them from just being pack of rogues, is still very present.

in arc 2 our protagonists, who grow to become friends, are shortly afterwards seperated once the journeys over and its presented as tragic that they have to be split by clan loyalty. its an arc about how the clans must come together and unite in times of crisis... and yet at the end of the day, they must be seperated because StarClan Says So!!! this bleeds into arc 3, really, since its so connected to what happens in arc 2. lives are nearly ruined over the restrictive nature of the warrior code. squirrelflight does whats right even if it means crossing societal boundaries by raising her sisters kits, and the revelation that the three are leafpool’s is seen as so catastrophic that someone gets LITERALLY MURDERED to prevent it from getting out. leafpool even says that she finds death preferable to facing all the consequences the warrior code would impose on her for simply having fallen in love. hollyleaf, the one most adherent to the code as a moral guide, has to reckon with realizing that it technically forbids her existence, as well as that the three are, inherently, kind of above it since they hold more power than starclan, their religious authority. this is a Thing in power of three... and then arc 4 veers hard back into StarClan Is Always Right. its a straightforward good vs evil story and starclan are “the good guys”

i dont have that much to say on DOTC because the code hadn’t been established yet, but i do think its interesting that clear sky’s closed borders and territorialism, which is very close to modern clan tradition, is seen as unreasonable and restrictive by the other characters (it is, the divisions between clans are very arbitrary). i dont have much to say on AVOS either tbh other than that it does kind of have a “the youth dont respect tradition!!1!!!” undercurrent. “see if you undermine authority everyone is going to die and get killed by rogues!!!!” though interestingly we do get to see some cats change clans to be with who they love, like dovewing.

and then we get to TBC and ASC, which are interesting in that the code is being dismantled. a starclan cat, ashfur, the villain of TBC, uses it to leverage power against cats he dislikes by labeling them as codebreakers, the main romance of the arc is forbidden by the code (and this is presented as a tragedy that they could never get to be together). starclan encourages them to change the code, and it does criticize the way clan society, well.... works. and ASC is going to be about all the ways the code will be changed and altered! awesome! and yet i still dont think theyve gone far enough. ashfur being a starclan cat who exploits his position as a religious guide (and eventually as leader) is presented as an outlier, a mistake, not a “real” starclan cat (which is bullshit). dead cats who were once evil but switched sides in TPONS and ALITM arent allowed to leave the Evil Torment Dimension despite having fought to save the clans and showed genuine change, because “starclan said so, they dont make mistakes, especially not when they sent you to the dark forest lol”. its a bewildering decision and i wish they just decided to make starclan kind of morally questionable Explicitly. they keep dancing around this idea and never going hard with it. and i could go on and on about the unfair starclan trial in squirrelflights hope and all that but this post is long enough...

idk how to conclude this other than... i wish this was all intentional, that the erins had conceived the clans as a deeply flawed society that the protagonists try to navigate within and eventually dismantle, rather than kind of accidentally backflipping into having created a restrictive, shitty place without meaning to. the code throughout the series has caused tragedy after tragedy and yet solved very little. if this was an intentional narrative about questioning tradition and the constraints of society, warrior cats would be literally incredible! but in practice it reads like the erins trying to have their cake and eat it too. it makes warriors really weird to read as an adult with a critical eye. i KEPT noticing this over and over when i reread the series last year. hopefully ASC will develop these ideas further

[lord-king-saint]

they're not delusional. they're in a cult.

trumpers, qanon, anti-vaxxers, the far right, and white supremacists are cult members. these arent idiots-- it's cult behavior. so if you want to understand what we're up against, dont write them off as delusional and instead study cults, and how they operate.

many people are born into cults (like how the women of the WKKK raise white supremacists, or how some anti-vaxxers are raised in new age cults) but the insurgence of popularity among cults and conspiracy theories is from recruitment-- and how are people recruited into cults?

people are most vulnerable to cults when:

-they're unemployed

-they move to a new city

-they experience loss

-they go through a breakup

-they don't have friends

-they come from a broken home

-they don't have direction

-they're isolated

read the list again. covid was a mass displacing, mass unemploying, isolating, and traumatizing event. poverty as capitalist violence led the charge for cults, but covid knocked it out of the park. people had to move, partners broke up, loved ones died-- and they were alone. and under capitalism, who doesnt already come from a dysfunctional home?

capitalism engineers cults, because it creates the exact vulnerability that cults exploit. and when you try to argue with cult members, it drives them deeper into those cults, right? until they cant even interact with "normies" anymore. that pattern is by design, so that cult members eventually push away their support systems, and fully rely on that community.

cults also rely on "heightened emotional states". spiritual cults use ecstatic meditations, like osho rajneesh, whose community would thrash and scream and beat each other with sticks in small rooms, followed by reverent silence. but non-spiritual cults use anger. qanon, neonazis, the KKK, the far right, and anti-vaxxers ingest a steady diet of outrage daily. their leaders drum up aggression. they want to "protect" people from microchips, globalists, white genocide, men in dresses, etc.

and if youve ever argued with a troll from these cults, you know that theyre in a heightened emotional state, grasping for a chemical fix, even if they seem rational-- but facts and logic don't work for these people, and why would it? their daily dosage of anger and mistrust makes it impossible, meanwhile the leaders and chaotic members know it's irrational, and just enjoy upsetting you.

the heart of every one of these cults is power. white supremacists want a majority white population, so they attack queers and abortion to "codify" the white nuclear family into law, for white power. even the anti-vax movement is about power, because the father of the movement, andrew wakefield, literally "made up" the vaccine/autism study to make money selling his own vaccine-- and lost his medical license-- because he wanted power.

anyway, thanks for reading. considering sharing. but remember, these arent dummies. theyre in a cult. knowing may not change things, but i hope it gives you peace, and helps you strategize differently. even capitalism is technically a cult. people would sooner die for the economy than save actual lives. hmm. interesting.

anyway: get vaccinated, destroy the stock market, god is non-binary, and black and trans liberation now! yes gawd! 💅🏽✨

[freakinator]

actually i think this is the final sign i needed to stop metagame theorycrafting cause i legit Cannot do that with the way the series operates 😭

i was gonna make a theory on uu taking place on a server that operates on snapshots but apparently 24w37a got released After the episode and im p sure cross dimension enderporters didnt work before then so idk whats going on here lol

[larrythefloridaman]

Y'all like your deities with or without the shell?

Under the readmore is aaaaaaaaall color god observations and musings based on them, because I am studying to become the world's Premiere Chromatheologian and RGB Understander so under the cut is pretty much Oops! All Spoilers! up to the most recent episode of season 3.

Apparently Universal Color God Attributes:

Damage to their domain hurts them, but fixing the issue, or lashing out by using their powers destructively, can help them to repair the damage.

If they sustain enough damage, it can temporarily paralyze them and send them into a strengthened but 'exposed' state (chartreuse's spirit activation in the last fight of 19) and further damage after that will activate a failsafe, which is unique by domain but seemingly designed to give them the chance to balance things, but can get… very out of hand or backfire depending on circumstances. (see: cobalt’s failsafe sending mark's universe into a never-ending apocalyptic war because word of the cure for death became too widespread for the killing urge failsafe to affectively balance anything because every side could simply revive their fallen.)

Chartreuse's failsafe is something of a stopped time bubble quarantine where processes that require the passing of time cannot complete, allowing her the time to wear down the offending party to beat them to death or plan around finishing them.

Cobalt's is inciting war, the casualties serving to balance the scale. I'm not sure we know Crimson's yet- he's never taken enough direct damage without doing damage to compensate in order to trigger it, although i dont remember season one well enough to recall if any of the universe stuff in it tracks with the pattern bc season one is a bit fucky

Connected in a fashion that allows them to simply Sense the overall status of the others to some extent, although they don't know Why theyre in the state theyre in without asking (chartreuse [and by extension, folk, presumably on her information] confronting crimson via crimsonaut for pretending to be dead, Cobalt confronting both his siblings about how they are handling their duties improperly but not knowing about Folk. He knew about the constants deaths because hes a death god, duh, but he didnt use their names like crimson did, possibly implying they're erased upon death so thoroughly that only crimson and the constants can really recall a shattered constants' existence, not even the other guardians.)

Abilities of the guardians can be replicated by mortals through three apparent methods- through machines (dimensional bus, the time machine, presumably J0hn's part in Sephiroth's resurrection,) simply through advanced enough individual skill (Home MD curing death, potentially Dantoinette's universe portal travel, maybe Genwun's sped up time bubble that evolved them into Genfour? although that could very well have just been an illusion and theyre just like, a fuckin theater kid that was doing pretend character development for the Bit or something given GenFive turned out to be a zoroark) or through stealing some of the power of the relevant god (Dr. Order stealing Chartreuse's power, Dani maybe having stolen some of Crimson's when she beat his ass. Dani's one woman universal travel is like, wicked ambiguous)

Cobalt:

Can seemingly perceive or act through any living material. (The Tree. Cobalt instructed Larry to slap his hand on that tree, that shit glowed and he had a new deal tattoo without Cobalt ever having been physically present)

Can influence the resurrected by giving them a killing urge. Represented by an aberrant brainwave and a ringing in the undead's heads. This doesnt appear to be direct control- as the Grunk could clearly restrain himself from killing people that genuinely didn't deserve it (like nightly and cha cha, who WERE grunk event targets but not fatally so. Nagito was a crimson thing so it really doesn't count here. God poor grunk his life really is just a constant plaything in the hands of the gods huh) and Sephiroth very much had personal motivation to want to kill Folk. failsafe activates this ability on the scale of war.

Deals. The extent of what Cobalt can do with these is unclear but Iggy's god powers were taken from him as his part in the deal so what he can take isn't limited to physical things or things obviously related to his domain.

Weaknesses:

Deals. While this ability is impressive his preference for making deals for those that offend against his domain is potentially very exploitable- Larry's knowledge of the cure for death is, if word of it were to ever get out beyond Larry, wildly dangerous for this dimension, so technically the safest thing for the iron-fisted cobalt to do would be to nip the problem in the bud and get rid of him. But, fascinatingly, that wasn't even put on the table, the first thing Cobalt does is threaten J0hn, prompting Larry to make a deal. While Cobalt enforces death, he also doesn't like unnecessary death, and Larry demonstrably knows how to keep a secret for the good of the world even at great cost to himself and Cobalt is aware of this- easily clarifying to Larry the aberrant thing endangering the universe wasn't his timeloop business. So while he's clearly not letting his resurrection fuckery go unpunished, he's being pretty merciful when he doesn't have to be and from a strictly, brutally pragmatic perspective probably shouldn't be.

His control over the undead manifests as a ringing and an aberrant brainwave trackable by J0hn's equipment, and could probably therefore be accounted for and circumvented? J0hn has, wisely, largely sworn off fucking with people's brains after the sephiroth fiasco went So Wrong, So Very Wrong, Oh God Oh Fuck Someone Cool Almost Died, but if he hadn't, and if J0hn let his dislike for authority and keeping Larry safe outweigh reason like he let safety, spite and comedic value outweigh good ethical sense when reprogramming sephiroth, in theory Mr. 'hacked a time machine for breakfast?' could. y'know. probably do it. what is a god's authority to an anarchist, what better to challenge life and death than the cold and eternal machine, you get the point its a fun scenario

Olive Garden Breadsticks and Small Cute Dogs, apparently

Chartreuse's:

Time Clones: taps into parallel timelines to retrieve alternate versions of herself to utilize.

Time Travel: what it says on the tin. Travel to the past creates painful splits in the prime timeline, but through careful action and traveling back into the past, these can be weaved into a time loop. A split from the timeline is a wound, and a successful timeloop is the surgical scar it can become with attentive care, to use a medical metaphor. Carefully closed and healing. Keeping Folk here is essentially akin to chartreuse pulling out her stitches on the initial incision.

Time Stopping: creates a space wherein things that take time to complete cannot complete, where things can move, but everything within is in a perfect unchanging stasis until the bubble drops. This is the form her failsafe takes.

Timeline Creation: can create timelines from scratch.

Can fuse alternate timeline versions of the same individual to allow them to coexist. (Ryan's confirmed in the discord that Dantoinette experienced both failures in 20, because Chartreuse fused the two instances of her to save the post-raid instance from fading. Could... theoretically do this to Folk and save herself the pain, but while Folk and Therapuppy are the same person, there's seven years and untold amounts of difference deriving from the time and circumstance between them and the inherent cognitive dissonances that would result from attempting that would be wicked fucked up to inflict, and that's assuming there isn't some reason that it wouldn't be possible anyway. while the two Danis had like. A day or so's difference between them, so she could be safely fused with the only dissonant thing being that she remembers both being too slow to prevent order's time escape and beginning to dissipate post-raid, AND losing that fight to her pre-raid. RIP Dani, that perfectionism must be kicking her ass)

Weaknesses:

Unwilling to use her powers destructively in her pursuit of domain repair and thereby much easier to damage to the point of paralyzing her, making her particularly vulnerable to Power Theft

Morally Optimistic. At one point in 19, she briefly justifies Crimson's shitty evil actions to herself after experiencing for herself how Wack the kerfuffleverse is firsthand, ("and all he did was kill a couple people!" Chartreuse. Honey.) and when she fights Crimsonaut she seems to actually believe for a second that he's actually worried about her when Crimson asks if she's okay after he beats her. Additionally, as D+, she concerns herself with trying to understand doctor order's motive, and after Larry defeats Order, he makes a point of confirming she feels no remorse before making his request for what Chartreuse does with her, and appeals to the idea of letting Order fulfill her desire to be a god in a way which isn't a problem for anyone and Chartreuse is more than happy to oblige under these conditions after what Larry's done for everybody. Then immediately threatens to evaporate him for playfully teasing her about having a crush on folk. Fucked up a little bit

Crimson's:

Universe Shifting: Travel between universes.

Universe Correction: appears to replace an aberrant individual with the 'correct' version of themselves for that universe, presumably sending them back to their own. (Mario from super mario was universe corrected, but still seemingly exists in wario form as evidenced by smashup kerfuffle, and was simply temporarily replaced with his corrected universe counterpart. But like. The dimensional bus system is still active crimbo doing the Put That Thing Back Where It Came From Or So Help Me routine aint gonna work if they can come back with a shrug and bus fare. you're fighting the symptoms without treating the problem)

Universal Constants:

Three individuals per universe that serve as the pillars which stabilize said universe, created by absorbing red orbs Crimson creates. Becoming a constant grants power, but also makes the constant fragile, and death wipes them from the face of the multiverse, only crimson, those he's possessed and the other constants seemingly able to recall they ever existed, although some physical evidence is still left behind (Larry's record of Nagito's death, which is just as redacted as everything else relating to him but still is very much something Larry has. Kind of a Voidfish adventurezone type beat ironically enough? Taako really has seen all this shit before no wonder he peaced tf out)

To counterbalance the weaknesses the constants have, they have a sort of spidey-sense to alert them to danger, and an intrinsic bonded connection to their fellow constants, and additionally, Crimson apparently doesn't suffer any pain from the death of constants or the structural instability of a universe.

Possession: what it says on the tin! Seemingly can only be done with permission to living things- none of crimson's direct hosts seem to have entered that agreement unwillingly, Valentine lost a bet, Hamburger and Crimsonaut have been by all evidence intentional allies to Crimson- but electronics are fair game, as seen with The Guy's suit. Kinda curious how that rule applies to bitches that are half and half, like J0hn or the clonebot gang, as its unclear whether The Guy's suit was yoinkable without permission because it was mechanical or because its not sentient. could go either way but if it's the former that's potentially very frightening

Fusion: Two individuals from alternate universes can be fused into one shared body which can take on aspects of either depending on which is currently in control. (possibly allows someone who traveled into a given universe to become a fixed resident there without it being an issue for Crimson, whose job is to prevent interdimensional travel?) Monday Mark and possibly T.O.M. are our main examples.

Corruption:

Unpleasant As Hell and can even kill you instead of changing you if you cant handle it.

turns the corrupted individual into a twisted exaggeration of themself, allows them supernatural control over their shape, and makes them very difficult- if not impossible by traditional means- to kill, based on Garfield.

Subjects them to control by Crimson, but can be exorcised of this influence just like crimson's direct hosts can, although the supernatural changes to their physiology are seemingly permanent, judging from Shantae.

Notable Weaknesses:

Exorcism can be performed to free a possessed or corrupted individual of Crimson's influence. Its unclear how exorcism works/is learned in CPUK, but confirmed exorcists: dantoinette and yung papaya's snake dad, confirmed non-exorcists: folk

The universal constant orbs are physical objects so they are Very Stealable and they grant a power boost so theres literally an Incentive to beat his ass for anybody who wants to be strong and either doesnt know or doesn't care about the whole 'getting erased when you die' part

Crimson has lots of tools to create pawns, but all of them have drawbacks. Corruption could kill a potential pawn, possession generally seems to require permission, and he has no control over the constants' choices and actions

Manipulative bitch's highest stat is charisma and it shows. This motherfucker is selling snake oil. If he was mortal rather than a Whole Entire God he'd make an excellent ineffectual saturday morning cartoon supervillain and i think everyone, including him, would be happier for it, ngl

Something interesting ive realized that likely wasnt fully intentional, is that a lot of Dr. Order's creations, considering her motive, can kind of be sorted by a color god it appears to be a crude attempt at mimicking the abilities of. My Grunk is a poorly executed resurrection, the clonebot gang vs chartreuse's timeclones (this one deserves special mention because Chartreuse used this shitty attempted mimicry to her advantage with D+, very smart and ironic play, excellent job Treusy,) spirits are somewhat similar to universal constant orbs (orbs which can be absorbed to grant power, but which have physical repercussions- key differences being that spirits require activation and grow stronger while attuning to a user without being used, and having far less severe drawbacks, taking a heavy toll on the body, but only once they've worn off and without the risk of wiping yourself from the face of existence,) and she also augmented Perfect Spriteman and Larry, which kind of track as crude imitations of Crimson's corruption!

Garfield was an acerbic cat who loved food and hated mondays, now its an actively malicious ever-hungry amorphous entity whose only weakness is monday and whose only consistency in form is 'cat-like.'

Shantae was (to my extremely limited understanding of shantae,) a friendly heroic type who had to introduce herself often, and she became something akin to a biblically accurate angel that can *only* introduce herself.

The Grunks a tough but sweet and supportive single dad with stage presence and a tendency to fly off the handle when he or his family are slighted, and now he gets so hype in the audience when his son does well that he bursts into flames and ascends and we get random grunk events along with the associated murder charges when he gets mad and the target sucks enough that he doesn't hold himself back from killing them.

Perfect Spriteman and Larry fit the trend of exaggeration of already present traits- Spriteman fucking loves sprite and became something that only thinks about sprite, and Larry the Florida Man, characterized from minute one by unpredictability and who spent his first matches in the series pre-shapeshifter transformation staying alive keeping stocks for Shockingly Long even despite getting seventh, became literally physically random as well as developing the ability to regenerate, albeit with the ability to feel pain normally very much intact, unlike Garfield just... Soaking up damage like its nothing in his pursuit of Jon. The fact that Arbuckle legit defeated Garfield, even temporarily, is terrifyingly impressive honestly that dude is fucking built different for being so chronically bland

i dont think they're actually corrupted in any meaningful way we have to worry about, to be fully clear, Spriteman was cured with fucking antacids, i simply think they could be a fucked up attempt at making something that kind of seems like it from a functional standpoint, from the wannabe god doctor that brought us green clones whose only fundamental association with time was accelerated aging and who thought an actively rotting corpse thats just reanimated enough that it can throw hands was as good as curing death

[beatcroc]

12, 24, 36 for the oc ask post!!

> Are they an overall healthy person? Do they make for a good patient or a terror? OH MAN. amaranth: yes, in an actually genuine sense. motions again at her being the god damned princess; she just kind of has her needs really well taken care of :v eats well, has good medical care, etc. also likes to stay in shape so she can keep being a scrappy little bastard and win every fight she picks. if she winds up in the hospital it's probably because she broke a bone from getting too rowdy with a fucking bear or something. she WILL be irritated at this but she'll do her best to just chill and Deal With It bc she knows it's important to let it heal properly. but also she is going to be so mad about it.

ezekiel: yes....though not for,,,,,,good reasons. i will be real with you they're definitely some kind of internally fucked up simply by virtue of having been alive 750+ years which human bodies are definitely absolutely not designed to do, but also theyre like, Fine. theyre juiced on god energy and dont have to worry about things like physical injury or natural biological deterioration. they havent been to a doctor in centuries. its fine

lily: ALSO has some some kind of wildly unnatural 700-year life preservation thing going on. i don't think this one's done much to her physically though, it just prevents her from growing/aging at all. i do like the idea that there can be weird side-effects for mortals that stay in nk's domain for so long, but i haven't really landed on anything specific it would do to you. as far as medical Care goes, honestly she probably does a lot of stuff herself. she's got a good few people checking in on her periodically out there otherwise, and if something was Really wrong one of her animal buddies [most likely helix] would run for help.

spurlocke: aside from the whole terminal god parasite thing, yeah he's pretty average. the toxinvein does make it harder for tech in general to interact with him, but as far as medical treatment goes it's probably still Workable at least. technically under the same life-stasis thing as lily, but he's only been like that for a few years and is still well within his natural lifespan

What are your character’s special skills?

amaranth: quick thinking and adaptability. does really well under pressure. besides being ridiculously strong-willed where it's practically impossible to change her mind on something once it's made up, it's also practically impossible to stop her from actually doing something she's set her mind to. you can try but she's very analytical and she Will find something to exploit; some way to get the upper hand or a way to slip away, and she damn well isn't afraid to take risks or make sacrifices for her goal.

ezekiel: playing the long con and raw perseverance. even though they're absolutely abysmal at fruitful reactions in the short-term, they're exceptional at laying low and biding their time [they're immortal, they've got more of it than anyone], and given the chance to figure out what they want for the end stat of something and plan their next moves, there's pretty much no way to stop things from going their way. and yes, ezekiel and amaranth are ABSOLUTELY a frequent case of unstoppable force meets immovable object.

lily: insanely skilled technician and really good with animals! not a whole lot to elaborate on here, she just likes mechanics and has had 700 years to get good at it lol. she's also weirdly emotionally clairvoyant at times, which i wouldn't entirely call a skill because it's not something she does deliberately, but i like to have her say really out of pocket shit to other characters about stuff they're maybe not ready to confront about themselves yet. it's so funny.

spurlocke: genuinely very charismatic, which is not something that can be said for the others. only one with real emotional intelligence, and he kinda just knows how to talk to people and be friends with whoever/get them on his side.

> Tell us something about your OC that doesn’t make it onto the page?

amaranth: thankfully it doesnt really come up in ss' plot at all but she is verifiably A Horny Person. listen. she fucks. enough that it's a character trait.

ezekiel: honestly i think p much everything about them gets covered but a thing i kind of downplay/dont bring up unless i have to, is that they're from an abusive background. this was part of the catalyst for them...becoming a godslayer, and also why they're Like That in general. they havent done the best at letting it go.

lily: honestly i do not know. lily's really a bit lacking in the general characterization department and is more important for her various connections to other characters/ plot stuff so,,,

spurlocke: considers himself a poet. it's not that this DOESN'T come up, since his band is pretty front and center to his whole deal and he does the songwriting for HALO BREΔK-- like it's There, i just don't really directly call him that. but that's what he considers it.

[tulipscomeinallsortsofcolors]

does Linda go to mortal school? or does May/Roman homeschool?

there’s a whole mess of issues here that complicate this question, and its a debate that goes on for nearly a full year

Logan and Patton, who are intimately familiar with exactly how cruel children (and teachers for that matter) can be, know they will see her claws and her tipped ears and strange noises and her flapping hands and think “different.” they’ll think “Wrong.” theyre in camp homeschool

Roman, who grew up isolated from other children and painfully, desperately lonely for years, is perfectly happy to teach her in theory but not willing to deprive her of regular contact with other kids. 

And then theres other complicating factors - the whole fact that public school generally requires you have something of a legal paper trail, which a child who came out of a magic witch-hazel does not in fact have. furthermore, at the point she mentally kindergarten age, they’ve had her less than a year, and they dont have enough data to be sure how she’ll even age/if she will consistently

It wouldn’t stop her from learning the material if she was still say, seven mentally in eighth grade, but Logan (rightfully) points out that Roman’s fears she’ll be socially isolated if they homeschool her might very well end up happening anyway in such a scenario.

Eventually they do end up homeschooling her. the practical concerns end up outweighing the emotional ones. BUT idk if this is a thing everywhere, but it is around here - oftentimes rural local school districts will allow homeschool students in their boundaries to participate in extra-curriculers.

now, technically, Linda is not actually enrolled in these (again, paperwork) but like... it doesn’t even matter who brings her, theyre all terrifying, but either the Lord of the Forest or one of his three magically terrifying consorts shows up, with a child who is for all intents a purposes the princess, and tells you she wants to join the soccer team

are you going to demand paperwork? i sure as FUCK am not going to demand paperwork.

(Yes i did pick soccer exclusively so she doesnt have to touch the ball and possibly pop it. please dont ask me anything about Linda’s soccer exploits because i have negative 100% of a clue how sportsball works, but feel free to send me headcanons if you know how it works)

[scatterpatter]

yknow im gonna expand on my angelXdemon rant from last night

FUCKIN GIVE ME VARIETY PEOPLE WHILE THERE’S NOTHING WRONG WITH THE STEREOTYPICAL “hunky demon X blue-eyed blonde twink cinnamon roll angel” FORMAT, ITS SOOOOO BORING THAT ITS THE ONLY TYPE I EVER REALLY SEE

GIVE ME POWER BALANCES- WHY IS THE DEMON ALWAYS STRONG AND POWERFUL BUT THE ANGEL IS A SMOL DEFENSELESS FRAGILE LIL THING? IT’S AN ANGEL, ANGELS ARE NOT BABY KITTENS THEY’RE FUCKING WARRIORS- GIVE ME AN ANGEL WHO CAN FIGHT AND STAND UP FOR THEMSELF- LET THEIR POWER BALANCE OUT WITH THE DEMON

GIVE ME DIVERSITY! GENDER FOR THE MOST PART IVE SEEN PRETTY CHILL LIKE THERES A FAIR BIT OF F/F AND M/M EVEN THO M/F IS THE MOST COMMON- ID LIKE SOME MORE GENDER NEUTRAL SHIT REPRESENTED THO(LIKE ANGELS TECHNICALLY SHOULDNT HAVE GENDER AS THEYRE CREATED NOT BORN, SO GIVE ME MORE NB/AGENDER/GNC REP!) GIVE ME BLACK ANGELS- GIVE ME CHUBBY ANGELS AND DEMONS- HELL MIX IT UP AND MAKE THE ANGEL THE HUNK AND THE DEMON THE TWINK I DONT CARE BUT DO SOMETHING- MAKE AN ANGEL THAT ISNT JUST A BLUE EYED BLONDE! MAKE ANGELS AND DEMONS WITH SCARS/BIRTHMARKS/STRETCHMARKS/ETC! GIVE ME SOMETHING DIFFERENT FROM THE NORM

MIX UP THE PERSONALITIES! MAKE THE ANGEL ARROGANT OR FULL OF THEMSELF, MAKE THE DEMON ACTUALLY KIND, MAKE THE DEMON SMART AND CALCULATIVE KINDA LIKE A BLOODSUCKING LAWYER, MAKE THE ANGEL HAVE A NO-TOLERANCE-FOR-BULLSHIT PERSONALITY, MAKE THE ANGEL RECKLESS, MAKE EITHER OR BOTH OF THEM HAVE ANXIETY OVER INTERACTING WITH HUMANKIND DUE TO NOT UNDERSTANDING HUMANITY, IDK FAM GIVE ME SOMETHING

MAKE THEIR RELATIONSHIP- LIKE- ACTUALLY HEALTHY? GOD EVERYTHING I SEE IS JUST “ooo the bad bad demon seduces the angel into sin it’s soooo bad~” LIKE S N O R E, IT CAN SOMETIMES WORK BUT LIKE C’MON IS THAT ALL YOU’VE GOT? MAKE THE ANGEL TEACH THE DEMON ABOUT KINDNESS, MAKE THE DEMON TEACH THE ANGEL TO LET LOOSE AND HAVE FUN! HAVE THEM COMPROMISE AND FIND A MIDDLE GROUND WITH EACH OTHER! TEACH THE ANGEL TO BE LESS JUDGMENTAL ON THOSE WHO SIN, TEACH THE DEMON TO LOVE OTHERS AND TO NOT ALWAYS EXPLOIT PEOPLE WHO ARE WEAK AND VULNERABLE! GIVE ME SOMETHING TO MAKE ME WANNA ROOT FOR THEM OTHER THAN “uuu the sin is so Hawt” LIKE UGHHHH

MAKE THEM A FUCKIN COUPLE JFC- SURE ITS NICE TO HAVE THE DEMON SEDUCING THE ANGEL AND THEY KISS AND MAYBE GET NAUGHTY IF YOU WANNA GO THAT FAR BUT LIKE... COME OONNNNNNN GIVE ME MORE- IF THEY’RE AN OTP THEN MAKE THEM AN OTP- HAVE THEM FLY TOGETHER! GO ON SILLY DATES! SNEAK THE ANGEL THROUGH HELL- SNEAK THE DEMON THROUGH HEAVEN- HAVE THEM DISGUISE THEMSELVES AS HUMANS AND RUN AROUND ON THE MORTAL PLANE BEING CUTE AND DOING COUPLE THINGS! HAVE SHENANIGANS AT RESTAURANTS AND SHIT- MAYBE THE ANGEL LIKES SWEETS AND THE DEMON CANT HANDLE HOW SICKENINGLY SWEET THE DESSERT IS- MAYBE THE DEMON LIKES SUPER SPICY FOOD AND THE ANGEL TRIES IT AND STARTS CRYING BECAUSE THEY CAN’T HANDLE THE SPICE- IDK MAN GIVE MY A N Y T H I N G

*INHALES*

GIVE ME SOCIETAL IMPLICATIONS OF THEIR RELATIONSHIP. IS IT ROMEO AND JULIET? IS IT COMMON FOR ANGELS AND DEMONS TO DATE? IS THIS THE FIRST THEY’VE EVER SEEN SOMETHING LIKE THIS? HOW WOULD THE ANGELS REACT? HOW WOULD THE DEMONS REACT? WOULD THEY TRY TO SPLIT THE OTP APART? WOULD THE ANGEL FACE BANISHMENT AND BECOMING A FALLEN ANGEL? MAYBE THE ANGEL AND/OR DEMON LOVES TO FLY AND WOULD RISK HAVING THEIR WINGS TAKEN! MAYBE THEY RISK BEING TURNED MORTAL AND HAVE TO WORRY OVER GROWING OLD AND DYING! HOW WOULD YOUR OTP HANDLE THESE?

LIKE C’MON LOOK AT ALL THAT SHITE I LISTED OFF THE TOP OF MY HEAD WHY CAN’T ANYONE ELSE MAKE THEIR OTP MORE INTERESTING LIKE IT’S ANGELS AND DEMONS THERE’S SO MUCH POTENTIAL THAT’S W A S T E D

[thelifetimechannel]

[qimranct-blog]

oK SO WAKABA AS THE PERSON WORKING FOR SHIDO, this is really badly written for my entertainment btw so dont take my joke dialouge too seriously

Ok so I am still hammering this out and feel free to add your own pinion on how this can be better bc tbh i only played the game once when it first came out so my memory is foggy. Lets start form the beegining: wakaba is doing some cognitive pscience shit and making great progress, shes learning more about the cognitive world than she ever imagined shed be able to without the ability to enter it.

This research reaches shido in some way or another and hey that sounds exploitable lets talk pscience. Wakabas doing her thing and shidos just chillin, watching from the side lines in case anything good comes of that.

Some good comes of that, shes got some clues on things like personas, other worlds, random bull thats been going down with persona shit all this time. Shes making SERIOUS progress and shido wants in on this shit, he wants more progress, he want the persona user.

She has none for him, hes not having that shit

he does some digging into the background of people related to the research. some way or another he gets what he needs on forcing a persona onto a person who would other wise not have any, he insists wakaba try it. she could learn so much more if she could just enter the cognitive world and with her research she can do SO MUCH with a persona.

shes not buying that bull, shes got a daughter to worry about that she would rather not endanger by forcing a inner self demon creature into her fucking soul. Masayoshit shidont does not like this, hes an angry egg head. "ill break that 2+2 not knowing ass childs leg if you dont do it u fuckin assmunch. i m an ass hole LISTEN TO ME" and wakaba knowing damn well that technically he has the power to do that... tries to talk him out of that. THERES no need to go this far. hes going this far though so shes got a choice to make.

She starts reading up on how to give a person a persona. Its awful, its balls its the pits and theres no way shes forcing that on anyone. not a chance in hell. But shes got to do something for futabas sake. Shes gonna use herself as the subject for this.

but theres one thing that hits her, the persona will aboslutely try to kill you out of no where regardless of where you are, cognitive world or not. not good, shes gotta give up a lot to make this work and that kind of includes futaba. she tries to make masayoshi change his mind and he suggests making someone else do it. She says no, thats torture. hes...he dont care, if she doesnt futaba is fucking dead.

wakaba tries to reason with him "if i do thins i cant be near futaba!" she says and he say "FUCK YOU AND YOU R DAMN DAUGHTER IM GONNA GO BUST HER KNEE CAPS YOU FUCKIN SHRUB." wAKABA INSISTS ON HIM NOT. He wont if she just does what he says. so she does. shes got that persona in her some way or another and boy is it suffering, its been trying to kill her all week. futaba is safe tho, shes still trying to be a good mom but things are looking grim, she tells sojiro if she dies suddenly then well, shits weird.

so yeah shes got a persona and shes doing everything he would have made goro do except her persona wants to kill her every 20 minutes like damn. chill. Shes got the suppressant pills yeah but even still this is suffering.

so yeah now her death. She was supposedly killed in front of futaba at one point. this sitll happens, except its not a mental shutdown that "kills" her, she gets attacked by her persona and falls into an open sewer hole or whatever you call those thing sand yEAH SOMETIMES THEYRE JUST LEFT OPEN IN PLACES IVE SEEN IT WITH MY OWN EYES YALL ITS NOT A STRETCH, but if it is feel free to punch me. and she falls into the water below, except she does not, she moves into the cognitive world and fights that bitch of a persona with more pills. Shido, has plans tho as he sees of what happened and decides, lmao yeah no lets just let you stay dead. and has people waiting for her where she entered the cognitive world to grab her before she can go home and bring her to him. He tells her she could have died and that hes sure shes no longer going to be able to take care of futaba in this state, that she should probably just stay dead since they reports on what happened say she fell and just vanished.

She...agrees??? i mean shes almost died like 12 times in the span of a week and shits getting bad. shes a danger to futaba. if she stays with him hes got his hands on the pills she needs and shes never too far away from the one giving her her missions so she can not only do what he says but finish her research however reluctantly considering the horrible things he has her doing.

now skipping on to when the phantom thieves become a thing. Shes,,,,doing the things that goro would have done. except since this has to do with my au theres not pretty detective prince on tv to antagonize the group, other than that everything goes the same,

wakaba does what shes doing and does not even know futaba is a phantom theif until shidos palace.

but before we get to that, saes palace.

the group does saes palace and it goes off without a hitch. alls chill. they live. im still not sure what to do with this part because everyone thought akira was dead because of the after math of this so tbh if yall got any ideas here...shoot so yeah shidos palace, they get there, get through every one, and get to where they would be going against goro but no its wakaba, futaba is shook, wakaba is shook, the whole squad is shook. 

wakaba is a little heart broken, shes fighting so hard to protect futaba and shes putting herself in harms way. She tells futaba to just stop all this and ust stay safe, she would take her place in the p thieves so long as it mean she was safe. futaba does not agree to this

wakaba is not pleased, she makes an offer "ok, well, im pretty strong so all of you fight me and prove that i can trust you to protect yourselves against the nightmare that is shadow shido so i dont have to worry about futaba being hurt," they kick her ass, she has never been more happy, she tells futaba shes happy to have been beaten and shes willing to go help them fight shido except HAHA FUCK YOU SHES NOT!

shes weak from the battle and her persona ssees it as the perfect time to strike her dead in one fucking hit dead. futaba is mortified.

wakaba is fucking pissed and with her dying breath shes just futa baby i love you please destroy that ass hole that tore us apart. ded.

rest of the game proceeds as normal, idk its late and i got no sleep and this is not written well at all bye,

[h-owu]

whos gonna tell them that theres a difference between racial and ethnic minorities? white people have never been systematically persecuted FOR BEING WHITE. white people who happen to be apart of an ethnic minority (or ethno-religion, for the case of judaism) ARE persecuted against, but thats because they are an ETHNIC minority, not a racial one.

also, it doesnt matter the percentage of population when it comes to if theyre a minority or not. its about how much power they hold in society (specifically in terms of their own self-determination). so while there are technically more people in the world who are asian than who are white, asian ppl are considered a racial minority over whites bc white ppl hold the majority of power (and have for fucking centuries).

theres also a lot of other weird shit that op is saying that i dont really feel fully equipped to address, however i will say that the bit about "asians appropriating from the english" or whatever is just. fucking insensitive given the amount of exploitation and oppression the english (and the west in general) have done in asia. the literal centuries worth of romanticization/sexualization and mysticization of various asian cultures done by the west is not even remotely comparable to people in asia.. wearing clothing with english on it?? like what the hell are you on about lol

Anyway that’s enough Narc supply for idiot children for one day.

If any of y’all out there want to add the names of some proudly racist, transphobic, abusive people to your block list:

zaythesnek

lavenderi

spring-salamander (previously dwarwinsfinches)

gaysian-fagby

dbs-loves-bees

[sellidionne]

tbh I feel as if veganism can be an either/or thing when it comes to animal activism and sustainability. The same way that like eating healthy doesnt have to mean someone is trying to lose weight, they just prefer to eat that way, if that makes sense. Veganism can just be a way of eating, can't it?

kind of, yes. you can take on a vegan diet without any other lifestyle changes but it would be just that, taking on a vegan diet. you wouldnt technically be considered a vegan since veganism is intended to be an entire way of living but I honestly feel that even just doing that can make a change not only for yourself but also on the world. But yeah I think people forget that its sometimes a conscious thing. if youre not comfortable with doing something because you believe that it involves animals in a way that unsettles you then dont do it. but if another person decides that they want to do it, let them. for example, I've come across many vegans who have and care for pets whereas other vegans arent okay with that and I think thats fine either way, something like that is a personal decision. the vegan society's website states that veganism is a way of living which seeks to exclude, as far as is possible and practicable, all forms of exploitation of, and cruelty to, animals for food, clothing or any other purpose.some people are getting impractical and taking it way further than it needs to go. I'm not even talking about the pet thing or the zoo thing, I mean there are people who refuse to do basic every day things such as using electricity or driving a car because of the effects that they feel it eventually has on animals and people who proclaim themselves to be advocates for animals and assume that they know what's best for them even in situations where they arent in any danger and its kind of insane. idk, it all just stems from the fact that people think everything has to be labelled and that there is no grey area with anything anymore. that you have to go all in or it doesnt count for anything. like people shut down meat eaters who have taken the steps to rid their home of products that are tested on animals because they still eat meat and I think thats wrong. is there more that they could be doing? yes. but at least theyre doing something I personally feel that any step towards a vegan lifestyle is a good one and if that means you only want to take on a vegan diet then at least you're helping solve the issue of humans killing animals for food. this turned into a rant im sorry lmao

[tumblunni]

Okay I just finally went and saw the first ep of ERASED and OH HELL YES I loved it as much as I expected to! The first episode doesnt really do much except establish the premise that got me hooked in the first place, but it does it SO WELL, and with SO MUCH ATMOSPHERE! I watched a review video thing about how great the cinematography is, and how subtle things in scene shooting psychologically condition you to figure stuff out subconciously before it even happens. It has that REAL good atmosphere of tension and paranoia during the suspenseful bits, and the tricky visual design definately helps that! And its so integrated with the plot??? ITS REALLY GOOD!!! Cos like.. THE PREMISE The premise is that our protagonist has the power to predict events/travel time when bad events happen/something like that. When a disaster happens and he could have prevented it, he jumps back in time to the moment where he could have prevented it. But the tricky part is that often he has NO IDEA what happened, where it happened, or ANYTHING! The example shown in the first episode was that he was just driving down the road to deliver a pizza and suddenly jumps back in time five minutes when seemingly nothing caused it. Turns out that a truck that passed him for barely three seconds was about to crash! So whenever he timejumps he needs to immediately dart around and look for the one thing that’s out of place, and then make a split second decision to stop it! So the cinematography tricks work INCREDIBLY WELL to help the viewer also get paranoid looking everywhere for clues, and the thing that draws your eye isnt even necessarily rational. The review video I saw before watching the series was pretty spoilery so I’m sad that I know the identity of the murderer now, but it was intriguing how it pointed out how the show subconciously trains you to associate certain things with disaster. i won’t mention what they are because spoilers, but its like a certain colour always appears before the sad scenes, etc. And then the reveal of the murderer is really well drawn because it starts setting up those colour clues ALL THROUGH THE EPISODE! After a season of that colour being used in moderation, it subtly disorients you that its suddenly everywhere. And it makes you paranoid even though the episode seems completely normal, so you kinda know before it happens that the identity of the murderer is gonna be revealed at the end. THATS SO RIDICULOUSLY CLEVER! That’s like gaslighting but in a positive intelligent way to enhance a story, rather than just ~ooo cos we’re a horror movie we’re gonna create continuity mistakes to make the viewer think theyre going crazy~ (Yes, that has actually been done before. Geez!) OH and then the other half of the premise is also SO GOOD! The premise is that this one particular disaster is worse than all the others because this time instead of flashing back five minutes he flashes back to his childhood, and has a chance to save two of his childhood friends! So as well as investigating this murderer, he has to try and blend back into his life as a child, without letting anyone know he’s technically his adult self possessing his own body. THATS A FRICKIN COMPLEX PREMISE YO And aaaa I hope it ends well, cos im already getting the feels!! Protagonist’s mum dies in the first episode, as a consequence of this murderer not being caught in his childhood. He has a second flashback in the first episode but its one he wasnt able to solve. However his mum DID see what was happening, and saved a kid from being abducted by the same person who killed those kids in the backstory. Because she knew about it, she recognises him and starts investigating him, and then gets killed off because she was too close to catching him. Seriously, she got fridged because SHE WAS THE REAL HERO! SHE WAS TOO COOL! She would have solved the whole plot right then and there! The protagonist wasnt even on the case yet until after she died! And now the premise means that we’re gonna see a lot of her nonetheless since we’ve flashed back before her death, and potentially protagonist could avert her death along with the deaths of everyone else. I love when a main character dying is something that happens FOR A REASON and isnt exploitative and horrible, phewwwwwww~! BUT I REALLY LOVE THE MUM AND I WANT HER TO BE ALIVE PLEASE SAY SHE’S ALIVE IN THE END And I bet protagonist gets clues via finding what she investigated, right?? Cos he picked up that piece of paper she was holding, and maybe if stuff is in his hand when he flashbacks then he gets to keep it even though everything else reverses...? I DONT KNOW IM TRYING TO FIGURE OUT STUFF AAAA I know who the murderer is cos of those spoilers but i dont know ANYTHING ELSE and im REALLY EXCITED TO SEE WHAT HAPPENS AAAA

[allofbeercom]

Can Adele fix the broken music industry?

Unless you fell into a post-holiday food coma, you know that Adeles album25just sold more copies in its first week than any album, ever. The average human being had been conditioned to believe this was not possible in 2015.

Remember that narrative?Napster destroyed the music business, the iPod stopped the bleeding, digital and streaming services are still nascent, and a Google search can find anything for free, so the good old days of multi-platinum records are pretty much gone.

On the heels of her first single “Hello,” Adele waved goodbye to that doomsday line of thinking, crushing decades-old sales records by such a distance that, if she were an Olympic athlete, wed immediately assume she healed her damaged vocal chords with PEDs. Putting aside certain idiosyncrasies of Adeles album buyers (it turns out old people still buy CDs!), getting more than 3.8 million people to doanythingin the same week is a triumphant feat.

The ripple effect of Adeles astonishing sales figure is already visible. This past week, Rihanna and her management made a last-minute decision to postpone the release of her new album,Anti, at the apex of the heaviest consumer spending moment of the year. It turns out the shadow of Adele is the one umbrella Ri-Ri wont stand under.

And who can blame her? Between Adeles album sales and Taylor Swifts cultural and touring dominance (FYI: She played to a stadium full of 76,000 people in Sydney last weekend), its tough to stand out at the moment, even for Rihanna, one of Forbes top 10 grossing female artists. Despite working in a music industry with a dearth of women in meaningful executive positions, the strength and power of female artists has never been more profound. And unlike Hollywoodwhere thanks to the North Korean email hack of Sony and a courageous Jennifer Lawrence, we now understand the starkness of the gender pay gapfemale musical artists get paid on par with their male counterparts. In music, the entire ecosystem earns a sizable percentage of whatever the artist makes; record labels make a percentage of album sales, promoters make a percentage of ticket sales, merchandisers make a percentage of T-shirts sold, and so forth. Which means we are at a unique moment in history where A-list women hold much of the real power in the music business.

The strength and power of female artists has never been more profound.

So what will they do with it? And how does their massive success shine a giant spotlight, for better and worse, on everything thats happening with the music business and the streaming business and the concert business and artist representation right now?

Adele and Taylor started this upheaval by each flexing a particular muscle that belongs to them and them only. Taylor used her pen as the sword, bringing the mighty Apple to the bargaining table to pay artists for streams during the free trial for Apple Music. Adele turned herback on streaming services to break an album sales record that had stood since Justin Timberlake was fronting a boy band with Britney Spears on his arm. But beyond the PR success and ego boost thats generated from seven-figure first-week sales numbers, these efforts did little to make a lasting impact on the business of music.

Like the rest of the news cycle, we celebrate heroic outliers, write think pieces, marvel at the numbers, and move on within the confines of the same old structure. As President Business from The Lego Movie would have us believe, everything is awesome. Only it isnt. While artists have done much to break through decades of exploitation and capture more of the value they create, the fan experience in most facets of music consumptionlive and recordedremains unconscionably broken.

Nowhere is the dysfunctional tension between Los Angeles/New York-based content creation and Silicon Valley-based technology more on display than in digital music services. In the Valley, we scoff at companies that ship their org chart in a product. (Note: Microsofts Steve Sinofsky who coined this phrase for mass appeal, and for some time it was Microsoft who was guilty of this en masse.) You can tell when groups within or outside a company arent working well together based on the way the products features play wellor dont play wellin production. This is displayed everywhere in digital music from convoluted hardware options and endless interconnected devices in the home to cutting-edge software that never seems quite ready for primetime. In particular, Apple Music still feels like a house built on the foundation of an old home that the owners never wanted to fully tear down for tax purposes. The compromises and technical debt are palpable.

The fan experience in most facets of music consumptionlive and recordedremains unconscionably broken.

But those issues pale in comparison to the evolving royalty structure in musicbasically, the agreements for how much artists, labels and songwriters get paid when you buy or stream a song. Without hit music from the Taylors and Adeles, those subscription music streaming services are essentially useless. Even if they have the best user experience for fans, without music that matters, their core proposition (the music you want for a flat monthly fee) becomes completely hollow. Disappointed fans know theyre being misled, especially when YouTube and BitTorrent offer even the mildly unscrupulous a holiday table cornucopia of free access to all the music on earth.

We know the economics of music streaming are still being sorted out, but we also know this happened with video content a few years agoand, eventually, major players like Netflix, YouTube and Hulu figured out how to window content, present it exclusively,and generate their own product. If music follows that model, then the biggest artists will sell their exclusivity to distributors like Spotify, Apple, YouTube/Google, and others. Our best asset to help that happen? Just keep complaining about this stuff.

What we are seeing and (not) hearing now as fans is the very public sausage making of a new recorded music revenue model, the loudly creaking rusty hull of an antiquated ship turning a bit too quickly in a swift current. For most of us downstream, it creates a suboptimal listening experience and never-ending frustration.

And its only worse with live music, where artists now make 70 to 90 percent of their income, despite a gallingly offensive fan experience.For one thing, the industry continues to lie to fansblatantlyabout the price of tickets until the very moment of purchase.An upper deck ticket for the Demi Lovato and Nick Jonas tour in Los Angeles on Sept. 17, 2016, is currently available on Ticketmaster for $49.95. After a $15.30 service charge, the actual price of that ticket is31 percent higherthan advertised. At StubHub, where between buyer and seller fees the ticket is routinely marked up 25 percent, the company tried to show pricing all-in. But after competitors didnt follow suit, StubHub reverted back to the draconian way of tricking fans into moving down the purchase funnel by baiting them with a lower price point, before dropping fees on buyers at checkout. Most artists are consciously (or navely) complicit in this dirty game. Many touring deals for large artists stipulate that artists are paid more than 100 percent of gross ticket sales. How can this be? Its because the promoter and venue make their money off of parking, beer, sponsorship, and importantly, service fees.

This wont change until fans start pressuring the artists to facilitate that change. Artists are intensely sensitive about their brands. With social media giving loud voices to all, artists are hyper-concerned with criticism for high ticket prices even though they have historically enabled a service fee system that exploits their fans. Its why so many good tickets often make it into the hands of brokers from venues, promoters, and artists directly. Ever wonder why you see so many VIP packages for sale? Theyre designed to charge market price for a ticket with a few low-cost add-ons attached. So why cant artists own their income desires and get paid what they are worth, or alternatively restrict transferability of tickets to ensure that fans get in at an artificially low price? Service fees are an extension of the ticket price, so why arent they presented as such up front in the buying process?

Apple Music still feels like a house built on the foundation of an old home that the owners never wanted to fully tear down for tax purposes.

All of the carnival barking about ticket prices comes against the backdrop of a swelling period of time between the onsale of a concert and the actual show date. For the concert example above, a fan buying four mid-level tickets would be putting down more than $400 of his hard earned money10 monthsbefore the show. That same week the tour plays a Wednesday night in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Who the heck knows what theyre doing on a Wednesday night 10 months from now in Albuquerque? The answers fall into three categories:

I dont.

Im one of the few passionate fans who will move my schedule around this show and give you my money ten months in advance.

Im a ticket broker, and Im buying bunches of tickets now to arbitrage and capitalize on all the people in #1 above.

This practice of ridiculously early sales has been expanded by the industry to bank money early, test demand, and reduce risk. Do they care that the best tickets go mostly to brokers, that fans pay more money than they otherwise would, and that the most passionate fans lose out on 10 months of interest on their money? Of course not. Were moving backwards.

The big question: Is all of this a calculated plan by the music industry to keep things as unfavorable for fans as possible, or can we chalk it up to sheer incompetence?

The recent Paris tragedy reminded us that the music industrys obligation to provide a better experience for fans are growing ever more urgent. The attacks on fans at a concert hall and a sports stadium were the manifestation of a longstanding fear we had at Ticketmaster about live eventscrowds are so much more vulnerable than we want to believe. We already learned this in air transportation after 9/11; 14 years later, we collect loads of data and restrict transferability of tickets between passengers boarding a 200-seat airplane. But with 80,000-seat stadiums, we continue to do almost nothing. With the use of cash, paper tickets, ticket reselling, and an average of almost three tickets-sold-per-order, upwards of 90 percent of individuals entering an arena or stadium can be unknown to event organizers.

The entire paradigm of music distribution is staring down the barrel of an evolutionary leap.

There are common sense solutions that would make live events safer for fans. By reimagining a ticket as a digital access credential replete with identity, payment, and location metadata, we could do the forensic work before and after events to identify bad actors. This need not restrict ticket transferability or resale; it simply means maintaining a centralized system of record where tickets can be sold and the data associated with buyers and sellers infinitely logged. Existing and emerging technologies, including blockchain, are candidates for handling this challenge. They can also prepare us for the dawn of virtual reality in live events, ensuring this technology becomes incremental and not cannibalistic to the artists live performance. To do so fully requires sunsetting the idea of a ticket as a piece of paper; identity and access can be tied to a phone, a card, or a fingerprint.

Guess what? This is precisely the course of technology across most consumer products today. Like other products, these advancements have the happy consequence of actually improving the consumer experience. This data can serve to personalize the live experience for each fan before, during, and after the event. It could allow artists to over-deliver on an experience for which they are charging astronomical sums, up to a year in advance. As usual, we fell way behind the curve in the music business. So maybe this is about incompetence over anything else.

Indeed, the entire paradigm of music distribution is staring down the barrel of an evolutionary leap. Twitter, like its many mobile social messaging peers from Snapchat to WeChat to Line to Instagram to Facebook, is really a direct-to-consumer distribution channel that could fundamentally transform the relationship between artists and fans. Katy Perry has 78M Twitter followers, Taylor Swift has 67M, Rihanna has 53M, and Adele, essentially without even trying, has 24M. Roughly half of the 100 most-followed accounts on Twitter are artists, and the technology is now in place for artists to commercialize their follower relationships by selling songs, tickets, and T-shirts directly on these platforms. Twitter led this effort; others followed suit. Its the fastest way to remodel the entire music industry. Any artist who pined for more control over the distribution of their art, as well as the artist-fan covenant, have the powers at their disposal to take command.

Which brings us back to what we learned this week, and this yearthat the biggest artists (including these stellar women who showed their might) have real leverage and real power right now. If they wanted, they could change a sedentary, broken industry. Conventional wisdom is that Adele is an outlier, capable of holding out for her own good but not much more. What if Adele, Taylor, and other elite artists united to force progress for all? Athletes in major sports leagues banded together. Actors held their own. So did screenwriters, directors, producers, and show runners. Music seems to be the only branch of entertainment where the collective voice of creators is mute.

The underlying driver of this silence is artist fragmentation. It is the key environmental factor upon which the 20th century music business was constructed: allow rare stars to extract their pound, but keep the bulk of the talent uncoordinated. Beyond the occasional telethon, its rare to find examples of artists working collaboratively for a cause at scale. Why is that? The leading culprit is that artists have traditionally outsourced a lot of their business decisions to their managers. Now that the time travelled from anonymity to stardom has shrunk to mere months, and artist-as-entrepreneur is a near requirement for success, the role of the artist manager has taken on increasing importance.

Sadly, management remains as fragmented and cutthroat as the days when Colonel Tom Parker was shepherding Elvis. In many cases, the speed to stardom brings along in its slipstream a relatively unsophisticated crew of hangers-on surrounding the artist. Cousins, classmates, boyfriends and the like, with little to no experience become entrusted with decisions that can impact decades of an artists revenue streams. Because most managers are paid on a percentage of the artists revenue streams, near-term money is usually prioritized ahead of long-term career value for an artist. Partnership and collaboration gets lost in fears and insecurities about acts being stolen away by other managers. Even the more sophisticated and professional managers suffer from the epidemic of the shark tank. Irving Azoff (Front Line Management) and Coran Capshaw (Red Light Management) are the two managers who have assembled artist management companies with meaningful scale. Ive apprenticed for them both, and they are excellent at what they do. But competition for the artists they manage (or would like to) remains high, and for their own business self-survival they are perpetually on alert. They do not operate in an ecosystem that fosters cooperation.

Music seems to be the only branch of entertainment where the collective voice of creators is mute.

Even the law works against artist representatives working together. California passed a law in 1978 called the Talent Agency Act that effectively says a person cannot be a manager and also book an artists tour. In practice, artists must carry both a manager and an agent, fragmenting the power of decision-making (and also the artists income). Entire cottage industries have been built on this church-state separation. Alliances are routinely built and broken between agencies and managers, further fueling the lustful competition and mistrust between artist representatives. One can surmise this is generally the scene that inspired the late Hunter S. Thompson quote: The music business is a cruel and shallow money trench, a long plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free, and good men die like dogs. Theres also a negative side.

Yet the opportunity for artists in the music business today is wonderfully beyond what even Thompson could have imagined (or hallucinated). And so it rests, finally, on the shoulders of artistsand the biggest ones, at thatto wrest control of this shallow trench of an industry away from those who have kept it in a state of morass, and give it depth. All that stands in the way of advancing the industry forward is overcoming the fragmentation within the artist community today.

And thats why Adeles eye-popping success last week is so confounding. Why, exactly, did she show her strength? The cynic will tell you it was for the money. But just as she could care less about what you think of her weight (somehow I dont expect the press to repeatedly address Chris Martins post-breakup body fat when the Coldplay album drops this week), she seems unmoved by the chance to make a few extra pounds. Which leads to the conclusion that like the rest of us, she falls somewhere on the scale between competitive and vain: She withheld her music from streaming services explicitly in search of setting a mark that none of her peers or predecessors ever did.

Having vanquished them now, will she flex her muscle for more than just the charts? She seemingly has willing partners in this effortin Taylor Swift and many of her now powerful female counterparts, as well as popular artists like Jay Z who have made recent business strides around artist empowerment. In so many ways, Adeles sales figures are less about her, and more a reflection of the continually crescendoing role of music in peoples lives.

In spite of all its dysfunction and fan neglect, our follower graphs on social networks hint that our accelerating interconnectivity is still threaded together most tightly by music. By following suit and binding together in this moment, Adele and the artist community can move the business and experience of music forward for all of us. As the Beatles knew: Come together, right now. Records are made to be broken. Adele and her peers have the chance to be indelible.

Nathan Hubbard is a former touring and recording artist, former CEO of Ticketmaster, and current head of commerce at Twitter. A version of this story was originally published on Medium and has been reprinted with permission.

Screengrab via AdeleVEVO/YouTube

from All Of Beer http://allofbeer.com/can-adele-fix-the-broken-music-industry/

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As chaos mounts, are the grown-ups reasserting themselves in Washington? | Geoffrey Kabaservice

Its not yet clear if Trumps presidency has suffered a mortal injury, but its credibility has taken a big hit

Republicans are not much given to quoting Lenin, but they might be in a mood to sympathise with his supposed observation that there are decades when nothing happens and weeks when decades happen.

It feels like a decades worth of misery rained down on Republicans in Congress and the Trump administration last week and theres no telling whether this week will bring a respite or more of the same. The damaging stories have come so thick and fast that there has hardly been time to take in one before the arrival of the next.

Donald Trumps firing of the FBI director, James Comey (perhaps to quash Comeys investigation of his campaign), was followed by the news that Trump had divulged highly classified intelligence to the Russian government.

Then it was off to the races with the Comey memo (apparently alleging that Trump tried to get the FBI director to call off his investigation into former national security adviser, Michael Flynn); revelations about Flynn having been in effect a foreign agent of Turkey, news of previously undisclosed contacts between the Trump campaign and Russia; the appointment of a special counsel to investigate Russian meddling; and on and on and on. Rumour has it that firings of top aides are imminent, while others in the administration are said to be polishing their CVs or putting pen to tell-all memoirs.

As I write this, the New York Times is reporting that Trump told Russian officials that he fired Comey because he was crazy, a real nut job and that his removal had taken away the great pressure Trump faced because of Russia. Who knows what revelation tomorrow may bring?

Its too soon to tell what the long-term impact of all of this upheaval will be. Many historical-minded commentators have suggested parallels with the Watergate scandal that brought down Richard Nixon, while others have pointed toward the Iran-Contra affair, which ultimately didnt detract from Ronald Reagans popularity. The possibility of Trumps impeachment, once discussed only on wild-eyed, leftist websites, is now a matter of serious consideration in the media and some Democratic circles.

At this point, the major similarity to Watergate is that a lot of Americans who in years past never talked about politics now talk about it all the time and in settings where politics rarely used to come up. Politics, its said, is displacing talk of sports and sex in such unlikely venues as bars, nail salons and strip clubs. The American Psychological Association recently warned that people increasingly feel stressed and cynical on account of political arguments in the workplace, sapping employee morale and performance.

On an anecdotal level, politics seems to be sundering friendships on social media platforms such as Facebook as well as in real life. Dating websites also report that fewer people are willing to consider relationships with people who dont share their political beliefs. On Match.com, 60% of singles said they were less open to dating across party lines than they were two years ago. One woman interviewed by a Washington, DC, radio station insisted that she couldnt date a supporter of the opposing party because when somebody has beliefs that you think are just morally wrong, it feels like a personal attack on you.

The phenomenon of political polarisation predates Trump, of course. In many ways, it goes back to the Nixon administration, when conservative aide Patrick Buchanan recommended that Republicans exploit tensions of race and class and use controversial social and cultural issues such as abortion to split the Democratic coalition. Such tactics could cut the Democratic party and country in half, he wrote to Nixon in 1971, and we would have far the larger half.

Another Nixon adviser, Roger Ailes, who died last week at age 77, also contributed to polarization by creating Fox News as a conservative counter to the mainstream news networks that took pride in their objectivity. More and more Americans now get their news from nakedly ideological outlets, which makes it less likely that theyll encounter opposing views or be able to distinguish truth from falsehood.

Trump ran a more divisive campaign than Nixon ever contemplated and, indeed, turned it into the sort of reality-TV spectacle that has driven all of those shouting matches at the office water cooler, Facebook unfriendings and failed first dates. Buchanans prediction has proved true: Republicans have cut the country in half and ended up with the bigger piece, as they now control a majority of both houses of Congress and governorships as well as the White House.

The continuing benefits of polarisation for Republicans have been evident even during the past difficult week. A recent poll shows that even as Trumps overall approval rating continues to slide, 84% of his supporters still approve of the job hes doing (although the share who strongly approve is waning). Many of his adherents simply dismiss the damaging stories about Trump as fake news purveyed by a biased liberal media. Theyre likely to continue to support the Republicans so long as they believe that Democrats represent a diabolical threat to the nation.

Many Republicans also point to accomplishments that wouldnt have happened under a Hillary Clinton presidency. Foremost among these is Neil Gorsuchs confirmation as supreme court justice, restoring the conservative majority. Trump voters, whose primary issue was immigration, are heartened by the news that arrests of immigrants have soared even as crossings at the Mexican border have dropped. And Trump signed more executive orders in his first 100 days in office than any president since Franklin Roosevelt, although most of those orders signalled Trumps intention to reverse President Obamas legacy on the environment and other issues.

Ousted FBI director, James Comey. Photograph: Jim Watson/AFP/Getty Images

But it turns out there is also a political cost to dividing the American people into hostile and mutually uncomprehending tribes. The Republican decision to lead off the legislative year by repealing the previous presidents namesake healthcare reform galvanised a sort of Tea Party movement of the left, making it unwise for Republican legislators to attend town hall meetings with their constituents or for Democratic legislators to co-operate on significant legislation.

For most of American history, major bills passed Congress thanks to a coalition of moderates from both parties. If bipartisanship is now dead, Republicans will need just about every vote from their own ranks to pass anything consequential. This has handed effective veto power to the House Freedom Caucus, a group of 30-odd Republicans (all men) on the far-right fringe, who have trampled party norms by voting as a bloc. They opposed the first iteration of the House healthcare bill as not going far enough to repeal Obamacare. When provisions to appease them were inserted into the second iteration, it nearly failed by going too far for the remaining Republican moderates. This dynamic, combined with chaos and incompetence in the White House, now casts serious doubt on the more ambitious items on the Republicans legislative wish list, including tax reform and infrastructure repair.

Traditionally, it has been seen as the presidents job to work with his own party in Congress as well as the opposition to form the majorities required to pass legislation and then to sell that legislation to a majority of the public. Trump signally failed in this responsibility even before this week of troubles and his job will be much harder now. Theres no way of knowing whether the newly appointed special counsel will find a smoking gun that will completely unravel Trumps presidency, but his credibility and standing as a party leader have both surely taken a big hit.

Like Miltons Lucifer, politicians would rather reign in hell than serve in heaven. Republicans in Congress still have the majority. Theyre likely to stick by Trump, even if the scandals hanging over the White House worsen, unless his unpopularity seems to threaten their own re-elections. But it does appear that whatever coat-tails Trump once possessed have vanished. Certainly, Republicans are ducking out of once-coveted television appearances for fear of having to defend the president, while few are lining up to have him come speak in their states or districts. The Trump presidency may have taken a mortal injury or it may turn out to have been merely a flesh wound. What seems more probable is that last week marks an end to the collective delusion that government is somehow unlike other highly technical fields of human endeavour, so simple, despite its apparent complexities, that even a child could run it.

The laws of political gravity may now begin to reassert themselves. White House officials may once again understand that gravity, prudence, probity and diplomacy are valuable and essential qualities in a president. Legislators may remember that super-majorities are aberrations rather than the norm, and cross-aisle co-operation and compromise are essential to the legislative process rather than base treachery. Voters may wise up to the hucksters who try to persuade them that everyone who supports the opposing party is Evil Incarnate. They may come to prefer the passage of modest but sensible legislation to the promise of future utopias and government that is boring but functional to cant-miss-TV or gladiatorial entertainment.

Then again, these lessons may come too late for Trump and for the rest of us.

Read more: http://ift.tt/2q7G67u

from Viral News HQ http://ift.tt/2qGR6MY via Viral News HQ

[trendingnewsb]

As chaos mounts, are the grown-ups reasserting themselves in Washington? | Geoffrey Kabaservice

Its not yet clear if Trumps presidency has suffered a mortal injury, but its credibility has taken a big hit

Republicans are not much given to quoting Lenin, but they might be in a mood to sympathise with his supposed observation that there are decades when nothing happens and weeks when decades happen.

It feels like a decades worth of misery rained down on Republicans in Congress and the Trump administration last week and theres no telling whether this week will bring a respite or more of the same. The damaging stories have come so thick and fast that there has hardly been time to take in one before the arrival of the next.

Donald Trumps firing of the FBI director, James Comey (perhaps to quash Comeys investigation of his campaign), was followed by the news that Trump had divulged highly classified intelligence to the Russian government.

Then it was off to the races with the Comey memo (apparently alleging that Trump tried to get the FBI director to call off his investigation into former national security adviser, Michael Flynn); revelations about Flynn having been in effect a foreign agent of Turkey, news of previously undisclosed contacts between the Trump campaign and Russia; the appointment of a special counsel to investigate Russian meddling; and on and on and on. Rumour has it that firings of top aides are imminent, while others in the administration are said to be polishing their CVs or putting pen to tell-all memoirs.

As I write this, the New York Times is reporting that Trump told Russian officials that he fired Comey because he was crazy, a real nut job and that his removal had taken away the great pressure Trump faced because of Russia. Who knows what revelation tomorrow may bring?

Its too soon to tell what the long-term impact of all of this upheaval will be. Many historical-minded commentators have suggested parallels with the Watergate scandal that brought down Richard Nixon, while others have pointed toward the Iran-Contra affair, which ultimately didnt detract from Ronald Reagans popularity. The possibility of Trumps impeachment, once discussed only on wild-eyed, leftist websites, is now a matter of serious consideration in the media and some Democratic circles.

At this point, the major similarity to Watergate is that a lot of Americans who in years past never talked about politics now talk about it all the time and in settings where politics rarely used to come up. Politics, its said, is displacing talk of sports and sex in such unlikely venues as bars, nail salons and strip clubs. The American Psychological Association recently warned that people increasingly feel stressed and cynical on account of political arguments in the workplace, sapping employee morale and performance.

On an anecdotal level, politics seems to be sundering friendships on social media platforms such as Facebook as well as in real life. Dating websites also report that fewer people are willing to consider relationships with people who dont share their political beliefs. On Match.com, 60% of singles said they were less open to dating across party lines than they were two years ago. One woman interviewed by a Washington, DC, radio station insisted that she couldnt date a supporter of the opposing party because when somebody has beliefs that you think are just morally wrong, it feels like a personal attack on you.

The phenomenon of political polarisation predates Trump, of course. In many ways, it goes back to the Nixon administration, when conservative aide Patrick Buchanan recommended that Republicans exploit tensions of race and class and use controversial social and cultural issues such as abortion to split the Democratic coalition. Such tactics could cut the Democratic party and country in half, he wrote to Nixon in 1971, and we would have far the larger half.

Another Nixon adviser, Roger Ailes, who died last week at age 77, also contributed to polarization by creating Fox News as a conservative counter to the mainstream news networks that took pride in their objectivity. More and more Americans now get their news from nakedly ideological outlets, which makes it less likely that theyll encounter opposing views or be able to distinguish truth from falsehood.

Trump ran a more divisive campaign than Nixon ever contemplated and, indeed, turned it into the sort of reality-TV spectacle that has driven all of those shouting matches at the office water cooler, Facebook unfriendings and failed first dates. Buchanans prediction has proved true: Republicans have cut the country in half and ended up with the bigger piece, as they now control a majority of both houses of Congress and governorships as well as the White House.

The continuing benefits of polarisation for Republicans have been evident even during the past difficult week. A recent poll shows that even as Trumps overall approval rating continues to slide, 84% of his supporters still approve of the job hes doing (although the share who strongly approve is waning). Many of his adherents simply dismiss the damaging stories about Trump as fake news purveyed by a biased liberal media. Theyre likely to continue to support the Republicans so long as they believe that Democrats represent a diabolical threat to the nation.

Many Republicans also point to accomplishments that wouldnt have happened under a Hillary Clinton presidency. Foremost among these is Neil Gorsuchs confirmation as supreme court justice, restoring the conservative majority. Trump voters, whose primary issue was immigration, are heartened by the news that arrests of immigrants have soared even as crossings at the Mexican border have dropped. And Trump signed more executive orders in his first 100 days in office than any president since Franklin Roosevelt, although most of those orders signalled Trumps intention to reverse President Obamas legacy on the environment and other issues.

Ousted FBI director, James Comey. Photograph: Jim Watson/AFP/Getty Images

But it turns out there is also a political cost to dividing the American people into hostile and mutually uncomprehending tribes. The Republican decision to lead off the legislative year by repealing the previous presidents namesake healthcare reform galvanised a sort of Tea Party movement of the left, making it unwise for Republican legislators to attend town hall meetings with their constituents or for Democratic legislators to co-operate on significant legislation.

For most of American history, major bills passed Congress thanks to a coalition of moderates from both parties. If bipartisanship is now dead, Republicans will need just about every vote from their own ranks to pass anything consequential. This has handed effective veto power to the House Freedom Caucus, a group of 30-odd Republicans (all men) on the far-right fringe, who have trampled party norms by voting as a bloc. They opposed the first iteration of the House healthcare bill as not going far enough to repeal Obamacare. When provisions to appease them were inserted into the second iteration, it nearly failed by going too far for the remaining Republican moderates. This dynamic, combined with chaos and incompetence in the White House, now casts serious doubt on the more ambitious items on the Republicans legislative wish list, including tax reform and infrastructure repair.

Traditionally, it has been seen as the presidents job to work with his own party in Congress as well as the opposition to form the majorities required to pass legislation and then to sell that legislation to a majority of the public. Trump signally failed in this responsibility even before this week of troubles and his job will be much harder now. Theres no way of knowing whether the newly appointed special counsel will find a smoking gun that will completely unravel Trumps presidency, but his credibility and standing as a party leader have both surely taken a big hit.

Like Miltons Lucifer, politicians would rather reign in hell than serve in heaven. Republicans in Congress still have the majority. Theyre likely to stick by Trump, even if the scandals hanging over the White House worsen, unless his unpopularity seems to threaten their own re-elections. But it does appear that whatever coat-tails Trump once possessed have vanished. Certainly, Republicans are ducking out of once-coveted television appearances for fear of having to defend the president, while few are lining up to have him come speak in their states or districts. The Trump presidency may have taken a mortal injury or it may turn out to have been merely a flesh wound. What seems more probable is that last week marks an end to the collective delusion that government is somehow unlike other highly technical fields of human endeavour, so simple, despite its apparent complexities, that even a child could run it.

The laws of political gravity may now begin to reassert themselves. White House officials may once again understand that gravity, prudence, probity and diplomacy are valuable and essential qualities in a president. Legislators may remember that super-majorities are aberrations rather than the norm, and cross-aisle co-operation and compromise are essential to the legislative process rather than base treachery. Voters may wise up to the hucksters who try to persuade them that everyone who supports the opposing party is Evil Incarnate. They may come to prefer the passage of modest but sensible legislation to the promise of future utopias and government that is boring but functional to cant-miss-TV or gladiatorial entertainment.

Then again, these lessons may come too late for Trump and for the rest of us.

Read more: http://ift.tt/2q7G67u

from Viral News HQ http://ift.tt/2qGR6MY via Viral News HQ