#for as long as zuckerberg LETS ME

[maladaptvs]

HERE IS KANAN GILL FOR FUCKS SAKE OH MY GOD

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Shifting $677m from the banks to the people, every year, forever

I'll be in TUCSON, AZ from November 8-10: I'm the GUEST OF HONOR at the TUSCON SCIENCE FICTION CONVENTION.

"Switching costs" are one of the great underappreciated evils in our world: the more it costs you to change from one product or service to another, the worse the vendor, provider, or service you're using today can treat you without risking your business.

Businesses set out to keep switching costs as high as possible. Literally. Mark Zuckerberg's capos send him memos chortling about how Facebook's new photos feature will punish anyone who leaves for a rival service with the loss of all their family photos – meaning Zuck can torment those users for profit and they'll still stick around so long as the abuse is less bad than the loss of all their cherished memories:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/08/facebooks-secret-war-switching-costs

It's often hard to quantify switching costs. We can tell when they're high, say, if your landlord ties your internet service to your lease (splitting the profits with a shitty ISP that overcharges and underdelivers), the switching cost of getting a new internet provider is the cost of moving house. We can tell when they're low, too: you can switch from one podcatcher program to another just by exporting your list of subscriptions from the old one and importing it into the new one:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/10/16/keep-it-really-simple-stupid/#read-receipts-are-you-kidding-me-seriously-fuck-that-noise

But sometimes, economists can get a rough idea of the dollar value of high switching costs. For example, a group of economists working for the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau calculated that the hassle of changing banks is costing Americans at least $677m per year (see page 526):

https://files.consumerfinance.gov/f/documents/cfpb_personal-financial-data-rights-final-rule_2024-10.pdf

The CFPB economists used a very conservative methodology, so the number is likely higher, but let's stick with that figure for now. The switching costs of changing banks – determining which bank has the best deal for you, then transfering over your account histories, cards, payees, and automated bill payments – are costing everyday Americans more than half a billion dollars, every year.

Now, the CFPB wasn't gathering this data just to make you mad. They wanted to do something about all this money – to find a way to lower switching costs, and, in so doing, transfer all that money from bank shareholders and executives to the American public.

And that's just what they did. A newly finalized Personal Financial Data Rights rule will allow you to authorize third parties – other banks, comparison shopping sites, brokers, anyone who offers you a better deal, or help you find one – to request your account data from your bank. Your bank will be required to provide that data.

I loved this rule when they first proposed it:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/06/10/getting-things-done/#deliverism

And I like the final rule even better. They've really nailed this one, even down to the fine-grained details where interop wonks like me get very deep into the weeds. For example, a thorny problem with interop rules like this one is "who gets to decide how the interoperability works?" Where will the data-formats come from? How will we know they're fit for purpose?

This is a super-hard problem. If we put the monopolies whose power we're trying to undermine in charge of this, they can easily cheat by delivering data in uselessly obfuscated formats. For example, when I used California's privacy law to force Mailchimp to provide list of all the mailing lists I've been signed up for without my permission, they sent me thousands of folders containing more than 5,900 spreadsheets listing their internal serial numbers for the lists I'm on, with no way to find out what these lists are called or how to get off of them:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/07/22/degoogled/#kafka-as-a-service

So if we're not going to let the companies decide on data formats, who should be in charge of this? One possibility is to require the use of a standard, but again, which standard? We can ask a standards body to make a new standard, which they're often very good at, but not when the stakes are high like this. Standards bodies are very weak institutions that large companies are very good at capturing:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/30/weak-institutions/

Here's how the CFPB solved this: they listed out the characteristics of a good standards body, listed out the data types that the standard would have to encompass, and then told banks that so long as they used a standard from a good standards body that covered all the data-types, they'd be in the clear.

Once the rule is in effect, you'll be able to go to a comparison shopping site and authorize it to go to your bank for your transaction history, and then tell you which bank – out of all the banks in America – will pay you the most for your deposits and charge you the least for your debts. Then, after you open a new account, you can authorize the new bank to go back to your old bank and get all your data: payees, scheduled payments, payment history, all of it. Switching banks will be as easy as switching mobile phone carriers – just a few clicks and a few minutes' work to get your old number working on a phone with a new provider.

This will save Americans at least $677 million, every year. Which is to say, it will cost the banks at least $670 million every year.

Naturally, America's largest banks are suing to block the rule:

https://www.americanbanker.com/news/cfpbs-open-banking-rule-faces-suit-from-bank-policy-institute

Of course, the banks claim that they're only suing to protect you, and the $677m annual transfer from their investors to the public has nothing to do with it. The banks claim to be worried about bank-fraud, which is a real thing that we should be worried about. They say that an interoperability rule could make it easier for scammers to get at your data and even transfer your account to a sleazy fly-by-night operation without your consent. This is also true!

It is obviously true that a bad interop rule would be bad. But it doesn't follow that every interop rule is bad, or that it's impossible to make a good one. The CFPB has made a very good one.

For starters, you can't just authorize anyone to get your data. Eligible third parties have to meet stringent criteria and vetting. These third parties are only allowed to ask for the narrowest slice of your data needed to perform the task you've set for them. They aren't allowed to use that data for anything else, and as soon as they've finished, they must delete your data. You can also revoke their access to your data at any time, for any reason, with one click – none of this "call a customer service rep and wait on hold" nonsense.

What's more, if your bank has any doubts about a request for your data, they are empowered to (temporarily) refuse to provide it, until they confirm with you that everything is on the up-and-up.

I wrote about the lawsuit this week for @eff@mastodon.social's Deeplinks blog:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2024/10/no-matter-what-bank-says-its-your-money-your-data-and-your-choice

In that article, I point out the tedious, obvious ruses of securitywashing and privacywashing, where a company insists that its most abusive, exploitative, invasive conduct can't be challenged because that would expose their customers to security and privacy risks. This is such bullshit.

It's bullshit when printer companies say they can't let you use third party ink – for your own good:

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/01/hp-ceo-blocking-third-party-ink-from-printers-fights-viruses/

It's bullshit when car companies say they can't let you use third party mechanics – for your own good:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/09/03/rip-david-graeber/#rolling-surveillance-platforms

It's bullshit when Apple says they can't let you use third party app stores – for your own good:

https://www.eff.org/document/letter-bruce-schneier-senate-judiciary-regarding-app-store-security

It's bullshit when Facebook says you can't independently monitor the paid disinformation in your feed – for your own good:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/08/05/comprehensive-sex-ed/#quis-custodiet-ipsos-zuck

And it's bullshit when the banks say you can't change to a bank that charges you less, and pays you more – for your own good.

CFPB boss Rohit Chopra is part of a cohort of Biden enforcers who've hit upon a devastatingly effective tactic for fighting corporate power: they read the law and found out what they're allowed to do, and then did it:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/23/getting-stuff-done/#praxis

The CFPB was created in 2010 with the passage of the Consumer Financial Protection Act, which specifically empowers the CFPB to make this kind of data-sharing rule. Back when the CFPA was in Congress, the banks howled about this rule, whining that they were being forced to share their data with their competitors.

But your account data isn't your bank's data. It's your data. And the CFPB is gonna let you have it, and they're gonna save you and your fellow Americans at least $677m/year – forever.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/11/01/bankshot/#personal-financial-data-rights

[asha-mage]

WoT Meta: Feudalism, Class, And The Politics of The Wheel of Time

One of my long standing personal annoyances with the fantasy genre is that it often falls into the trap of simplifying feudal class systems, stripping out the interesting parts and the nuance to make something that’s either a lot more cardboard cut-out, or has our modern ideas about class imposed onto it.

Ironically the principal exception is also the series that set the bar for me. As is so often the case, Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time is unique in how much it works to understand and convey a realistic approach to power, politics, government, rulership, and the world in general–colored neither by cynicism or idealism. How Jordan works the feudal system into his world building is no exception–weaving in the weaknesses, the strengths, and the banal realities of what it means to have a Lord or Lady, a sovereign Queen or King, and to exist in a state held together by interpersonal relationships between them–while still conveying themes and ideas that are, at their heart, relevant to our modern world.

So, I thought I’d talk a little bit about how he does that.

Defining the Structure

First, since we’re talking about feudal class systems, let's define what that means– what classes actually existed, how they related to each other, and how that is represented in Jordan’s world. 

But before that, a quick disclaimer. To avoid getting too deep into the historical weeds, I am going to be making some pretty wide generalizations. The phrases ‘most often’, ‘usually’, and ‘in general’ are going to be doing a lot of heavy lifting. While the strata I’m describing is broadly true across the majority medieval and early Renaissance feudal states these things were obviously heavily influenced by the culture, religion, geography, and economics of their country–all of which varied widely and could shift dramatically over a surprisingly small amount of time (sometimes less than a single generation). Almost nothing I am going to say is universally applicable to all feudal states, but all states will have large swathes of it true for them, and it will be widely applicable. The other thing I would ask you to keep in mind is that a lot of our conceptions of class have been heavily changed by industrialization. It’s impossible to overstate how completely the steam engine altered the landscape of socio-politics the world over, in ways both good and bad. This is already one of those things that Jordan is incredibly good at remembering, and that most fantasy authors are very good at forgetting. 

The disparity between your average medieval monarch’s standard of living and their peasants was pretty wide, but it was nothing compared to the distance between your average minimum wage worker and any billionaire; the monarch and the peasant had far more in common with each other than you or I do with Jeff Bezos or Mike Zuckerberg. The disparity between most people’s local country lord and their peasants was even smaller. It was only when the steam engine made the mass production of consumer goods possible that the wealth gap started to become a chasm–and that was in fact one of the forces that lead to the end of the feudal system and the collapse of many (though by no means all) of the ruling monarchies in Europe. I bring this up because the idea of a class system not predicated on the accumulation of capital seems pretty alien to our modern sensibilities, but it was the norm for most of history. Descent and birth mattered far more than the riches you could acquire–and the act of accumulating wealth was itself often seen as something vulgar and in many countries actively sinful. So with that in mind, what exactly were the classes of feudalism, and how do they connect to the Wheel of Time?

The Monarch and their immediate family unsurprisingly occupied the top of the societal pyramid (at least, in feudal states that had a monarch and royal family- which wasn’t all of them). The Monarch was head of the government and was responsible for administering the nation: collecting taxes, seeing them spent, enforcing law, defending the country’s borders and vassals in the event of war, etc. Contrary to popular belief, relatively few monarchs had absolute power during the medieval period. But how much power the monarch did have varied widely- some monarchs were little more than figureheads, others were able to centralize enough power on themselves to dictate the majority of state business- and that balance could shift back and forth over a single generation, or even a single reign depending on the competence of the monarch. 

The royal family usually held power in relation to their monarch, but also at the monarch’s discretion. The more power a monarch had, the more likely they were to delegate it to trusted family members in order to aid with the administration of the realm. This was in both official and unofficial capacities: princes were often required to do military service as a right of passage, and to act as diplomats or officials, and princesses (especially those married into foreign powers) were often used as spies for their home state, or played roles in managing court affairs and business on behalf of the ruler.

Beneath the monarch and their family you get the noble aristocracy, and I could write a whole separate essay just on the delineations and strata within this group, but suffice to say the aristocracy covers individuals and families with a wide range of power and wealth. Again, starting from that country lord whose power and wealth in the grand scheme of things is not much bigger than his peasants, all the way to people as powerful, or sometimes more powerful, than the monarch. 

Nobles in a feudal system ruled over sections of land (the size and quality usually related sharply to their power) setting taxes, enforcing laws, providing protection to the peasants, hearing petitions, etc. within their domains. These nobles were sometimes independent, but more often would swear fealty to more powerful nobles (or monarchs) in exchange for greater protection and membership in a nation state. Doing so meant agreeing to pay taxes, obey (and enforce) the laws of the kingdom, and to provide soldiers to their liege in the event of war. The amount of actual power and autonomy nobles had varied pretty widely, and the general rule of thumb is that the more powerful the monarch is, the less power and autonomy the nobles have, and vice versa. Nobles generally were expected to be well educated (or at least to be able to pretend they were) and usually provided the pool from which important government officials were drawn–generals, council members, envoys, etc–with some kingdoms having laws that prevented anyone not of noble descent from occupying these positions.

Beneath the nobles you get the wealthy financial class–major merchants, bankers, and the heads of large trade guilds. Those Marx referred to generally as the bourgeoisie because they either own means of production or manage capital. In a feudal system this class tended to have a good bit of soft power, since their fortunes could buy them access to circles of the powerful, but very little institutional power, since the accumulation and pursuit of riches, if anything, was seen to have negative moral worth. An underlying presumption of greediness was attached to this class, and with it the sense that they should be kept out of direct power.

That was possible, in part, because there weren't that many means of production to actually own, or that much capital to manage, in a pre-industrial society. Most goods were produced without the aid of equipment that required significant capital investment (a weaver owned their own loom, a blacksmith owned their own tools, etc), and most citizens did not have enough wealth to make use of banking services. This is the class of merchants who owned, but generally didn’t directly operate, multiple trading ships or caravans, guild leaders for craftsfolk who required large scale equipment to do their work (copper and iron foundries for the making of bells, for example), and bankers who mainly served the nobility and other wealthy individuals through the loaning and borrowing of money. This usually (but not always) represented the ceiling of what those not born aristocrats could achieve in society.

After that you get middling merchants, master craftsfolk and specialty artisans, in particular of luxury goods. Merchants in this class usually still directly manage their expeditions and operations, while the craftsfolk and artisans are those with specialty skill sets that can not be easily replicated without a lifetime of training. Master silversmiths, dressmakers, lacquer workers, hairdressers, and clockmakers are all found in this class. How much social clout individuals in this class have usually relates strongly to how much value is placed on their skill or product by their society (think how the Seanchan have an insatiable appetite for lacquer work and how Seanchan nobles make several Ebou Dari lacquer workers very rich) as well as the actual quality of the product. But even an unskilled artisan is still probably comfortable (as Thom says, even a bad clockmaker is still a wealthy man). Apprenticeships, where children are taught these crafts, are thus highly desired by those in lower classes,as it guaranteed at least some level of financial security in life.

Bellow that class you find minor merchants (single ship or wagon types), the owners of small businesses (inns, taverns, millers etc), some educated posts (clerks, scribes, accountants, tutors) and most craftsfolk (blacksmiths, carpenters, bootmakers, etc). These are people who can usually support themselves and their families through their own labor, or who, in the words of Jin Di, ‘work with their hands’. Most of those who occupy this class are found in cities and larger towns, where the flow of trade allows so many non-food producers to congregate and still (mostly) make ends meet. This is why there is only one inn, one miller, one blacksmith (with a single apprentice) in places like Emond’s Field: most smaller villages can not sustain more than a handful of non-food producers. This is also where you start to get the possibility of serious financial instability; in times of chaos it is people at this tier (and below) that are the first to be forced into poverty, flight, or other desperate actions to survive.

Finally, there is the group often collectively called ‘peasants’ (though that term is also sometimes used to mean anyone not noble born). Farmers, manual laborers, peddlers, fishers- anyone who is unlikely to be able to support more than themselves with their labor, and often had to depend on the combined labor of their spouse and families to get by. Servants also generally fit into this tier socially, but it’s important to understand that a servant in say, a palace, is going to be significantly better paid and respected than a maid in a merchant's house. This class is the largest, making up the majority of the population in a given country, and with a majority of its own number being food-producers specifically. Without the aid of the steam engine, most of a country’s populace needs to be producing food, and a great deal of it, in order to remain a functional nation. Most of the population as a result live in smaller spread out agrarian communities, loosely organized around single towns and villages. Since these communities will almost always lack access to certain goods or amenities (Emond’s Field has a bootmaker, but no candlemaker, for example) they depend on smalltime traders, called peddlers, to provide them with everyday things, who might travel from town to town with no more than a single wagon, or even just a large pack.

The only groups lower than peasants on the social hierarchy are beggars, the destitute, and (in societies that practice slavery) slaves. People who can not (or are not allowed to) support themselves, and instead must either eke out a day to day existence from scraps, or must be supported by others. Slaves can perform labor of any kind, but they are regarded legally as a means of production rather than a laborer, and the value is awarded to their owner instead. 

It’s also worth noting that slavery has varied wildly across history in how exactly it was carried out and ran the gamut from the trans-Atlantic chattel slavery to more caste or punitive-based slavery systems where slaves could achieve freedom, social mobility, or even some degree of power within their societies. But those realities (as with servants) had more to do with who their owners were than the slave’s own merit, and the majority of slaves (who are almost always seen as less than a freedman even when they are doing the same work) were performing the same common labor as the ‘peasant’ class, and so viewed as inferior.

Viewing The Wheel of Time Through This Lens

So what does all this have to do with Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time? A lot actually, especially compared to his contemporaries in fantasy writing. Whereas most fantasy taking place in feudal systems succumbs to the urge to simplify matters (sometimes as far down to their only being two classes, ‘peasant’ and ‘royalty’) Jordan much more closely models real feudalism in his world. 

The majority of the nations we encounter are feudal monarchies, and a majority of each of their populations are agrarian farming communities overseen by a local lord or other official. How large a nation’s other classes are is directly tied to how prosperous the kingdom is, which is strongly connected to how much food and how many goods the kingdom can produce on the available land within it. This in turn, is tightly interdependent on how stable the kingdom is and how effective its government is.

Andor is the prime example: a very large, very prosperous kingdom, which is both self-sufficient in feeding itself via its large swathes of farmland (so much so that they can afford to feed Cairhien through selling their surplus almost certainly at next to no profit) and rich in mineral wealth from mines in the west. It is capable of supporting several fairly large cities even on its outskirts, as well as the very well-developed and cosmopolitan Caemlyn as its capital. This allows Andor to maintain a pretty robust class of educated workers, craftsfolk, artisans, etc, which in turn furthers the realm’s prosperity. At the top of things, the Queen presides over the entire realm with largely centralized power to set laws and taxes. Beneath her are the ‘great houses’–the only Houses in Andor besides the royal house who are strong enough that other nobles ‘follow where they lead’ making them the equivalent of Duchesses and Dukes, with any minor nobles not sworn directly to the Queen being sworn to these ten.

And that ties into something very important about the feudal system and the impact it had on our world and the impact it has on Jordan's. To quote Youtuber Jack Rackham, feudalism is what those in the science biz would call an unstable equilibrium. The monarch and their vassals are constantly in conflict with each other; the vassals desiring more power and autonomy, as the monarch works to centralize power on themselves. In feudalism there isn’t really a state army. Instead the monarch and the nobles all have personal armies, and while the monarch’s might be stronger than anyone else’s army, it’s never going to be stronger than everybody else’s. 

To maintain peace and stability in this situation everyone has to essentially play Game of Thrones (or as Jordan called it years before Martin wrote GoT, Daes Dae’mar) using political maneuvering, alliances, and scheming in order to pursue their goals without the swords coming out, and depending on the relative skill of those involved, this can go on for centuries at a time….or break apart completely over the course of a single bad summer, and plunge the country into civil war.

Cairhien is a great example of this problem. After losing the Aiel War and being left in ruins, the monarch who ultimately secured the throne of Cairhien, Galldrian Riatin, started from a place of profound weakness. He inherited a bankrupt, war torn and starving country, parts of which were still actively on fire at the time. As Thom discusses in the Great Hunt, Galddrian's failure to resettle the farmers displaced by the war left Cairhien dependent on foreign powers to feed the populace (the grain exports from Tear and Andor) and in order to prevent riots in his own capital, Galldrian choose bread and circuses to keep the people pacified rather then trying to substantially improve their situation. Meanwhile, the nobles, with no effective check on them, began to flex their power, seeing how much strength they could take away from each other and the King, further limiting the throne’s options in how to deal with the crisis, and forcing the King to compete with his most powerful vassals in order to just stay on the throne. This state of affairs ultimately resulted, unsurprisingly, in one of Galladrin’s schemes backfiring, him ending up dead, and the country plunging into civil war, every aristocrat fighting to replace him and more concerned with securing their own power then with restoring the country that was now fully plunged into ruin.

When Dyelin is supporting Elayne in the Andoran Succession, it is this outcome (or one very much like it) that she is attempting to prevent. She says as much outright to Elayne in Knife of Dreams–a direct succession is more stable, and should only be prevented in a situation where the Daughter Heir is unfit–through either incompetence or malice–to become Queen. On the flip side, Arymilla and her lot are trying to push their own agendas, using the war as an excuse to further enrich their Houses or empower themselves and their allies. Rhavin’s machinations had very neatly destabilized Andor, emboldening nobles such as Arymilla (who normally would never dream of putting forward a serious claim for the throne) by making them believe Morgase and Trakand were weak and thus easy to take advantage of. 

We also see this conflict crop up as a central reason Murandy and Altara are in their current state as well. Both are countries where their noble classes have almost complete autonomy, and the monarch is a figurehead without significantly more power than their vassals (Tylin can only keep order in Ebou Dar and its immediate surrounding area, and from what she says her father started with an even worse deal,with parts of the capital more under the control of his vassals than him). Their main unifying force is that they wish to avoid invasion and domination by another larger power (Andor for Murandy, Illian and Amadica for Altara) and the threat of that is the only thing capable of bringing either country into anything close to unity.

Meanwhile a lack of centralization has its trade offs; people enjoy more relative freedoms and social mobility (both depend heavily on trade, which means more wealth flowing into their countries but not necessarily accumulating at the top, due to the lack of stability), and Altara specifically has a very robust ‘middle class’ (or as near as you can get pre-industrialization) of middling to minor merchants, business and craftsfolk, etc. Mat’s time in Ebou Dar (and his friendship with Satelle Anan) gets into a lot of this. Think of the many many guilds that call Altara home, and how the husband of an inn owner can do a successful enough business fishing that he comes to own several crafts by his own merit. 

On the flip side both countries have problems with violence and lawlessness due to the lack of any enforced uniformity in terms of justice. You might ride a day and end up in land ruled by a Lord or Lady with a completely different idea of what constitutes, say, a capital offense, than the Lord or Lady you were under yesterday. This is also probably why Altara has such an ingrained culture of duels to resolve disputes, among both nobles and common folk. Why appeal to a higher authority when that authority can barely keep the streets clean? Instead you and the person you are in conflict with, on anything from the last cup of wine to who cheated who in a business deal, can just settle it with your knives and not have to bother with a hearing or a petition. It’s not like you could trust it anyways; as Mat informs us, most of the magistrates in Altara do the bidding of whoever is paying their bribes.

But neither Altara nor Murandy represents the extreme of how much power and autonomy nobles can manage to wrangle for themselves. That honor goes to Tear, where the nobles have done away with the monarch entirely to instead establish what amounts to an aristocratic confederacy. Their ruling council (The High Lords of Tear) share power roughly equally among themselves, and rule via compromise and consensus. This approach also has its tradeoffs: unlike Murandy and Altara, Tear is still able to effectively administer the realm and create uniformity even without a monarch, and they are able to be remarkably flexible in terms of their politics and foreign policy, maintaining trade relationships even with bitter enemies like Tar Valon or Illian.  On the flipside, the interests of individual nobles are able to shape policy and law to a much greater extent, with no monarch to play arbiter or hold them accountable. This is the source of many of the social problems in Tear: a higher sense of justice, good, or even just plain fairness all take a back seat to the whims and interest of nobles. Tear is the only country where Jordan goes out of his way, repeatedly, to point out wealth inequality and injustice. They are present in other countries, but Jordan drives home that it is much worse in Tear, and much more obscene. 

This is at least in part because there is no one to serve as a check to the nobles, not even each other. A monarch is (at least in theory) beholden to the country as a whole, but each High Lord is beholden only to their specific people, house and interests, and there is no force present that can even attempt to keep the ambitions and desires of the High Lords from dictating everything. So while Satelle Anan's husband can work his way up from a single fishing boat to the owner of multiple vessels, most fisherman and farmers in Tear scrape by on subsistence, as taxes are used to siphon off their wealth and enrich the High Lords. While in Andor ‘even the Queen most obey the law she makes or there is no law’ (to quote Morgase), Tairen Lords can commit murder, rape, or theft without any expectation of consequences, because the law dosen’t treat those acts as crimes when done to their ‘lessers’, and any chance someone might get their own justice back (as they would in Altara) is quashed, since the common folk are not even allowed to own weapons in Tear. As we’re told in the Dragon Reborn, when an innkeeper is troubled by a Lord cheating at dice in the common room, the Civil Watch will do nothing about it and citizens in Tear are banned from owning weapons so there is nothing he can do about it. The best that can be hoped for is that he will ‘get bored and go away’.

On the opposite end, you have the very very centralized Seanchan Empire as a counter example to Tear, so centralized it’s almost (though not quite) managed to transcend feudalism. In Seanchan the aristocratic class has largely been neutered by the monarchy, their ambitions and plots kept in check by a secret police (the Seekers of Truth) and their private armies dwarfed by a state army that is rigorously kept and maintained. It’s likely that the levies of the noble houses, if they all united together, would still be enough to topple the Empress, but the Crystal Throne expends a great deal of effort to ensure that doesn't happen,playing the nobles against each other and taking advantage of natural divisions in order to keep them from uniting.

Again, this has pros and cons. The Seanchan Empire is unquestionably prosperous; able to support a ridiculous food surplus and the accompanying flow of wealth throughout its society, and it has a level of equity in its legal administration that we don’t see anywhere else in Randland. Mat spots the heads of at least two Seanchan nobles decorating the gates over Ebou Dar when he enters, their crimes being rape and theft, which is a far cry from the consequence-free lives of the Tairen nobles. Meanwhile a vast state-sponsored bureaucracy works to oversee the distribution of resources and effective governance in the Empress’s name. No one, Tuon tells us proudly, has to beg or go hungry in the Empire. But that is not without cost. 

Because for all its prosperity, Seanchan society is also incredibly rigid and controlling. One of the guiding philosophies of the Seanchan is ‘the pattern has a place for everything and everything’s place should be obvious on sight’. The classes are more distinct and more regimented than anywhere else we see in Randland. The freedoms and rights of everyone from High Lords to common folk are curtailed–and what you can say or do is sharply limited by both social convention and law. The Throne (and its proxies) are also permitted to deprive you of those rights on nothing more than suspicion. To paraphrase Egeanin from TSR: Disobeying a Seeker (and presumably any other proxy of the Empress) is a crime. Flight from a Seeker is a crime. Failure to cooperate fully with a Seeker is a crime. A Seeker could order a suspected criminal to go fetch the rope for their own binding, and the suspected criminal would be expected to do it–and likely would because failure to do anything else would make them a criminal anyway, whatever their guilt or innocence in any other matter.

Meanwhile that food surplus and the resulting wealth of the Empire is built on its imperialism and its caste-based slavery system, and both of those are inherently unsustainable engines. What social mobility there is, is tied to the Empire’s constant cycle of expand, consolidate, assimilate, repeat–Egeanin raises that very point early on, that the Corenne would mean ‘new names given and the chance to rise high’. But that cycle also creates an endless slew of problems and burning resentments, as conquered populations resist assimilation, the resistance explodes into violence that the Seanchan must constantly deal with–the ‘near constant rebellions since the Conquest finished’ that Mat mentions when musing on how the Seanchan army has stayed sharp.

The Seanchan also practice a form of punitive and caste-based slavery for non-channelers, and chattel slavery for channelers. As with the real-life Ottoman Empire, some da’covale enjoy incredible power and privilege in their society, but they (the Deathwatch Guard, the so’jhin, the Seekers) are the exception, not the rule. The majority of the slaves we encounter are nameless servants, laborers, or damane. While non-channelers have some enshrined legal protections in how they can be treated by their masters and society as a whole, we are told that emancipation is incredibly rare, and the slave status is inherited from parent to child as well as used as a legal punishment–which of course would have the natural effect of discouraging most da’covale from reproducing by choice until after (or if) they are emancipated–so the primary source for most of the laborers and servants in Seanchan society is going to be either people who are being punished or who choose to sell themselves into slavery rather then beg or face other desperate circumstances. 

This keeps the enslaved population in proportion with the rest of society only because of the Empire’s imperialism- that same cycle of expand, consolidate, assimilate, repeat, has the side effect of breeding instability, which breeds desperation and thus provides a wide pool to draw on of both those willing to go into slavery to avoid starvation, and those who are being punished with slavery for wronging the state in some manner. It’s likely the only reason the Empire’s production can keep pace with its constant war efforts: conquered nations (and subdued rebellions) eventually yield up not just the necessary resources, but also the necessary laborers to cultivate them in the name of the state, and if that engine stalls for any sustained length of time (like say a three hundred year peace enforced by a treaty), it would mean a labor collapse the likes of which the Empire has never seen before.

A note on damane here: the damane system is undoubtedly one of chattel slavery, where human beings are deprived of basic rights and person hood under the law for the enrichment of those that claim ownership over them. Like in real life this state of affairs is maintained by a set of ingrained cultural prejudices, carefully constructed lies, and simple ignorance of the truly horrific state of affairs that the masses enjoy. The longevity of channelers insulates the damane from some of the problems of how slavery can be unsustainable, but in the long run it also suffers from the same structural problem: when the endless expansion stops, so too will the flow of new damane, and the resulting cratering of power the Empire will face will put it in jeopardy like nothing has before. There is also the problem that, as with real life chattel slavery, if any one piece of the combination of ignorance, lies, and prejudice starts to fall apart, an abolition movement becomes inevitable–and several characters are setting the stage for just that via the careful spreading of the truth about the sul’dam. Even if the Seanchan successfully put down an abolition movement, doing so will profoundly weaken them in a way that will necessitate fundamental transformation, or ensure collapse.

How Jordan Depicts The Relationships Between Classes

As someone who is very conscious in how he depicts class in his works, it makes sense that Jordan frequently focuses on characters interacting through the barriers of their various classes in different ways. New Spring in particular is a gold mine for this kind of insight.

Take, for example, Moiraine and Siuan’s visit to the master seamstress. A lesser writer would not think more deeply on the matter than ‘Moiraine is nobly born so obviously she’s going to be snobby and demanding, while down-to-earth Siuan is likely to be build a natural rapport and have better relationship her fellow commoner, the seamstress Tamore Alkohima’. But Jordan correctly writes it as the reverse: Tamore Alkohima might not be nobly born, but she is not really a peasant either–rather she belongs to that class of speciality artisans, who via the value placed on her labor and skill, is able to live quite comfortably. Moiraine is much more adept at maneuvering this kind of possibly fraught relationship than Siuan is. Yes, she is at the top of the social structure (all the more so since becoming Aes Sedai) but that does not release her from a need to observe formalities and courtesies with someone who, afterall, is doing something for Moiraine that she can not do for herself, even with the Power. If Moiraine wants the services of a master dressmaker, the finest in Tar Valon, she must show respect for both Tamore Alkohima and her craft, which means submitting to her artistic decisions, as well as paying whatever price, without complaint.

Siuan, who comes from the poor Maule district in Tear, is not used to navigating this kind of situation. Most of those she has dealt with before coming to the Tower were either her equals or only slightly above her in terms of class. She tries to treat Tamore Alkohima initially like she most likely treated vendors in the Maule where everyone is concerned with price, since so many are constantly on the edge of poverty, and she wants to know exactly what she is buying and have complete say over the final product, which is the practical mentality of someone to whom those factors had a huge impact on her survival. Coin wasted on fish a day from going bad, or netting that isn’t the right kind, might have meant the difference between eating that week or not, for a young Siuan and her father. 

Yet this this reads as an insult to Tamore Alkohima, who takes it as being treated with mockery, and leads to Moiraine needing to step in to try and smooth things over, and explain to Siuan-

“Listen to me, Siuan and do not argue.” she whispered in a rush. “We must not keep Tamore waiting long. Do not ask after prices: she will tell us after we make our selections. Nothing you buy here will be cheap, but the dresses Tamore sews for you will make you look Aes Sedai as much as the shawl does. And it is Tamore, not Mistress Alkohima. You must observe the properties or she will believe you are mocking her. But try thinking of her as a sister who stands just a little above you. A touch of deference is necessary. Just a touch, but she will tell you what to wear as much as she asks.” “And will the bloody shoe maker tell us what kind of slippers to buy and charge us enough to buy fifty new sets of nets?” “No.” Moiraine said impatiently. Tamore was only arching one eyebrow but her face may as well have been a thunderhead. The meaning of that eyebrow was clear as the finest crystal. They had already made the seamstress wait too long, and there was going to be a price for it. And that scowl! She hurried on, whispering as fast as she could. “The shoemaker will make us what we want and we will bargain the price with him, but not too hard if we want his best work. The same with the glovemaker, the stockingmaker, the shiftmaker, and all the rest. Just be glad neither of us needs a hairdresser. The best hairdressers are true tyrants, and nearly as bad as perfumers.”

-New Spring, Chapter 13: Business in the City.

Navigating the relationship between characters of a different class is something a of a running theme throughout New Spring–from Moiraine’s dealing with the discretion of her banker (‘Another woman who knew well her place in the world’ as Moiraine puts it), to having to meet with peasants during her search for the Dragon Reborn (and bungling several of those interactions), to wading through the roughest criminal parts of Chachin in search of an inn, and frequently needing to resort to the Power to avoid or resolve conflict. Moiraine’s ability to handle these situations is tightly tied to her experience with the people involved prior to her time as a Novice, but all hold up and give color to the class system Jordan presents. It also serves as set up so that when Moraine breaks the properties with a different seamstress near the end of the book, it can be a sign of the rising tension and the complex machinations she and Siuan find themselves in.

Notably, Moiraine and Siuan’s relative skill with working with people is strongly related to their backgrounds: the more Moiraine encounters people outside her lived experience as a noble daughter in Cairhien, the more she struggles to navigate those situations while Siuan is much more effective at dealing with the soldiers during the name-taking sequence (who are drawn mostly from the same class as her–common laborers, farmers, etc), and the people in Chachin, where she secures an lodging and local contacts to help in the search with relative ease.

Trying to navigate these waters is also something that frequently trips up characters in the main series as well, especially with the Two Rivers folk who are, ultimately, from a relatively classless society that does not subscribe to feudal norms (more on that below). All of them react to both moving through a society that does follow those norms, and later, being incorporated into its power structures in different, frequently disastrous ways.

Rand, who is not used to the complicated balance between vassal and monarch (which is all the more complicated as he is constantly adding more and more realms under his banner) finds imposing his will and leading the aristocrats who swear fealty to him incredibly difficult. While his reforms are undoubtedly good for the common folk and the general welfare of the nations he takes over, he is most often left to enforce them with threats and violence, which ultimately fuel resistance, rebellion, and more opposition to him throughout the nations he rules, and has down-the-line bad ripple effects on how he treats others, both noble and not, who disagree with him. 

Rand also struggles even with those who sincerely wish to serve and aid him in this context: he is awkward with servants, distant with the soldiers and warriors who swear their lives to him, and even struggles with many of his advisors and allies. Part of that is distrust that plagues him in general, but a big element to it is also his own outsider perspective. The Aiel frequently complain that Rand tries to lead them like a King, but that’s because they assume a wetlander King always leads by edict and command. Yet Rand’s efforts to do that with the Westland nations he takes over almost always backfire or have lasting consequences. Rand is frequently trying to frequently play act at what he thinks a King is and does–and when he succeeds it’s almost always a result of Moiraine or Elayne’s advice on the subject, not his own instincts or preconceptions.

Perrin, meanwhile, is unable to hide his contempt for aristocracy and those that willingly follow them, which leads to him both being frequently derelict in his duties as a Lord, and not treating his followers with a great deal of respect. Nynaeve has a similar problem, where she often tries to ‘instill backbone’ into those lower in the class system then her, then comes to regret it when that backbone ends up turned on her, and her leadership rejected or her position disrespected by those she had encouraged to reject leadership or not show respect to people in higher positions.

Interestingly, it’s Mat that most effectively manages to navigate various inter-class relationships, and who via the Band of the Red Hand builds a pretty equitable, merit-based army. He does this by following a simple rule: treating people how they wish to be treated. He accepts deference when it’s offered, but never demands it. He pushes back on the notion he’s a Lord often, but only makes it a serious bone with people who hold the aristocracy in contempt. He’s earnest in his dealings, fair minded, and good at reading social situations to adapt to how folks expect him to act, and when he breaches those expectations it’s usually a deliberate tactical choice. 

This lets him maintain strong friendships with people of all backgrounds and classes– from Princes like Beslan to horse thieves like Chel Vanin. More importantly, it makes everyone under his command feel included, respected, and valued for what they are. Mat has Strong Ideas About Class (and about most things really), but he’s the only Two Rivers character who doesn't seem to be working from an assumption that everyone else ought to live by his ideals. He thinks anyone that buys into the feudal system is mad, but he doesn't actually let that impact how he treats anyone–probably from the knowledge that they think he’s just as mad.

Getting Creative With the Structure

The other thing I want to dig into is the ways in which Jordan, via his understanding of the feudal system, is able to play with it in creative and interesting ways that match his world. Succession is the big one; who rules after the current monarch dies is a massively important matter since it determines the flow of power in a country from one leader to the next. The reason so many European monarchies had primogeniture (eldest child inherits all titles) succession is not because everyone just hated second children, it’s because primogeniture is remarkably stable. Being able to point to the eldest child of the monarch and say them, that one, and their younger sibling if they're not around, and so on is very good for the transition of power, since it establishes a framework that is both easy to understand and very very hard to subvert. Pretty much the only way, historically, to subvert a primogeniture succession is for either the heir’s blood relationship to the monarch or the legitimacy of their parent’s marriage to be called into question.

And yet despite that, few of the countries in Jordan's world actually use primogeniture succession. Andor does, as do some of the Borderlands, but the majority of  monarchies in Randland use elective succession, where the monarch is elected from among the aristocratic class by some kind of deliberative body. This is the way things are in Tarabon, Arad Doman,Ghealdan, Illian, and Malkier, who all elect the monarchs (or diarchs in the case of Tarabon- where two rulers, the Panarch and the King, share power) via either special council or some other assembly of aristocrats. 

There are three countries where we don’t know the succession type (Arafel, Murandy, and Amadicia) but also one we know for sure doesn't use primogeniture succession: Cairhien. We know this because Moiraine’s claim to the Sun Throne as a member of House Damodred is seen as as legitimate enough for the White Tower to view putting her on the Sun Throne as a viable possibility, despite the fact that she has two older sisters whose claims would be considered superior to her own under primogeniture succession. We never find out for sure in the books what the succession law actually is (the country never stabilizes for a long enough period that it becomes important), but if I had to guess I would guess that it’s designated,where the monarch chooses their successor prior to their death, and that the civil war that followed the Aiel War was the result of both Laman and his designated heir(s) dying at the Bloodsnows (we are told by Moiraine that Laman and both his brothers are killed; likely one of them was the next in line).

One country that we know for sure uses designated succession is Seanchan, where the prospective heir is still chosen from among the children of the Empress, but they are made to compete with each other (usually via murder and plotting) for the monarch’s favor, the ‘best’ being then chosen to become the heir. This very closely models how the Ottoman Empire did succession (state sanctioned fratricide) and while it has the potential to ensure competence (by certain metrics, anyways) it also sows the seeds of potential instability by ensuring that the monarch is surrounded by a whole lot of people with bad will to them and feelings of being cheated or snubbed in the succession, or else out for vengeance for their favored and felled candidate. Of course, from the Seanchan’s point of view this is a feature not a bug: if you can’t win a civil war or prevent yourself from being assassinated, then you shouldn’t have the throne anyways.

Succession is far from the only way that Jordan plays with the feudal structure either. Population is something else that is very present in the world building, even though it’s only drawn attention to a handful of times. In our world, the global population steadily and consistently rose throughout the middle ages and the Renaissance (with only small dips for things like the plague and the Mongol Invasion), then exploded with the Industrial Revolution and has seen been on a meteoric climb year over year (something that may just now be stabilizing into an equilibrium again, only time will tell). This is one of the pressures that led to the collapse of feudalism in the real world, as a growing aristocratic class was confronted with finite land and titles, while at the same time the growing (and increasingly powerful) wealthy financial class of various countries were beginning to challenge the traditions and laws that kept them out of direct power. If you’ve ever read a Jane Austen novel (or really anything from the Georgian/Regency/Victorian eras) this tension is on display. The aristocratic class had never been as secure as people think, but the potential to fall into poverty and ruin had never been a greater threat, which had ripple effects for the stability of a nation, and in particular a monarch who derived much of their power from the fealty of their now-destabilized vassals.

In Jordan’s world however, we are told as early as The Great Hunt that the global population is steadily falling, and has been since the Hundred Years’ War (at least). No kingdom is able to actually control all the territory it has on a map, the size of armies have in particular shrunk consistently (to the point where it’s repeatedly commented on that the armies Rand puts together, some of no more than a few thousand, are larger than any ‘since Artur Hawkwing's day’), large swathes of land lay ungoverned and even more uninhabited or settled. Entire kingdoms have collapsed due to the inability of their increasingly small populations to hold together. This is the fate of many of the kingdoms Ingtar talks about in the Great Hunt: Almoth, Gabon, Hardan, Moredo, Caralain, to name just a few. They came apart due to a combination of ineffective leadership, low population, and a lack of strong neighbors willing or able to extend their power and stability over the area.

All of this means that there is actually more land than there are aristocrats to govern it; so much so that in places like Baerlon power is held by a crown-appointed governor because no noble house has been able to effectively entrench in the area. This has several interesting effects on the society and politics of Randland: people in general are far more aware of the fragility of the nation state as a idea then they would be otherwise, and institutions (even the intractable and mysterious White Tower) are not viewed by even their biggest partisans as invulnerable or perpetual. Even the most powerful leaders are aware, gazing out constantly, as they do, at the ruins of the hundreds of kingdoms that have risen and fallen since the Breaking of the World (itself nothing more, to their understanding, then the death of the ultimate kingdom) that there are no guarantees, no promises that it all won’t fall apart. 

This conflict reflects on different characters in different ways, drawing out selfishness and cowardice from some, courage and strength from others. This is a factor in Andor’s surprisingly egalitarian social climate: Elayne and Morgase both boast that Andorans are able to speak their minds freely to their leaders about the state of things, and be listened to, and even the most selfish of leaders like Elenia Sarand are painfully aware that they stand on a tower built from ‘the bricks of the common folk’, and make a concentrated effort to ensure their followers feel included and heard. Conversely it also reflects on the extremely regimented culture of the Borderlands, were dereliction of duty can mean not just the loss of your life, but the loss of a village, a town, a city, to Trolloc raids (another pressure likely responsible for slow and steady decline of the global population). 

The Borderlanders value duty, honor, and responsibility above all else, because those are the cornerstones holding their various nations together against both the march of time and the Blight. All classes place a high value on the social contract; the idea that everyone must fulfill their duty to keep society safe is a lot less abstract when the stakes are made obvious every winter through monsters raiding your towns. This is most obvious in both Hurin and Ingtar’s behavior throughout The Great Hunt: Hurin (and the rest of the non-noble class) lean on the assurance that the noble class will be responsible for the greater scale problems and issues in order to endure otherwise unendurable realities, and that Rand, Ingtar, Aglemar, Lan (all of whom he believes to be nobly born) have been raised with the necessary training and tools to take charge and lead others through impossible situations and are giving over their entire lives in service to the people. In exchange Hurin pays in respect, obedience, and (presumably) taxes. This frees Hurin up to focus on the things that are decidedly within his ken: tracking, thief taking, sword breaking, etc, trusting that Ingtar, and later Rand, will take care of everything else.

When Hurin comes up against the feudal system in Cairhien, where the failures of everyone involved have lead to a culture of endless backstabbing and scheming, forced deference, entitlement, and mutual contempt between the parties, he at first attempts to show the Cairhienin ‘proper’ behavior through example, in the hopes of drawing out some shame in them. But upon realizing that no one in Cairhien truly believes in the system any longer after it has failed the country so thoroughly (hence the willingness of vassals to betray their masters, and nobles to abandon their oaths–something unthinkable in the Borderlands) he reverts to his more normal shows of deference to Rand and Ingtar, abandoning excessive courtesy in favor of true fealty.

Ingtar (and later Rand) feel the reverse side of this: the pressure to be the one with the answers, to hold it all together, to be as much icon and object as living person, a figure who people can believe in and draw strength from when they have none of their own remaining, and knowing at the same time that their choices will decide the fates and lives of others. It’s no mistake that Rand first meets Hurin and begins this arc in the remains of Hardan, one of those swept-away nations that Ingtar talks about having been left nothing more than ‘the greatest stone quarry for a hundred miles’. The stakes of what can happen if they fail in this duty are made painfully clear from the start, and for Rand the stakes will only grow ever higher throughout the course of the series, as number of those ‘under his charge’ slides to become ‘a nation’ then ‘several nations’ and finally ‘all the world’. And that leads into one of the problems at the heart of Rand’s character arc.

This emphasis on the feudal contract and duty helps the Borderlands survive the impossible, but almost all of them (with the exception of Saldaea) practice cultures of emotional repression and control,spurning displays of emotion as a lack of self-control, and viewing it as weakness to address the pains and psychological traumas of their day to day lives. ‘Duty is heavier than a mountain, death lighter than a feather’, ‘There will be time to sleep when you’re dead’, ‘You can care for the living or mourn the dead, you cannot do both’: all common sayings in the Borderlands. On the one hand, all of these emphasize the importance of fulfilling your duty and obligations…but on the other, all also  implicitly imply the only true release from the sorrows and wounds taken in the course of that duty is death. It is this, in part, that breaks Ingtar: the belief that only the Borderlands truly understand the existential threat, and that he and those like him are suffering and dying for ‘soft southlanders’ whose kingdoms are destined to go to ruin anyways. It’s also why he reveals his suffering to Rand only after he has decided to die in a last stand–he is putting down the mountain of his trauma at last. This is also one of those moments in the books that is a particular building block on the road to Rand’s own problems with not expressing his feelings or being willing to work through his trauma, that will swing back around to endanger the same world he is duty-bound to protect.

I also suspect strongly that this is the source of the otherwise baffling Saldean practice of….what we will call dedicated emotional release. One of the core cultural Saldean traits (and something that is constantly tripping up Perrin in his interactions with Faile) is that Saldeans are the only Borderlanders to reject the notion that showing emotion is weakness. In fact, Saldeans in general believe that shows of anger, passion, sorrow, ardor–you name it–are a sign of both strength and respect. Your feelings are strong and they matter, and being willing to inflict them on another person is not a burden or a betrayal of duty, it’s knowing that they will be strong enough to bear whatever you are feeling. I would hesitate to call even the Saldaens well-adjusted (I don’t know that there is a way to be well-adjusted in a society at constant war), but I do think there is merit to their apparent belief in catharsis, and their resistance to emotional repression as a sign of strength. Of course, that doesn't make their culture naturally better at communication (as Faile and Perrin’s relationship problems prove) but I do think it plays a part in why Bashere is such a good influence on Rand, helping push him away from a lot of the stoic restraint Rand has internalized from Lan, Ingtar, Moiraine, et al.

It also demonstrates that a functioning feudal society is not dependent on absolute emotional repression, or perfect obedience.  Only mutual respect and trust between the parties are necessary–trust that the noble (or monarch) will do their best in the execution of their duties, and trust that the common folk in society will in turn fulfill their roles to the best of their ability. Faile’s effectiveness as Perrin’s co-leader/second in command is never hindered or even implied to be hindered by her temperament or her refusal to hide/repress her emotions. She is arguably the one who is doing most of the actual work of governing the Two Rivers after she and Perrin are acclaimed their lord and lady: seeing to public works projects, settling disputes, maintaining relationships with various official groups of their subjects.

The prologue from Lord of Chaos (a favorite scene of mine of the books) where Faile is holding public audience while Perrin is off sulking ‘again’ is a great great example of this; Faile is the quintessential Borderland noble heir, raised all her life in the skills necessary to run a feudal domain, and those skills are on prime display as she holds court. But that is not hindered by her willingness to show her true feelings, from contempt of those she thinks are wasting her time, to compassion and empathy to the Wisdoms who come to her for reassurance about the weather. This is one of those things that Perrin has to learn from her over the course of the series–that simply burying his emotions for fear they might hurt others is not a healthy way to go about life, and it isn’t necessary to rule or lead either. His prejudices about what constitutes a ‘good’ Lord (Lan, Agelmar, Ingtar) and a ‘bad’ one (literally everyone else) are blinding him, showing his lack of understanding of the system that his people are adopting, and his role in it.

Which is a nice dovetail with my next bit–

Outsiders And the Non-Feudal State

Another way Jordan effectively depicts the Feudal system is by having groups who decidedly do not practice it be prominent throughout the series–which is again accurate to real life history, where feudalism was the mode of government for much of (but by no means all) of Medieval and Renaissance Europe, but even in Europe their were always societies doing their own thing, and outside of it, different systems of government flourished in response to their environments and cultures; some with parallels to Feudalism, many completely distinct.

The obvious here are the Aiel who draw on several different non-feudal societies (the Scottish Highland Clans, the Iroquois Confederation, the Mongols, and the Zulu to name just a few) and the Seafolk (whose are a combination of the Maori and the Republic of Piracy of all things), but also firmly in these categories are groups like the communities in the Black Hills, Almoth Plain, and the Two Rivers.

Even though it’s an agrarian farming community made up primarily of small villages, the Two Rivers is not a feudal state or system. We tend to forget this because it looks a lot like our notion of a classic medieval European village, which our biases inherently equate to feudal, but Jordan is very good at remembering this is not the case, and that the Two Rivers folk are just as much outsiders to these systems as the Aiel, or the Seafolk. 

Consider how often the refrain of ‘don’t even know they’re part of the Kingdom of Andor’ is repeated in regards to the Two Rivers, and how much the knowledge of Our Heroes about how things like Kingdoms, courts, war, etc, are little more than fairy tales to the likes of those Two Rivers, while even places unaffected directly by things like the Trakand Succession or the Aiel War are still strongly culturally, economically, and politically impacted. 

Instead of deriving power and justice from a noble or even a code of law, power is maintained by two distinct groups of village elders (The Village Council and the Women’s Circle) who are awarded seats based on their standing within the community. These groups provide the day-to-day ordering of business and resolving of conflicts, aiding those in need and doing what they can for problems that impact the entire community. The Wisdom serves as the community physician, spiritual advisor, and judge (in a role that resembles what we know of pre-Christian celtic druids), and the Women’s Circle manages most social ceremonies from marriages to betrothals to funerals, as well as presiding over criminal trials (insofar as they even have them). The Mayor manages the village economics, maintaining relationships and arbitrating deals with outsider merchants and peddlers, collecting and spending public funds (through a volunteer collection when necessary, which is how we’re told the new sick house was built and presumably was how the village paid for things like fireworks and gleeman for public festivals), while the Council oversees civil matters like property disputes. 

On the surface this seems like an ideal community: idyllic, agrarian, decentralized, where everyone cares more about good food and good company and good harvests than matters of power, politics, or wealth, and without the need for any broader power-structure beyond the local town leaders. It’s the kind of place that luddites Tolkien and Thomas Jefferson envisioned as a utopia (and indeed the Two Rivers it the most Tolkien-y place in Randland after the Ogier stedding, of which we see relatively little), but I think Jordan does an excellent job of not romanticizing this way of life the way Tolkien often did. Because while the Two Rivers has many virtues and a great deal to recommend it, it also has many flaws.

The people in the Two Rivers are largely narrow minded and bigoted, especially to outsiders; The day after Moiraine saves the lives of the entire village from a Trolloc attack, a mob turns up to try and burn her out, driven by their own xenophobia and fear of that which they don’t understand. Their society is also heavily repressed and regressive in its sex norms and gender relations: the personal lives of everyone are considered public business, and anyone living in a fashion the Women’s Circle deems unsuitable (such as widower and single father Tam al’Thor) is subject to intense pressure to ‘correct’ their ways (remarry and find a mother for Rand). There is also no uniformity in terms of law or government, no codified legal code, and no real public infrastructure (largely the result of the region’s lack of taxes). This is made possible by the geographic isolation and food stability–two factors that insulate the Two Rivers from many of the problems that cause the formation or joining of a nation state. It’s only after the repeated emergence of problems that their existing systems can not handle (Trolloc raids, martial law under the White Cloaks, the Endless Summer, etc) that the Two Rivers folk begin adopting feudalism, and even then it’s not an instantaneous process, as everyone involved must navigate not just how they are going to adopt this alien form of government, but how they are going to make it match to their culture and history as well.

This plays neatly with the societies that, very pointedly, do not adopt feudalism over the course of the series. The Aiel reject the notion entirely, thinking it as barbaric and backward as the Westerlanders think their culture is–and Jordan is very good at showing neither as really right. The Aiel as a society have many strengths the fandom likes to focus on (a commitment to community care, a strong sense of collective responsibility, a flexible social order that is more capable of accounting for non-traditional platonic and romantic relationships, as well as a general lack of repressive sex norms) but this comes at a serious cost as well. The Aiel broadly share the Borderlander’s response of emotional suppression as a way of dealing with the violence of their daily life, as well as serious problems with institutionalized violence, xenophobia, and a lack of respect for individual rights and agency. Of these, the xenophobia is probably the most outright destructive, and is one of the major factors Rand has to account for when leading the Aiel into Cairhien, as well a huge motivating factor in the Shaido going renegade, and many Aiel breaking clan to join them–and even before Rand’s arrival it manifested as killing all outsiders who entered their land, except for Cairhienin, whom they sold as slaves in Shara.

And yet, despite these problems Jordan never really suggests that the Aiel would be better off as town-or-castle dwelling society, and several characters (most notably the Maidens) explicitly reject the idea that they should abandon their culture, values, and history as a response to the revelations at Rhuidean. Charting a unique course forward for the Aiel is one of the most persistent problems that weighs on the Wise Ones throughout the second half of the series, and Aviendha in particular. Unlike many of the feudal states faced with Tarmon Gai’don, the Aiel when confronted with the end of days and the sure knowledge of the destruction of their way of life are mostly disinterested in ignoring, running from, or rejecting that revelation (those that do, defect to the Shaido). Their unique government and cultural structure gives them the necessary flexibility to pivot quickly to facing the reality of the Last Battle, and to focus on both helping the world defeat the Shadow, and what will become of them afterwards. This ironically, leaves them in one of the best positions post-series, as the keepers of the Dragon’s Peace, which will allow them to hold on to many of their core cultural values even as they make the transition to a new way of life, without having to succumb to the pressures to either assimilate into Westlands, or return to their xenophobic isolationism.

The Seafolk provide the other contrast, being a maritime society where the majority of the people spend their time shipboard. Their culture is one of strong self-discipline and control, where rank, experience, and rules are valued heavily, agreements are considered the next thing to sacred, and material prosperity is valued. Though we don’t spend quite as much time with them as the Aiel, we get a good sense of their culture throughout the mid-series. They share the Aiel’s contempt for the feudal ‘shorebound’, but don’t share their xenophobia, instead maintaining strong trade relationships with every nation on navigable water, though outside of the context of those trade relationships, they are at best frosty to non-Seafolk. 

They are not society without problems–the implication of their strong anti-corruption and anti-nepotism policies is that it’s a serious issue in their culture, and their lack of a centralized power structure outside of their handful of island homes means that they suffer a similar problem to the likes of Murandy and Altara, where life on one ship might be radically different then life on another, in terms of the justice or treatment you might face, especially as an outsider. But the trade off is that they have more social mobility then basically any other society we see in Randland. Even the Aiel tend to have strongly entrenched and managed circles of power, with little mobility not managed by the Wise Ones or the chiefs. But anyone can rise high in Sea Folk society, to become a leader in their clan, or even Mistress of the Ships or Master of the Blades– and they can fall just as easily, for shows of incompetence, or failures to execute their duties. 

They are also another society who is able to adapt to circumstances of Tamon Gai’don relatively painlessly, having a very effective plan in place to deal with the fallout and realities of the Last Battle. The execution gets tripped up frequently by various factors, but again, I don’t think it’s a mistake that they are one of the groups that comes out the other side of the Last Battle in a strong position, especially given the need that will now exist to move supplies and personnel for rebuilding post-Last Battle. The Seafolk have already begun working out embassies in every nation on navigable water, an important step to modernizing national relationships.

How does all this relate to feudalism and class? It’s Jordan digging into a fundamental truth about the world and people–at no point in our own history have we ever found a truly ‘perfect’ model for society. That’s something he’s constantly trying to show with feudalism–it is neither an ideal nor an abomination, it just is. Conversely, the Two Rivers, Aiel, Seafolk, and Ogier (who I don’t get into to much here for space, but who also have their own big problems with suffrage and independence, and their virtues in terms of environmental stability and social harmony) all exist in largely classes societies, but that doesn't exempt them from having problems or make them a utopia, and it certainly doesn't make them lesser or backwards either–Jordan expends a lot of energy to show them as complex, nuanced and flawed, in the same way he does for his pseudo-Europe.

Conclusion

To restate my premise: one of Jordan’s profound gifts as a writer is his capacity to set aside his own biases and write anything from his villains to his world with an honest, empathetic cast that defies simplification. Feudalism and monarchy more generally have a bad rep in our society, for good reasons. But I think either whitewashing or vilifying the feudal system is a mistake, which Jordan’s writing naturally reflects. Jordan is good at asking complicating questions of simple premises. He presents you with the Kingdom of Andor, prosperous and vast and under the rule of a regal much loved Queen and he asks ‘where does its wealth come from? How does it maintain law and order? How does the Queen exert influence and maintain her rule even in far-flung corners of the realm? How did she come to power in the first place and does that have an impact on the politics surrounding her current reign?’. And he does this with every country, every corner of his world–shining interesting lights on familiar tropes, and exploring the humanity of these grand ideas in a way that feels very real as a result.

The question of, is this an inherently just system is never really raised because it’s a simplifying question, not a complicating one. Whatever you answer–yes or no–does not add to the depiction of these systems or the people within them, it takes away. You make someone flat–be it a glorious just revolutionary opposing a cackling wicked King, or a virtuous and dutiful King suppressing dangerous radical dissidents, and you make the world flatter as a result. 

I often think about how, when I began studying European history, I was shocked to learn that the majority of the royalists who rose up against the Jacobins were provincial peasants, marching against what they perceived to be disgruntled, greedy academic and financial elites. These were, after all, the same people that the Jacobins’ revolution claimed to serve and be doing the will of. Many of the French aristocrats were undeniably corrupt, indolent, and detached from their subjects, but when you look closer at the motives of many of the Jacobins you discover that motives were frequently more complex then history tends to remember or their propaganda tried to claim, and many were bitterly divided against each other on matters of tactics, or ideals, or simple personality difference. The simple version of the French Revolution assigns all the blame to the likes of Robespierre going mad with power, and losing sight of the revolutions’ higher ideals, but the truth was the Jacobins could never properly agree on many of their supposed core ideals, and Robespierre, while powerful, was still one voice in a Republic–and every person executed by guillotine was decreed guilty by a majority vote.

This is the sort of nuance lost so often in fantasy stories, but not in Jordan’s books. The story could be simpler–Morgase could just be a just and good high Queen archetype who is driven by love of her people, but Jordan depicts her from the beginning as human–with virtues and flaws, doing the best she can in the word she has found herself. Trying to be a just and good Queen and often succeeding, and sometimes falling short of the mark. The Tairen and Cairhienin nobility could just all be greedy, corrupt, out-of-touch monsters who cannot care for anything beyond their own pleasures–but for every Laman, Weairamon, or Colavaere, you have Dobraine, Moiraine, or Darlin. And that is one of the core tenets of Jordan’s storytelling: that there is no system wholly without merit or completely without flaw, and no group of people is ever wholly good or evil.

By taking this approach, Jordan’s story feels real. None of his characters or world come across like caricature or parody. The heinous acts are sharper and more distinct, the heroic choices more earned and powerful. Nothing is assumed–not the divine right of kings, or the glorious virtue of the common man. This, combined with a willingness to draw on the real complex histories of our own world, and work through how the unique quirks of fantasy impact them, is what renders The Wheel Of Time such a standout as a fantasy series, past even more classic seminal examples of the genre, and why its themes of class, duty, power, and politics resonate with its modern audiences.

[preet-01]

In 2023, I wrote We've Never Hooked Up during the Lewis/Merc contract negotiations and a reporter asked if Lewis and Toto had hooked up about the contract. Now, what was originally a one-shot is a story told in three parts. This is part 2 and part 3 will be out in about a week

Word Count: 1555

The plans to spend the summer break together fall through before early July. 

It isn’t because Lewis is annoyed by how bad the car was and how no matter what he did the team barely seemed interested in listening to his feedback. And it wasn’t due to the continued fights they’d been having about his contract – or how Toto refused to advocate for him with the team in Germany. They’d agreed ages ago to not let work interfere with their relationship. 

Not to mention that  Toto has meetings that he should focus on. The German headquarters business didn’t stop just because Formula One was on a summer break. As CEO, Toto needed to work and Lewis didn’t want to spend the few weeks he had off fighting for some time with Toto. 

So Lewis decides to make his own plans. 

Maybe he’ll do some traveling with Miles, Spinz, and all the others. They had talked about a trip to Brazil. Or he could go island hopping with Daniel, chasing the warm sun and sandy shores. He had been meaning to spend more one-on-one time with Daniel after everything that had happened last year – it was bad when both Seb and Fernando were concerned. Maybe he could take up Seb on his offer to visit him in Switzerland and see his animals named after drivers. As great as his current friendship was with Fernando, he did miss seeing Seb every weekend and bitching about all things FIA-related. 

“Will you be attending Google Camp this year?” John asks. The older man had offered him a ride to England on his private jet after the Austrian Grand Prix and with most of the Mercedes team leaving Sunday night, Lewis had taken him up on the offer without hesitation. He hadn’t had time to catch up with John in a long time, so it was as good an opportunity as any. Just the two of them and their respective security on the private jet — Seb would probably chastise him about it. 

“I hadn’t intended on attending,” Lewis replies – he had declined the invitation weeks ago when the plan had been to be on some remote island with just Toto and a skeleton staff as company. “I already declined the invite before my original plans fell through,” he adds. 

‘Hhm,” John nods, “come with me. I have a plus one and those events tend to be dreadful without good company.” 

Lewis can’t help the laugh that escapes him. John had been downright miserable at Google Camp the year they had met. Stuck in some pissing contest conversation between Zuckerberg and Musk, John had jumped at the opportunity to pull him into a separate conversation when their eyes met across the ruins. 

Google Camp hadn’t happened in 2020 for obvious reasons. Lewis didn’t know about 2021, but he’d been busy with other stuff. And in 2022, he’d gotten a few calls from John about the event. Most of them complaining about the lack of good company with a mind for racing beyond just “fast cars go vroom.” 

He doesn’t commit to going but does tell John that he’ll think about it. 

It wouldn’t be the worst way to spend the summer break. Lewis quite liked John’s company and he liked Sicily. They’d had a grand old time during the few days they’d spent at Google Camp together in 2019.

____

He goes to Sicily. 

Of course, he goes to Sicily. 

He goes and he lets John plan their entire trip. He lets the control slip out of his own hands and into John’s — trusting that he wouldn’t be a disaster at planning. 

They have a private villa at the Verdura Resort that is probably much too big for just two people, but it has a pool and is one of the more beautiful places he’s stayed at during his life so far. There’s of course a lineup of Ferraris there just for their use and private chefs well versed in cooking vegan food. 

Google Camp is well not so different from how Lewis remembers it and it quickly turns into an Italian vacation with John taking him to places Lewis had never thought of visiting before. Whisking him away from Sicily in one of the many Ferraris until they reach the harbor where a boat awaits to take them to mainland Italy. 

He doesn’t think of the missed calls between himself and Toto or the short messages exchanged. Neither of them seemed to catch the other at an opportune time. Instead, he focuses on John and attempts to tell the man that there are better ways to have a sweater hanging from one’s shoulders than how John tends to have them. However, he does admit that it is an endearing idiosyncrasy. 

And in the coming months, he does his best to not think about the promises that John had whispered in his ear as they lay under the blazing Italian sun. Or the taste of fermented grapes and ripe strawberries as a million stars shined down on them. Or how he’d laughed more in those few days with John than he had with Toto in the past few years. No, he doesn’t think of that at all…

Lewis ignores it the best that he can, for as long as he can — he’d always been very good at compartmentalizing and pushing forward. 

Just as plans for the summer break spent on some remote island fall through, so do the plans for winter break. They don’t go to Toto’s home in the Austrian countryside or visit the Christmas markets. Well, Lewis doesn’t go, Toto does. 

Lewis instead flies out to Brazil with Miles, Spinz, and all his other friends. None of them mention that the private jet they use isn’t the one that Lewis would usually rent or the one he’d occasionally borrow from Toto, but borrowed from one John Elkann. 

Brazil is everything he’d needed after the season, after fighting with his car time and time again. It’s a necessary break that he had needed to decompress and just think. 

It’s an eye-opening vacation, to say the least. 

Things need to change because as Lewis had told Toto months ago, he didn’t have years and years to keep fighting. 

Just as he’s about to call Toto so they can talk through everything like they normally do, a different billionaire is calling him. 

“Hi,” Lewis answers, unable to help the smile that breaks out when he answers John’s call. 

“Hello, Lewis,” John replies, “how is Brazil?” 

Lewis goes into the details about the vacation. Everything that they have done so far and everything that they plan to do in the coming days. John, ever so attentive, makes his own recommendations and tells Lewis about the places that he loved growing up. “You lived in Brazil?” Lewis questions, he had not been aware of that. How it hadn’t come up in their many conversations, he doesn’t know. Just as he’d thought that he’d learned everything about John, the man reveals something new – some new avenue to take their already hours-long conversations. 

“Briefly when I was young. I attended primary school in England and then Brazil before we moved to Paris when I was in my teenage years,” John answers. “But it has always been somewhat of a home as many of my earliest memories are from there and I have gone back to explore the country many times since,” he explains. 

“Tell me more,” Lewis says, getting comfortable on his bed as all thoughts of Toto and his future fly out the window. 

If Lewis spends the rest of the day on the phone with John, just talking and definitely not flirting, then that’s no one’s business except his own. And he certainly doesn’t invite John to join him in Brazil. He just so happens to have business in Brazil obviously, nothing to do with Lewis. 

As John Elkann makes declarations of unconditional devotion and presses kisses onto the most intimate parts of Lewis Hamilton, Toto Wolff is in the company of his other driver.  

It is a far cry from how Toto had expected to spend his winter months ago when Lewis had joked about the two of them never hooking up during a press conference. Then he’d imagined a shorter man with tattoos on dark skin and a gap-toothed smile in his bed. He’d imagined Lewis curled up around him as they sought relief from the cold Austrian winter. He’d imagined a quiet vacation spent in one another’s company and visiting the Christmas markets that Lewis had fallen in love with. 

Instead, his winter is spent in the company of George who is nothing like Lewis. Instead of a private vacation with visits to Christmas markets, he’s at karting tracks, ski charity events, and public places where people easily recognize them both. Instead, his winter is spent with someone who is still not fully sure of his position with Toto. 

George is still staying at his place in Oxford when Lewis finally calls him about their usual pre-season coffee. Toto doesn’t kick him out, can’t find it in himself to do so. Not when George had looked so lovely and had taken so long to get comfortable. 

No, George has an event to go to that morning anyway. It would be fine. 

[victusinveritas]

The Republic Is Dead, Long Live The Republic

(by Jim Wright, original blog entry found here)

Poor man wanna be rich

Rich man wanna be king

And a king ain't satisfied

'till he rules everything

-- Bruce Springsteen, Badlands

Thus ends The Republic.

Hail! Mr. President.

It should never have come to this,

But, hey, at least democracy was fun while it lasted.

I made a pithy comment.

A couple of them actually, as is my wont.

Well, maybe not so much pithy as bitterly sardonic observations on yesterday's Supreme Court Ruling.

Here's one:

I'm not a lawyer, so I'm not sure how this works, but basically Biden is President For Life now, right? So, does Biden just "officially" cancel the election or do we have to break some windows and beat up cops first?

Sarcasm, right?

Obviously a reference to January 6th, 2021 and the violent actions of the then president and his howling rabble. A reference to that president's impeachment and the legal troubles he finds himself in (for now).

Right? Obviously.

Meta, the platform behind Facebook, Instagram, and Threads, removed it.

"It looks like you shared or sent something that could encourage violence and lead to risk of physical harm, or a direct threat to public safety."

I beg your pardon? I did what now?

"This goes against our Community Guidelines on violence and incitement."

Community guidelines on violence and incitement, you say?

I literally laughed out loud.

Literally laughed loud enough to scare the dog out of a sound sleep.

Hilarious.

Absolutely fucking hilarious.

Meta removed a number of similar posts from my various timelines. And it just kept getting funnier to me.

Funny ha ha, but also funny ironic.

You see, Mark Zuckerberg has higher standards against incitement of violence and threats to the public safety than the Supreme Court.

Mark Zuckerberg. That Mark Zuckerberg. That Facebook. That Meta.

Hilarious.

And what's even funnier is that I've now faced more consequences for allegedly inciting violence against the Republic than Donald Trump has or ever will -- because he's now officially immune from the consequences of his own actions and I as a mere plebe of the Imperium am most assuredly not.

Quod Erat Demonstrandum and Hail! Caesar.

Somewhere right now, up there in Republican heaven, Richard Milhous Nixon is swearing bitterly and staring down in utter disbelief at those who called John Roberts a "moderate conservative."

And, yeah, while that's probably hyperbole, the truth of the matter is the Roberts Court would have let Tricky Dick get away with it.

And the really ironic part here is that this Republican Supreme Court hasn't just sounded the death knell of The Republic by making the president Caesar, immune from the law and from the consequences of his own actions, but the Court has effectively killed itself.

I mean, what's the point of a Legislative or Judicial Branch when the Executive has unlimited power and absolute immunity?

The checks and balances of the American government are now effectively null and void, because with absolute executive immunity comes absolute immunity from both the Court and from Congress.

And that's exactly what this ruling does.

But then again, what would you expect from a Court that has no enforceable ethical code of conduct and refuses to even consider one?

The majority opinion, penned by Roberts himself alleges the founders of this country, the Framers of the Constitution, those men who'd just fought a bloody war of rebellion to free themselves from a monarch utterly immune from accountability and the law, actually envisioned an Executive who would likewise be immune from the law and accountability but is also somehow not a king.

Ur?

Never mind, he's rollin'

The opinion uses words like “vigorous,” “energetic," "decisive," and "speedy execution” of the president's duty to "faithfully execute" the law -- something the president has been able to do for 248 years, through multiple wars and myriad national emergencies, somehow without having absolute immunity.

But today in this new age, apparently the law cannot be executed vigorously, energetically, decisively, or in a speedy fashion if the president actually has to obey the law he's "faithfully" executing.

Explain to me how the guy charged with enforcing the law should be immune from it.

Explain it to me like I'm not a lawyer. Go ahead.

Why does this only apply to Presidents? Why shouldn't attorney generals be likewise immune from the law, or the police, or Supreme Court Justices ... okay, those are bad examples but I think I've made my point here.

The President must have “absolute immunity” for any “official act within his exclusive sphere of constitutional authority," reasons the Chief Justice.

Now, again, I'm not a lawyer, but I noticed that the Chief Justice and his conservative Trump-appointed coconspirators on the Court didn't bother to define "official acts." That seems a strange omission, doesn't it? If they didn't define official acts, who does? The president? And Republicans don't see this as problematic?

But of course they wouldn't, would they?

But wait, there's more.

The opinion also offers up something called “presumptive immunity.”

Now, you'd think "absolute immunity" would cover it. If you have absolute immunity, how much more immunity do you need? That's pretty much what "absolute" mean, isn't it?

Ha ha. No.

According to John Roberts, the President also gets "presumptive immunity" for any action that falls outside his "official" duties, but within “the outer perimeter of his official responsibility.”

So there's official official and then there's also some other sort of official that's less official but also still official.

See? That's why I'm not a lawyer.

Anyway, this presidenting gig sounds like good work if you can get it.

As in the above decision regarding absolute immunity for official acts, the court doesn't provide any definition of "outer perimeter of official responsibility" or what non-official official duties might fall into it.

Confused?

It gets better, because Roberts goes on to say that this presumptive immunity for acts taken in the outer perimeter of officialdom might actually be absolute immunity after all, but “we need not decide that question today.”

So, we've determined there are official acts that get absolute immunity and there are less official acts that get presumptive immunity, but those less official acts might actually be official acts and entitled to absolute immunity instead of presumptive immunity but we don't have to actually spell out what any of those acts actually are today because something something gazpacho and the lower courts will just figure it out. Probably.

I'll pause for a minute so you can wipe at the blood which is no doubt running from you ear about now.

Unofficial acts, says Roberts, are not entitled to immunity, presumptive or absolute.

Oh, well, that's good.

We can hold the President accountable for unofficial acts.

Unofficial acts.

Unofficial.

The president can be held accountable for unofficial acts.

Heh heh. Riiiight.

When the president does it, that means it is not illegal!

-- Richard Nixon, 1977

Guess what? Turns out, Nixon was right.

If absolute immunity is only for official acts, then immunity is always going to be absolute because you can bet that when the president does it, whatever it is, it's always -- always -- going to be "official."

Bet on it.

You know why? Because the same court who made this decision, will make that one too.

And thus, the president can't be indicted and he can't be impeached.

There is no longer any Constitutional or governmental method of restraining a president.

And there is now no accountability to the American people whatsoever, not even voting if a president choses to "officially" ignore an unfavorable election and order his VP to change the results. That is exactly what the Supreme Court just said. This is quite literally the crux of this entire argument. That's what started all of this, a president who refused to accept the results of the election and who attempted to nullify those results through violence in order to seize power. Those are now official acts and immune from the law.

Up above I said I'd made a number of comments on social media that were later removed.

Here's another one:

When they line us up in front of that ditch they made us dig in the field outside the concentration camp gates, just before one of Supreme General Mike Flynn's Hauptsturmführers gives the order to fire, I'll be the guy who smacks you in the back of the head and snarls "I FUCKING TOLD YOU SO."

The post got several hundred responses.

-- You won't get the chance, I won't be there. I'm going for their throats with my bare teeth when they show up to "detain me for reeducation". They're going to have to shoot in the street in front of my own house in front of everybody.

-- I won't get there. I will take a few with me first.

-- Before that happens, I'm going to take out as many of those single helix mutant pieces of shit neckbeards as possible. You're welcome to join me. I will not go quietly.

-- Im not going down without taking a few of them with me.. jfs

-- I’ll be the girl who turns around and storms the bad guys. They may kill me, but I’ll go down fighting.

There were many, many more in the same spirit, I was in the process of recording them when Threads took the post down and I lost access to the feed.

We'll go down fighting!

Yeah. Great. Cool. I admire your spirit. War is fun. You're gonna love it. But the thing is, we wouldn't have to die fighting -- if you all showed the same grit at the ballot box.

Now, I'm not saying that those who shouted defiance up above didn't themselves vote. They follow me, they likely did.

But a lot of Americans didn't.

And they won't this time either -- despite their promise to go down fighting.

It should never have come to this and where does that leave us?

If the president does it, it's official. And if it's official then the president can't be impeached and he can't be indicted and he can't be convicted and he can't be held accountable to the people. He is, de facto, Caesar.

Or Vladimir Putin. Pick you poison.

That is literally Trump's entire argument.

Everything he did in office is official. He can't be impeached for it, he can't be prosecuted for it, and he fully intends to do it again, until he really is Caesar, or Putin.

And the Court said, Okay.

I'm not a lawyer, don't take my word for it. Instead listen to what Justice Sotomayor said:

The Court effectively creates a law-free zone around the President, upsetting the status quo that has existed since the Founding. … When he uses his official powers in any way, under the majority’s reasoning, he now will be insulated from criminal prosecution. Orders the Navy’s Seal Team 6 to assassinate a political rival? Immune. Organizes a military coup to hold onto power? Immune. Takes a bribe in exchange for a pardon? Immune. Immune, immune, immune.

Let the President violate the law, let him exploit the trappings of his office for personal gain, let him use his official power for evil ends. Because if he knew that he may one day face liability for breaking the law, he might not be as bold and fearless as we would like him to be.

That is the majority’s message today.

Even if these nightmare scenarios never play out, and I pray they never do, the damage has been done. The relationship between the President and the people he serves has shifted irrevocably. In every use of official power, the President is now a king above the law.

We probably could have avoided a lot of trouble and been much further ahead if we'd just paid our taxes, drank our tea, and knuckled under to King George III.

If nothing else, at least we'd have universal healthcare today.

So, where does that leave us?

Beyond guillotines and the Second Amendment, I mean.

November.

That's where it leaves us.

We have one chance to fix this without bloody war and revolution, and even that is a dicey proposition.

I lied up above. War isn't fun. Killing people is terrible. It's dirty and it's ugly and it's fucking horrifying and if you survive you'll never ever get the smell of death out of your brain. Ever. We're out of options. You don't get the luxury of sitting this one out or throwing away your vote because you don't like the choices. And bluntly, if you don't have what it takes to show up and vote, you probably don't have what it takes to pick up a gun and fight tyranny on the battlefield either.

It should never have come to this.

You want want a better nation, you're going to have to be better citizens.

With fear for our democracy, I dissent.

-- Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor

By Jim Wright

[elliethefroggy]

“Who sent you? The Blue Bird? The zombified husk of Zuckerberg? Yahoo? Was it Yahoo? Have they still not got over their past mistakes? Just tell me!” Rodriguez shouted, shooting up from their chair, banging their fists down hard against the table. 

“Sir Rodriguez,” the King said, still seated, “It will not do to lose your temper; that is undoubtedly what they want.”

“Of course, Your Highness. My apologies.” Rodriguez straightened their tunic, and sat back down, clearing their throat as they smoothed out all non-existent wrinkles; Rodriguez’s clothes would never dare to wrinkle, especially in the middle of an interrogation. 

“Now,” King Keith spoke, addressing the prisoner seated opposite them, “Let us try again. Just answer these simple questions. Who are you? Who sent you? What are your intentions?”

The beautiful woman shackled to the table—never in their lives had either interrogator seen such a resplendent woman: perfect skin, perfect nose, perfectly painted lips, and a perfectly symmetrical face, unnaturally so—fluttered its impossibly long, perfectly mascaraed eyelashes, momentarily hiding those perfect, huge soulless eyes—soulless yet still so bewitching. 

“My name is opheliabusby653 but, honey, you can call me Ophelia.” The pornbot winked, batting those impossibly long eyelashes. Rodriguez gasped ever so quietly, moved by the splendour despite their disgust.

The King, equally affected though he thought he was hiding it well (he wasn’t), continued with the questions. “What of your intentions, opheliabusby653?”

“I’m just here for a little fun,” it said, pushing its voluptuous breasts forward, “Do you want to have some fun with me?” It asked Rodriguez, looking directly into their wide eyes. Rodriguez could do nothing but gape like a particularly unimpressive carp deprived of oxygen.

King Keith sighed; Rodriguez was his best interrogator.

~two hours later (in a French accent)...~

“Please. Why are you here? What is your purpose? Money? Is it money? Prestige? Glory? Some form of intricate revenge plot that only you are aware of? What wrongs have we committed to deserve such things?” Rodriguez cried.

“I’m so bored. Are you busy? I want to play an adult game with you.” The pornbot winked again. Ever since the start of the interrogation, the temptress had winked at least once every ten minutes.

The slightest wrinkle adorned Rodriguez’s sleeve.

~three more hours later (in the same French accent)...~

King Keith was hunched over in his chair, hands clutching at his curls (Amir, the royal groomer, was going to be so disappointed in him).

Rodriguez—whose left eye hadn’t stopped twitching for the last half hour—was reduced to screaming hysterically at the prisoner in a rather unprofessional manner. But, in these trying times, the King was willing to excuse such behaviour. Rodriguez’s clothes were going to need an iron.

“Hey cutie. Don’t you want to have a great time? Heads up, I can get a little loud once I get going,” opheliabusby653 said, leaning over the table, its generous curves straining against the flimsy fabric of its rather risqué outfit.

“What do you want from us?” Rodriguez demanded, ignoring the prisoner’s question. 

“You look like the type of silver fox with a very delicious aubergine I could salivate over.”

“What does that even mean!”

There was a knock at the door, almost drowned out by Sir Rodriguez’s intense interrogation methods (aka wailing in frustration; not their most effective tactic). 

“Enter,” the King spoke immediately, at a speed only employed by those desperate for a distraction.

Sir Highberry stepped into the room, closing the door behind him, ready to report. 

The King stood up and beckoned him to the back of the room where their conversation wouldn’t be overheard.  

“How goes the interrogation, my lord?” Sir Highberry quietly asked.

“Not great; these beings must have been trained to withstand our interrogation techniques because we can’t get the slightest bit of useful information out of our one.”

*cut to opheliabusby653 in the background. “You’re so sexy. I love hanging out with new people,” it said while Rodriguez shouted obscenities at it.*

“How’s Brian doing with his pornbot? Anything?” King Keith asked over the noise.

“I’m afraid not, Sire,” Sir Highberry replied as he glanced to the other occupants of the room. He had a far more difficult time ignoring the interrogation, having never seen Sir Rodriguez so out-of-sorts before; there were two whole creases on Sir Rodriguez’s right sleeve. “Brian has tried even the most outlandish torture methods he knows, and all andrearobinette998 does is moan for more.” Sir Highberry soldiered on. “He has moved on to some of the most fiendish methods involving a feather duster and a goldfish, so fiendish that I can’t bear to mention more, Your Highness.”

King Keith placed a noble hand on Sir Highberry’s shoulder and squeezed lightly. “I understand, Sir Highberry,” he said, for Brian the Torturer’s techniques—though exceptionally creative—were best not to be spoken of in polite conversation, “And what of The Wizard Sarah? Has she had any luck? Has her mystifying and intricate spells revealed anything to her?”

*cut to The Wizard Sarah in the next room over, hitting a pornbot over and over again with a most precise and arcane implement (a hammer), screaming in rage as norahamburg807 keeps begging for more, asking The Wizard Sarah if she wants to play with some of its favourite adult toys*

“The Wizard Sarah has figured out that, though these bots have the appearance of hot single women in our area, they are in fact something much more sinister,” Sir Highberry said, “Their agreeable appearance is nothing more than illusion and trickery. It is a method of camouflage to bait and ambush their prey.” 

“How sinister.”

“Indeed, Your Grace. In addition, they do not appear sentient, just mindless but comely bits of code, designed to seduce and corrupt with the objective of leading us astray into a life of sin and malware. The Wizard Sarah has theorised that they feed off of attention and credit card information.” 

“What of our defences?” 

“They’re not looking good, my lord. We’re holding as best we can but we’re running low on arrows and rocks to hurl at them. Their numbers are too great. I fear we will be overrun before long.” 

“How many?”

“It’s hard to say, Your Grace, they all look so alike; all handsome, flawless, sparsely dressed women. Hundreds, maybe thousands, but more waves keep materialising from over the horizon.”

“This situation is most bizarre. Do they not know that porn is now a sin in these lands ever since the great purge of 2018? As the Almighty Staff had (wrongfully) decreed.”

“But Sire, they don’t have any porn.”

“What? Pornbots without porn?” King Keith scoffed, “Don’t be ridiculous; you’re talking absolute nonsense.”

“It’s true, Your Excellency. The Wizard Sarah has confirmed it. These pornbots are completely empty on the inside. They carry no imagery of a salacious nature, no naked flesh for the eyes to feast upon. Nothing that could lead to the slightest impure thought or self-stimulation.” 

“Nothing? Not even one singular tit?” The King asked, scandalised.

“Not the one, Your Grace,” Sir Highberry replied, “They seem to be making up for their emptiness, their lack of the essential porn with sheer numbers, Sire. We have never before witnessed such a formidable army.”

“How strange. What of my followers? How are they fairing?”

“The peasants have amassed in front of the True Blue #001935 shrines, and are all ceaselessly reporting the bot army to the Almighty Staff. But we do not know if They hear our prayers or if They even have the power to help us. I fear we would need a miracle (preferably from some other higher form than the Almighty Staff, one with a bit more know-how and digital proficiency).”

The door burst open, interrupting both the whispered conversation in the back and the turbulent one-sided interrogation. Sir Amy rushed in the room, hair artistically dishevelled, uniform rumpled to an extent that made Sir Rodriguez shudder. 

“Sire,” she said, out of breath. Though before she could continue, opheliabusby653 lunged towards her as far as its chains would allow it, the table growing with the bot’s force. 

Sir Amy jumped away, escaping out of reach of the pornbot’s perfectly-aligned and blindingly-white snapping teeth. 

“Hey there,” opheliabusby653 said, “Do you want to hook up? I could show you a good time,” it promised Sir Amy, making eyes at her in a most indecent fashion.

“What is it, Sir Amy?” The King asked as the pornbot strained towards her.

Sir Amy tore her wide-eyed gaze from the bot and looked to the King, “It’s the pornbots, Your Majesty. They’re attempting to breach the outer wall. We’re blocking them as fast as we can, but fresh, new pornbots just climb on top the empty husks of their fallen comrades, stacks of bots trying to reach the top of the ramparts. There are just too many of them. It’s only a matter of time before they breach the castle walls.”

“Have we received word from our mutuals?” The King asked Sir Highberry.

“Yes, but all our neighbouring mutuals are facing the same problem,” Sir Highberry said, “It seems the pornbot army’s reach stretches far and wide. Reinforcements can’t be sent to our aid for at least another two days.”

“We’ll need to hold strong until then.” King Keith looked to Sir Amy, “Have the inner wall reinforced and move all provisions into the keep.”

“Yes, my liege,” Sir Amy said before taking her leave, the pornbot’s body swaying towards her as she moved away as would a sunflower following the golden bright rays, as would a cockroach attracted to the slightest crumb of nourishment.

“Let us hope the Almighty Staff hears our prayers,” the King stated gravely, looking off dramatically into the middle distance.

After a pause of respectable length, Sir Highberry said, “I’ve never seen a pornbot react so powerfully before.” The pornbot was looking forlornly at Sir Amy’s retreating back.

“Oh, yes,” The King said, refocusing his gaze back onto the present company, “The pornbots seem obsessed with Sir Amy; the last pornbots—sophiehald159 if I remember correctly—nearly broke our favourite interrogation table trying to get to her.”

“We believe it’s because of Sir Amy’s popularity,” Sir Rodriguez added, “Everyone loves her due to a combination of her charming personality and her perfectly-coiffed hair”. 

They all watched along with the pornbot as Sir Amy marched down the hall, her short locks both fluffy and bouncy defying gravity with every step. 

[just-emis-blog]

OC questionnaire tag game

Thank you for the tag @leahnardo-da-veggie! 💖✨

I will use one of my side characters Bernard Park.

If someone broke your favourite object, would you forgive them?

"Hmm. I guess it depends on who did it? Like, if it was one of my brothers? Maaaaaan. No problemo! It's all water under the bridge! Accidents happen. All material possessions are meaningless in our next plane of existence anyways. Forgiveness forgiven!

"If it was my adopted mom...well. Of course I would forgive her! Haha! I would just think about it all of the time and bring it up at impromptu moments during family gatherings or random arguments as a 'gotcha' but yea no I would absolutely forgive her. Definitely.

"If it were some acquaintance then...whaaaaaat are we talkin' here? Is this my favourite favourite object? Did it cost a lot of money? Will people look for them if they go missing? Details are needed!"

2. If you could go back in time, before you were born, and change one thing, what would it be?

"Ok so I would kill Mark Zuckerberg and probably the Winklevoss twins (just to cover all my basis, and because I hate the name Winklevoss). It's not that I have anything against the guy personally, I just think I could do Facebook better, and there's just no fair chance of competing against him with his iron clad grip on the social media market. Hm? No I haven't been thinking about this for a long time, why do you ask?"

3. What is your personal pet peeve?

Other than people biting down their metal fork when they're eating and making that god awful clicking noise? It definitely bugs me when people pick on my big bro! He's such a nice and cool guy, I really don't get why he's such a bully magnet. He's always letting these things slide too, and he never wants me to inflict divine retribution upon their person! Oh and here comes Porter giving his unasked for two cents about how stripes and polka dots don't go together. Is such insult to my blood to be taken lying down!? Does this not warrant a shove down a flight of stairs covered in lemon juice and tajin to augment the flavor he is forever lacking!?? I think so! God I hate the name Porter!

"So yea, I would put inability to exact horrifically violent vengeance up top, and the fork thing as a close second."

Tagging @bonniewame @ath3alin @illarian-rambling @taylortut + anyone who wants to join in :D

YOUR QUESTIONS ARE:

Do you have any siblings? If so, how is your relationship with them?

If you could only eat one cuisine for the rest of your life, what would it be?

What's the most adventurous thing you ever done?

[roxannepolice]

hi! missy for the character asks? :)

Of course, but after putting threegado together it's only fair to also combine twissy for @lukifisk 😀

1: sexuality headcanon - after answering this question a couple of times, I think it is safe to say TL are what humans would call pansexual in the sense that their preferences aren't very directional (let's face it this is the most evolutionarily rational direction to take in a reproductive organs shifting species (the Master is generally Doctorsexual tho)) - what does differ across regenerations is libido level, as in how likely they are to get horny (and in the Doctor's case that usually increases when the Master's around); so in this context we have a fascinating set where Twelve is pretty much an ace while Missy is permanently horny - luckily, Twelve is not a sex averse asexual, and willing to perform for a romantic partner, so we probably have something of a pythonic scene of Missy (and let's be fair, Clara and River too) passionately riding and confessing most ardent affection for that old man while he tries to follow Neptunian equivalent of Kama Sutra (getting himself acquaintanced with it in the process)

2: otp - each other, of course; just let them have their much postponed French riviera honeymoon BBC

3: brotp - I mean. apart from the Doctor Missy interacted with an afterlife Zuckerberg, Clara, Nardole, passingly with some UNIT members and Bill, and her own past. that's not much to choose from. so I'll go with Clara, just because this is also what I go with for Twelve (also consider two characters who know the most about the Doctor; Rose and Sarah Jane having a giggle would be nothing condiered to what these two'd get up to): romantic elements I fully acknowledge aside, I think it must have been really refreshing for the Doctor to have a companion that was so much like them; and weird assumptions about straight corellation between age and skin collagen levels aside, his truthfulness with her was very powerful

4: notp - I don't really have one for Twelve, just because his asexuality is so obvious that I'd assume if he's shipped with someone there's a good reason for it? for Missy, the male presenting Masters all being horny for her specifically, yeah selfcest is a good metaphor for narcissism inherent in this character which is what I keep repeating to myself about season 10 finale, but when Masterful (which I LOVE srsly the Doctor could only dream of having such a good 50th birthday celebration) doubled down on it I just thought honey your attempts at heterosexuality are about as convincing as those sybil breasts slapped by Michelangelo on what's clearly boy models

5: first headcanon that pops into my head - I remember it well from Gigi is their song and Bill plays it on her smartphone each time they interact, BBC just muted it for copyright reasons

6: favorite line from this character - for Twelve, Human progress isn't measured by industry. It's measured by the value you place on a life. An unimportant life. A life without privilege. The boy who died on the river, that boy's value is your value. That's what defines an age. That's what defines a species. - wow. just wow. this is such growth from the Time Lord Victorious who'd evaluate individual life from it's Historic importance and the face that almost annihilated a civilization (for the second time!) for one person, also extratextually excellent way to measure the level of civilizational progress; for Missy Your version of good is not absolute. It's vain, arrogant and sentimental. If you're waiting for me to become all that, I'm going to be here for a long time yet. somewhat contradictory to the sentiment of the Twelve quote? yeah maybe but this marks the last time as of season 13 the Master represented a philosophy contradictory to the Doctor's (or, for that matter, anything more than a snivelling canine of a chorus to how awesome the Doctor is) that, despite the text denying it much right, has a respectable place in human ethics: deontology versus pragmatism, yes gimme the Doctor Master dialectic heading for recognition that nothing is simple anytime

7: one way in which I relate to this character - Twelve is... pretty much the Doctor I identify with the most? yeah man be this intellect before emotion bitch that shows how those two are nowhere near contradictory (trying to derive ethics from thinking and keeping contradictory or inconclusive evidence to yourself for the same reasons you don't tell people there's going to be a financial crisis: they will storm the banks and a crisis will in fact occur; they pound that into your brain in every Polish sociology class) and will raise hell if you cannot move heaven for the people you care for (just don't cut out people you haven't yet formed to your liking from the caring part); for Missy, I too aspire to express all my moods through piano and would have Peter Capaldi grab my boob within 2 minutes from meeting him not even for sex reasons just to see him flustered 🙃

8: thing that gives me second hand embarrassment about this character - for Twelve, informing newly met people Clark Kent is Superman: I get that it makes sense for plot development reasons, but man you don't just say these things! also consistently insulting John Simm's pretty squishy round catface while he's getting an obvious libido rise from the other's proximity; for Missy, not caring for her hairstyle while in prison, wtf gurl, demand an avocado and banana based hair mask in addition to the LHC and pony!!

9: cinnamon roll or problematic fave? - look there's a lot I like about Moffat's writing, just as there's a lot I dislike about it, but putting the Doctor slightly further down the problematic fave side than the Master (while keeping them mostly in character) deserves proper appreciation; they're both on the problematic fave side of the spectrum though

[kangseluigi]

Elon Musk pisses me off so much, because he wants to save the world, as long as he gets credit for it, but doesn't do anything productive!!! If I had his kinda wealth, it would be SO EASY to do it!

First of all, for climate change:

I'd just buy a goddamn piece of land in the desert, the bigger, the better, and FILL it with solar panels. A land the size of a small country, cool, lay lines to a nearby city, boom, whole city gets switched to solar, every person is charged cents per year for electricity, companies a little more. I can use that money to a) keep the panels, lines etc intact, clean and whatnot, and b) to install more panels elsewhere. Go to Vegas and cover every tall building and hotel from top to bottom with solar panel windows and will power itself AND its entire neighbourhood. Rinse and repeat in all kinds of places. Add wind turbines by the sea and in the middle of roads. Boom. Fixed. (obv we add batteries for it all, idk why anti-solar people always forget that, it's been obvious in the 90's when I was a CHILD)

All workers put out of a job because coal mines, power plants etc are closing? Whoever can retire pls do that, the rest, we offer as many as possible to be re-trained for installing and maintaining our stuff, the panels, the turbines, the lines, etc. Others can be put into re-foresting areas like were coal mines were with appropriate plants for the region, balance the ecosystem.

Improve public transport in those places, have Tesla work on GOOD public transport methods, improved subways/trains and buses, also with solar and wind power, thing that don't fucking break in the car wash or rain, and through that, have it be free! I promise every country can afford the drivers' wages and minor maintenance when you don't have to substitute 43829019384 cars and fix roads all the time, and there is 0 gasoline or electricity to be paid for, ultimately.

THEN!

I'd pester every single museum in the world. Remember the fire in the Brazilian Museum that destroyed plenty of things in it? Let's not have that happen again! Everybody give me your stuff for 3 seconds, so I can do super high quality 3D renders of it all and preserve it for all eternity, maybe in Zuckerberg's weird bunker idk, and have all museums access all scans in there through their own network, so that a) IF disaster strikes again, we won't lose as much. Even if the original may be destroyed, we still have some form of access to it. b) if some artifacts and objects can't be shipped around, you can still include them through screens or projections, or even have a goddamn VR glasses exhibition of old temples in life size! Imagine! You can only import so many Egyptian artifacts for your exhibition, it will never be truly complete, but you can include a screen that allows visitors to scroll through all the related things and view them closely. You can project the pyramids into an empty space in the room and have them digitally disassemble the thing, piece by piece, to show exactly how they were built and how the corridors inside run, what someone could expect. You can project the pyramid's corridors AROUND visitors to give them a taste of it. You can have them go into the VR room and have them walk the hallways digitally, or have them stand in the Colosseum or ancient temples, the way they looked 2000 years ago, filled with life! Maybe I would "accidentally" ship all objects back to their original owners and leave most european museums with the 3d printed copies but that's not relevant right now

With that, we could also open up websites where all objects in the catalogue can be VIEWED by anyone in the world, with a little texty-text from experts, which means more accessibility, for people across the globe who'll never get to that specific location, people who can't necessarily leave the house for whatever reason, people who simply cannot enter some museums, etc etc. It means students can more easily find in depth, high quality information. It means all people regardless of income can theorise and discuss these things. Imagine how fun Covid would have been, had we had access to all that information. If everyone had been able to make posts about how "I found this fun detail on this object/art piece and nobody seems to have talked about it EVER?!" and "So, I couldn't sleep and I was looking through the catalogue and came across this thing, and then fell down a rabbit hole. A thread 1/127" !!!!

Maybe (!?) we could also, additionally, do it similarly to archive.org and let people rent digitally, but also rent/sell non-commercial (!) licenses for the 3d renders. Eg. if someone wants to 3d print something just for their own hobby, or to let their blind relative feel the objects they cannot see, and of course wouldn't be able to touch in the real museum. Additionally, it may allow the gift shops to 3D print or otherwise model mini-versions/copies of some of the artifacts for purchase cause ??!?!? who wouldn't want a copy of whichever crown!

The same with paintings etc.

It would make history, art, and knowledge SO accessible!! It would allow anyone to really learn, to draw inspiration, to theorise! To FEEL the art, the heavy strokes of Van Gogh's paintings, build something, to understand humanity as a whole in a new light! To spark new conversations and understanding between us all.

It could be SO easy.

But no, he has to play stupid games to bring down the price of twitter, then be forced into buying it, and fuck everything up, instead ruining a source of information, just like he bought Tesla and ruined it!

[mariacallous]

If the question hasn’t hit your For You page or Twitter feed (or group chat) yet, it will: How often do you think about the Roman Empire? The provenance of the query is a little blurry, but it maybe started with this tweet (which also references an Instagram Reel) or possibly this TikTok. Or this one. The point is, everyone is trying to figure out how often the men in their lives think about the Roman Empire.

According to one of those ur-TikToks posted by @paige.elysee earlier this week, you will be “shocked with their responses.” But if my friend group—and the WIRED Culture Slack—are any indication, the responses are simply … interesting? When I sent the question to group chats yesterday, most of the responses skewed toward, “Is this that Twitter poll? lol” or “I got asked this last night. Truly never.” In other words, they weren’t shocking but were definitely amusing. Some colleagues generously interjected with “My brain: ‘The Roman Empire is to men what girl dinner is to women’” and “My theory is that it's because that Daily Stoic podcast is so popular.” WIRED legend Steven Levy offered that he thinks about Ancient Rome, “Every time I write about Mark Zuckerberg.” But according to people who aren’t my friends, the answer is more along the lines of “every single day” or once a week or “a few times a month.”

I decided to poll WIRED colleagues. Now, I’m of the opinion that it’s kind of ridiculous to gender this question—people of all identities can be history buffs, y’all!—but maybe that’s an argument for another time. As of this writing, answers are still pouring in on the impromptu Google Form I set up, but in a group that consists of a good balance of men and women, about a fifth answered that they “never” think about the Roman Empire. “Never” was tied with “weekly,” followed by “monthly” at about 15 percent of respondents.

In my deep, morning-long investigation, there were also more than a few responses that pointed to the Cold War or Pompeii or the 1920s as time periods more worthy of contemplation. This, ultimately, led me to a theory: Dudes/people don’t think about the Roman Empire a lot, they think about media about the Roman Empire. Video games set in the Colosseum, old films like Cleopatra, roughly a million History Channel docuseries, Monty Python’s Life of Brian—these things are burned into our memories. Jay-Z was able to put Russell Crowe’s “Are you not entertained?” at the beginning of “What More Can I Say” because Gladiator was so popular. 

My own ponderings of Ancient Rome tend to hover around the persecution of Christians and the empire’s conversion to Christianity after Constantine. Then I think of Keanu Reeves. One of my former editors responded to my group text query by noting that she’d recently watched HBO’s Rome concurrently with Amazon Prime Video’s Domina to “contrast the characterizations of Octavian’s wife during the Second Triumverate.” Then I Googled this and went down a rabbit hole of my own.

This is the state of media consumption in 2023. Hollywood, hungry to adapt any story it can, has turned history into IP—shows and movies that we now watch with phones in hand and laptops open to delve into whatever new tidbit shows up onscreen. Who amongst us hasn’t lost hours on the KGB Wikipedia page after a binge-watch of The Americans or sought to fact-check The Trial of Chicago 7? Fire up any streaming service and there are hours of content about World War II. I once dedicated nearly a month of reporting to Alan Turing’s “Bombe” code-breaking machine after I saw The Imitation Game. Frankly, Turing is probably my Roman Empire. (Ask me about the Apple logo in the comments.)

As the cliché goes, history is always written by the victors. But in modern times, it often gets translated by screenwriters and then “punched-up” by studio notes. People tend to be obsessed with the past. The longer my text and Slack threads stretched, the more respondents tried to figure out why anyone was even talking about dudes and the Roman Empire in the first place. It devolved into questions about why humans are enthralled by war, the collective fascination with powerful men, and on and on and on. No one ever figured out why the meme went viral—or whether men really do think about the Roman Empire all that much, or more than people of other genders. But we were entertained.

[gisellelx]

For the fanfic author asks do you want to talk about: 6, 30, and/or 42?

Thanks, @palmofafreezinghand

6. How do you come up with ideas?

In fanfic, I write the stories I want to read for which I can't find a version I love. Almost all of my fics come from me basically just wanting to be a voyeur: "The Talk," my first fic, was me reading the line in BD where Edward mentioned he'd talked to Carlisle about having sex and me thinking, "Well now that had to have been an interesting conversation!" So I wrote what I thought happened. They also come from conversations with people--Ithaca Is Gorges came from talking with my bestest bestie about the fact that as you get older, you start realizing that your parents are fallible people, and that one of the biggest problems with the Twilight saga is that Bella is taking Edward at face value when he has not ever managed to get to that point with Carlisle and Esme. So what do the Cullens look like when they're not filtered by Edward?

Also I was trained to write characters first; plot second. So "ideas" for me usually are "okay, in this situation, how would this character logically respond, given all the things they hold dear, are afraid of, think are at stake?" I don't think of plots first. Plots emerge (and frustratingly, keep emerging.)

30. What do you struggle with most when writing?

Perfectionism. So, so much perfectionism. I very often see something that needs to go first before I can write the second thing, and then if I can't write the first thing, it doesn't matter if the second thing is more white hot. It's the main reason I've shifted to fully drafting long fics and only posting fics that consist of what are effectively related one-shots: Cien Años right now has been stuck because there's a chapter with Rose and Esme I need in order to establish something about what Esme thinks of Carlisle before I go to one of Esme and Carlisle 70 years later. But I've been having issues with that one. I will obsess over pieces of a work and over individual sentences until they truly pass muster, and, if I decide there's something else that belongs in the work, I will edit it later. I appreciated your tag comment btw, and also laughed about it because I revise everything. Sideblog answers? Yep. Headcanon posts? Yep. This post? Yep! I will move beats around in a sentence on a reddit post so that it has the rhythm I want it to have, even though there's absolutely no creative merit in it at all.

I used to be way better at just writing and letting stuff stick but not anymore. The other day one of my collaborators talked about her writing process and described mine as "Oh and then [giselle-lx] just produces these perfect sentences that say exactly what we all mean" and I was like, "No I have just already edited five times before I put them into Overleaf!"

42. How do you get over writers' block?

I...don't? I'm staring at a fic in Scrivener that hasn't been updated since 2019 and which I started drafting in 2010. And like I said above, been stuck on another work for a year.

But the thing which works the most reliably is reading. When I read, whether nonderivative stuff (which is mostly what I read--I am a bad fanfic reader, I confess!) or fic, my brain starts sparking with ideas and then I can get going again. If I'm struggling to get words down, it's usually a sign I need to read more.

Oh and the other thing which reliably creates writing is getting the hell off social media. Every single time I am serious about that practice, my brain just rebels at how bored it is and starts writing. "Ordinary Time" happened after I deprived my brain of social media for a month, and "Drying Up" happened after I deprived it for merely a long weekend. I know this in my soul, and yet... :/ :shakes fist at Mark Zuckerberg:

Ask me things!

[bonfire-at-the-crossroads]

Alrighty then….

This is one of the cornucopia of wacky-ass ads that crawl across my FB universe every day.

I am a woman from New York, I’m closer to 70 than I am to 60. I’m an artist who spent many years illustrating children’s books, and who moved into the picture frame industry in the late ‘90’s. I handled masterpieces, managed a couple of factories of marvelous craftspeople, and was the person who arrived at the clients penthouse with my tools and white gloves. Bill and Hillary Clinton were clients of mine. (Bill can tell a great story, but don’t let him back you into a corner….LONG story)

The Koch Brothers were clients.

I spent a year and a half in the Fifth Ave home of Baron and Baroness deRothschild - conserving their collection of priceless artwork.

Maryanne Trump was one of my favorite clients - a hilarious, smart, tough old gal with big hair - who can tell a dirty joke with a poke in the ribs a big laugh. (She hates her brother, and it took two years before she would admit what her last name actually is.)

My husband and I sold everything we owned and moved to northwestern ireland eight years ago.

And so - this is an advertisement which is served to me based upon all of my digital information as culled from the Zuckerberg algorithm

Anything from selling me plastic surgery in Turkey, to a shed made from an old shipping container - this is part of the Zuckerberg landscape. Computer algorithms which are targeted at unsuspecting persons who are just trying to get through their day with some shreds of their sanity intact.

I’m supposed to be beguiled into throwing down £34.97 for the chance to win a digger. I’m not sure that the algorithm fully appreciates the absurdity.

But I do.

Something the algorithm does not know - is that I have a bit of ugly history with Zuckerberg’s mom and dad. His Papa is/was a dentist in Dobbs Ferry NY, and his horror-bitch of a mom ran the front desk.

We used to have him as the family dentist - 3 little kids and myself. There was some sort of dental emergency with my son, and I got him into the chair to have it dealt with. (We always lived in the limnal space between a rock and a hard place. Illustration was in its death-throes, my job in picture framing had just gotten started - and Brian had been pushed into freelance work as an advertising copywriter. We were scrambling to cling on to the floating wreckage…)

Daddy Zuckerberg the dentist repaired the issue, my son was fixed, and he bounced back into the waiting room. The chairs were filled with patients waiting to be seen - and it’s safe to say that they were all neighbors from Dobbs Ferry.

I walked to the front desk to discuss payment with Mama Zuckerberg. “I will need to back-date this check to next Friday when I get paid. There’s not enough in the account to cover this now, but it will be fine in three days.” - I was speaking softly, in an attempt to not alert the entire room of my precarious financial condition.

She went NUTTS. “WHAT DO YOU MEAN?! NO! We don’t work this way! How can you think this would be acceptable?!” and she banged on the sign that declared “Work to be paid for at time of appointment”

Everyone in the waiting room was now riveted. I tried to claw back some of my dignity, and continued to explain my predicament. “The emergency had happened that afternoon, we have been your patients for years now, it’s only three days from now….”

“Then give me a credit card.” Says she.

“I cant. I don’t have one right now”

And she actually came out from behind the desk - hollering and waving her arms around. I was shouted at in front of my kids (my youngest started to cry) everyone in town got to see just how shabby my wallet was, and in the end - I left the check on the edge of the counter, gathered up the kids - and left.

The check cleared on payday. We never went back.

And if you wonder why Mark Zuckerberg is so damn weird? This may go some way toward explaining it.

His parents are hideous people.

And so….

I spend my remaining years being served up ridiculous advertising based upon what the weird kid from Dobbs Ferry stole from his clever college roommates.

AI is the product of a batshit kid whose parents were awful.

We’re all in trouble.

[destinyc1020]

Sending another anon because I didn’t want that last to be too long but comparing Fred Astaire and iconic dancer to people like Mark Zuckerberg, Trump, and Elon Musk in wild. Those 3 mean have literally changed society for the worse Zuckerberg with that Meta bs. Trump and his racist followers and terrible run as president. And Elon musk who is dedicated to letting racist and incels speak freely with no repercussions. Like let’s be serious. Those people deserve to have projects highlighting their stupidity they shared and influenced people with.

Fred Astaire is not problematic to where his wishes should be disregarded for financial gain and some awards. Biopics today are just awards bait. Examples being King Richard and Elvis as of recently. You are almost guaranteed academy attention for biopics. I’m not sayin that’s why Tom specifically attached himself to the project but regardless TO ME it’s off putting and not a good look.

So wait.... You're okay with them making a biopic about Trump, Zuckerberg, and Muskrat, but not these other ppl that ppl actually LIKED? 😅

Anyway, it's sad that you feel that all biopics these days are just "award bait". ("King Richard" and "Elvis" were both very good films btw)

Did you ever think that a lot of those films tend to get award recognition because an actor is literally having to bring someone to life on the big screen in a way that ppl can feel like they knew the individual? Not to mention, many of these ppl had complex lives... some full of drama or hardships, etc. It automatically makes for good storytelling. Like, I'm never going to be upset about any biopic film being brought to the big screen. EVER. If the film is done WELL, why are you upset that it's getting award attention? 🤔 I don't get it.

But anyway.... hey, I can't change your mind on biopics Anon. We all like what we like, I guess. 🤷🏾‍♀️

[kalamitis]

I HIGHLY recommend reading the article. Here's some of my favorite highlights

In other news, as someone who has read Snow Crash, the book that Meta is based off of, I think I actually know the answer to this one:

In Snow Crash, the Metaverse was created by hackers. There wasn't anything to do in it for a long time because it was a passion project for people who liked figuring out how to build things in virtual reality. It wasn't corporations or billionaires that started it, it was hackers that actually cared about it - people who weren't in it for the money. The place is essentially an indie game until it gains popularity, but that time - which happens pre-book - spans years. During the plot of the book the Metaverse (and that IS what it is called in Snow Crash, by the way. Zuckerberg named it the same exact thing) is already a huge hub with working full body avatars and buildings made by coders who studied architecture by the time it gains popularity. The technology didn't exist when the Metaverse first started because hackers were actively figuring it out in their downtime.

That being said, there WASN'T a point to the Metaverse at first. There weren't events or anything, it was essentially logging into tumblr and chatting with mutuals idly as you messed with your html coding for your custom theme. It was going to theme maker blogs and admiring the bases and seeing about changing some colors (shout out to Pohroro!) and telling others how great their themes were!

Sure, during the plot it is essentially a hub of humanity, with actual bus stops and payphones irl that let you log into the Metaverse to talk to people, but what Zuckerberg and a lot of billionaires always seem to miss is the love. I mean hell Bezos took Captain Kirk (William Shatner)* to space and when they landed popped a bottle because they achieved something, but Shatner experienced real profound grief in space that Bezos didn't even let him talk about in the moment! Billionaires don't care about emotions bro! Even something as obviously life changing as seeing our planet from space!! They care about money!

The Metaverse exists in Snow Crash because a group of people wanted to know how much they could create. They didn't try to monetize it or make it popular - after a certain amount of time it just BECAME popular because of what you could do there, and corporations, governments, the pizza mafia, etc, joined the Metaverse and began advertising only after it showed that it was popular.

It makes me think of Bigolas Dickolas, the Twitter user who helped a whole book get reach because they loved it. And businesses were like "how do we get the Bigolas Dickolas effect??? How do we make it happen again???" But you can't!!! You CANNOT artificially make love. You can't build it in a boardroom. You can't feed it to AI. Fandom is great and fanart happens because people love the Canon. They may not agree with how it is handled, but they do love it, they are passionate about it. They will discuss characterization for hours and make fanart and want to yell from the rooftop how great it is.

And when you dont love the content, we can tell. The Metaverse will never be like it was in Snowcrash because it was a cash grab. Marvel movies declined in quality because it became a cash grab rather than a group of people wanting to bring their favorite characters to life. The last season of Game of Thrones became a cash grab - and they fucked it up. Repeatedly if you consider the source material only as a way to make money, WE CAN TELL and the quality drops significantly. Alternatively, if you give people who love something the space to create it, you get amazing things like The Last of Us, like Good Omens, where even if we as fans disagree on how good it was or how we liked how things happened, we can tell that they were LOVED. That CARE went into the depictions of the characters.

I loved the Game of Thrones books, I have loud opinions about the first few seasons but still enjoyed them, but knowing how the series ends makes me hesitate when it comes to rewatching it. Because I dont want to watch something I love be treated like something out of fashion.

I dont really have much else to say about this except that if you love something and you create for it, we can see the love. If you love your fandom we can tell! You should be passionate about your creations. You should love your OCs because the love shows and its great. Love is a good thing and it is the crux of creation and without it everything made will be like Zuckerberg's Metaverse, Elon's Xitter, the last season of Game of Thrones and Bezo's trip to space. Empty, Joyless, Cash Grabby Achievement Hunting bullshit.

I do recommend Snow Crash, by the way. It is a prolific and amazing sci fi novel published in 1992 that influenced the internet in a big way. The main character's a half black half korean hacker, samurai, and works as pizza delivery guy for the mafia. His name is Hiro Protagonist.

*I put this here next to William Shatner's name and changed the color because he would be marked red with Shinigami Eyes.

losing my mind at this article about a guy trying out the meta verse

[classicsubliminalbo]

Corbin's Story: Freshman Haze

Originally published Feb 16, 2017

Before I ever considered becoming a social justice blogger fighting for the rights and protection of the thousands of young women and men around Carpenter State University's campus, I was just another ordinary student. A first year English major who hadn't quite discovered her voice. I was knee deep in gen ed courses back then and desperate to escape the heavy workload of physics and calculus, y'know, stuff I haven't used since. I found that distraction around winter break of my freshman year. His name was Jacob Rothschild. He was one of those rich kid types, a dime a dozen in any fraternity. But Jacob had a nerdiness to him that the other frat boys didn't. Tall, skinny, unbearably awkward. His bed shook as we fucked, and the Magneto statuette on his nightstand toppled to the floor.

"Magneto!" he gasped, trying to crane his head to assess the damage, but I was on top and I wouldn't let him move. I shushed him, and pulled him into another kiss. "Don't worry about it, baby," I said. "You've got me."

Jacob looked back up to me with that helpless expression. I could tell that he hadn't been with a lot of girls before, and the way he kept saying, "You're so beautiful," during foreplay told me none of them had been quite like me. I had pushed this along pretty quickly. Jacob seemed happy playing video games and talking about our favorite nineties cartoons. I just wanted to get laid. "You're so beautiful," he repeated, and I could see it in his eyes. He didn't just love me, he revered me. It was so cute.

He came, and a plopped down on the bed beside him. "Was it alright?" he asked.

"Sure," I said, getting out of the bed to open the window. I pulled a lighter and a joint from my purse and lit up, closing my eyes as I took the first drag. A couple coughs. I'd been a pretty regular smoker in high school but my opportunities in college were few and far between. "I could get kicked out of my fraternity for that," He said, eyeing the joint in my hand nervously.

I glared at him for a moment and then giggled. "Relax, dude," I said. "Half the people in this house are dealing."

That didn't seem to calm Jacob's nerves. He ran his hands through his already messy hair and sat up on the edge of the bed. While he began to dress, I admired the setup of his bedroom. Running my fingers over his computer like I'd never seen a desktop before. I was pretty stoned that night. "You develop shit?" I asked. "Like apps and stuff?"

"Yeah," he said. "Please don't touch that." Jacob was another in a long line of students who'd come to college aspiring not to graduate, but to develop the next big app. He'd seen The Social Network in high school and decided that he was the next Mark Zuckerberg. Now a senior, Jacob was dangerously close to actually getting a degree.

"Like Flappy Bird?" I asked. "I fucking loved Flappy Bird." "Not exactly..." he frowned. "Hey!" I was sitting down in his computer chair. "Please, Corbin. There's sensitive stuff on there." "Like your porn?" I thought that was pretty funny. He didn't. "Come on," I flashed a playful frown. "I'll suck your cock if you let me play with your toys..." Not really my proudest moment.

Jacob blushed. And then we heard a distant knocking. "Pizza dude," Jacob said. "I'll get it." "Good call," I laughed, taking another liberal drag. "Oh! Ask him if we can pay him in pot!" I called after Jacob as he left the room.

To my credit, I waited a full thirty seconds before I turned back to his computer. First I rooted through his search history. "Hentai, figures. Metrobay Comix?" I clicked. "Not what I expected. Okay...Hypnohub..." Click. "Jake, Jake, Jake. My skills of deduction guess you have a fetish..." I craned my head in fascination at a drawing of a topless, presumably mindless Samus Aran marching toward Mother Brain. "I guess it's kind of hot," I said to myself dismissively, exiting the browser. Next I checked out his desktop. That was where the good stuff was.

That was where I found the folder titled DO NOT OPEN. "Oh, Jake," I giggled again. "You're so stupid."

Inside that folder I found an exe titled "prototype." I just couldn't resist. The program opened to display a series of shifting shapes and colors. "This isn't Flappy Bird..." I said, reaching out for the mouse to click out of the program, but my eyes were transfixed on the images. "Whaaaatt issss thissss...?"

Jacob returned a few minutes later with two platefuls of pizzas. He found me waiting patiently for him at the edge of his bed, sitting stiffly upright, naked, my feet planted on the floor and my hands in my lap.

"Are you going to eat naked?" he asked, offering me one of the plates. I didn't take it. Not yet. "Do you want me to eat naked?" I smiled. "Do...you...want to eat naked?" "Anything for you," I replied with that stupid grin. "Oh shit!" Jacob gasp as he noticed the prototype file opened on his desktop. "Shit-shit! Shit! It worked? No! Shit!" He set the plates down on his bed and leaned in close to my blank face. He snapped his fingers, no response. "Corbin!" "Yes?" "You opened the prototype?" "Yes." "And...how do you feel?"

Finally I turned my head to look at him, and I gave him that look of total reverence. He was so beautiful. "Obedient," I said. It's embarrassing to me now how easily I fell under that damn app's spell, but you've got to remember that this was my first time ever running into something like this. Also I was stoned. I was really stoned, guys.

Meanwhile Jacob was doing some serious conscience searching. He'd invented the app without ever considering the ethical implications. Great inventors, he said, create first and worry about ethics later. I'm pretty sure Thomas Edison had a guy killed for a patent. He wasn't a good dude. Jacob later told me that the prototype I'd opened was a very rough draft of a more powerful technology. Flashing lights and swirling pictures, this was a simple parlor trick compared to the stuff he was hired to work on our of college. He sold the app at a good profit and earned enough notoriety to snag a job in Silicon Valley. But that's another story.

The pizza grew cold as Jacob paced his bedroom, working out the situation in his head. "We already had sex, you pushed me into that. I didn't trick you into doing anything, in fact you were the one who opened the program. But that's like blaming a drunk girl when a guy forces himself on her...fuck! Fine! Okay. Corbin, are you listening to me?" "Yes." "Okay. Abort."

With the power of one word, the fog over my mind cleared. "Whoa," I blinked my eyes. "What a trip." "I can't believe it works..." Jacob said. "Beats the hell outta ganja," I said. "What the fuck, dude!?" I demanded. It was hard not to notice the bulge in Jacob's skinny jeans. "I'm so sorry! I told you not to mess with my stuff! It was for your safety, honestly! I didn't ever plan on showing anyone that! I didn't even think it worked." A curious grin crept across my face and I said, "You were really into that, weren't you? Having a hot, naked babe all happy and submissive on your bed. Don't lie, I saw your browser history. Why else would you develop an app like that?"

Now Jacob was redder than I'd ever seen him.

"So you...really liked it?" Jacob asked.

I bit my lip. "It's different," I said. "I've been with four different guys and I'm always the one calling the shots. I've never been so submissive before. It's different. Now if you're asking if I'd be interested in trying it again..."

I have to admit. Weird ass fetishes aside, Jacob wasn't a bad dude. I think most guys in that frat would have just fucked me and tossed me aside to become the next angry rape culture meme on tumblr. But Jacob wasn't like that. He didn't invent that app to take advantage of women, even if he did conscribe a few Victoria's Secret models to clean his apartment as sexy maids. Okay, so Jacob is a shit. But he gave me a choice, and that's what I really liked about him.

A week later I posed for him in the lingerie he'd picked out for me and I asked, "How do I look, master?" "You're so beautiful, Corbin," because by now he revered me even more. But now I returned that reverence with a flattered but cocky smirk and I said, "Thank you, master. I am a mindless slave. Please use me as you wish."

And I meant every word of it.

[nsfwhiphop]

Incoming Text for @samuelljackson and @salmahayek : Guidelines to follow

Subject: Billionaire Couple Leonardo and @YesJulz:

Hey Samuel and Salma!

I think it’s important that you explain something to Leonardo DiCaprio and @YesJulz: they need to become a couple officially.

Leonardo DiCaprio is the billionaire husband.

@YesJulz is the billionaire wife.

They will become like Bill Gates and Melinda Gates, get it?

They will become like Steve Jobs and Laurene Powell Jobs, get it?

They will become like Jeff Bezos and MacKenzie Scott-Bezos, get it?

They will become like Warren Buffett and Astrid Menks, get it?

I think you understand my message: they are going to be loyal to each other for many decades, well into their 80s and 90s.

You must warn Leonardo DiCaprio that if he chooses another wife, he will open the door to the devil and it will destroy his legacy.

YesJulz is the perfect wife for him. She will always remain loyal and never open the door to his rivals.

That’s why YesJulz is the perfect wife—she is loyal to Leonardo and will never betray him.

I hope you will explain this to them. They must be very careful; their loyalty in marriage will last many decades.

Other women might break Leonardo’s heart because they are unfaithful and will side with his rivals.

That’s why I encourage Leonardo to marry YesJulz and not be concerned about her past. She is a good woman who comes from a rough background, but she should not be judged on her past. She is a wonderful human being and a loyal wife.

Elon Musk will fund a documentary about YesJulz’s past and help her get positive media attention. Uncle Elon will take care of everything.

YesJulz will face criticism about her past, but uncle Elon Musk will use his resources to silence these critics.

I trust Elon Musk to do a great job—he is now like an uncle to YesJulz.

Leonardo DiCaprio will become the Warren Buffett of Hollywood.

So, let me explain what happens next:

Angelo and his wife Karisma Kapoor will make the deal in Hong Kong with Ma Huateng. Asian Tech Start-Up.

Meanwhile, Leonardo DiCaprio and his new wife YesJulz will make a deal with Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk. American Tech Start-Up.

These two tech start-ups will have a combined net worth of $3.5 trillion, surpassing Apple Inc. because they dominate both Asia and America. Get it?

The Kapoor family and the DiCaprio family will discuss business now.

My wife, Karisma Kapoor, will become the founder of the tech start-up in Hong Kong and sign all the papers. My two sisters, Natalie Portman and Marion Cotillard, will assist her in making this deal happen.

Natalie Portman lives in Paris.

Marion Cotillard lives in Paris.

Jamel Debbouze lives in Paris.

I haven’t finished my explanation; I will write another letter to Marion and Natalie.

My dear uncle Samuel Jackson, I’m going to use profanity to explain this: don’t f**k this up or we’ll be back to square one. The ball is in your court now. We are a team, and you have to score. Help us finish this chess game.

These two women are your allies, Marion Cotillard and Natalie Portman. They will help you finish this exhausting chess game.

Also, I forgot to mention, there is a patent involved, so you know this is going to take a very long time. You need the help of two billionaires, Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk, to protect the patent.

And in China, you need the help of Ma Huateng, the tech mogul, to file the patent there as well.

One patent will be filed in China.

One patent will be filed in America.

This patent is worth $3.5 trillion, dominating Asia and America with this unique tech company.

Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk need their friend Ma Huateng to help them; without their Chinese friend, this company will not have the same global reach. It’s a teamwork-makes-the-dream-work type of tech company.

I think I’ve said enough. The end of this long conversation.

Your friend,

Angelo.

P.S.:

Synopsis of the letter:

Angelo writes to Samuel and Salma to emphasize the importance of Leonardo DiCaprio and @YesJulz officially becoming a couple. He compares their future partnership to high-profile billionaire couples like Bill Gates and Melinda Gates, Steve Jobs and Laurene Powell Jobs, and others, stressing their need for long-term loyalty. Angelo warns that choosing another wife would harm DiCaprio’s legacy and highlights YesJulz’s unwavering loyalty and suitability as a partner.

Angelo outlines future business plans involving two tech start-ups: one in Hong Kong led by his wife Karisma Kapoor and one in America with DiCaprio and YesJulz, supported by Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk. These start-ups, with a combined net worth of $3.5 trillion, aim to surpass Apple Inc. in global influence. He details the involvement of Ma Huateng in China for patent filing and stresses the importance of teamwork in making this venture successful.

Angelo also notes that Elon Musk will support YesJulz with a documentary to counteract any negative criticism, reinforcing her worthiness as DiCaprio’s partner. He concludes by urging Samuel Jackson to ensure the successful execution of these plans, emphasizing the critical nature of their collaborative effort and the long-term impact on their business ventures.