#its becoming an epidemic

[loservillepopulationone]

Kaito Kid in the metaverse!?!?

ngl this was half an excuse for a persona 5 crossover and half an excuse to draw Kid in something else

They team up because Phantom thieves of Heart and Kid's bad guys are part of the same org duh!

How many teenage Phantom Thieves are there in Japan?!? Or teenage detectives for that matter... between Persona and DCMK I feel like the ratio is so absurd ajnfsdlvnfsb

I like to imagine everywhere else is relatively normal but everyone in Japan just loses it

Kaito, after dealing with Magic Immortality Gem, Real Magic Witch and Deaged Detectives: yeah sure giant mesh of human subconsciousness might as well

This is perfectly within all of their lucks :sob:

Morgana: talking about metaverse mechanics Kaito, who was already starting to have an identity crisis before this: ?!???

"Your main defense is being no 1 Kid fan???" "Fuck I should do that" "Ryuji no"

Kaito, magically appearing roses out of thin air: you know when I say I'm going to steal someones heart I usually mean metaphorically

Design ramblings:

Mostly I just wanted Kaito to look more immature than Toichi's/Kid's suit so instead of impersonating him its more Kaito-

he looks so Kid is because his biggest sense of self isn't being Kuroba Kaito or Kid or whatever he is "Dad's son" at his core- everything else is second so that's what he looks like! Not Kid himself but his own thing with some clear design inspirations!

Imagine this design of Kaito's standing beside og Kid... Father and son.....

There's also a certain jewel motivating him and his revenge... and they ARE going after the crows in this arc... at least I think so I forgot if Kaito or Conan call them crows or guys in Black in my mind and my canon they are interconnected enough that I cannot for the life of me remember but Im p sure Conan's the one who calls them guys in black

I think he'd have like a theatre mask because of all his disguises and theatrics lmao

I haven't decided his personas design yet I just !?!?!?! the persona designs are so cool in game it has to have something jewel related right???

[chessentans]

We need a feminist movement with legs again. Whenever I see commercials for full body deodorant I become much like a wild dog

[spitblaze]

Why am I losing followers. Did I do something or are ppl nuking their accounts over the whole midjourney thing

[skeletxr]

2001 A Space Odyessy sure is A Movie

[inkskinned]

no, but really, we need to talk about the casual objectification that has become the fallback discourse of the internet: if you're pretty and dressed nicely, you're a slut. and if you're even vaguely outside of their body standard, you're fucking disgusting.

too-frequently, people position sex workers as being "the problem". they sneer you're addicted to pornography, you don't know what a real woman looks like. but real women are in pornography. the real bodies on display are not the issue here: the issue is that other people feel extremely confident when commenting on someone's physique.

2000's super-thin is slowly worming its way back into the public ideal. recently i saw someone get told to "go for a run", despite the fact she was on the thinner side of average. not that it would ever be appropriate to say that: but it's kind of like sticker shock when you see it. people think that is fat? holy shit. do they just have no idea about things?

but what are you going to do about it? that's the problem, right. because chances are - you're a normal person. we can say normalize carrying fat on your body, but we are not the billion-dollar diet industry. we are not the billion-dollar fashion industry. we are just, like. people. who are trying to make content on the internet, without being treated shittily.

as someone who has been on both sides of things: you are treated better when you are thin and pretty. this is statistically correct. i am not saying that you cannot be bullied for being thin; i'm saying there are objective institutional biases against certain bodytypes. there are videos of men and women who lost weight all saying: i now know for a fact exactly how much worse you're treated. in the comments, some asshole inevitably says something akin to you deserved to be dehumanized when you were fat.

which means that ... the easiest thing to do is be pretty and thin. it is the path of least resistance, because of course it is, because any time you post a picture of yourself without a thigh gap, someone immediately comments something like you need to try a diet.

the other half is also dehumanizing though, huh, just in a different way. when i put on makeup and nice clothes, i am told i slept my way to the top as a professional. do you know how many women in STEM have told me they purposefully dress to "unimpress" because they already struggle to be taken seriously and if they're ever considered pretty - it for some reason takes away from their authority.

so they make it seem like it's your fault. you, existing in a body - it's your fault! if you didn't want shitty comments, don't have a body. they position us against each other like chess pieces; vying for male attention we don't even need.

and i can be an authority on this unless you think i'm fat and unattractive. when i am pretty and thin, i'm an activist. when i am just a normal person who makes a good point: i am immediately dismissed. nobody fucking believes you if you're not seen as attractive. you literally lose value. you cease to exist.

but the whole time, it feels like - is anyone actually grounded the fuck in reality? the line of "pretty and thin" keeps shifting. nobody seems to understand what "a normal weight" even looks like, because it's not something that exists - you cannot tell a person's health by looking at their body. even if you think you could tell that, even if you're sure a person is dangerously overweight - people are not your dolls. they do not need to be dressed up or displayed properly to soothe your aesthetics. you aren't concerned for them, you're stealing their agency. you don't get to say if they're "allowed" to take pictures and post them on the internet - you don't get to tell them how to exist.

people hide behind "the obesity epidemic" without any actual qualifications. they crow things about "normalizing unhealthiness".

but it's bullshit. i have visible abs. there is a pair of parallel lines on my body, even when i'm relaxed; where my obliques meet my abdominal wall. i am proud of this because it means i'm strong, because i overcame an eating disorder only to be ripped as fuck. it is genetic and physical luck that i even get any definition, i'm pleased as punch.

but it does mean that my abdominal wall sticks out a little bit. the other day i posted a video of myself dancing, and, for a moment, my shirt slipped. you could see a little bit of my stomach. i was cartwheeling to the floor. moments before this, i'd had my foot over my head.

a guy slid into my DMs. a row of vomiting emojis prefaced: you should really lose some weight before you think about dancing.

i stared at it for a long time. there was a time when i would have been triggered by this, where it would have encouraged me to starve myself. i would have ignored the fact i'm flexible, agile, good at jumping: i would have lost the weight for a stranger's passing comment. i would have found myself and my body fucking disgusting.

and for what? to please what? because why? so that he can exist in this world without an unchallenged eyeball? what would my self-hatred even accomplish? usually i write paragraphs. obviously. on this particular occasion, in this body i've been at war with for ages: i just felt exhausted.

it shouldn't be even worth saying. it shouldn't be hard to explain. all of this emotional turmoil when he cannot even comprehend the most basic truth: i am not an object on display for him.

[doyoulikethissong-poll]

Mariah Carey and Boyz II Men - One Sweet Day 1995

"One Sweet Day" is a song by American singer-songwriter Mariah Carey and American vocal harmony group Boyz II Men. The song was released on November 14, 1995, as the second single from Carey's fifth studio album, Daydream. The artists co-wrote the song with Walter Afanasieff, who co-produced it with Carey. The artists wrote the song about the loss of specific people in their lives, and being inspired by sufferers of the AIDS epidemic which was globally prevalent at the time.

"One Sweet Day" received universal acclaim from music critics, many of whom praised its lyrical content and vocals while calling it a standout track on Daydream. It was ranked first in Rolling Stone's reader's poll for the Best Collaboration of All Time. The song spent 16 weeks atop the Billboard Hot 100 in the US, becoming the longest-running number-one song in the chart's history at the time, a record held for 23 years. Boyz II Men had previously held this record twice, with "End of the Road" (1992) spending 13 weeks at the top and "I'll Make Love to You" (1994) spending 14. "One Sweet Day" still remains the only number one debut to spend sixteen consecutive weeks at number one. The song ranked first on Billboard's Hot 100 decade-end chart. Subsequently, the publication ranked it as the ninth best charting single of the 1990s with post-'90s sales and streaming figures incorporated. Internationally, the song topped the charts in Canada and New Zealand and reached the top-ten in Australia, Belgium, Denmark, France, Ireland, the Netherlands, Norway, Panama, Sweden and the UK.

"One Sweet Day" won many prestigious awards throughout 1996. At the Blockbuster Entertainment Awards, the song won the award for Favorite Adult Contemporary Single Female. It also won the award for Song of the Year at the BMI Awards and a Special Award for 16 weeks at #1 at the Billboard Music Awards.

"One Sweet Day" received a total of 42,1% yes votes. :( Previous Mariah Carey polls: #46 "The Roof (Back in Time)" Previous Boyz II Men polls: #243 "Hey Lover"

[letherightonein]

Why "male loneliness epidemic" is a male supremacist psyop [corrected ver.]

I said in a former post that the "male loneliness epidemic" is not real and is a male supremacy psyop, and I want to explain more broadly why it is.

Manosphere

If you don't know about it yet, there is a thing called "Manosphere", a name that stands for a group of communities created by men and oriented towards men. Manosphere is composed of incels, redpill, blackpill, MGTOW and MRA ideologies.

Incels are "involuntary celibates", men who want to date but can't do it. The term was created by a woman called Alana (invcel) and mostly referred to people who felt isolated and incapable of forming romantic relationships or trapped in a dying relationship. But nowadays it is tied to a broad ideology that I will explain later.

Redpill stems from the Matrix scene where Neo has to choose between the redpill and the bluepill, being the redpill the one who will awaken him. The whole ideology started to take its form in pick-up artistry forums such as SoSuave, and states that in order to mate and get laid a lot you have to become a "high value male", while also understanding "female nature". The original big three exponents of this ideology were Rollo Tomassi, Chateau Heartiste and Roosh V, but nowadays only Rollo remains moderately relevant.

Blackpill is the most pessimistic and nihilistic version of the redpill, it is tied to incels but is not exclusive of them. It focuses on biological determinism, and states that the most important thing on mating is looks. That seems innocent at first sight, but this ideology also states that most men are not attractive to women, and they are having a soft harem relationship with “Chad”, a highly attractive man, in detriment to average men and creating incels in the process.

MGTOW started as an independent community, with a first manifesto written in 2001 in a male focused forum. In the manifesto they advocated in favor of a society with enforced gender roles and a smaller state. But nowadays they are connected to redpill and blackpill. It is mostly overlooked, but in Spanish communities there are also two other manifests, MGTOW 2.0 and MGTOW 3.0. I don't know if there is a fourth one nowadays, but they help to understand the transition MGTOW has made over the years and how manosphere ideologies have been adopted by this group.

MRA stands for Men's rights activism, also called Men's rights Movement (MRM). The father of the movement is Ernst Belfort, who wrote against women's rights and the "legal subjection" of men, in response to feminists and John Stuart Mill. Nowadays it is also tied with redpill, given that prominent figures of the movement promote or believe in redpill ideology, such as Paul Elam or Karen Straughan.

In 2014, Cassie Jaye who was allegedly a feminist by that time, did a documentary on MRA called "The Redpill". It's not clear why she called it that way, but it is suspected that it was with the purpose of dragging more people on the redpill. It is also said that she received money from r/Theredpill subreddit. The documentary was international, since it reached both English and Spanish audiences (I don't know much about other languages/countries). It exposes a lot of problems men face, such as dying in war, losing custodies and domestic violence, but never explains what MRAs do to help those men.

That term

Once you become familiar with all these communities, you start to see how they are all the same. They share the same stats, the same studies, the same terms, the same narratives. The only thing that changes is the label, if the members can or not to have sex with women, if the members want or not to have sex with women, and if the members "care" or not about society.

One of the core terms that is transversal to almost all communities is "Hypergamy". (The central one on MRA is Gynocentrism). And it is a tricky one.

Men in these communities are used to gaslight and belittle external people, but also they bully each other constantly. In Spanish, for example, MGTOW ones used to dedicate long livestreams and called each other cucks, betas, manginas, etc. One point of discussion and "artistry" in the manosphere is hypergamy. It has inspired long videos, live streams, books, blogspots and debate among its members. Entire communities have been divided over this concept, and others have been created.

In their videos and "private" spaces they call any woman hypergamous. I remember when MacKenzie Scott divorced Jeff Bezos, and she was called hypergamous by these people, arguing that she planned it all - “they marry the provider and once they secure their money, they go with someone they really like”- and ignoring that she divorced because Jeff cheated on her. 

“Hypergamy” in short, is mating “up”, but the manosphere twists this term to make it fit anything women do. Women who date men who are more attractive than them are hypergamous, women who date men who are less attractive than them but have money are hypergamous, women who date men with less education than them are hypergamous. Women who rate men "below average" (another male bullshit story) are hypergamous. 

Women's nature is hypergamous and male nature is not, even if men also leave their geriatric wives for 20 year old women, even if men also cheat with a more attractive mistress, even if men marry more educated women, even if men marry women with more money. They are not hypergamous, they are polygamous, but also don't mind settling with a woman given that "women choose" and men barely have any chance with women. 

Anything a woman does is hypergamy. Except when you call them out and tell them it's all fake, or where is the inner consistency, given that they call marrying a poor man and a rich one “hypergamy”. Then, they come with studies on hypergamy. "How can you say that women are not hypergamous if this study says that they 'marry up'?". Suddenly the term only applies to marriage, behind are left all those theories over “Chad” being picked by all women.

Hypergamy, in academia, is a term used by social scientists that is related to marriage and the act of marrying up in social class, annual income or status. Since superior education in the west is a high sign of status (repeated two times in a list of status signals among men and women across 14 countries), studies on the subject account for income and degrees. 

The research found that women are married to men who earn more than them, but don't have more education than them, so men are "marrying up" in status. Such a trend has not substantially changed among decades. Nevertheless, it is recognized that it doesn't translate on men being the breadwinners, given that most marriages are dual income, and that hypogamous marriages, where the man has less education than the woman, are becoming more common.

Nothing about women making heartless plans on marrying with the rich one, divorce him and then mate with “Chad”, nothing about women sleeping mostly with “Chad”, certainly nothing about hypergamy being exclusively female. But it's enough for them, even when the second they provide those studies they make it clear they are being dishonest. The seeds have been planted; women are choosing only the rich ones to marry, leaving poorer men single. The one who is debating them and the ones watching the exchange, only have to start to believe that female hypergamy is rising, being amplified by technology and being extended to other aspects of relationships.

The Lie...

...and how everyone decided to believe it

As we have seen, the manosphere term is not the one that social scientists use. It is whimsical and doesn't make sense...on the surface. The magic is in repeating that women are hypergamous, that they will choose all the time only a few men and let the rest sexless, single or childless, that sexual revolution and women's freedom of choice is a disaster and contrary to civilization. If the lie is repeated enough times, people will start to believe it. 

And well, it worked. It worked so well that feminists, instead of checking the data, seeing the male strategy and debunking the nonsense, decided to repeat the same lie. “Women are choosing better, women are making men single and sexless! Pussy Power!”. There is literally a book on this. 

White supremacists also adopted the term, and the manosphere also adopted white supremacists perspective; they quote the work of Roger Devlin, Sexual Utopia in Power from time to time. 

Authorities regarded as “thinkers”, such as Jordan Peterson, and a long list of influencers also adopted the narrative and repeated it to the public. 

Normal people also believe in it, in 2019 The WaPo decided to craft and release a graph that, until today, is made viral countless times in social media, indicating that “men are in crisis” given that “ a third of them are sexless”. They repeat that there is a “male loneliness epidemic” and it’s implicit that women are the problem; “they should lower their crazy standards, they should stop being delusional”.

Women are rating 80% of men below average! They are delusional! Their simps make them believe they are 10/10!

It's extremely easy to fall in the rabbit hole. They start hearing about a disbalance on the distribution of sex, or dating, or in dating apps matches. They start hearing about a singleness crisis among men, and they have already accepted that such disbalance, such crisis, is a modern thing, because no one seemed to talk about it in the past. (right?)

They hear about male loneliness and mental health issues, and they understand that the disbalance is a bad thing. So they are one step away from starting to believe that mating is a process that should be regulated and controlled by the state, religion or cultural norms. Like, one click away from watching Jordan Peterson saying exactly that.

The manosphere has been repeating this idea for more than 10 years. At least one decade feminists had to stop this shitshow and they didn't, which is surprising given that the whole thing is perfectly summarized in the white supremacist essay I linked above. But they didn’t, because at some level, this meme also can benefit liberal feminism. The ones who spread and believe in this idea don't care about the data, they want the narrative, and it can be used to promote diverse agendas. So, instead of debunking and calling out, they chose to use the narrative for the feminist cause and they are now losing. Women are losing. Women lost.

The truth

While the General Social Survey graph from 2018 is made viral again and again on social media, the same survey on more recent years is completely ignored. 

The most repeated bunk of the last couple years.

Reality is that in both 2021 and 2022, the sexless in those years were below 20%, which is consistent with former years. Most men and women were having sex. In 2021, women even reported being slightly more sexless than men -but no one threw a tantrum over a “female loneliness epidemic”.

The survey also included a variable to measure people who were sexless for the last 5 years. Less than 10% of men and women reported being sexless that amount of time. It indicates that there is not “soft harem” around “Chad” or “Alpha males”, but people are having sex in a 1:1 ratio, and that most of the time, for every sexless man there is a sexless woman.

It is also repeated constantly that there are more single men than women, and it is suggested that it is because women are part of soft harems with High Value Males. This idea has been repeated so many times that even researchers have adopted it.

But the truth is that this disparity has been a thing for decades, even a century.

Before the sexual revolution, when everyone was married (right?), there was also a disparity between single men and single women. The key here is that the disparity exists between young people, and the most near explanation is age gap relationships; young men are more single because their female counterparts are dating slightly older men. But also, nowadays single people report less interest in having a relationship; men are not suffering for their “involuntary celibacy”, they are not into it.

I't curious how the "women and men are different" crowd swear that single women are looking for casual dates with "high value males" when it has been proven over and over that men have a higher sexual drive.

It’s also said that Dating apps have caused a disaster on the “dating market”, given that women nowadays have instant access to “high value males” and can ignore average men, while they are there longing for the minimum chance. Again, the idea that women are into a soft harem with “Chad”. This idea doesn’t hold reality, it’s true that by taking into account raw data, it seems that women have much more matches than men, but the major factor ignored is the gender ratio within dating apps; when adjusting that, matches become even, again fulfilling the expected 1:1 ratio between men and women.

It’s also stated that dating apps have increased “hook-up culture”, but that doesn’t seem to be true. Here's a deep dive on dating apps and dating.

Academic naiveté(?

Manosphere gives a final push for the hypergamy narrative by quoting the experts on the matter. And somehow, researchers don't have a problem with it.

It has been said -by prominent figures like David Buss- that there is or will be a mating crisis among educated women, because there will be a shortage of high income husbands. They say "women don't marry because there are not enough economically attractive men". And with "don't marry" they understand "remain single and childless".

That crisis doesn't exist. Marriages between college educated people are the longest ones, there are less widows and divorces even. Educated women are more likely to be married than the opposite.

The focus also is steady on marriage, and I suspect that’s because their narrative perishes if they actually start to value mating and reproduction instead. In the US, at least 40% of all births are out of wedlock, and that figure increases if we take into account other American and European countries. Maybe women are not marrying out of “lack of economically attractive men”, but they are still reproducing with them. More bluntly: women are having kids with men that can’t buy a ring, but they keep saying that women are “too picky”.

The real crisis, if there is any, is happening among classes, the poor are poorer and the rich are richer. They are sharing their assets with each other and forming strong families while the poor prioritize reproduction since they can’t afford marriage and everything that entails.

Ironically, equality and women's choice have achieved what these men are apparently longing for. The secretary marrying her boss or the nurse marrying the surgeon is becoming a thing of the past -or probably it was never a thing. The doctor is marrying another doctor, the boss is marrying a woman with a Phd. Rich men are not dating down, even when rich they marry rich women, not the cashier 20 years younger than them. 

To counteract this they quote Leonardo Dicaprio and his creepy behavior, without noticing that the man is not marrying or having children with those women. While even richer men are married and with kids with women at their level.

The future

It's clear to me that the agenda is settled, and they will do anything that can reinforce it. If we push for the truth to be known, they probably won't be able to use sexlessness or the singleness gap as a thing, so they have created a new term: "dysphoric singlehood". And they will start measuring it soon. 

The stats, the terms, the memes will change. But the core will remain the same. Women’s choice is dangerous, it leads to the creation of more incel men and to degeneracy. "Women will destroy civilization" at worst and "women's nature causes pain to men and it should be controlled or put in check" at best. And there are and there will be groups who will propose tight control from men over women as a solution.

Call to action

Nowadays, as I have said, this conspiracy is shared by a lot of different groups with different interests, but are more tightly enforced by male supremacists.

As feminists are interested in women's well being and freedom, they shouldn’t make male supremacists work easier by repeating their lies. Sadly, I have seen countless times feminists, here and in other places, spreading manosphere lies, mostly because it serves to a temporal sense of victory over men or because it can feed the “patriarchy hurts men too” libfem bit.

But feminism shouldn’t prioritize fantasy over reality, even if it’s rough; almost everything remains the same in the heterosexual world, women are still dating, having sex, marrying and having kids with men in large numbers. Incels are tiny outliers in the big scheme of things: nothing is rising.

Our sisters should know the truth, our nature is not contrary to civilization, our choices are not detrimental, we shouldn’t be controlled. Nature runs its course.

Conclusion

It is important to understand that evolution doesn't allow everyone to reproduce. It's nothing new that some men and women didn't pass their genes, this was a thing in the past and will always be. 

Mating, having sex and therefore, reproducing is not a right. The whole point of evolution is that effective subjects make it, and the few remaining ones are left behind. This process is not being blown up by technology or women having more freedom. 

The influence of women on reproduction is discussed, but given that even in cultures with arranged marriages the future wife has a word on it and mothers, who are also women, have also a said in who the husband should be, I highly doubt that there was a long period of time in human history where women had no choice at all. It doesn’t seem to be consistent with reality to believe that women are programmed to only like a few men.

About data on human relationships, I think it’s important to be skeptical from now on of every viral graph and any “too perfect and bright” theory. If it relies on a result given in only one year, it’s bunk. If it incites a moral panic, it’s bunk. If multiple sources don’t show a clear trend, it’s bunk.

Doesn’t matter if it comes from your respected professor, that influencer or popularizer that you like, that intellectual that always transforms big chunks of information into easy concepts to get. Don’t trust, they are probably wrong. If your grandma knows about it, you are late in your contact with reality by at least 20 years.

[yellosnacc]

I've got a question regarding the Slomen. how do they show affection towards one another? Are they similar to humans when it comes to affection or do they have their own little silly way, and considering the women have those neat feathers on their tiny arms I was also wondering if they had a special display like some birds do or if its just there to look pretty.

While it is similar to humans, in that they have spoken language of affection, touch is much more common in everyday conversation, and thus extra common in affectionate interactions.

Often more intimate and happy interactions contain fewer words as the interacting slomen likely operate on the same "wavelength" and have an easier time reading one another. Touch is also a more intimate way of speaking than speech since others can't listen to it.

Also by "wavelength", I mean set up mood but also the fact slomen can to some degree smell the stress level of others, like many earthly creatures do. Unlike humans, they also smell sickness, making it lot easier for a group to survive an epidemic despite the high contact large groups slomen socialize in.

Hugs are very common in any close group. In a friendly environment, cuddle between two will likely become a cuddle of many. Sleeping is a communal activity.

And to the "wings" and the big feathers!

Yes, some cultures have silly wing dances and decorating methods. It's more common where women are more proactive during courting. In some other places, the mid limbs aren't even allowed to be viewed and/or are trimmed before seasons. But matriarchs are most often allowed to have large fancy show feathers.

So slomen don't have any remaining biological needs to dance with their mid limbs like some of their relatives but there is a desire to show off.

Some individuals might use them in body language like the happy wing waving in the picture. It can look silly but it's hard to not imitate your friend sillying when talking to them. It's a way of bonding.

[abearinthewoods]

Unpopular opinion:

The male loneliness epidemic is not real

It was made up by men to guilt you into sleeping with them or being with them.

Do not trust them.

That means yes all men including you because of male entitlement

Sleeping with men will not solve the male loneliness epidemic because its not about sex. Its about the fact that men and women are (generally speaking) unwilling to be as empathic and warm and kind and open and friendly to men as they are towards women.

But assuming men are doing it to guilt you into sleeping with them is a part of the problem. These sexist assumptions about men permeate every interaction men have with women that it keeps any man not high enough on the charismatic scale to side step them from developing close friendships or becoming socialized around women.

Read more bell hooks. If you want to create loving men you must learn to love men.

[sandplague]

pathologic 3 save & sound 2024 presentation

this is a quick attempt at a transcript of the presentation. I think I got most of it but there are some words I was unable to hear, I can't say I have a lot of practice doing this and that's on me so if any of you guys can help me I'll edit it asap

Ressa Schwarzwald: I'm Ressa from Gameowdio. Our team has been working on Pathologic 3 with Vasily Kashnikov and his apprentice Nikolai. This video will feature some of the audio stuff we've made together.

Our goal regarding audio direction was to give the real experience of being in the epicenter of an epidemic. Fully realistic, no bullshit. So we are obviously shooting this video in The Town. We realized pretty early that the game was quite different from the original Pathologic 2 because of the time travel mechanics. So for the prototype we built a time travel machine [the date November 1924 shows on screen], which appeared to be quite useful to record some source sounds, and [date changes to November 3024] make this video in just half a second using existing technology.

Let's start with the music.

Vasily Kashnikov: Hi, I'm Vasily Kashnikov, audio director of Pathologic 3 project. I'll tell you how our music is structured. We were already thinking about how the Bachelor's game would sound when we were working on Patholgic 2 and writing music for Haruspex. In Pathologic 2, the music had more ethnic and real motives (motifs?) and instruments. Since the city and its customs are familiar with Haruspex since he was a child, he is involved in the traditional way of life. In the case of Pathologic 3, this is the view of an outsider who evaluates everything from the point of view of rationality and science. Therefore, we are trying to make the Pathologic 3 soundtrack colder and more detached from the steppes and ethnicity in character. There is more synthesis, guitars at the same time, the Bachelor communicates with those in power so the soundtrack contains a large share of minimalist so-called furniture music that could sound in the beginning of the last century. Piano etudes and references to composers of that time: Satie, Debussy, etc. The soundtrack is a rather eclectic mix of dreampop, downtempo, and (?) minimalism.

In the city when the Bachelor is alone with himself, we emphasize the cold mind of the rhythm section: less emotional harmony, and sometimes electronic timbres. In the rooms where we need to separate the main character from those he interacts with, we use more expressive harmonies and more classical instruments: piano and guitar passages.

When we designed the interactive music system, we assumed that time is finite, and the music had to change depending on the amount of time the Bachelor had left. However, we later abandoned this system and now the music changes depending on the state of the Bachelor himself, who can fall into apathy or psychosis. To emphasize these states, we apply filters and effects to different layers of our tracks and get a slower, muffled sound in the case of apathy, and wired (?) nervous, glitchy in the case of psychosis. In the infected quarters, there are interactive systems that... [screen begins to distort] oh my god, Nataliya! Please stop this!

Nataliya Radina: Whoops, hehe, sorry. But yeah, basically the other system we created reflects everything you hear in the game. Such as... If we use our gun when dealing with the local thugs, the longer we aim the weapon at the people, the less sounds of the outside world we hear and the louder becomes the heartbeat. To add to the intensity, sharper tone was used along with a high pitch tinnitus sound. If the psychosis level goes to the maximum, it starts to damage Bachelor's health, which is accompanied by flashes on the screen, as well as low heartbeat and short breathing sounds.

Vasily Kashnikov: In the infected and rebel's quarters, there are also interactive systems that change the character of the music by adding or disabling instrument layers depending on the state of the world or the Bachelor's equipment to fight the plague. As a result, we have 12 tracks for each day spent in the city. they can freely switch between each other and several dozen themes for locations and characters, and all the music is subject to change depending on the state of the Bachelor.

Nataliya Radina: Since the game has a weather changing system, we also wanted to reflect that in our audio feedback as well. The game has global wetness parameter that shows how intense the rain is. The more it rains, the more squishy and muddy are the steps of the outside surfaces. Moreover, if you come closer to the window, you can hear the rain pondering on the glass. Even in the middle of the plague, we always have room for cozy moments, right? My favorite part of that system is involving cows. [cow moo]. So, when it's raining, you can actually hear very very soft sound of raindrops dropping on those bovine butts. And I personally think it's beautiful.

Artur Ramanouski: Hi, my name is Artur, and I was also involved in creating some sound assets for the game.

Probably the hardest thing to record were the footsteps. I had everything planned out: bought the equipment, got every type of surface, but...there was one small thing I overlooked: I live in a city with over 12 million people. Noise everywhere. The solution was simple and ingenious: I recorded everything on a Sunday, because in Buenos Ares, Sunday is the one day when no one does anything.

Nataliya Radina: One of the most important places in the game is the cathedral. There we have a system of ladders that control the speed and direction of time. Direction wise, we can have it flow normally, or reversed. [entire presentation is rewound very quickly so it's back to Ressa]

Ressa Schwarzwald: She is super professional.

Nataliya Radina: As for the speed, we can make it stand still, go twice as fast, or half normal speed. We created an audio system that has to (?) understand what is actually happening around (inaudible). When we reverse time, spatial effects are added to the surrounding sounds. Ambience, steps, and the mechanism itself. When time stands still, we increase the low frequencies in the ambience, and all the other sounds are muted to zero. Now lastly, when the time goes twice as fast, or half the original speed, the pitch of the surrounding sound changes accordingly.

The coolest part of this system is that it's been actually implemented into the game engine using only one parameter.

Ressa Schwarzwald: Thank you for watching. See you here, later!

[xiaq]

Favorite fantasy series: The Folk of the Air. I do NOT understand the hate this series gets on booktok/IG. The world-building is immaculate, the politics are juicy, the writing is engaging, and the romance is a slow burn that’s secondary to the plot and character development. I will read anything that Holly Black writes.

Favorite sci/fi series: The Murderbot Diaries. These are quick, quippy, and satisfying reads. I would die for Murderbot.

Favorite romance series: Not sure if they count as a series since they’re all standalones in the same universe, but Ali Hazelwood’s books ft. Women in STEM having unrealistic romances gets an A+ from me. If you need easy beach reads with happy endings, go for one of these (Also, the first book started as Star Wars fic; neat!).

Favorite graphic novel series: I’ve been following the Heartstopper webcomic for years, but I finally purchased/ re-read the print books this year. If you want sweet, nostalgic writing with diverse queer representation and whimsical art, Heartstopper is for you. If you want a historical/educational story, I highly recommend the Marchseries, which is an autobiographical view of the civil rights movement by John Lewis. 

Favorite historical romance: I know I’m not supposed to judge a book by it’s cover, but I put off reading A Lady for a Duke despite rave reviews because I simply did not vibe with the cover. This was a terrible choice. I read this book in one euphoric sitting and then re-read it two additional times this year. The banter! The pining! The drama! 

Favorite fantasy: A Taste of Gold and Iron and its follow-up short novella Tadek and the Princess. These books may have changed my brain chemistry. I loved this world and its characters and the novella made me cry like a baby.

Favorite science fiction: The Martian. I’d read this before but I re-read it on a work trip and fell in love all over again. Such an excellent science-y sci/fi book that nonetheless feels very approachable and fun.

Favorite non-fiction: They Were Her Property is the driest book I read this year but the content was fascinating (and horrifying). If you want to interrogate your perception of white women’s role in slavery (and, to a lesser degree, the role of Christianity therin) — take your time, and be ready to adjust your worldview—especially if you think Gone with the Wind was an accurate portrayal of the south. How to Survive a Plague, on the other hand, is less dry—you can tell a journalist wrote it—but it’s very detailed. It’s rare that I don’t finish a book in one or two sittings, but this took me over a month. If you’ve ever wondered about the social history of the AIDS epidemic and how a diagnosis went from a quick death sentence to an easily manageable condition (and how hard grassroots movements had to work to get some fucking help to make that happen), this is for you.

Favorite comic: Infidel. Damn. The art. The narrative. So short but so impactful. This is horror, so be mindful.

Favorite graphic novel: This is a tossup between If You’ll Have Me, a sugary-sweet sapphic romance, and The Prince and the Dressmaker which is an equally adorable story about expressing ones true self regardless of social expectations.

Favorite WTF: Butcher and Blackbird and Bride. I’m still not sure how I feel about B&B but it was certainly an interesting way to spend two hours. Bride is on the list purely because reading the word “knot” on a print page instead of an AO3 tab felt illegal.

Favorite feel-good/comedy: Monstrous Regiment. I’ve read this book so many times and, after the election, I read it again. I doubt any other book will surpass what has become an emotional support story for me.

Favorite YA: Cemetery Boys (Magic! Mystery! Queerness!) She Drives me Crazy(Athletics! Misunderstandings! Enemies to lovers! Queerness!), and A Little Bit Country (Country music! Thinly veiled Dolly Parton references! Queerness!) (Hm. Seems to be a theme here).

Favorite Sports Romance: Icebreaker (the Graziadei one, not the Hannah Grace one). You know how a lot of hockey books (my own included) can be light on the actual hockey? Not the case with Icebreaker. The character development was lovely, but the hockey was divine. Graziadei clearly knows and loves the sport.

Favorite historical fiction: What the Wind Knows (Mystery! Time Traveling! Love! Ireland!) and Kindred (Mystery! Time Traveling! Love! The Antebellum South!).

Favorite Space Odyssey: Gideon + Nona the Ninth. I had to make a special category because neither sci/fi nor fantasy feels appropriate for this yet incomplete series which is as rollicking good fun as it is completely confounding. I still have no idea what’s happening but I can’t wait to read the next one.

Favorite pleasant surprise: A Court of Mist and Fury. I waited so long to read the ACOTAR series because I got such conflicting reports from folks. I took the advice of a reader I trust and powered through the first book. ACOMAF was worth the contextualizing journey. I loved it. I’m still working through the rest of the series but this book was an unexpected joy.

Least favorite book: Lol, no. We don’t play that game here.

[tomorrowusa]

A lot of those bros who embraced Trump may soon become incel bros.

Apparently the "4B" movement has crossed the Pacific from South Korea.

To explain 4B, this is from Elle...

McKenna, who did not want her last name published for privacy reasons, first heard about 4B a few months ago, via a TikTok video referring to the South Korean social movement. The basic idea: women swear off heterosexual marriage, dating, sex and childbirth in protest against institutionalized misogyny and abuse. (It is called 4B in reference to these four specific no-nos.) The mostly online movement began around 2018 protests against revenge porn and grew into South Korea’s #MeToo-esque feminist wave. In the wake of Trump’s victory, 4B is once again on McKenna’s mind – and she’s not the only one.

Trump’s embrace of manosphere figures such as Joe Rogan, the Nelk Boys and Adin Ross means he has strong support among their evangelists – mainly, young men. But for young women, the former president’s long history of misogyny means a vote for Trump is a vote against feminism, especially with reproductive rights as a key issue in 2024. Ahead of the US election, pundits predicted a history-making gender gap, and early exit polls support that prediction: women aged 18-29 went overwhelmingly left, while Trump picked up ground with their male counterparts compared with 2020. With the race called, TikToks viewed hundreds of thousands of times offered one way for women to go for the jugular: 4B, specifically cutting off contact with men. “Girls it’s time to boycott all men! You lost your rights, and they lost the right to hit raw! 4b movement starts now!” one creator wrote on TiKTok in a video viewed 3.4m times.

B4 began in South Korea to protest blatant misogyny. It grew when South Korean bros helped to elect a misogynistic president.

In South Korea, 4B began as an offshoot of national protests against the spycam epidemic, in which perpetrators filmed targets – most of whom were women – during sex or while urinating in public bathrooms without their knowledge or consent. “These videos were sold and exchanged by men on Discord, and women didn’t know how many men had taken part, and if any of the men in their lives had,” said Min Joo Lee, an assistant professor of Asian studies at Occidental College. “There was a general sense of, ‘Who can I trust? And before I regain my trust in men, I need to refrain from contact with them.’”

Voyeurism is something Trump is famous for.

4B happens at a time South Korea is experiencing a drop in its fertility rate. So women are operating from a position of strength. Of course fertility fanatic Elon Musk is appalled by B4.

South Korea’s fertility struggle caught the attention of the vehement Trump ally Elon Musk. The Tesla CEO has at least 11 living children (one son died in infancy in 2002). He describes pronatalism, the enthusiastic promotion of reproduction, as a way to save humanity from “population collapse”. When Taylor Swift came out in support of Kamala Harris this summer, he seemingly offered, creepily and unprompted, to get her pregnant. He’s propped up South Korea’s declining fertility rate as a case study for Americans who do not get busy making babies. Consider Musk an archetypical 4B foe. He’s far from the only one. Far-right figures such as Nick Fuentes, a white supremacist who has praised Hitler and once described his “ideal wife” as 16 years old, celebrated on X after Trump’s win, tweeting, “I’d just like to take the opportunity to thank men for saving this country from stupid bitches who wanted to destroy the world to keep abortion,” and, “Your body, my choice. Forever.” That sort of violent rhetoric, which is spreading among Trump’s far-right supporters, will not exactly convince the majority of young American women they should be dating at the moment.

Musk's worry about "population collapse" is contrived and probably racist. What he really wants is higher white fertility.

We're in no danger of our species going extinct unless we make the planet unlivable. There are currently 8.1 billion humans. Even if that were cut in half, that would leave us with more humans than there were in 1974; they seemed to do just fine back then with ABBA and Gerald Ford.

So women, do whatever it takes to secure your rights. At the very least, discriminate in favor of guys who donated to Harris-Walz before November 5th.

[she-is-ovarit]

By EDITH M. LEDERER Updated 9:11 PM PST, March 8, 2024 UNITED NATIONS (AP) — Legal equality for women could take centuries as the fight for gender equality is becoming an uphill struggle against widespread discrimination and gross human human rights abuses, the United Nations chief said on International Women’s Day. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres told a packed U.N. commemoration Friday that “a global backlash against women’s rights is threatening, and in some cases reversing, progress in developing and developed countries alike.” The most egregious example is in Afghanistan, he said, where the ruling Taliban have barred girls from education beyond sixth grade, from employment outside the home, and from most public spaces, including parks and hair salons. At the current rate of change, legal equality for women could take 300 years to achieve and so could ending child marriage, he said. Guterres pointed to “a persistent epidemic of gender-based violence,” a gender pay gap of at least 20%, and the underrepresentation of women in politics. He cited September’s annual gathering of world leaders at the U.N. General Assembly, where just 12% of the speakers were women. “And the global crises we face are hitting women and girls hardest — from poverty and hunger to climate disasters, war and terror,” the secretary-general said. In the past year, Guterres said, there have been testimonies of rape and trafficking in Sudan, and in Gaza women women and children account for a majority of the more than 30,000 Palestinians reported killed in the Israeli-Hamas conflict, according to the Gaza Ministry of Health. He cited a report Monday by the U.N. envoy focusing on sexual violence in conflict that concluded there are “reasonable grounds” to believe Hamas committed rape, “sexualized torture” and other cruel and inhumane treatment of women during its surprise attack in southern Israel on Oct. 7. He also pointed to reports of sexual violence against Palestinians detained by Israel. International Women’s Day grew out of labor movements in North America and across Europe at the turn of the 20th century and was officially recognized by the United Nations in 1977. This year’s theme is investing in women and girls to accelerate progress toward equality. Roza Otunbayeva, the head of the U.N. political mission in Afghanistan, told the Security Council on Wednesday that what is happening in that country “is precisely the opposite” of investing in women and girls. There is “a deliberate disinvestment that is both harsh and unsustainable,” she said, saying the Taliban’s crackdown on women and girls has caused “immense harm to mental and physical health, and livelihoods.” Recent detentions of women and girls for alleged violations of the Islamic dress code “were a further violation of human rights, and carry enormous stigma for women and girls,” she said. It has had “a chilling effect among the wider female population, many of whom are now afraid to move in public,” she said. Otunbayeva again called on the Taliban to reverse the restrictions, warning that the longer they remain, “the more damage will be done.” Sima Bahous, the head of UN Women, the agency promoting gender equality and women’s rights, told the commemoration that International Women’s Day “sees a world hobbled by confrontation, fragmentation, fear and most of all inequality.” “Poverty has a female face,” she said. “One in every 10 women in the world lives in extreme poverty.” Men not only dominate the halls of power but they “own $105 trillion more wealth than women,” she said. Bahous said well-resourced and powerful opponents of gender equality are pushing back against progress. The opposition is being fueled by anti-gender movements, foes of democracy, restricted civic space and “a breakdown of trust between people and state, and regressive policies and legislation,” she said. [Click on the link to continue reading]

[transmutationisms]

could you talk more on eds and biopolitics?

sure, so this is broad strokes and it's also worth reiterating that the energy deficit characteristic of EDs can have a lot of different causes besides intentional food restriction—food insecurity is a huge and underrecognised factor here but there are many others. so when i talk about intentional restriction and the desire to be thin / lose weight, i'm not suggesting these are universal characteristics or causes of EDs.

anyway though, in the context of discussing these things, and particularly the relationship between 'diet culture' and EDs, a perennial frustration to me is that i often hear people fall back on the idea that the desire to be thin comes about as a result of the beauty standards perpetuated in mass media, fashion adverts, &c, without any subsequent interrogation of why it is that beauty itself is now so heavily dependent on thinness. after all, plenty of people have pointed out this is not a universal; beauty varies in different times and places, what is described or depicted as beautiful in historical records doesn't necessarily have much overlap with today's hegemonic standards, and so forth.

so when historicising this phenomenon it becomes very clear that the euro/anglo standard of thinness as beauty is, one, part of the ideological apparatus justifying colonialism thru the creation of race and white supremacy. sabrina strings and da'shaun harrison have written on this. two, the thin ideal is also inextricably tied up in medical discourses defining the ideal body as one that is economically productive, with the promise being that if the populace can be transformed into 'healthy',*** useful, hardworking citizens, the state benefits. control of bodyweight is therefore certainly a means of demonstrating one's supposed self-control, moral discipline, &c, but it is also a demand expressed in medical terms: these two discourses merge and overlap, and are both part of the capitalist state's transformation of its citizenry into a biological resource that can be controlled, managed, and exploited to bourgeois ends (profit): hence, biopolitics.

(***the story of how 'health' itself comes to be so dependent on thinness is obviously a critical piece of all this but this post is long as shit already so suffice it to say that this conflation is also not obvious, necessary, universal, &c &c)

medico-political discourses in the 19th century tended to talk about the dangers of both over- and under-weight more than what we hear now; similarly, if you think about something like wilbur atwater's calorie-value charts, these were explicitly intended to guide labourers to the most calorie-dense foods, because to atwater the central danger to be avoided was starvation among the workforce. these days in wealthy countries like the us, you are much more likely to hear about weight management in the context of demands to reduce; this is of course following moves like the WHO declaring an 'obesity epidemic' in 1997, and the rise in the usa of more explicitly nationalist, militaristic weight-loss rhetoric in the post-9/11 era.

however, my position is that these demands for thinness, and the beauty standard that follows and justifies them, are not a departure from earlier 19th- and 20th-century scientific nutrition advice, just an evolution that, for a multitude of reasons (politics, medical professional interests, insurance company practices, &c) has simply come to focus more on the ostensible economic and national threat posed by fatness. the underlying logic bears the biopolitical throughline: the state has, or ought to have, an interest in enforcing the health of its population, and as part of this demands that you the individual surveil and alter your weight according to the scientific guidelines du jour.

this is fertile ground for the development of what, in extreme form, we regard as ED pathology. first, because even the most purely 'health'-motivated individual engaging in the required degree of bodily monitoring and caloric restriction is liable to respond to energy deficit in ways that can become diagnosably distressing. second, because the morals of 'health' are never far from standards of beauty; thinness is sold in overtly profitable ways (the diet and weight-loss industries) and furthermore, our idea of beauty is often a kind of post hoc justification for the thinness already being demanded by state and medical authorities. which is really just to say, beauty is part of the ideological superstructure both resulting from and invoked as a justification for the material conditions of capitalist biopolitics. again this is very broad strokes, but imo it is a much more useful framework to understand EDs than simply presenting them as a result of desiring thinness because it is glorified in The Media, because... reasons (essentially the rené girard model, lol).

[whencyclopedia]

Deir el-Medina

Deir el-Medina is the modern Arabic name for the worker's village (now an archaeological site) which was home to the artisans and craftsmen of Thebes who built and decorated the royal tombs in the nearby Valley of the Kings and Valley of the Queens.

The ancient inhabitants called the village Pa Demi (“the village”) but it was referred to in official correspondence as Set-Ma'at (“The Place of Truth”) because the workers there were thought to be inspired by the gods in creating the eternal homes of the deceased kings and their families. Early in the Christian era the village, then deserted, was occupied by monks who took over the Temple of Hathor for use as a cloister. The temple was referred to as Deir el-Medina (“Monastery of the Town”) and this name finally came to be applied to the entire site.

Unlike most villages in ancient Egypt, which grew up organically from small settlements, Deir el-Medina was a planned community. It was founded by Amenhotep I (c.1541-1520 BCE) specifically to house workers on royal tombs because tomb desecration and robbery had become a serious concern by his time. It was decided that the royalty of Egypt would no longer advertise their final resting places with large monuments but, instead, would be buried in a less accessible area in tombs cut into the cliff walls. These areas would become the necropolises now known as the Valley of the Kings and the Valley of the Queens and those who lived in the village were known as “Servants in the Place of Truth” for their important role in creating eternal homes and also remaining discreet regarding tomb contents and location.

Deir el-Medina is among the most important archaeological sites in Egypt because of the wealth of information it provides on the daily life of the people who lived there. Serious excavation at the site was begun in 1905 CE by the Italian archaeologist Ernesto Schiaparelli and furthered by a number of others throughout the 20th century CE with some of the most extensive work done by French archaeologist Bernard Bruyere between 1922-1940 CE. At the same time Howard Carter was bringing the treasures of the royalty to light from Tutankhamun's tomb, Bruyere was uncovering the lives of the working people who would have created that final resting place.

History of the Village

The earliest extant ruins at the site are from the reign of Thutmose I (1520-1492 BCE), son and successor of Amenhotep I, but there is no doubt that it was Amenhotep I who first planned the site. He and his mother, Ahmose-Nefertari, were worshipped as protective gods at the site throughout its history. The workers also venerated the cobra goddess Meretseger (whose name means “She Who Loves Silence”), the personification of the Theban necropolis and protector of the dead and, especially, of their tombs.

By the time of the New Kingdom (c.1570-c.1069 BCE) tomb robbing had become almost epidemic in scope. Although measures such as false doors and labyrinths had been a part of tomb building since the Old Kingdom (c.2613-2181 BCE) they were not effective in keeping robbers from reaching the burial chamber and the vast treasures left there with the deceased. One gains an understanding of exactly how great the wealth in these tombs was when one considers the treasures of Tutankhamun's tomb discovered by Howard Carter in 1922 CE. Tutankhamun died before he was 20 years old and had not yet amassed the kind of wealth a king like Djoser (c.2670 BCE) or Khufu (2589-2566 BCE) would have had entombed for the afterlife.

The Valley of the Kings was selected as the new necropolis for royalty and the village was planned for easy access (a half hour's walk) from a worker's home to the tombs. The village was in continuous use from the time of Thutmose I until the collapse of the New Kingdom in c. 1069 BCE. Although the community and nearby necropolises were planned to safeguard the tombs of the kings, human greed and opportunity would eventually work to undermine the plan and some of the workers themselves would turn to robbing the tombs they had helped build and protect for an easy and quite substantial payoff. For most of its history, however, the village seems to have functioned as it was intended.

Continue reading...

[sizzlingsandwichperfection-blog]

I just read the article you posted a while back about TB (heads up- it said the gift article link has lapsed or some such). Did J&J ‘evergreen’ (be allowed to be evil) or was it allowed to become generic?

Relatedly, how do you manage empathy fatigue? I deal with OCD too and it screams at me that I have to care about and do all the things all at once. How do you choose where to put your time and energy?

(Also, when I get the coffee subscription for my husband’s birthday, which version should I get?)

For me empathy fatigue sets in when I careen my attention from this crisis to that one to the next one to the one after that, always feeling overwhelmed by each emerging problem but never having the time or attention to devote myself to one problem or another.

I'll give you an example. In 2014, a horrific ebola epidemic swept through Guinea, Liberia, and Sierra Leone. The world paid attention to it. Everyone was talking about it. And then .... it ended. At least in the global imagination. Money dried up. The world moved on to the next crisis.

That's not to say the next crisis wasn't important. It was important. But in Sierra Leone, the ebola crisis wasn't really over even after people stopped contracting ebola. 15% of Sierra Leone's healthcare workers had been killed by ebola, and the already fragile healthcare system plummeted into what one Sierra Leonean physician described to me as "a state of collapse."

And so the crisis remained a crisis even after the world's attention shifted. 1 in 17 women in Sierra Leone were dying in childbirth. Over 10% of kids born died before the age of five. Tuberculosis killed thousands every year despite curative treatment being available.

And this is when Hank and I finally, belatedly realized that responding to crises in the news was not adequate. Instead, we would need to commit the kind of long-term attention and long-term support that long-term crises demand. This means making difficult choices--there is also high maternal and child mortality in countries other than Sierra Leone, but we choose to focus on Sierra Leone because we see an opportunity to make a difference, because the government is serious if limited in its commitment to improving healthcare and educational opportunities, and because we had to make a choice or else we would be overwhelmed by the many causes.

What about the other causes? Well, we trust people to work on those causes. We believe in their importance. And we support their work by doing ours as well as we can, and trusting they are doing theirs as well as they can. I still get overwhelmed. I still get depressed. But I find that the deeper I go into my particular areas of interest--global healthcare delivery, health care accessibility, ending TB, fighting maternal mortality--the better I feel personally, and the more good I feel like I'm able to do.

2. Johnson & Johnson has not abandoned their secondary patents on bedaquiline but they have committed to allow generics to be available in most countries, even those where the secondary patents apply. Unfortunately this deal leaves out many countries that need generic bedaquiline, including Ukraine, which is absolutely unacceptable. So progress has been made, but the progress (as is so often the case) is inadequate. The fight goes on.