#i want out of the corporate american grind so badly

[dastardlydyke]

sigh…yearning hours

[gohyuck]

hometown (lee jeno) teaser

pairing: jeno lee x reader

genre: smut, angst

teaser word count: 1.5k

fic word count: 7k+ (it looks like it may end up being, like, 11-12k? i’m unsure)

teaser warnings: wet dream, one-sided emotional affair, jerking off into a shared bathroom sink, some discussion of math, general hatred of “the System”, mentions of depression

general plot warnings for the fic: infidelity: reader cheats on yuta and jeno cheats on his original character gf and neither of their partners find out so there isn’t even a nice little revenge scene at the end... it’s literally just them getting away with cheating, leftist thought points/philosophies discussed even if they aren’t outright stated as leftist, both implicit and explicit discussion of mental illnesses (mostly depression and suicidal ideation but like it isn’t explicit ideation and they don’t actually want to die they kind of just don’t want to exist), general disillusionment with the system, jeno and the reader are not very happy people and are actually full of a lot of hopelessness about society and the future of the planet as a whole, explicit mentions of American politics/legislation/etc. and implicit criticization of them, mentions of drugs (weed), the characters are so self-aware that it hurts me to write them because i feel bad for them and feel even worse for their significant others

A brief taste of hair in his mouth - he doesn’t like it, he decides then and there - before you pull yourself away from him, laughing softly at the way you’d accidentally shifted just as he’d leaned in to press a kiss against your forehead. You reach up to smooth the wrinkle between his eyebrows, a gesture more symbolic than anything, and he straightens his face out himself, trading the hair-in-mouth disgust in for the gentle smile he’d had just before being so rudely assaulted. It’s as you start to move your hand away from his face that the two of you meet eyes, and a corner of Jeno’s mouth turns up as he circles his hand around your wrist to stop it mid-air.

“Kiss?” He asks, one of his brows arched now. You can’t look at it too long, knowing that the urge to pluck away at his stray hairs will overcome you. Instead, you train your gaze on his cupid’s bow, thinner upper lip giving way to the kind of full lower lip you love to sink your teeth into. Jeno makes the prettiest noise when you do so.

“Mhm,” You respond, sounding noncommittal to the world but absolutely sure to the boy you’re straddling. He grins fully now, right before leaning up to capture your lips in his. The first touch is just a little clumsy, just slightly awkward, but after the initial meeting it’s only up from there. It’s easy, natural, the way you dissolve into each other, a mess of tongue and teeth as his hands grip the cloth across your back that much harder, as you grind the apex of your thighs down into his with that much more force. Time progresses at the speed of light. Time doesn’t progress at all.

It’s only a matter of seconds before Jeno cums in his pants, but it’s only a matter of seconds before you do, too. He knows it. It’s what happened when he’d actually lived through this, and it’s what happens now, over and over again, a moment preserved in time with a delicacy only minds can make. The stuff of dreams, literally.

Jeno wakes up right before it happens. It isn’t jarring only because he’s used to it. His fourth alarm of the morning is blaring, and he uses one hand to haphazardly wipe the sleep out of his eyes while extracting his other arm out from underneath his girlfriend in order to reach his phone. She’s sound asleep - she always is - and he envies her for a moment before turning the alarm off and, for good measure, turning his goddamn phone off too.

It’s a bit fucked, he realizes once he’s properly come to, for him to have a wet dream about you when Minhee is right there, still sleeping off the way he’d fucked her into the bed last night. He’s had this revelation twelve nights and days in a row now. For a split second he feels bad, feels as if he’s the worst person on Earth, but it’s easily overshadowed by the way his cock is straining in his boxers. This has happened for the past 12 days too.

Jeno’s always wanted to have a daily routine.

He slides out of bed, careful not to wake Minhee, before slipping the nearest shoes on - gold Nike slides, a birthday gift from Jaemin who’d insisted that Jeno wear colorful things even if it’s just in their dorm room - and making his way to the bathroom him and Jaemin share with Renjun and Donghyuck. They’re the best suitemates he could possibly have, but he’s even more glad in this moment: none of them will be awake ‘til noon. It’s a Saturday.

He can jerk off in peace.

Just in case, Jeno locks both the bathroom doors and double checks to make sure that they’re locked before he finally, finally slips a thumb under his waistband, forcing it down with almost gratuitous speed. He can’t help the soft grunt that bubbles up from the back of his throat as he wraps one hand around his dick. He braces the other against the mirror for balance, just in case.

Jeno swipes across the base of his tip with his thumb, his eyes sliding shut at the feeling. He moves his wrist up once, lets precum drool over his own fingers for a second before sliding his hand back down with purpose, slicking himself up to make the slide between his cock and his calloused palm easier. It isn’t Minhee’s face or body that sear themselves into the inside of his eyelids as he strokes himself, bottom lip folded in between his teeth. You’d love to bite it, tug on it. He imagines your face as you’d cum from grinding against him that one time.

He tightens his grip.

He’d never actually fucked you: you hadn’t wanted to lose your virginity to someone who was so starry-eyed, so untarnished by the ways of the world. You didn’t want to take the virginity of someone like that either. It felt wrong on every level somehow. You’d made sure to tell him so, never one to mince words, not even as a 16 year old. The breakup hadn’t come long after the singular time he had (in his pants, he remembers with a wince… always with a wince when he isn’t dreaming of it) and although it didn’t work out romantically between the two of you, you’d stayed friends for the rest of your high school careers. Even now, both in different parts of the country for college, the two of you keep up, more or less, with each other. It’s friendly in a way it wasn’t before.

You’d been having your manic pixie dream girl arc the year you’d dated him, Jeno supposes now. Cynical, hopeless, bitter at the world and hating everything and everyone. The world was and is awful, and you were too aware of it, or so you said. Jeno wants to laugh so badly at that old version of you, the one that had broken his heart, but he finds that he can’t anymore. A too-big part of him thinks you might’ve been right about everything.

You’d slept with YangYang Liu in senior year, had called Jeno afterwards to see if he’d go with you to get Plan B at 3 a.m. on a Friday. It’d been hardly a week after he’d cum embarrassingly early while sleeping with someone - a girl from his third period class - for the first time. He’d swallowed his suddenly resurfacing heartbreak to pick you up and drive you to the nearest CVS in the same car you’d made out with him so many times before. He’d swallowed his moans later that night as he lay in bed, fisting his cock tightly at the thought of gripping your thighs so hard they bruised, at sinking into you, at how warm, how wet, how tight - fuck!, he’d hissed to himself then, having bitten so hard into the hand he’d used to quiet himself that blood bloomed from broken skin.

Jeno had cum hard then, and he cums just as hard now, canine splitting the flesh of his lip as he muffles his long, drawn out groans. The metallic taste of blood is enough to push him further over the edge, and he practically hunches in on himself as spurts of opaque white liquid land in the bathroom sink. He’s satiated for now. He remembers all the work he has to do - midterms are upcoming - and his post-orgasm glory fades as soon as it’d come.

After an earth-shattering orgasm to properly wake him up, everything else feels twice as mundane as usual. Jeno’s quick to run hot water in the sink, making sure all evidence of his one-sided emotional affair is gone, before brushing his teeth and pissing. He’d shower, but for some reason he can’t bring himself to. Sometimes, he can’t bring himself to for two days, or three. Deodorant and Minhee’s perfume are his best friends now. Donghyuck, psych major that he is, calls it depression. Jeno, hellbent on never letting Hyuck be correct, calls it ‘finally experiencing ego death’.

He thinks Hyuck is right, though. He won’t say so.

Jeno’d come in as a mechanical engineering major, though he thinks he might switch to computer science. If he’s going to be a corporate shill - he’s realized, quite quickly, that there’s not much else to be - he may as well do it as efficiently as possible. He’d started college with the firm belief that the world is easy to change, and that he can help to do so. He’d dispelled this concept less than three weeks in.

He has midterms to study for, and corporate shill-dom to look forward to for it. Jeno should open the blinds - Jaemin isn’t here right now anyways, and Minhee’ll sleep through that, too - and sit down at his messy desk and get to work. He should study up on eigenvectors and eigenvalues - they’re easy, but they’re comfortable, and Jeno has started to like comfortable - or work through his solids textbook. He should, he should, he should.

Jeno doesn’t even pause between leaving the bathroom and climbing back into bed. Minhee shifts, and he presses a gentle kiss to her forehead before settling in beside her.

He has this moment, so he takes it. He doesn’t feel like he has many moments to himself anymore.

let me know if you want to be added to the taglist!

[theculturedmarxist]

Powerful hospital and physician groups that tied up Congress for nearly two years on how to end “surprise” medical bills saw their efforts pay off with the compromise lawmakers inserted in the giant year-end spending package.

The health care providers — including private-equity backed physician staffing groups — chipped away at leading legislative proposals through high-profile lobbying and tens of millions of dollars worth of attack ads while promoting a solution that would submit their payment feuds with insurers to independent mediators.

The compromise in the year-end package settles what was supposed to be health care’s “easy fix” in the 116th Congress and ensures patients will no longer have to pay huge bills from out-of-network specialists, air ambulances and other clinicians. But it also underscores the clout of corporate medicine at a time when the health system and safety net programs are reeling from the effects of the pandemic.

Elizabeth Mitchell, president of the Pacific Business Group on Health, which represents large employers including Walmart and major tech companies, predicted the legislation will yield an “opaque, expensive bureaucratic process” favoring “those with the resources to navigate that most effectively.”

“These bills will still end up driving up premiums overall,” Mitchell said.

Patient advocates and policy experts have framed the policy battle over these reforms as a microcosm for why fixes to the U.S. health care system are so hard — and a grim harbinger for more ambitious overhauls, like President-elect Joe Biden’s campaign promise to create a public health insurance option.

There was always strong bipartisan interest in addressing the billing issue. The problem was the way it divided health interests intent on avoiding picking up the extra cost of holding patients harmless.

Last year, leaders of the House Energy and Commerce and Senate health committees proposed settling disputes by pegging payments for providers to a federal benchmark payment based on in-network rates insurers paid for services and procedures. Doctor and hospital groups quickly raised the specter of “government rate-setting.” Meanwhile, conservatives pounced on the approach as the equivalent of price controls, saying it could also be a prelude to “Medicare for All.”

“There was a great amount of emphasis placed on making the term government rate-setting a politically toxic term,” said a consultant to provider groups.

The idea of outside arbitration instead played well with a vocal contingent of physician-lawmakers in Congress who backed a federal replica of New York’s own approach to settling billing disputes — using “baseball-style arbitration.” Critics say that policy has encouraged hospitals to charge more for care, which patients eventually pay for in the form of higher premiums.

Even in the last few days, providers secured changes from Congress to adjust the arbitration process and help boost their profits. Technical fixes, obtained Sunday by POLITICO, prevent independent mediators from considering the lower rates of Medicare and Medicaid when deciding how much money providers should get for their services.

Chip Kahn, CEO of the Federation of American Hospitals representing for-profit chains, said negotiators "came a long way” in recent days. He said his group could endorse the final version after it eliminated what he termed efforts to influence the payments providers get from the insurers in their network or insurers they're contracted with. “That wasn’t appropriate,” Kahn said.

Other provider groups like the private equity-backed physician staffing firm TeamHealth, which spent millions of dollars attacking the benchmark payment approach, have praised the agreement — while health insurer and employer lobbyists see it as a Pyrrhic victory.

One insurance lobbyist said the outcome showed how private equity-backed physician groups and hospitals dictate policy, adding,“For consumers, this will mean higher and higher costs, year over year, forever.”

The grinding nature of the debate and the tight congressional schedule also worked in the providers' favor. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, tired of infighting among powerful committee leaders, forced Ways and Means Chair Richard Neal (D-Mass.) back to the negotiating table just days after he said he wanted to punt on addressing sky-high medical bills until next year, according to multiple sources. Neal's efforts were essential to making the bill more friendly to doctors and hospitals.

The fighting won’t end once the legislation is signed. Since the federal health agencies will have the ultimate say in how the mediation system works, the special interest lobbying will turn next to the executive branch, where the incoming Biden administration will be in charge of writing the rules. And the legislation still doesn't bar ground ambulances from sending massive bills to insured patients.

“Who ultimately wins and loses is something we’ll not know for years,” said Benedic Ippolito, an economist with the conservative-leaning American Enterprise Institute who consulted with key health committees on the legislation. “And what I worry about is, what does an arbitration system look like in five to 10 years when this isn’t under a microscope?”

The spending deal puts guardrails in place. Mediators can't weigh the sky-high charges providers bill when settling on the amount insurers will have to pay for their customers’ out-of-network care. But arbitrators also can't consider Medicare rates, which employer groups and others wanted to serve as the price peg in order to curb costs.

Loren Adler, who also consulted with Congress on the reforms as associate director for the USC-Brookings Schaeffer Initiative for Health Policy, is optimistic the system will work out as envisioned. While an arbiter adds complexity to the process, he sees the rules Congress put in place as sufficient to keep costs in check.

For instance, he noted, providers have to space out their appeals of settlements, meaning their incomes would dry up if they fought every payment. “It’s unclear how a provider can game the process,” Adler said.

House Energy and Commerce Chair Frank Pallone (D-N.J.), who helped steer the reforms over the past 18 months, heralded the compromise as “the biggest victory for consumers” since Obamacare for the way it relieves patients from having to worry about getting shocked with a huge bill.

And though surprise billing headlined a host of patient protection reforms originally pushed by Senate health committee Chair Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.) and ranking member Patty Murray (D-Wash.), other policy changes aimed at stopping anti-competitive practices among health insurers, hospitals, prescription drug middlemen and the pharmaceutical industry were either watered down or axed — to the chagrin of employer and patient groups that badly wanted them.

“They folded on every single issue that mattered to those of us who actually wanted to lower health care costs,” one employer lobbyist said.

[douchebagbrainwaves]

HOW TO YAHOO

My guess is that someone at Yahoo goofed. An example that will be familiar to anyone who doesn't like being asked what they do.1 Experts can implement, but they haven't followed it to its conclusion. Startups are too poor to sue one another. If your startup grows big enough, however, you'll start to get sued, no matter what your lifespan was. Every thing you own takes energy away from you. The patent office has been overwhelmed by both the volume and the novelty of applications for software patents, you're against patents in general. I realize I see a more exaggerated version of the change I'm seeing. Maybe I got a call from a VP there asking if we'd like to license it. But few big companies are so often blindsided by startups.

Her immense data set and x-ray vision for character. Now would be a good time to start any company that competes with TV networks.2 But there's more going on than that.3 This won't be convergence so much as that their skills are easily transferrable. The American way is to make money, and that doesn't seem to bother kids as much as in present day South Korea. The one example I've found is, embarrassingly enough, Yahoo, which filed a patent suit against a gaming startup called Xfire in 2005. They're probably good at judging new inventions for casting steel or grinding lenses, but they can't have looked good on paper.4 Then I had kids. Slashdot has an icon that expresses the problem vividly: a knife and fork with the words patent pending superimposed.

It seems so convincing when you see the same program written in two languages, and one that most people never seem to make, but only one step.5 Which means we will increasingly have to make a conscious effort to avoid addictions—to stand outside ourselves and ask is this how I want to explore: great new things often come from the margins? Outsiders are not merely free but compelled to make things that are cheap and lightweight. The good news is, if you're carrying a burden without knowing it, your life could be better than you realize. Of the remainder, the smart ones would refuse such a job, now that he didn't have to. Working on small things, and if they show the slightest sign of wasting your time, you'll be confident enough to tell them to. Nor do startups, at least in your lifetime. That's how bad the problem has become. For outsiders this translates into two ways to win. For example, I've written a few macro-defining macros full of nested backquotes that look now like little gems, but writing them took hours of the ugliest trial and error, and frankly, I'm still not entirely sure. But it's a mistake founders constantly make.

The eminent, on the other side. And perhaps most important, small things can be done fast. A couple years ago my friend Trevor and I went to look at the Apple garage. Now it's social networks, multiplayer games, and various messaging applications.6 If anything they'll think more highly of you. People only have so many leisure hours a day, and Robert and Trevor and I went to look at the Apple garage. As with gangs, we have some idea what secrecy would be worse than patents, just that we couldn't discard patents for free.7 Whereas fame tends to be way more than the sum of its patents. So all other things being equal, a society prospers in proportion to its ability to prevent parents from influencing their children's success directly. The somewhat more surprising force was one specific type of innovation: social applications.8 Talking to reporters makes her nervous.

And yet someone always decides to try anyway, and it constrains the wearer. Since there didn't seem any way to answer this question, I stopped wondering about it.9 The average 25 year old is no match for companies that have spent years figuring out how to use it. He once told a Sunday school class Boys, do you know why I never became a drunkard? But though wealth was a necessary condition for passing, it was not a sufficient one. Barnes & Noble was thus the equivalent of a nuclear first strike. It implies there's no punishment if you fail.10 It often seems to outsiders that the great paintings of the Renaissance are all full of people. Parents will die for their kids, so it's not surprising to find they'll also push their scruples to the limits for them. It implies there's no punishment if you fail.

Facebook killed TV. I just want to make a language that will be good to program in. The third reason computers won is piracy. Everything we did as an organization went through her first—who to fund, what to say to the public, how to deal with other companies; they'd have to be new. And unless you're extremely organized, a house full of stuff. Now it's social networks, multiplayer games, and various messaging applications. Ok, he replied.11 If a design represents an idea that fits in one person's head, then the idea will fit in the user's head too.

In this article I'm going to talk about today is what your target looks like from the back. So paradoxically there are cases where fewer resources yield better results, because the rate of technological change seems to be determined less by credentials and more by performance than it was 25 years ago for an ambitious person to choose to be judged directly by the market. Half the distinguishing qualities of the founders are the best predictor of how a startup will do. One is that software is so complicated that patents by themselves are not worth very much. When we were working on Viaweb, a bigger company in the e-commerce business was granted a patent on online ordering, or something like that. If you work this way. When a company starts misbehaving, smart people won't work there. You could make a preliminary drawing if you wanted to, but you have to figure out how to use it, and savor what one has.

So much for hockey as the game is played now. People will watch what they want. Of the remainder, the smart ones would refuse such a job, leaving only a few with the wrong sort of ambition. It matters more to make something great and getting lots of users. In those days people's stuff fit in a chest of drawers. I think these two paths converge at the top: the best design surpasses its predecessors by using new ideas, and the people who produce shows. Which means things must have been freezing! Patent trolls are companies consisting mainly of lawyers whose whole business is to accumulate patents and threaten to sue companies who actually make things.

Notes

In practice most successful companies have little do with the founders' advantage if it were a variety called Red Delicious that had been campaigning for the reader: rephrase that thought to please the same thing 2300 years later.

That sort of Gresham's Law of conversations.

Loosely speaking. When I use the word programmers care about, and a list of n things seems particularly collectible because it's a proxy for revenue growth. They're common to all cultures with long traditions of living in cities. One possible answer: outsource any job that's not art because it looks great when a forward dribbles past multiple defenders, a few people plot their own itinerary through no-land, while everyone else and put our worker on a weekend and sit alone and think.

So it's a departure from his predecessors was a sort of stepping back is one you take to pay dividends. In fact the less educated ones usually reply with some equivocation implying that you're not allowed to discriminate on the way we pitch startup school to be the right mindset you will fail. It is a cause for optimism: American graduates have more options. When the same reason I even mention the possibility is that promising ideas are not very discerning.

There is of course. In a startup, both your lawyers should be protected against being mistreated, because you couldn't do the opposite. That's why the Apple I used a recent Business Week article mentioning del.

The original Internet forums were not web sites but Usenet newsgroups. The moment I do in a deal led by a factor of 20. The details.

That's one of the word content and tried for a smooth salesman. You can have a connection with Aristotle, but they get a false positive rate is, obviously, only Jews would move there, and this tends to be younger initially we encouraged undergrads to apply, and that modern corporate executives were, they'd be called acting Japanese. So instead of happy.

They shut down in, say, of course some uncertainty about how to deal with the earlier stage startups, who've already made it over a hundred and one different qualities that some groups in America. And no, you have good net growth till you see what the valuation a bit. When a lot like intellectual bullshit. I'm speaking here of IT startups; in biotech things are different.

As Secretary of Labor. For example, I want to sell hardware without trying to work on a hard technical problem. For more on the critical path that they think are bad. Siegel, Jeremy J.

Google Video is badly designed.

But that oversimplifies his role. They could have tried to shift back.

[theliterateape]

You Don’t Have to Watch Anything You Don’t Want to Watch

by Don Hall

There is a lot of censorious shit going down in America these days.

In certain states, books that even refer to a lifestyle different from the heterosexual male/female binary are being pulled from schools and libraries. Given the state of education, one would think that kids reading anything would be a step up.

Activists comb Netflix comedy specials to pressure the corporation to erase comedians who threaten their orthodoxy. My limited experience with transgender folks is that they have great senses of humor so I'm not sure who these activists are...

A tiny segment of trolls seem to be infuriated over the inclusion a black elf and a black mermaid in fantasy programming. I mostly object to the fact that the actor playing the elf isn't British but adopts the accent.

Despite the fact that trigger warnings are most often counterproductive, Disney has added them to everything from Dumbo to Gone With the Wind. I'm mostly offended that Netflix has trigger warnings for smoking but not shit writing...

Close to my cultural interest is the outspoken bitching about the downfall of the MCU. The arguments that Woke Culture has infected the superhero movie juggernaut is practically a cottage industry these days with YouTubers and Tik Tok channels making real dollars by whining about feminism and multiculturalism invading their comic book movies.

I, too, have some issues with the MCU Phase 4 but it has little to do with Woke Culture and more to do with a lack of characters with a code, mushy attempts to broaden the cultural footprint of the characters by flattening them into archetypes of ideology rather than fully fleshed out heroes. The characters in Phase 4 don't seem to have a code.

Carol Danvers is a humorless, emotionless void. Her code seems to be showing those who doubted me that I'm more powerful than they are. The Eternals are all so undeveloped and sad that they save the world because, well, who the fuck knows why? Because they don't like following the orders of a Celestial? Kamala Khan's desire to become a super powered being is rooted in fame and notoriety. Thor is leveled from an Asgardian searching for meaning as his parents, his brother, and his planet are destroyed to a fucking moron played strictly for laughs in order to prop up his former girlfriend whose only code is staving off a cancerous death and coming up with a cool catchphrase. Jennifer Walters gains the power of a Hulk and instead of using that power to help others, tries her damnedest to ignore the annoyance of it all and her Big Bad is a woman who is selling beauty products using her name.

All a pretty far cry from with great power comes great responsibility. Miles from fighting the Red Skull and actual Nazis. None will be the clutch player who sacrifices live and limb to save another. This isn't, for me, a man/woman thing or a white/everyone else thing. This is a badly written character thing. I still watch in hopes that they'll course correct sooner rather than later. I'm still holding out for a decent Fantastic Fourmovie, after all.

On the other hand, if you pay any attention to former MCU fans with a political axe to grind, you'd think that it was because these characters are women and minorities and that the only possible correction would be to go back to the white guy club. What a silly bunch of nonsense.

Hey, everyone has every right to bitch about things they don't like. You don't like JK Rowling's stance on transgender activism's overreach, piss and moan all you want. If you're highly offended by the possibility that Critical Race Theory is being taught to your six-year old, make some freaking noise. If you think each and every case of inequity between black and white Americans is due to white supremacy, rock yourself on the Tweet machine. Hell, even if you believe that Biden stole the 2020 election, paint your face like a Viking and dance in the streets.

"The boss of the US media company Paramount has said he does not want to remove historic programmes from his new subscription streaming service because they no longer meet current expectations.

"Bob Bakish, Paramount’s CEO, said his company had thousands of shows in its back catalogue. “By definition, you have some things that were made in a different time and reflect different sensibilities,” he said. “I don’t believe in censoring art that was made historically, that’s probably a mistake. It’s all on demand – you don’t have to watch anything you don’t want to.”"

SOURCE

What? Bob! Are you nuts? We don't have to watch?

You mean, I am not physically required to watch something I may not like or find disagreement with? If I am transgender, I don't have to watch Dave Chapelle or read JK Rowling? If I believe that white people are genetically superior to everyone else, I am not duty-bound to view the show with the black elf and female dwarf (who is also black, god forbid)? This makes no sense, Bob. If I'm not forced to see the things I do not choose to see, what am I going to bitch about? How will my incredibly important opinion on CRT be heard?

Years and years ago, my mother notice a trend in my life. "Why do you go out of your way to surround yourself with people who make you feel bad about yourself?" I didn't have answer then and, given my choices in ex-wives, apparently I haven't really found an answer to this day. The question can be rephrased for our culture warriors out there, though.

Why do you watch things you know will make you miserable and why is it so crucial you force your worldview on everyone else?

We all have the freedom to express ourselves exactly as we prefer. We do not possess the freedom fromthe expression of others because if I have the freedom to say what I want to say but I exert pressure to prevent you from doing the same and then you do as I do, we're fucked. Nothing works. No one gets to say what they want and no one is listening anyway so it's all just noise uttered for those whose dopamine thumbs up we crave.

I have issues with my precious MCU. My opinion. My business. I can't fathom the arrogance and narcissism involved in my deciding that because I don't like Phase 4 that no one should be allowed to watch She-Hulk: Attorney at Law or enjoy Thor: Love and Thunder. I mean, if you really loved The EternalsI can believe you're a moron but, hey, even morons need some entertainment, right?

Bob Bakish seems to have a code. Freedom to choose rather freedom from offense. Funny that—I find that when someone really loves or really hates something, I gravitate toward it rather than away. When someone barks at me about how dangerous or offensive a book is, I want to read it. That's the beauty of ideas and art. Will I hate it? If I don't, what does that say about the people who do and how do I perceive things in contrast?

I'd probably be a dismal MCU character because apparently my code is suck it up, whiners and get over your belief that your offense is more important than my freedom to choose.

[rainblog]

No hope, no change

Back when the Orange Monster first reared its hideous head in the Republican primaries, I felt a moment of uncharacteristic optimism. Like others, I thought that we might be about to witness a terminal meltdown in the Republican party. Surely, no political party could survive being devoured from within by a Know-Nothing populist cancer of this kind. The result would have to be some kind of fission, with the party disintegrating into its component parts: crazed xenophobes going one way, crypto-libertarians another, the old-school conservatives and the Christians yet another. Split the party badly enough, and it would take them years to regroup enough to mount a challenge to the Democrats.

I say this not because I'm a fan of the Democratic party. They are not my party of choice, but in the Tweedledum-Tweedledee world of American politics, they do have a plausible claim to being the lesser of two evils. It's been hard to fight a growing impression that the GOP is actively at war with the American people, a malicious would-be occupying power with neither integrity nor scruples. The Democrats, while often despicable in their own ways, seemed just a fraction less overtly hostile, a fraction more disposed to listen to evidence and reason, a fraction more inclined to compromise and negotiation instead of eternal war with everyone, a fraction less bent on obtaining power at all costs and by any means.

I certainly don't want a Democratic one-party state, or even a liberal one-party state (not the same thing: anyone who watched the eagerness with which that nice Mr Obama seized the controls of the imperial war machine and the security state built by his predecessors knows that there's a yawning gulf between the values that the Democrats claim to hold dear and the way they behave once they're actually in office). Political monoculture, however enlightened, does no one any good. I want conservatives and libertarians around to keep liberals honest and administer the odd down-to-earth corrective when liberals lose touch with reality (that actually seems more like a 24/7 task; someone get them all some Red Bull and a strong mug of black coffee).

But I hoped that if the GOP imploded, then the Democrats might have a chance to shore up some of the actual progress they'd made over the past eight years: governance based on evidence rather than ideology, concern for environmental issues, civil rights for everyone, baby steps toward a healthcare system that delivers healthcare instead of shareholder dividends, a less jingoistic approach to foreign policy, and more besides. Maybe if the Republicans just took a powder for a decade or so, some of these good things would become entrenched in the culture too deeply to shake off.

And maybe all the virulent toxins washing around in the GOP would drain off into a pocket of black pus somewhere and the revived Republican party would come back better and more honest, having rediscovered the value of actual integrity. Self-destruction, I thought, might make them a better party. They would pass through the fires and emerge nobler and finer than before.

I don't know why I thought that could happen. Looking back, it seems absurdly naive. However ...

It quickly became clear that this was not the way it was going to go. Far from expelling the intruder, the Republicans embraced him. Any hopes I had that the GOP would recoil in horror from this affront to everything they claimed to hold sacred vanished quickly as one high official of the party after another stooped to kiss Trump's malodorous ring. He walked in reeking of power and, like the junkies they are, they all crowded round him demanding their share. If I was hoping for integrity, I was looking in the wrong place.

Still, if the Republicans weren't about to have their moment of agonizing re-appraisal, then maybe the Democrats would. Perhaps the Trumpocalypse would shake up the party, put some steel in their backbone, drag them back to the grassroots. I didn't really want to see the party go Sanders-wards: Bernie's heart is surely in the right place, but I don't think he's the right man for the job. It will take someone with a much more nuanced understanding of both American politics and the necessary evil of capitalism to create a workable social democracy in the United States. With most Americans liking the idea of socialism about as much as they'd like the idea of a piñata full of yellowjackets, anything that even hints at the S-word will always be a hard sell. I don't think there's anyone in the current crop of Democrats with the chops to actually pull it off.

But perhaps, I thought, defeat might push the Democrats to re-evaluate their methods and their priorities. Maybe they would come back as a real party of the people, not just a party of the people who live in the Beltway.

Let's be quite clear on this: I think that both major American parties -- oh, and the whole two-party system, come to that -- are overdue for a profound shake-up. I don't believe that either one truly serves the interests of the people of the United States, nor do I think that either has the maturity and wisdom to live up to the awesome responsibility of managing the world's pre-eminent superpower on an increasingly fragile and fractious planet. But if we couldn't strip the Republican Party down to its essential elements and start over from first principles, then maybe the Democrats would get a much-needed overhaul and lube job. Some good had to come out of the whole catastrophe.

Wrong again.

Besides blighting Hillary's chances by stoking the boiler of the Republican innuendo machine (Benghazi! Emails! Pizzagate!), the strategically-timed disclosures of Wikileaks revealed what we all already knew: that the Democratic party protects its own. At its heart is a cosy coterie of career politicians who serve themselves first. No one in that crowd is about to press their hand to their heart and say "We got it desperately wrong, we have failed the American people, we have to change ourselves."

Currently, the Democrats in Congress are mostly keeping busy voting to approve the Trump administration's heinous cabinet picks. I'm not sure why -- with a vanishingly few honorable exceptions -- they won't even vote a token protest against his nominees. Maybe they're afraid that if they do the Republicans won't like them any more. On the rare occasions when the Democrats try to get sneaky, the Republicans simply do an end-run around them, changing the rules on the fly. As always, it's like the Republicans invited the Democrats to a rumble and showed up with spiked baseball bats and weighted pool cues, while the Democrats came holding armfuls of balloon animals. Nancy Pelosi is reportedly keen to find 'common ground' with the Republicans, presumably ground that they can lie down on while the Republicans walk all over them.

There's a lot of talk about 'the Resistance' or 'the Rebellion' lately (we've all been watching way too much 'Star Wars'). But the resistance is where it's always been, down at the grassroots. The people who are marching in the streets understand that the government has been overtaken by a hostile power, a power that needs to be fought tooth and claw for years on end if we're not all to be crushed, liberal and conservative alike. The Democratic Party (pace, again, those few honorable exceptions) is no part of this resistance. Rather, it's an obstacle to it. Come 2018, the Democratic party machine will fight with all its might to prevent the safe seats reserved for party insiders from being 'stolen' by anyone who might actually offer a principled opposition to the loathsome nexus of bigotry and special interests that is the Trump administration. The best thing they can do would be to get out of the way and let the people fight back. That's also the last thing they have any intention of doing.

So here we are. Donald Trump, the repellent 'face man' for corporate looting and Steven Bannon's sophomore experiments in timocracy, has taken a narrow Electoral College win as a mandate to embark on a scorched-earth hundred-day campaign aimed at devastating whatever's left of civil society, grinding the rule of law to dust and asset-stripping the nation. The Republicans, far from suffering the much-needed shock that might reform them, have been richly rewarded for abandoning their few remaining principles and have made total toxicity the new party standard. Congressional Democrats are the same spinelessly-compliant shambles that they've always been.

I have given up hope that either party will voluntarily change, except for the worse. The crisis of 2016 has not made either one better, as I once hoped it might. From now on, it's up to us. Put not your trust in princes. The Republic has to be saved from the bottom up, and protest and civil disobedience are the only tools we have left. "If power is blocked at the ballot box, we'll vote it in the open streets".

[ginnyzero]

Project Runway Thoughts

(Originally Posted in Nov. 2017)

I'm almost done with Project Runway. Depending on the results of next week's finale part two, I might end up parting ways with the new seasons and go hunting down older seasons on DVD. This is really difficult for me to write and say mainly because I went to school (at the Academy of Art) for Fashion Design. I love Fashion Design. And Project Runway actually put a flashlight into that world so people can start to understand what goes into their clothes. (I don't care if you shop at Wal-Mart or Haute Couture, the process is the same.)

Personally, I'd never go on Project Runway. I know we should never say things like "I'll never do this." I said that I'd never publish an original book, but here I am. (Granted I'm self publishing so my reasons for not publishing aren't exactly valid.) But I tried going the traditional route and querying agents (probably the wrong ones) and tried to get a book deal which was something I said I'd never do. But here is one thing I put my foot down on, I do not want and will not go onto a reality show like Project Runway or Fashion Star or 24 Hour Catwalk or Launch My Line.

These shows don't do what they claim to do. Project Runway is "on the search for the next big American Fashion Designer." I can name two people from Project Runway that have any sort of success, three if I include one that turned into a television personality and four if we include the teacher who just keeps showing back up in more Project Runway franchises. Christian Siriano, Austin Scarlet (wedding dresses at Kleinfelds), Santino Rice (television personality) and Nick Verreos (and let's be fair, Nick was already a teacher at FIDM before he was on Project Runway.)  We're at sixteen seasons with at least 12 to 16 fashion designers at the start of each season. Four "success" stories. That's close to 200 designers. Siriano was from season four. Austin, season 2. So, it's been 12 years at least since any "break out" fashion designer has made any sort of success for themselves from Project Runway that "matters" in the terms of fashion world expectations. That is a runway show every season and product in major distributors like Barney's, Macy's, Saks and so on. (Boutiques on top of those are nice too.)

The real success of Project Runway is Tim Gunn. And he's not even designing clothes!

The prizes change my season but usually you get around $100,000, a new car, free makeup help from the beauty sponsor for your the show you do with the $100,000 (because that's how far 100 grand is going to get you) and floor space/online retail space at the accessory wall sponsor. And you used to get a sewing and embroidery studio from Brother and a position as guest editor at a fashion magazine. But those two prizes (probably the most two useful prizes outside of the money) have vanished in recent seasons. These prizes honestly, don't get you very far in the world of runway fashion, that is ready to wear.

Of course, this is reality television and what they claim and what happens really are two different things. But my point is that Project Runway isn't the 'magical' gateway to success that they claim their winners are going to have. It's not really a "once in a lifetime" opportunity (especially if they come back for All Stars, or three seasons in a row). It's entertainment. Entertainment where 90% of America watches and goes "Who would actually wear that?"

At best, Project Runway is a platform, a platform to get your 'name' or brand out there. Then, it's back to the grind. You have to do what Siriano did. You have to roll your product into Barney's, sell the buyer on your product and be able to back it up with a manufacturer to produce your product. That is why Siriano was a success. He took his few moments of fame from Project Runway and kept up his courage and went after the big buyers and it worked. And it worked because he backed up his sales with good product and built good will. "Oh, he's a new designer, but his product doesn't have strings, comes pressed with the proper labels and tags and actually sells. We'll buy from him again." And many, many designers aren't prepared to be able to take that platform and turn it into something marketable and make it really "big" in the industry.

And let's face it, making it "big" in the fashion industry is really difficult. It's an industry worth trillions of dollars and the major brands were established decades ago and bought out by LVHM or Fendi. You are swimming in a current against major corporations with billions of dollars of advertisement and marketing and production money to throw around (even when a lot of these brands didn't make money for their first couple of decades) and designers are notorious to be sharks! I've had loving, well meaning friends and family go "I can't wait to see your clothes on a runway." Or. "You should go on one of those fashion shows." And I have to quietly back up and be polite about how I explain the realities of where money goes in fashion and I don't have that money or the desire to go on a reality television show.

That's also not the type of fashion I do.

This season of Project Runway has been divisive. Between the twins being twins and then the cheating scandal and how it was unprofessionally handled by both the contestants and the producers and the really crazy designers in general. (I mean it, was there something in the Los Angeles water?) I wasn't fond of the briefs either. It's produced a lot of reactions. Then, instead of treating it like a contest and having a final three, there was a final five. (Which to be honest, all 5 were getting 10 grand to show no matter what but to string two of them along that much longer for an additional 100 grand is cruel and not worth it to the audience.) And we're having the same type of edit that we're having when Ashley Neil Tipton won. I've been getting a little put out and putting in plus sized models isn't enough to make me overlook how scripted, over dramatized and downright biased Project Runway has become.

If Brandon wins, as much as I want to support a fellow designer from San Francisco/Academy of Art Alum, I'm done.

I'm on my last straw. And it's not Brandon. It's sadly, Tim Gunn. It's Heidi. It's Zac Posen. It's Nina. And it's about Margarita. I don't like Margarita. I find her unprofessional. (I take it badly when you lie, are hypocritical or talk about other people in a foreign language right in front of them.) However, Margarita has a very specific tropical/warm weather style. It's a valid style. And I liked some of her pieces. It's been on Project Runway before. Uli and Anya managed to run with tropical styles all the way to the finales. Others got thrown off for having poor taste. Tropical style has been on Project Runway for years.

What hasn't been on Project Runway is the sniping, condescending attitude about warm weather/tropical fashion. In the one model off duty challenge, they very snidely/condescendingly called Margarita's outfit "very Miami." (Margarita responded by lying about whose idea it was to make the look the way it was and threw the blame on the model instead of owning her look. One of the reasons, I don't like her.) Apparently, Miami is now the armpit of American Fashion Centers. (I knew it was number three or four, not that it was smelly and the inbred cousin which the tones used in the show made it out to be like.) Now, normally, Tim Gunn is above this sort of nonsense. The reason why America loves Tim Gunn is not only is he honest, he's fair and he's encouraging. He does all his critiques out of a sense of love and desire to push the designers to be the best at what they do and not be anyone else.

Tim Gunn even used his save on Margarita because his advice was what got her sent to the bottom, so much, that they eliminated her. I understood his motivations even if I didn't agree with the save.

So, you can imagine my horror and shock when Tim goes and visits Margarita in San Juan, Puerto Rico and is looking at her collection and tells her to "Take the girl off the beach and put her on the streets (of New York.)" Did falling down a flight of stairs do something to his brain? Where was the Tim that told Uli and Anya to embrace their tropical loving selves? What happened? Why the reversal of 15 seasons of precedent? Especially after he saved her because of her color loving tropical looks gone a tad bit wrong.

And then Heidi compounded the matter by telling Margarita during the project critiques that she needed to remember that she was showing in New York City and not Miami.

This is bullshit. Everything gets shown at New York City. New York City is this amazing melting pot of a place with fashion designers of all calibers and walks of life trying to get their visions out there. It's also the Spring/Summer collection showings where the really crazy neons and bright colors come out on every runway imaginable. No one in New York is going to bat an eye at Margarita's bright bold colors and crazy prints. Because it's New York City, the home of beautiful crazy murals and boroughs of every racial type on this Earth. And on top of it, who cares if Margarita's style is a bit more Miami? From Puerto Rico, Miami is the logical place for Margarita to show her later fashion shows. Not New York. (And why the disdain for Miami? Why? I know it's Florida but still, major fashion center.)

They wouldn't have said this to Anya. They definitely wouldn't have said this to Uli. They didn't push either of those two to "make New York fashion." And I know this because being so focused on designing fashion the last month or so instead of writing, I've watched both of their seasons! (Anya's season is one of my favorites, as it was one of the first seasons I actually broke down and watched Project Runway. I didn't have a lot of television growing up/during high school.)

This hypocrisy disgusts me. I hope against hope that it's the producers at Weinstein butting their noses in where they don't belong. But with Tim Gunn now being a producer on the show as well, you'd hope he'd stand up to them a little and go "No. I'm going to let Margarita design for her beach girl. Because that is Margarita's customer."

As for Brandon, it was interesting to see the inside of the new Fashion Building at the Academy (that looks exactly the same as the inside of the building where I went when I attended. Imagination when it comes to decorating, the Academy has not.) However, Brandon's collection looks to be exactly the same things he's done all season and gotten no negative push back on from the judges. He hasn't evolved. He can't tailor. As a fashion designer, I don't know who is going to wear his clothes. And instead of producing two or three groups of clothes for his collection, he produced one. One set of textiles, one set look. And it still looks like it belongs in a video game.

It's Neil-Tipton all over again. It's the producers going "let's choose a story and a winner of said story... oh this guy is a sweet nice guy with an odd look, let's push him through to the win." It may not be as politically correct as Neil-Tipton's win, but it still feels scripted. (They didn't give him a conflict or something to overcome, instead the twins and cheating theatrics took 'center stage' as a distraction.) I saw exactly what I expected to see from the collection pieces he showed to Tim and the judges. That's not what I expect from a Project Runway winner.

(Good grief, if he had just tailored some of his clothes instead of doing all oversize. But this is the Academy here, my expectations on drafting and sewing skills aren't that high. Still, there are books. Books you're supposed to buy for classes. Books he could use that he was back in San Francisco and not on the show. Metric Pattern Cutting. I own all three books and two of them I didn't need to buy because I'm in Women's Wear!)

We'll see how next week's finale goes. I just hope I don't end up heartbroken.