#literally zero percent of this is accurate

[cyren-myadd]

I often see people describe Spider as a neglected child. Do you think that is totally accurate? Would Norm and the other scientists have set rules and boundaries? If Lo’ak and Spider did something stupid together would Jake punish both of them? What would a scene like this look like?

I don't think Spider was PHYSICALLY neglected, as in the adults always made sure he had food, water, medical care, and a safe place to sleep. But was Spider EMOTIONALLY neglected? Yes, I think so. The High Ground comics don't go into much detail about Spider's relationship with the people who raised him, the McCoskers, but what little we do see is nothing like the love and care Jake and Neytiri have for their children. I definitely don't think McCosker ever abused him, and I'm sure the other humans would've stepped in if he ever physically neglected him, but I one hundred percent believe the McCoskers emotionally neglected Spider. When Jake decided to move the Omaticaya and the allied humans to High Camp, Spider was packed and ready to go, and he didn't seem to care about never seeing his foster family again. Same with McCosker. McCosker was annoyed with him for trying to run away with Kiri, but he didn't really seem to care that Spider would prefer to live with the Na'vi and loyal humans over his foster family. If a kid is willing to leave behind the people who raised him for 14ish years without even saying goodbye, there is clearly something wrong with the relationship between the kid and the family. That emotional connection, knowing that there's an adult who loves you and would help you if you were in danger, just wasn't there for Spider like all the other child characters have.

(it seriously kills me that every time another child character was in danger, there was an adult rushing to rescue them concerned about their wellbeing, but when Spider was in danger, the only ones who did anything about it were A. the other child characters, which didn't end well :( and B. the war criminal who needed a 3-hour movie to realize he actually does care about his son)

As for the scientists, I'm sure they cared about Spider and made an effort to teach him things (I headcanon that Norm is the one who taught him to read and write and other basic human stuff while the Sully kids taught Spider the Na'vi stuff) but at the end of the day, they weren't his guardians and weren't responsible for raising him, teaching him rules, and disciplining him. That would fall to McCosker, and as far as I can tell with McCosker, it looks like he just gave up on raising Spider and lets him do whatever he wants as long as he comes home to sleep at night. We could speculate that maybe McCosker was a better parent when Spider was younger, but based off of how one of Spider's earliest appearances in the movie is him running around in the jungle with unkempt, matted hair and his only adult supervision there because he was with the Sully kids, we can guess that McCosker wasn't always that invested in raising Spider.

When it comes to discipline, I don't think Jake would feel like it's appropriate for him to discipline Spider and would prefer to leave it to McCosker. That's what he did in the comics when the boys were in trouble for exploring the battlefield. Jake makes it clear in both the comic and the movie that he does NOT view himself as a parental figure to Spider, and thus he's not responsible for disciplining him when he fucks up.

I'm very curious to see if Jake's relationship to Spider is different in A3. Since Spider went through literal torture to keep High Camp safe and ran back into a battlefield with zero hesitation to help Jake find Kiri and Tuk, I wonder if Jake will decide to properly look after Spider instead of just letting him hang out with his kids. I've seen some folks say Jake's "a son for a son" line is meant to symbolize Spider's adoption into the Sully family, but I don't think an adoption should happen until A. the Sullies know Spider saved Quaritch and they resolve that situation, and B. Spider and Neytiri resolve their issues.

Whatever ends up happening, I just want Spider to have the same love and protection that all the other child characters have. All children deserve to have a parent who loves and protects them, even if they have made some pretty big mistakes like saving Quaritch. If Jake can be forgiven for helping Q plan Hometree 9/11, Spider can absolutely be forgiven for only sparing his life when all his other actions opposed him.

[bamboobrat]

succession s4 e5 recap: swedish elon and his logan roy tribute band

time is a flat circle and we are back to ken hyping himself listening to rap, driving to the office.

anyone feeling nostalgic yet?

he is immediately caught off guard by the fact that roman and shiv are already there.

also he seems like the worst boss ever.

i really don't like ken when he is not hitting rock bottom.

(there is a movie about a sleeping robot in a cave that takes up too much time in this episode. let's not get into all that)

the old guard checks up on the CE-bros before their trip to norway.

matchy matchy<3

turns out mattson wants them all there (why wouldn't he?) so THE GANG IS GOING TO NORWAY! lets bleed the swede!*

*as a norwegian, i approve this message

mortality has set into team krank, as they put on compression socks before the flight.

krank is not here to have fun. krank has no young mistress to impress. krank is serious.

shiv has noticed ken's leaks to the media from last week because she is boss. it's the comeback we've been waiting for.

but most importantly, she is waging a very important war against tom and his stupid new sneakers:

the sibs say they can kill tom for her. that's brotherly love.

hugo is not having a good time.

i am tho.

gerri rallies the troops by shitting on europeans.

yes mommy tell me i'm weak because i have free healthcare! sit on my face

gerri for CEO. always.

they accurately depict what it is like driving in norway:

(this is why i don't have my licence)

the gang arrives in the motherland and it's beautiful, but rainy (so authentic) and are all like WHY THESE WOOD CABINS SO SMALL?!

ironic because jeremy lives in fucking denmark.

anyway, whatever this is:

I DO NOT APPROVE!

the trip up to mount olympus is interrupted by con saying he can send a picture of their dead dad to the group chat.

nobody wants to see it.

also, marcia is putting logan in a kilt like the fucking bay city rollers and con had to cancel a room full of working class whites in cleveland. the sacrifice.

they give con carte blanche for the whole funeral thing, which is probably a terrible decision.

the funeral is going to be one big campaign rally, i'm serious.

the others have to settle for a nice lil scandi brunch spread. what a hard life.

i don't say this often, but i would be hugo in this scenario, piling onto my plate like it's nobody's business.

karolina has a cute lesbian moment.

she says something in swedish at some point, but let me tell you, i understand swedish and i didn't even pick up on it. no shade to dag, but lol.

hugo doesn't understand how ski jumping works.

i thank the writers for putting this joke in there, even if literally no one other than random scandi people will get it.

it's like the opposite of danny boyle's the beach<3 give back to the community<3

roman enters negotiations and puts his fingers in the caviar.

you think i didn't notice? after all this time, you must know i notice everything.

the CE-bros make the village elders proud, as mattson offers 187 per share as long as he gets ATN.

also, gerri does a second take looking back at roman. these are the crumbs i am destined to live on, i guess. roman doesn't want to give up ATN tho, probably because 1) his dad wanted ATN 2) his dad told him he wouldn't make it at pierce and belongs at ATN 3) he is, somehow, the most rational of the siblings right now????

speaking of rational: how are we feeling about the shiv/mattson potential here? i honestly have zero objections.

shiv is like fuck yeah, sell ATN, that shit is toxic.

agreed, but who gave mencken an open line to ATN-meetings? sounds like something logan told cyd to do during one of those late night calls.

"even dad had a line" rings true zero percent. pass.

get rid of atn. word is, they don't even have tucker carlson anymore? just keep a sweater, much less racist.

we get some important leo dicap representation:

and greg is the bringer of all that is exposition, telling us there is a kill list with 8 to 9 names, ever evolving.

now, as most readers of these recaps would know, i would like to avoid spending any time on greg whatsoever (made even more poignant by the recent rumors about nick), however, this must be one of the best exchanges of dialogue ever made:

greg: da fam shiv: da fuck

that's all.

tom tells the swedes that americans don't care about the rest of the world and it's funny because it's true.

and alex being like "you're ALL related?!"

i see you, succession writers, i see you.

mattson calls waystar a parts shop and has a good take on right wing media:

"i dont think news for angry, old men works"

instead, he opts for bloomberg grey: simple, cheap, huge, ikea'd to fuck. i do love ikea.

he calls the sibs a tribute band which is harsh. even for a scandi, it's fucking harsh.

anyway, SAUNA! SAUNA! SAUNA!

GERRI. IN. SAUNA! (chant with me)

i will never forget what the succession writers took from me.

krank out here just chilling.

i've never shipped anyone more.

we are introduced to ebba. i can tell i'd have more to say on this in any other situation, but it just feels weird (all norwegian know each other, i guess).

anyone else here for the shiv/mattson dynamic?

i'm sorry, i kind of ship it????

ken wants to tank the deal and roman immediately calls him out on his destructive bullshit:

and then immediately caves.

"i think we are good at running the ship" they say after doing it for approximately 24 hours.

i wish i had their confidence.

also, pinky can't dance, according to ken, so they keep shiv out. meanwhile, she gets cozy with lukas, who asks her about her marriage (bad) and tells her he sends liters of blood to ebba (also bad).

shiv shows us why she is paid the big bucks for political advice:

we don't see the end of their night, so i'm just going to assume they fucked. because she's worth it.

also, talking up gerri and karolina? girlies stick together<3

big bi vibes here. huge. idc if she's pregnant and drinking.

meanwhile, the CE-bros use greg to leak that the negotiations are souring. why would you trust greg with anything?

in an attempt to fuck the deal, the CE-bros show a terrible film to the swedish team, as if being scandi doesn't mean you've sat through enough terrible cinema already....

we get the strangest fight in tv history:

lol @ us for thinking this was an important moment for the two of them and then it's a fight about white sneakers and fat earlobes.

i sure hope shiv fucked lukas.

roman receives a photo of his dead dad and it doesn't really put him in the right place to negotiate with mattson:

ouch.

leave it to kieran to make an emmy-worthy speech across from alex skarsgaard peeing.

the plan was: tank the deal, but in a subtle way. what they did: try and tank the deal, but in a not very subtle way. did the deal tank: no.

i hope you understand.

the question is, if a deal collapses in the woods and no one hears it, is it a SEC violation?

mattson ends up offering 192 per share. karl jizzes his pants.

shiv gives the little spelunker tom a lil treat, telling him to fire cyd.

then she asks him out?

and ignores him again because she is taking a call from mattson?

idk my dudes, but i'm into this shiv comeback.

mattson seems happy and flirty and i sure as shit hope this goes somewhere.

as long as it doesn't involve liters of frozen blood.

i have a feeling it will be all good vibes until he learns about her pregnancy. there's always something rotten in the state of denmark (or norway, or sweden, but it's all the same).

the waystar-team receives the kill list after the offer and it's very stressful for a few people who made themselves suffer through a session in the sauna:

not on the kill list: karolina gerri tom because shiv fucking did the thing!!

oh, and karl and frank are on the kill list, but i think they are just fine.

maybe the real treasure was the compression socks we made along the way.

[buck-yyyy]

Mike’s Pocket - AKA, Theo losing his goddamn mind over FUCKING fabric

Okay, so I’ve talked about this before, you’ve definitely read about this before, everyone knows about Pocketgate by now—so, instead of reiterating old points, I’m gonna summarize my opinions (and therefore what I’m drawing from for this whole thing) the stuff that we’ve all been over and then I can talk about fun stuff >:D

1. Finn Wolfhard said that the pocket was sideways!

Okay, yes he did say that, but I also need everyone to look at the pocket closely for a second.

See that thick shadow and creasing at the top? The pocket opens from the top, meaning that it can’t open from the side (underneath the triangle) because it needs to be attached by at least three sides—otherwise, it would be hanging off. There is no way for the pocket to open from the side, because it wouldn’t be structurally sound—additionally, we would see the fabric creasing to accommodate that opening, whether or not there’s a cover over it. That triangle opens (we can see that the metal circle is the same kind of snap closure that’s at his neckline), but it’s purely decorative.

2. The triangle points to Will all the time!

HELL YEAH! GONNA GET INTO THAT!

3. There’s a letter in the pocket! Hm. See, this is where I’m torn, because I love the idea, but also, I don’t think it… makes sense? Even folded up notebook paper (because it would have to be folded to fit) would be noticeably bulging (hate that word for…chronically online reasons) against the fabric and noticeably pushing it out. This anon I got a while back makes a good point, but I’m not a huge fan. I just feel that we would see the letter in the pocket, because even if (like the anon said) they’re planning on him having a letter, he wouldn’t have had it in that pocket because changes of clothes do exist, and after several sweat, dirt, blood and grime filled days in the same clothes, no matter how much of a teenager Mike is, he would one HUNDRED percent change out of that thing as soon as he had the chance. No point in keeping it around.

4. Triangle imagery = queercoding!

FUCK yes. The woman in charge of costume design literally said that she purposely incorporated triangle patterns and organization into Robin’s clothing, there’s absolutely zero reason to believe that she wouldn’t do that for other characters that are intended to be queer.

FUN PART NOW!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I just finished my fourth or fifth rewatch of season 4 today, and I noticed something kinda neat—it almost seems like there’s… two jackets?

I’ve talked before about my theory that they used interfacing in the pocket (because we know that it’s handmade) to draw our attention to it, and I stand by that based on the way that it moves—in certain scenes.

A fabric that’s reinforced with interfacing will bend, but it will NOT bend the normal way fabric does. It doesn’t quite follow the shape of your body—I mean, it will follow the curve roughly, but it’ll kinda make its own shape. I wish I had an example, but I don’t own any clothes with interfacing, aaand my mom already looked at me like I was insane when I ran in to bend the collar of my dad’s shirt to hopefully get an example, so. You’re just gonna have to take my word for it. 

For example- interfacing in the collar of his shirt to keep it stiff!

NOW, FOR A REFERENCE!

Alright. Here’s a shirt made out of what I’d wager is a pretty similar fabric, although I think it’s slightly more flexible than what Mike is wearing. (If I see any of y’all insulting my fashion taste I Will End You)

When the fabric around it is scrunched, it keeps its shape, yes—but the fabric of the pocket creases slightly in places where it already had wrinkles. And what about when it’s actually on?

I hope you all know I bound my chest (at almost 11pm) so I could make this as accurate as possible without it getting in the way. 

Anyways, see how when my arm is close to it, it bends? Mike’s only does this, like, half the time.

This is a terribly blurry image, but you can see that the pocket is facing Argyle, and is bending perfectly naturally with his arm pressed up against the side of the shirt. It matches the shape of his pose, and it doesn’t look like there’s anything in there. Regular pocket! No interfacing!

Points to Jonathan, and it’s a little stiff, sure, but it's creasing pretty normal. Likely just a stiff jacket.

This one is,,, tricky. It looks pretty stiff, I’d agree. 

But look closely! The black lines are where it creases and wrinkles with the shape of the rest of the fabric, and the white traces how the shape of the pocket follows the shape of the edge of his shirt.

And oh, my favorite ever example (and the reason I’m looking into this to begin with) <3 that pocket is moving NORMALLY and it’s facing EL!!!!! RIGHT AS HE’S SUPPOSEDLY ABOUT TO SAY ILY!!!!!!!!

But let’s look at some examples where it IS facing Will. 

NOW THAT’S AN INTERFACED BEND! JUST A LITTLE BIT TOO PERFECTLY CURVED! Notice the difference between how it’s bending in this versus when he’s with El in the last example! (of course, the difference in pose should also be accounted for, but still. That is HEAVILY drastic.)

FUCKKKKKKK YEAH BAYBEE

STIFF! ASS! POCKET! I mean, it’s nearly straight (heh), whereas Will’s is way more curved. They’re both slouching and facing the same direction. 

(Tracing isn’t perfect but my point still stands.) 

Anyways, I fully believe that there’s two copies of this jacket—one for scenes with Will on Mike’s left, in order to draw attention to the triangle/arrow; and one for scenes without him. Thoughts?

[feistyvampire]

because i’m really nervous about my OCs still i don’t talk a whole ton about them but edgar’s best friend — someone he knew since they were both children — is rain, a childhood friend with an extremely shy demeanor who also tends to struggle to talk to someone within the first encounter or two - they would be more likely to chime in every so often at least with edgar around because he makes them feel more at ease but they do still have a lot of anxiety and get nervous fast

appearance wise, rain is quite a bit taller then edgar at around 6 feet or so (i didn’t decide an exact number; just know they are tall and pretty broad in figure)

visibly they have that notable height and body build, blue hair, and heterochromatic eyes similar to this picrew image:

(source)

some extras:

-it isn't one hundred percent accurate as normally their hair is fully decorated with moon and star shaped hair accessories throughout (probably done most often by edgar since they don't have the patience to do it all on their own) -their go to outfit is casual and usually always features a crop top-- belly out club /j -they are adept at a type of light magic that lets them create and manipulate it into shapes, making the magic shows they do really fun -edgar and rain have a very strong family dynamic and egdar would literally do anything for rain. he loves them with every ounce of himself and they've been close for a long time now so they know and trust each other a LOT. i would say with zero hesitance that if anyone knows everything about edgar, that person is definitely rain.

[anonimityblog4000]

that “art” is totally AI. some ai is decent at drawing hands, and the “artist” likely drew over AI to make it more believable (the post you linked mentions this). they could easily adjust fingers and make corrections, so claiming these edits are proof it’s not AI is weak. the piece is nonsensical in ways no human would produce (odd asymmetricality, wonky lines, lines that disappear, etc) and has distinctly AI texture. here's an example: a skull beneath harrow’s left hand seemingly melts into a spine (several bones under harrow are wrong in ways that scream AI). i'm not saying human art can’t be bad or nonsensical, but it’s nonsensical in human ways. this isn’t. some art you cited as “proof” this person can draw is also AI, though i can’t be sure they all are. either way, just because someone can draw doesn’t mean they don’t use AI, and it’s clear this person is using AI and lying about the extent to which they use it. 

and to your final point, since you seem to think it’s nail in the coffin evidence: sites that “check” for AI are widely considered unreliable. even hive moderation isn’t perfect. 

Can I just point out, again, that claiming that hands in the piece look decent as evidence that its image generated is just the most bizarre backwards logic? You are essentially claiming that an artist took AI work, drew over the AI hands and that the result is both evidence that it’s AI because they look bad (they don’t) and also that it’s evidence that it’s AI because they look good. I’m also calling you out this dismissive “ ‘proof’ that this person can draw” line, like….yeah they can clearly draw, the evidence of them drawing well for years is indeed evidence that they can draw.

Also as I explained in my post I don’t think AI detection tools are cast iron evidence, however the fact that it doesn’t flag isn’t zero percent useful in determining these things. You can’t have it both ways that AI generation software is literal magic that can produce whatever you claim to support your argument in the moment and also that AI detection tools are literally worthless and zero percent accurate. Feel free to share the other art you claim is AI and explain yourself.

[ultraericthered]

No leftist is a literal Nazi unless they are officially affiliated with Nazi organizations and subscribe to Nazism, and seeing as Nazism and fascism in general are Far Right ideologies, it's a low non-zero percent chance likelihood (authoritarianism and totalitarian tyranny knows no political affiliation, but fascism in particular is Far Right). So what is actually happening here and should be accurately described as much is that radical, hardcore Far Left extremists who are vehemently antisemitic and anti-Israel are beginning to gladly stand side by side with Nazis in their positions, like they've gone from "let's punch Nazis!" to "Nazis are our brothers in arms, actually!"

(Also, to be a Trump Supporter in the 2020s is to willfully embrace authoritarianism, fascism, bigotry, self-interest, psychopathy, and raw, naked pure evil. I do believe we should all agree on that.)

I so love watching leftists fall into Qanon type bullshit because they fundamentally can’t handle the fact that the Israeli and Palestinian conflict is not clear cut or simple. It’s sooo much fun watching the growing antisemitism from people I used to respect. I love seeing them spread misinformation because it’s anti Israel and I definitely love how they’re actively denying what happened in October and then deciding that everything in the past that led to Israel’s creation is also a conspiracy. Super duper fun

[besanii]

wwx + lwj being isolated together on their (largely empty) campus after being forced to return early from their study-abroad trips, living across the hall from each other, bored out of their skulls; lwj's set to pass the time reading his online textbooks, meditating, playing guqin; wwx's going out of his mind without proper access to his dorm room, studio space, and novel stimulation; eventually they open their doors, tape out the space of 6 feet, & sit in their doorways swapping songs + bonding

[Read on AO3]

Tap-tap-tap

Lan Wangji takes out one earbud and frowns in the direction of his closed door. There is a long pause during which no sound is heard and Lan Wangji is about to put his earbuds back in when it starts again.

Taptap-tap-tap

Taptaptaptaptaptaptaptap…

Irritated, he storms over and yanks the door open, ready to snap at the offender, only to come face-to-face with…nothing. He blinks, confused, and moves to close the door again when he hears giggling from somewhere near the ground. He frowns.

“What are you doing?” he asks.

Wei Wuxian grins up at him from where he is splayed out on his stomach in the doorway across the hall and waves. His other hand is holding onto a long contraption made of a jumble of stationery haphazardly taped together that spans the entire width of the corridor, the end of which stops just short of Lan Wangji’s leg.

“Hiya, Lan Zhan!” Wei Wuxian chirps. “I’d come closer but we’re not allowed.”

Lan Wangji feels a headache already starting to develop in between his eyes. He pinches the bridge of his nose to ward it off and sighs.

“What do you want, Wei Ying?” he asks. “I’m busy.”

Wei Wuxian sits up on his knees with a wide grin.

“Can I borrow a pen?” He shrugs. “I seem to have used up all my spares.”

Lan Wangji stares at him, and then down at the long pole of taped stationery still lying on the ground by their feet. The throbbing in his head grows louder, more insistent. He has lectures to listen to, notes to take, and he needs to practice. He doesn’t have time to entertain Wei Wuxian and his flights of fancy.

“Ridiculous,” he says, and slams the door shut.

–

The next day, the tapping starts again. This time, Lan Wangji is in the middle of practicing a new song on his guqin and only hears it when he stops to make a note on the score. He’s half tempted to ignore it and return to his practice, but he finds himself instead opening the door again to see Wei Wuxian sprawled on the floor, lounging back against the door frame.

He perks up when he sees Lan Wangji.

“Lan Zhan! Hi!” He scrambles to sit back on his heels when Lan Wangji moves to shut the door again. “No, wait, don’t go!”

Lan Wangji pauses, one hand on the door, and sighs.

“What do you want, Wei Ying? I’m—”

“—busy, I know,” Wei Wuxian finishes for him. He scratches the side of his nose with a sheepish expression. “Sorry, I promise I won’t bother you for very long. I just…I’ve been working on a new piece for class and I really need a second opinion on this one part and you’re the only one on this floor who’s also doing Composition 4505 so…”

Lan Wangji feels a twinge of guilt at the hopefulness in his tone. It’s been three days since the beginning of their confinement and while Lan Wangji is used to silence, he knows it must be difficult for someone as sociable and energetic as Wei Wuxian, who is used to hanging out with others and thrives on social interactions. He sighs again.

“Give me a moment,” he says, and drags his desk chair over to the door. He takes a seat facing Wei Wuxian and folds his arms over his chest. “Alright, whenever you’re ready.”

Wei Wuxian beams.

-

The next day, Lan Wangji opens his door before the tapping even begins. Wei Wuxian’s door is already open and he’s crouching, stationery pole in hand, ready to begin tapping. Instead, the tip of the pole (one of those jumbo-sized Sharpies Lan Wangji’s seen him use to make markings on posters and charts) taps Lan Wangji on the chest and he raises an eyebrow.

“Oops? Sorry,” Wei Wuxian says with a nervous chuckle. He starts pulling the pole back when Lan Wangji makes a grab for it. “Hey!”

“I’m confiscating this,” Lan Wangji tells him sternly. “So you can stop damaging school property.”

“But how am I supposed to get your attention?” Wei Wuxian complains.

Lan Wangji sets the pole just inside the door of his room.

“The door’s open,” he says. “Just call me.”

-

Wei Wuxian takes his now constantly open door as an invitation to call on Lan Wangji at all hours of the day. He insists that they eat together (it’s one of the stranger experiences of Lan Wangji’s life, sitting cross-legged in his open doorway facing Wei Wuxian doing the same across the hall), and asks Lan Wangji to listen to him practice the dizi and give him feedback. He surprises Lan Wangji one day by pulling out a stack of flashcards he’d made to help him study for one of the subjects they didn’t share.

“I had too much time and I couldn’t sleep,” he admits, “so I looked up your course notes. You have a quiz on Monday right? Maybe this will help?”

His cheeks are tinged pink and he twirls a lock of hair between his fingers as he makes himself comfortable on the floor, not quite meeting Lan Wangji’s eyes. Bashfulness is a rather…charming look on him, Lan Wangji’s heart decides, and skips a beat. He’s still staring at Wei Wuxian, trying to process this new bit of information, when Wei Wuxian cocks his head to one side and blinks up at him with confusion in those big, gray eyes.

Lan Wangji’s heart skips again.

Oh.

-

Two weeks pass by in a blur of shared meals, study and practice sessions across the hall, and those newly-awakened feelings only grow the more time he spends with Wei Wuxian. He’s also started paying more attention to his little habits and thinking them cute, although he’s no longer sure if it’s because of the feelings or if the feelings are because of those habits.

Wei Wuxian is fidgety and restless by nature and if he has to sit still for long periods of time, he’ll start twirling things in his fingers. Like a pen, or his dizi, or his hair. He also likes to chew on the ends of his hair when he’s deep in thought, which Lan Wangji finds really quite distracting; his fingers itch to brush away the lock of hair from his mouth, and then maybe replacing it with his own—

His ears burn and he has to turn back to his book to stop himself from staring at Wei Wuxian’s mouth. Luckily, Wei Wuxian is too busy humming to himself as he scribbles on a piece of paper to notice.

They’re eating dinner on their last night of enforced isolation when Lan Wangji finally admits to himself that he almost doesn’t want this to end. He likes spending time with Wei Wuxian, just the two of them; he likes seeing him in his pyjamas, buried in his notes, reading glasses (reading glasses!) slipping off the bridge of his nose as he twirls a pen in his hand. He likes listening to him talk while they’re eating, even though Lan Wangji himself doesn’t contribute much to the conversation. He likes the way Wei Wuxian smiles at him over the top of his laptop, eyes crinkling at the corners and nose scrunched up as he makes faces.

He just…really likes Wei Wuxian. 

He doesn’t know what to do with this information.

“Hey Lan Zhan,” Wei Wuxian says, completely oblivious to Lan Wangji’s internal conflict. “What’s the first thing you’re going to do once we’re allowed outside?”

He’s chewing on the ends of his chopsticks, lips pursed in thought and Lan Wangji is transfixed. He barely even registers the question before his mind supplies the answer.

I’m going to kiss you. 

It is only when Wei Wuxian squeaks, his chopsticks clattering to the floor as he turns bright red, does Lan Wangji realise he hadn’t spoken those words in his mind.

“Sorry,” he says, clearing his throat. His ears burn. “I didn’t mean—”

Wei Wuxian claps his hands over his ears and shakes his head.

“Nope, nope, stop talking,” he says loudly, his eyes squeezed shut. “You can’t say things like that, Lan Zhan!”

Lan Wangji’s heart sinks. He opens his mouth to apologise again, but Wei Wuxian interrupts him to waggle a finger in his direction.

“You can’t just say things like that,” he whines again. “That’s not fair. It just makes me want to run over there and kiss you, but we can’t until tomorrow and maybe not even then because of this social distancing thing and that’s—not—fair!”

He scrunches up his face in a way that makes him look stupidly adorable and Lan Wangji really, really wants to jump him. But he doesn’t, because he still has some semblance of self-control.

“I’m going to kiss you,” he says instead, louder, firmer, and feels a surge of satisfaction when Wei Wuxian wails and covers his face. “First thing tomorrow.”

-

(He does. Multiple times. Caution be damned.)

Notes:

Okay, so this is just for fun and isn’t mean to be a reflection of what it’s actually like to be in quarantine/isolation. I also haven’t had much dorm experience besides 6 months in Japan about 9 years ago, so none of this is accurate. The 14 day period is based on what Australia’s recommended as a safe isolation period, so that’s what I’m going with.

Stay safe and healthy everyone!

// buy me a ko-fi //

[Read on AO3]

[cosmictulips]

🔥 🔥 🔥 unpopular opinion astrology edition pls lmao

*cracks knuckles*

I'm so sorry lol

🔥 I hate most if not all astro observation posts. No offense -no there's full offense to this- it's VERY biased and based on .. ?? what observations LOL what y'all study? there's no way to honestly prove observations because you can't just look out and know every persons chart that you interact with on a daily basis. there's a lot of guess work unless you're stupidly good at guessing peoples rising signs or sun signs.

I mean I guess it could be based off research that you do through books and other medias but that's not the case with 99 percent of the posts here on tumblr. and quite frankly I'm annoyed by almost all of it.

Use actual psychology and state it. it's more accurate, and fun. but not everyone is into studying body language. I know. and I know people state it's their personal opinions but listen, we all got opinions. doesn't make shit true and people REPEAT what others say!

🔥 Leos are annoying and I have such a hard time with them. that's just it. EVERY Leo I know --and let's make this clear I know they're leos based on fb info and they tell me. they always gotta tell me LOL -- loves to talk about themselves. but not in the way you might think. and that's where I both love and hate them.

I love hearing people talk about themselves and they do just that LOL. I get a lot of fun stories from leos and I get some cool knowledge from them.

but MAN y'all be some big ass hypocrites. there's one leo who "preaches" peace and tolerance but then will go post some weird ass shit that directly contradicts it. Like, I get talking just to talk but you can't be that oblivious can you?

But I think that can be said for most ... fixed signs. as a fixed sign, I think we just... do that lol.

🔥 I hate what social media has done to astrology LOL. I never liked the "uwu I'm a scorpio so I'm a bitch" thing. not when it was a meme, not ironically, not now especially. astrology is the LITERAL story of the stars and we've taken it and thrown it around and it makes people who do this shit professionally seem like children.

No Linda, you have NO basic understanding of what it means to be a libra and you telling me that "you're all about fairness and peace" just proves to me that you REALLY don't know much about being a libra and you need to actually study the chart and not listen to tik toks.

I literally can't fucking stand it.

And like, just in general! I really hate how social media has just squashed the whole idea of astrology. and people think it's this basic ass thing and ME OVER HERE okay and others who have been doing this for YEARS ARE JUST MOCKED BUT YOU TELL ME SUSAN IF YOU CAN LOOK IN THE NIGHT SKY AND NAVIGATE IT AND READ SOMEONE TO FILTH.

TELL ME SUSAN CAN YOU DO THAT? CAN YOU TELL ME HOW MY VIRGO ASS MOON PSYCHOANALYZES MY EVERY MOVEMENT OR ARE YOU JUST GONNA FIST PUMP THE MOONS ASS AND BE LIKE HAHA YOURE SUCH A TAURUS.

🔥 CUSPS. I CAN"T STAND WHEN SOMEONE TELLS ME THEY'RE ON A CUSP. FIGURE IT OUT SWEET PEA. YOU ARE NOT TWO SIGNS. IF YOU DO YOUR ASTRO CHART AND IT SAYS ZERO DEGREES LEO THEN GUESS WHAT HONEY BUTT? YOU'RE A LEO.

you can feel like you belong to the other signs but that can be explained! and learned! and you can learn how to feel more of your sign! so stop saying astrology is fake because you can't take FIVE FUCKING MINUTES AND GOOGLE SOMETHING.

the only person who has bedazzled me is my friend. she's a full on leo with a sag moon and I swear to the gods she's a cancer. YOU CANNOT TELL ME OTHERWISE. she has NO cancer energy but being around her you're just like "how da fuck are you not a cancer". but that's a different conversation.

Idk why I used Leo in that example. I get it mostly with pisces cusps and gemini cusps people.

[veronicasanders]

(School of Rock inspired) if you were a questionable substitute teacher in charge of a group of kids and you were going to teach them about music, what genre would it be and who would you teach them about?

OMG I love this question for so many reasons. But maybe mostly because for me, this is literally zero percent hypothetical.

I used to work in an elementary school (as an instructional assistant and in the after-school program), and I also worked as a sub--you can decide how questionable after you hear my answer! 😂

So, I mostly worked with Kindergarten through 3rd graders (about ages 5-9), and I taught ALL of them, every single one, Madonna's Vogue. And if you actually read the lyrics, they are absolutely age-appropriate with an uplifting message, so I feel pretty good about that.

I also made a playlist that we used for dance parties in the after-school program and while I don't still have it (or totally remember everything on it), it was a very eclectic mix of pop, Motown, classic rock/folk, R&B, soul, show tunes, songs I thought of as "Bar Mitzvah standards," some actual kids' songs, TV theme songs, and probably also whatever random stuff I had pirated from AudioGalaxy back in the glory days. It was about 200 songs altogether.

*Okay, my parents FaceTimed me and it was a long-ass call and while we spoke, I tried finding most of what I remembered and making it into a Spotify playlist so here you go, a look into my chaotic mind. The songs are a lot of what I remember with some variations, although I DO remember that it began and ended with Vogue so that's accurate.

[huaxxian]

Stone Skipping || CH2 ; 𝘢 𝘣𝘪𝘨 𝘣𝘳𝘰𝘵𝘩𝘦𝘳'𝘴 𝘳𝘦𝘵𝘶𝘳𝘯

Half a year had passed since [name] and Senku had been revived at the very same day. Experiments were conducted, their home slightly improved, but the two had still made no other progress with the revival serum. Despite that, neither had given up, instead opting to continue trying.

The two teenagers had been gathering sticks in an area near their home, each having an axe of their own. “[nickname],” Senku looks down at their form, who sat in the very same branch he was standing on. Said person looked up at him, tilting their head. “You brought the basket, right?” They nodded in response, silently pointing at the basket below their branch. He nodded thankfully, adjusting the sticks gathered in his arms.

He could see them move to take it from his grasp, but he gave a pointed look, saying, “Don’t you dare take it. I already made you carry three other baskets back home.” A pout overtook their face, but nonetheless, they nodded and sat back down as he cut even more sticks from the upper branches.

rustle, rustle

step, step, step

[name] perked up at the sounds, turning their head to look past Senku’s form. Not even a moment later, an oh-so-ever-familiar form popped from the bushes as he pushed it aside, breathing heavily. The smile on their face widened as Taiju’s eyes widened at the sight of the duo. “S-Senku..! [nickname]!” His eyes teared up.

I found them! They’re alive!

From beside the shorter teenager, Senku smirked at him. “Kukuku, so you finally woke up, eh? You great big oaf, stop making your sibling worry for so long. You don’t want to see them with white hair so quickly, now do you?” He quickly moved down from the tree, offering his hand to [name] after, helping them down.

Immediately upon the teenager’s safe landing on the floor, Taiju started wailing, opening his arms to hurriedly give a hug their way. Not even concerned in the slightest, all [name] did was open their arms, beaming right back.

"You're alive, you're alive!! Senku, [nickname]! I c-can't believe it.."

Well, if [name] wasn't the slightest bit concerned, Senku most definitely was. Placing a foot on his face, the male hurriedly pushed the shortest out of Taiju's way, which ended up being behind him. "Don't hug either of us when you're buck naked, idiot! I'll fucking kill you!" [name] gave his back a pat, shaking their head. "Sen-chan, don't be too mean. You know it's completely just how Tai-chan is." They smiled, turning to the said person. "It's nice to see you after so long.. I would give you a hug, but.. I don't think Sen-chan would let me."

Taiju returned his sibling figure's smile. "It's okay! I get it.." He scratches his head sheepishly, laughing it off. "I think?" They giggled in response, motioning their head to follow them, which he did. Starting their trek back home, Senku spoke, "As of today, it's October 5th, in the year 5738 AD. How long you planning on sleeping in, huh?"

He pointed at [name], who was beside him, skipping as they went. "We've been awake and working for over a half a year now." Taiju blinked in surprise, the information slowly processing in his brain as seconds passed. "Huh?" The brawn of the group looked over to the other brain, confusion evident on his face. "How does Senku know just precisely what the date is..?"

[name] closed their eyes and smiled at him. "Sen-chan just counted, is all." Senku picked at his ear, scoffing. "As if there's another way of keeping track."

Another slow moment of processing.

"..So then, inside that darkness.. the whole time, you.." He glanced at [name] once more. "Did you too..?" His tone of voice had softened considerably, and so had his features. They shook their head. "It was just him, and I knew even then." They smiled and looked forward as Senku pushed aside the branches ahead of them.

"Even if I was able to wake up through sheer willpower alone.. If I were to wake up without means of survival in the midst of winter and with no food supply, it'd be game over. That's why, in order to survive, it was essential that I start in spring."

"That's also precisely why Sen-chan needs an accurate calendar," [name] added, "He wouldn't be able to know otherwise, and luck would be too much of a risk to depend on." Taiju placed a hand under his chin, opening his mouth to ask another question when Senku jerked his head to the front. "Hey, we're here. Don't just stand around gawking, get your ass over here and help out."

Brown eyes widened in astonishment. It wasn't no fancy house, but it was stable and enough. A simple rack made of sticks and vines leaned on the tree's huge trunk, holding several stone spears. "I haven't had enough manpower. [nickname] was of great help, but I didn't want to burn them out than what was necessary. That'd be stupid, I'd be working the only other person in this world death. It took up to an entire day of just drawing up life and survival plans on my own, while they hunted for food and materials. To progress forward into some kind of civilization from here.." He trailed off, glancing behind him to where the two stood, listening to his explanation.

"We've been waiting for you all this time," Taiju pointed to himself, confusion heavily lacing his face. "Yes, you, damnit Taiju. We waited for you because we were both ten billion percent sure that you were alive!" [name] walked forward, now beside the scientist. "You decided to tell Yuzu-chan about your feelings prior to the petrification, and we both knew Tai-chan well enough to know that you wouldn't give up after deciding so."

"Especially not after being cut off in the middle of a man's resolve," he huffed and smirked. "You weren't ball-less to the point of giving up and throwing in the towel after just a measly thousand years!"

Taiju looked down, clenching his fist. It was silent for a few seconds, but as always, with them, it doesn't last long. The fiery determination they had gotten accustomed to seeing had returned ten-fold, and they could only stare as he agreed.

"You're damned right!"

The scientist of the quartet looked over at his assistant. "Can ya get him some damn clothes already?" His nose scrunched in disgust as he pointed shakily at the muscular student, earning a confused and completely innocent look in return. [name] laughed at his obvious disgruntlement, nodding. "I'll go get clothes for Tai-chan!" They waved before carefully climbing their so-called ladder and hurrying inside.

◇─◇──◇─────◇──◇─◇

It didn't take long before Taiju had gotten his clothes, and before [name] was forced to rest by the one and only scientist of the group. The two had bickered back and forth repeatedly; Senku insisted that they take a break, since they apparently wouldn't be getting a lot even with Taiju around. Despite his confusion, Taiju agreed with this, making them reach a compromise.

[name] would rest just as the two wanted them to, but not up in the hut. Instead, they'd be napping on a covered area on the ground near the fire Senku was trying to make.

"When we need to use our heads.. I'll leave the thinking up to the two of you, Senku." Taiju glanced at his napping sibling. "And when we need to use our bodies.. you leave that to me." Senku glanced over as well. They looked comfortable enough, not at all irritated by the grass or the fire crackling nearby. Sleeping like a baby, they simultaneously thought, amused.

Senku turned towards Taiju once more. The time humanity took to climb from the stone age to our previous civilization.. was two million years. But, we're going to dash all the way back to the top all at once. "We'll take back the world and I'll identify the scientific cause on why we turned into stone, and how we were revived.. with the help of [name]."

Careful not to shout as he usually does, Taiju nodded and added, "And then.. I'll save Yuzuriha!"

"Three high school kids.. are going to build civilization from zero. We'll become the Adam and Eve of this world." Senku smirked widely, standing up and placing his hands on his waist. "Now, things are starting to get exciting!"

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

The two were calm and quite frankly, inspired by each other's goals, only to panic as [name] sleepily moved around, adjusting their place during their sleep. They covered each other's mouths and stared worriedly down at the shortest of them three, but fortunately, they didn't wake up. Taiju and Senku looked at each other and nodded, vowing not to cause anymore noise.

Senku pointed at their tree house and mouthed, "Bring them up." The other caught on to this instantly and carefully scooped them up in his arms, making sure that they were comfortable and left asleep. Then, without much difficulty, Taiju brought them upstairs, his friend following in tow. He placed them down on their make-shift bed, pulling the extra animal skin they had used as a blanket over them not long after, patting their head affectionately.

Taiju blinked and turned to Senku. "Wait, so was it just you guys this whole time?" The male in question raised his eyebrow. "Yeah, it's just been us." Taiju stared at him, expecting him to say something. "Why are you staring at me like that for??" He opened his mouth, pointing as he whispered, "You didn't tell them about your fee—"

Senku quickly put a zip on his mouth, grumbling.

◇─◇──◇─────◇──◇─◇

The next morning, [name] had woken up to Senku and Taiju still sleeping. It must be pretty early still.. They pushed the blanket away from their form, standing up silently. The teen carefully walked down the ladder, keeping an eye out on the two until they were out of their vision. A yawn escaped their mouth as they stretched their arms and shoulders, shaking their head as they did. What to do..?

[eye color] eyes looked around. They could go hunting for food like mushrooms and animals, but it would be more efficient for Taiju to do it, because he was literal brawn. Though, maybe I should come with Tai-chan later on if he does end up gathering food.. He might take poisonous mushrooms along. [name] could make more jars or baskets, but Senku would most definitely scold them for working too hard. Again.

Honestly, they can't see what he's talking about.

So instead, they opted to walk towards the high school primate's statue. If they could remember correctly, which they could, Tsukasa Shishio's statue was not too far from Yuzuriha and the camphor tree.

True to their memory, it really wasn't far. No animals in sight, nor any other statues in his area. Nature's green, green, and more green is all that could be seen. Pretty, [name] smiled to themselves, gathering the bunch of dahlias and other flowers into their arms. Without much struggle at all, they weaved the bunch into a gorgeous flower crown, one that would surely fit snugly on Tsukasa's head.

They brought it on the male's head, fixing the vines and the petals softly, making sure that his vision wasn't obscured whatsoever. Next, they took a few steps back, admiring their work. As I thought, it does fit Tsuka-chan. [name] nodded in approval and sat down on a nearby root, humming a song they especially liked from back then.

I wonder how everything became like this.. A time-lapse would be interesting to see.

They looked down on the dirt. It was devoid of rocks, unlike the last few areas they've been in. Upon realizing, the teen immediately takes a stick and begins drawing on the ground. Three pairs of nubs.. three heads too. Leek for hair, spiky hair, wavy hair.. Rocket ship. Proud, they grinned and tilted their head, staring down at their work.

It wasn't the best of art, of course. It was merely three little chubby figures that represented the trio that they so deeply treasured. Their proud green faded, and soon, a frown had taken its place. Something's missing.. Quickly, [name] erased the rocket ship outline with their foot to make space. Then, without a shadow of a doubt, they added one more figure.

Long hair and buffy arms.. It's Tsuka-chan!

The grin from before returned anew. The rocket ship outline was quickly drawn again, and for this time, they were satisfied.

"I wonder if Tai-chan is already awake.. or Sen-chan.." They yawned and stood up, brushing away the not-so imaginary dirt around of their skirt. [eye color] eyes glanced behind to check on the statue one last time before smiling. "I'll see you soon, Tsuka-chan.."

With that, they turned back, walking back home.

◇─◇──◇─────◇──◇─◇

When they had arrived, the two were already awake and kicking, arranging their respective areas. Taiju had noticed them first, and with a happy shout, had alerted Senku as well. "You're back," the scientist nodded towards them in greeting. In contrast to his reaction, Taiju immediately got down from their little hut and bounded towards his sibling, hugging them tightly.

"Keep hugging them like that and they'll run out of air, you big idiot." Senku retorted as he followed suit, albeit less enthusiastically and more calmly. [name] only smiled in return, patting the taller on the back. "Big oaf, you up for gathering food?" Enthusiastically, the male in mention nodded his head, quickly taking a basket from nearby. [eye color] eyes glanced at the scientist, as if waiting.

Feeling their expectant stare, Senku snickered and picked at his ear with his pinky. "Of course, you're joining him too [nickname]. Keep him out of trouble, and make sure the idiot doesn't get himself attacked or poisoned." He pressed a hand against his mouth, as if trying to block the snickers.

Not that he was actually trying, though. It was actually the opposite.

Satisfied and amused, [name] closed their eyes and smiled, taking a basket as well. Taiju immediately dashes off, leaving a trail of dust behind him, and causing it to spread everywhere. [name] coughed and looked away from all the sand and dust before waving at the scientist. "We'll make sure not to take too long, Sen-chan.."

Senku gave another nod before turning away. The [hair color]-haired teen hurried, and with some effort, was able to catch Taiju before he could get too far from them.

"[nickname], what should we gather first?" [eye color] eyes looked around cautiously, taking in the environment. From what they could tell, there were some pigs nearby. The rustling as well as their familiar grunts is what gave it away. They quickly pressed a finger to their mouth, to which Taiju immediately silenced himself, waiting for their next order.

"There are pigs nearby. We don't know where the mushrooms are at right now, and since the pigs seem to be a closer choice, let's go with that.." [name] spoke as softly as they could, but loud enough for Taiju to still understand their message. He nodded in determination and moved to single-handedly take any pig on, but stopped as they placed a pale hand on their arm, halting him in his position. He looked towards his sibling in confusion, tilting his head.

[name] smiled at him and shook their head, motioning him to stay still, so he did. Taiju watched curiously as the teen quietly grabbed onto a branch and pulled their upper body up, causing them to now stand. Surprisingly enough, despite all the movement, the rustle of leaves seemed natural, as if it was just a rustle of the wind and not a teenager climbing a tree. He could only watch as [name] looked down at him from their position above, saying, "Please stay here, Tai-chan.. I'll bring them to you, so brace yourself to catch one or two, okay?"

Taiju beamed up at them. "Okay." He responded, lowering his stance and opening his arms wide. His sibling smiled at his determination and switched from tree to tree, getting closer to the area of the pigs, as evidenced by the growing sound of grunts. Few adults.. few young ones, [name] mused to themselves. Some squeals were pitched, but majority weren't.

I can't overwhelm Tai-chan with too many pigs. I can't trap them when they're this close either. The very best I can do is to get one or two younger pigs.. But how do I? They glanced around. They moved to another tree, one that was to the left of the pigs. Tai-chan is to the right. The pigs can't move to the north, there's no entrance or exit there. It's blocked. [name] quickly stood still and observed keenly from above.

There were four adults, but only two piglets to be seen. Sen-chan would be satisfied with one, or at the very most, two of them.

And so, they formulated a plan.

Without further a do, they dropped from the tree, not bothering to cover the noise. The pigs became alert, and soon enough, their eyes had caught on to the teen's form. They grew increasingly loud in sound and scattered, moving towards their left, the other remaining direction for escape. Quickly reacting, [name] ran towards the two mini-groups (stomping and making loud noise with their feet all the while), forcing the piglets to separate from their adults. This time, they moved towards Taiju's direction, just as they had planned.

[name] immediately began creating even more noise, as well as increasing their speed. In panic, the pigs hurried even closer towards Taiju's direction.

Any moment now. [eye color] eyes made contact with familiar brown ones, and they nodded. Taiju shouted as he tackled the two piglets into his grasp, making the shorter of the two smile and stop abruptly. With heavy breathing, they helped him place one piglet in each of their baskets.

"That was a good idea, [nickname]!" Taiju laughed and gave them a particularly hard pat on the back in congratulations, causing them to lose all the air they had regained and double over, coughing all the while.

"Ack— I'm sorry [nickname]!!"

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.

"Wow, you guys got so much," Senku stared down at the two's baskets, which now sat on the floor. "You got some crazy cheats going with your endurance there, Taiju.." He trailed off as he glanced to his assistant. "You didn't just dash wherever did you? [nickname] looks like they went through a hurricane." The scientist laughed as he pointed at them.

He wasn't wrong there. The poor [hair color]-haired teen had their hair all over their face, with tangles way more than they'd like. Leaves, petals, and even sand had gotten into their hair as well; Senku could only wonder what the hell Taiju had put them through to come back this haggard. [name] only smiled patiently as Taiju turned red in embarrassment, causing him to laugh even more.

"He did exactly that, actually.." Their words only made Taiju shout apologies, to which they shook their head at in amusement. "I couldn't stop him at all, sorry Sen-chan.." They chuckled and jokingly bowed their head in apology. Senku snickered again and walked towards them, patting away all the sand away from their hair. He removed the leaves and petals along the way, tugging gently at the strands that had gotten tangled.

"Don't you worry about it at all. I can't blame you when he's like this." He ignored Taiju's pouting at the side and only continued fixing his [hair color]-haired friend's head. It didn't take much arranging to actually clean [name] up, and soon enough, all was well. They smiled at him gratefully and he returned it slightly before backing away and moving towards the baskets.

Taiju watched in curiosity as he sat on the ground, expecting him to do something completely different, only to see him blatantly separating what they had found. [name], on the other hand, watched in amusement at their brother's reaction as Senku began listing them all off. "Amanita virosa, poisonous! Hypsizygus tessellatus, brown clamshell, edible! Amanita muscaria, Fly agaric, poisonous! Can't you just tell that thing's no good?! It looks like it came from Mario!"

With every mentioned name, Taiju's confused and aghast expression worsened, making them chuckle. "Calm down, Sen-chan.. That was a pretty good haul for the first time. I'm sure Tai-chan will take that into mind next time?" The two looked over to him. One stare was filled with doubt, and the other was one of utter patience and belief. Taiju doesn't respond, only choosing to blink at them in confusion. Senku sighed, "He probably won't, you know. Oh well, I'll bid you good luck when the time comes."

The scientist takes a few of the edible mushrooms and placed them on the sticks over the fire. The trio surrounded the fire they had made in silence, waiting for Senku's word. He first handed a decent-sized one over to Taiju, then proceeded to give an even bigger mushroom to the other teen. [name] blinked slowly as Senku gave them a stern glance. "Get some more fat in your bones, you look like you could get blown away by the wind any moment now."

From beside the [hair color]-haired teen, Taiju also added, "You always ate too less during lunch time too! Get some more food!" He immediately begins handing more mushrooms over to them, with Senku following right away. "I don't think I can stomach t-this much, you two.." [name] gently pushed the food away and just stuck with the one the scientist had given them. "But, I guess I can try eating this one at least..?" they smiled.

It wasn't the best compromise, but it satisfied the two males enough to leave them alone for now. Taiju took the first bite, making [name] and Senku stare expectantly. "D-Delicious!" He shouted in glee, "What'd you season these with?!" Senku grinned and begin taking normal-sized bites into his food as well.

"Just regular old salt that [nickname] and I extracted from the sea water. With just salt added, humans can eat just about anything. Salt is also indispensable when preserving food, and probably was the primitive man's greatest discovery." He explained. Taiju, upon finishing his mushroom, thanked the male whole-heartedly. "For all the things things I'd never be able to figure out! Both of you. I'll repay you in kind with determination and strength!"

He then finished his food and stood up, puffing his chest out in determination. Without even a warning, he took a basket and scurried off, shouting, "All right!! Time to go gather on the back side!"

Senku had opened his mouth to tell him that it was okay, but he had already been too far from their sight. He shook his head and turned to his side, where they sat with an amused smile and a still completely unfinished mushroom. "I don't get how you can keep up with him. He has too much stamina, he has got to be cheating with something." He grumbled, and gathered the sticks his friend had left into his hands. "Should you really be asking me that, Sen-chan? You have known them longer than I have, if anything, I'm surprised you've survived this long.." [name] chuckled and continued eating.

"Speaking of which, the back side is near towards the cave where you came from, right, Sen-chan?" The scientist hummed in confirmation. "Yeah, why?" He glanced over his shoulder, seeing them stand up and brush away any dirt that could have gotten on their skirt. "Maybe we should follow Tai-chan, he might assume there's someone else out there aside from us if he sees the pot.." Not expecting it, Senku let out an amused scoff. "I wouldn't be surprised if he did, he is a big oaf after all. Sure, let's go. His mind can go to absurd places and it'd be easier to explain when we're there."

[ Author's Note ] // So far, these are all the chapters I've pulled from quotev. As of this very moment, I'm working on two separate chapters: a 100-hearts special, and the next regular chapter. For those of you who found this in Tumblr, I made a poll before on what the readers would like for the special. As it turns out, 'Crossover Traveling' won. No one really expressed what they wanted aside from my friends, who I asked personally. I ended up choosing Kimetsu no Yaiba as your destination. That's all for this note, thank you so much for reading, and for your time!

[mst3kproject]

The Neanderthal Man

Since I'm taking a break from fishmen, I might as well let Bigfoot catch up a bit.  The Neanderthal Man isn't exactly a Bigfoot movie, but it’s along the same lines and its entire starring cast has MST3K pedigrees.  Robert Shayne was in Indestructible Man and Teenage Caveman. Richard Crane was Rocky Jones, Space Ranger! Beverly Garland was in Swamp Diamonds and Gunslinger. Even the composer, Albert Glasser, wrote music for Invasion USA, Last of the Wild Horses, and almost all of MST3K’s Bert I. Gordon movies.

Some little mountain town in the middle of the Sierras (which the Portentous 50's Narrator takes some trouble to tell us is a primeval place where 'the defacing hand of civilization has fallen but lightly') is having a rash of saber-toothed tiger sightings!  At first these are laughed off, but when the game warden himself sees one cross the road in the middle of the night, it's time to do something about it.  The warden shows a cast pawprint to Dr. Ross Harkness in Los Angeles, who is interested enough to come up and see for himself. Local Mad Scientist Dr. Groves pooh-poohs the whole thing, which is enough to tell me that we're not dealing with a local cryptid here.  Somebody is making prehistoric monsters.

So... I may not have actually run out of movies, but I seem to be running out of plots, because this is a remarkably similar movie to Monster on the Campus. The major difference between the two films is that Dr. Blake turned himself into a caveman by accident, while Dr. Groves here is doing it on purpose.

Another difference is that Monster on the Campus' story, while silly, was linear – events escalated in a way that felt logical, and there were reasons why things happened when and where they did.  By contrast, The Neanderthal Man feels like a first draft.  At the beginning of the film, we're dealing with the saber-toothed tigers that Groves has been creating by injecting cats with his de-evolution serum.  We hear about these slaughtering game and livestock, and it seems like only a matter of time before they move on to human beings.  The beginning of the film is quite upfront about the fact that Groves is responsible, too, as it is only mildly mysterious in its depiction of one of the creatures escaping his lab.

Sometimes the saber-tooths are represented by an actual tiger, usually filmed from behind or at a great distance so nobody has to put the prosthetic teeth on it.  They do have prosthetic teeth, but they're only visible in a couple of shots. Imagine being at a bar and some guy tells you his job is sticking fake fangs on real tigers for a caveman movie!  For close-ups, there's a hilarious puppet head that looks like the sort of thing you'd see mounted on a frat house wall as a joke.  The director had the sense not to linger on this in motion shots, but later we see still photographs Groves has supposedly taken of his experimental subjects and they're even stupider-looking than we imagined.

Anyway, this goes on for a while with rising action, as the game warden goes to get Harkness and they manage to shoot one of the animals, only to have it vanish from the kill site when they try to show it to Groves (the movie never bothers to explain how that happened, incidentally. The ending suggests that the creatures change back when they die, but there's definitely no dead kitty cat at the scene, either).  The whole movie could easily have just had the cats and their creator as the antagonists, perhaps even ending the same way as Dr. Groves proves his work to the other characters by injecting himself. That's not what happens, though.  Instead, the story mostly forgets about the cats one we find out Groves has also been carrying on human experiments.

(Before himself, Groves' first experimental subject was his disabled Latina housekeeper.  Another series of photos show her half-transformed into a cavewoman who for some reason is wearing drag queen false eyelashes.  And as long as I'm talking about the movie being gross and bigoted, there's a bit where a woman is violently raped.  This happens off camera, but the audience is not allowed to entertain any illusions about it.)

The problem is that before we see him give himself an injection in the arm, we have had absolutely no indication that Groves has been giving his serum to anything besides the cats! Cats are stealthy, cryptic creatures and if one of those has been seen wandering around killing things, then surely a full-on caveman beating people to death would not be able to stay out of sight!  If what we were seeing were the first time Groves had tried the formula on himself then that would be an explanation, but his notes reveal that he's been doing it for so long that he's on the verge of losing control of the transformation and permanently reverting to a pre-human status, as indeed he does for the climax.  Much like the stupid dinosaur in The Beast of Hollow Mountain, the movie's main monster is given no build-up whatsoever!

There's worse yet, though.  The main characters, Dr. Harkness and Groves' daughter Jan, are barely involved in the 'caveman' part of the plot. They get phone calls about the various murders that Groves is committing in caveman form, and they snoop around the lab to figure out things the audience already knows.  The same story could have been told without them, perhaps with the game warden and the hunter as protagonists, and it would probably have been more interesting. The script also repeatedly has Dr. Groves wander in and bluster about how the tiger sightings are hallucinations and tall tales, which seems a little unnecessary when we already know he's responsible. The film-makers can't seem to decide whether they want us to know that or not.

Dr. Groves wears glasses.  Maybe the reason his primitive alter-ego is angry and breaking shit (although it does politely open and close the window it climbs out of, which made me laugh) is because it can't see. This is also my theory about why the Hulk smashes, and what do you know?  In Avengers Endgame he's got Hulk-sized spectacles and only smashes when he's told!

The direction of The Neanderthal Man can probably best be described as 'serviceable'.  It shows us what's going on, but doesn't particularly add anything to the proceedings.  The 'Neanderthal' mask is immobile and uninteresting, not much better than somebody's Party City Sasquatch costume.  Even the eyes are just painted on, meaning the poor guy in the costume can’t do much because he can’t see where he’s going.

The dialogue is often very strange, with characters talking like they're in a Jules Verne novel. If only one person did this, it might seem like a character quirk – it works for Dr. Groves, for example – but it's everybody. Seeing the cat carcass is gone, Harkness declares, “I refuse to believe in the supernatural!  There must be some logical cause and effect to this unholy adventure!”  Groves' fiancee Ruth berates him for ignoring her, saying, “I want you, the man I once knew!  The good companion, the cheerful friend.  I want the happiness we once found in each other.”  It's bizarre to listen to, and often audibly awkward for the actors.

Monster on the Campus was kind of trying to be about how humanity must choose to evolve away from our inner savage, although the finale didn't bear that out.  There's a scene in The Neanderthal Man in which this movie seems to be trying to go in the opposite direction, saying that we were never savage to begin with.  Dr. Groves is speaking to a panel of scientists about the size of the brain in various 'primitive' species of human.  He points out that by the time we reached Homo erectus we were already working with four times the cerebral jelly of a chimpanzee, and argues that our ancestors would have been recognizably human in their behaviour and problem-solving capacity.

(Amusingly, his chart of human evolution includes Piltdown Man, which was proven to be a hoax literally a few months after this movie's release.  What makes this even more tragic for the writers is that their list of primitive humans seems to be the only place where they actually did any research.)

The problem with Dr. Groves' theory is that he already knows it's wrong. We soon learn that he's been experimenting on himself with his serum for a while already, and his notes show that he knows very well he regresses into a near-mindless animal.  The movie does not even try to reconcile these ideas.  If Groves were continuing his experiments in the hope that perfecting his serum would give him a more accurate reconstruction of ancient man, that would be one thing, but the script never goes there.

So now that we've had two 'man turns into caveman by injecting science juice' movies, of course I have to ask which one is better.  Monster on the Campus wasn't a good movie but it was definitely an improvement on The Neanderthal Man in several respects, and although I don't have any way to find out for certain, I suspect it was an intentional remake.  It's definitely more entertaining and gets bonus points for including the Meganeura dragonfly, but nothing in it is nearly as funny as The Neanderthal Man's fake tiger head.  I guess if you're gonna watch one or the other, stick to Monster on the Campus, but if you're gonna watch both, start with The Neanderthal Man and do them in chronological order, the better to spot the inspirations and references.

Before I go, a fun paleontology fact: current thinking is that the saber-toothed cat's eponymous fangs actually didn't show when it had its mouth closed!  There are zero cave paintings or ancient sculptures of a saber-tooth cat with teeth visible, and when scientists looked at the structure of the enamel in the canines, it suggested that in life the teeth were hidden by big, fleshy, St Bernard jowls.  Google 'smilodon lips' and behold how this looks fully three hundred percent more ridiculous than you're imagining.  I love nature.

[hellzyeahwebwielingessays]

Superior is INDEFENCIBLE! Part 1: Why MJ SHOULD have known ‘Peter’ was an imposter in Superior #2!

Part 2

I wanna talk about some of the comments made regarding Superior Spider-Man #2 on this podcast. It starts at the 18 minute mark.

The person who voiced the comments under discussion also had some follow up in a messageboard regarding the episode.

So first let’s define what those comments were. Basically it’s all a defence of Mary Jane’s obliviousness to Doc Ock pretending to be Peter in Superior #2. I say defence it’s more of a finger wagging/pointing at the people who had a problem with it and were calling it out.

Mary Jane Watson is not real so stop getting upset about her potentially being raped

If Doc Ock did rape her that wouldn’t be Marvel claiming that it’d be okay to rape people because Otto is a villain

He calls out someone who claimed that Doc Ock ‘technically’ raped Mary Jane by tricking her

If no one is having sex with anyone it is not rape

He tries to justify MJ’s obliviousness like this: Imagine being in a relationship with someone for many, many years. You guys break up and spend a lot of time apart not even in contact with one another and then a few years later you see each other again and hang out regularly in the same social group. There is still an unspoken distance between you two because you weren’t intimate to the same degree as you were when you were together. In that amount of time someone changes. In this case Peter he has had a lot of crazy Avengers adventures since he and MJ broke up. He’s a financially successful member of HORIZON labs, a fact that surprised MJ and hurt her because he did it without her. And now when MJ and peter were back together there has been a few years between the last time you two were together and Peter has done a lot of growing without you. Even though you hung around as friends you don’t act the same way around your friends as you do with an ex that you were now getting back together with.

He goes on to argue that MJ is noticing some differences in Peter that she is commenting upon.

He continues by addressing MJ’s deduction of Peter being the Chameleon in Spec #245.  He claims that there were big differences between that situation and Superior #2. Chameleon didn’t have Peter’s body, he was merely using a hologram of it so there’d be ore subtle differences. At the time Peter and MJ were married whereas in Superior #2 they were not. Otto could address any subtle difference MJ noticed by simply bringing up something only Peter would be aware of.

During Spec #245 and the Clone Saga Peter and MJ were more in tune with one another since they were married

‘Chameleon can't make himself as tall as Peter is....same weight....the voice will be similar but can't be 100 percent the same....Ock can though.’

So let’s unpack all this.

“Mary Jane Watson is not real so stop getting upset about her potentially being raped”

I trust I need not go into a detailed explanation about how emotional investment into fiction works.

Instead let’s consider this from a moral perspective. Many if not most female characters in Marvel and DC had gotten the short end of the stick and MJ circa 2013 (when this issue was released) perhaps more than many.

99% of the time rape in superhero fiction, especially to women, legitimately comes from a place of sexism or misogyny. The understandable sensitivity of the topic is such that it’s utterly repugnant to had milked it for cheap tension the way Marvel had done at the time.

And to do it with such a beloved and iconic character, the leading lady of the Spider-Man universe no less. No, that was simply out of order.

That’s not a ticking time bomb that should even BE in a Spider-Man story in the first place.

The PRINCIPLE of the matter is what most people were upset about.

“If Doc Ock did rape her that wouldn’t be Marvel claiming that it’d be okay to rape people because Otto is a villain”

Again, most people were not concerned over this.

What they were concerned about was the damage it’d do to MJ and Otto as characters were Marvel to go through with it and indeed the damage it wound up doing to Doc Ock specifically because he attempted  to rape MJ. Until a retcon is employed it will be forever canon that Doc Ock WOULD had raped MJ by deception if given the opportunity; a concept this poster denied on another thread just FYI.

But why would fans feel such a way? Why is Doc Ock doing that somehow worse than attempted mass murder with a nuclear bomb or orbital space technology?

Because everyone reading super hero comic books is totally awwere that death is not only reversible, but that within the context of DC and Marvel’s defined morality systems rape is a special kind of evil.

TVTropes lists off some infamous examples:

“Identity Crisis: Dr. Light was evil, but he wasn't evil until it was Ret-Conned that he had raped Sue Dibny in the JLA watchtower. Following the retcon, it's become standard practice to write Light as a serial rapist. Quoth Plastic Man: "It's like that's his power now."”

“He calls out someone who claimed that Doc Ock ‘technically’ raped Mary Jane by tricking her”

Okay. If someone did say that then they were in the wrong.

But Otto was still exploiting and violating Mary Jane’s sense of trust and emotional intimacy by preying upon her feelings for Peter.

Worse he violated her in other ways (in terms of privacy if nothing else) by accessing Peter’s memories of being intimate with Mary Jane.

The closest real world equivalent to this would be breaking stealing someone’s property breaking into it for the express purpose of seeing private photos given to them by their lover which you proceed to masturbate over…Whilst the person you’ve stolen from watches in horror and yells at you to stop…

Except in context it’s even worse than that because Otto literally feels  the sensation of Mary Jane’s body in spite of her never giving him consent to do that.

Maybe you could argue that is not rape or sexual violation. But it’s unequivocally some  form of serious ethical violation.

“If no one is having sex with anyone it is not rape”

Even if we said this statement is technically accurate (which can be debated depending on what counts as sex), the issue is one of violation  which can take many forms beyond just sexual violation.

“He tries to justify MJ’s obliviousness like this: Imagine being in a relationship with someone for many, many years. You guys break up and spend a lot of time apart not even in contact with one another and then a few years later you see each other again and hang out regularly in the same social group. There is still an unspoken distance between you two because you weren’t intimate to the same degree as you were when you were together. In that amount of time someone changes. In this case Peter he has had a lot of crazy Avengers adventures since he and MJ broke up. He’s a financially successful member of HORIZON labs, a fact that surprised MJ and hurt her because he did it without her. And now when MJ and Peter were back together there has been a few years between the last time you two were together and Peter has done a lot of growing without you. Even though you hung around as friends you don’t act the same way around your friends as you do with an ex that you were now getting back together with. “

This is the big one that needs discussing. First of all here is another poster who had some astute comments:

“While you made a good case for why Mary Jane would realistically not figure out right away that her beloved "Peter" was really Doc Ock, there were, however, two very big strikes against this.  In the first place, Dan Slott himself has repeatedly acknowledged that Mary Jane knows Peter better than anyone else.”

This is totally true and it even precedes Slott’s tenure too. She offered Peter insights into himself towards the end of BND and encouraged him to get with Carlie. 

Early into Slott’s run she advised him to tell Carlie to truth. 

She was able to inspire Peter into action during Spider-Island by pointing out he was still special in spite of everyone possessing his powers.

She reaffirmed his uniqueness after the crisis was resolved.

And she set his mind straight at the end of that story. In fact her big take away from this story was a greater  understanding of Peter because of her experiences saving the city with his powers.

She continued to connect with Peter and offer clear insights into his deepest inner nature in the ‘’I Killed Tomorrow’ arc.

She was one of the few people in ‘Ends of the Earth’ who had absolute faith in Peter to save the entire world from the Sinister Six. She was so confident that she exploited the lowered real estate prices due to the crisis and purchased a nightclub.

In the immediate aftermath of ‘Ends of the Earth’ she was again a confidant who offered him advice and understanding over his inner problems. Specifically his guilt regarding Silver Sable’s ‘death’ during the crisis.

She did this again in the ‘Alpha’ storyline, this time zeroing in on stuff connected to his childhood and Uncle Ben’s influence.

Now, we can (justifiably) take issue with the specifics of the above. We could argue they were out of character or misinformed or what had you.

But the point is that Slott was framing  Mary Jane as the person both closest to Peter and the person who didn’t just comparatively understand him best, but who simply got  him on an incredibly deep level.

And yet when inconvenient for the plot all that went out the window.

So Mary Jane was clearly  contradicting Slott’s own personal definition of her.

The astute poster continued.

“After all, she has known Peter was Spider-Man practically since day one, has been in a continuous on-again, off-again relationship ever since they first met, and has lived with him for years.  This is someone who, by all accounts, has been intimate with Peter on every single level.  Even after brief periods of separation, someone who has been that close with someone else is going to know things about them that other people would not.”

Again this is very on point. Prior to Brand New Day (let alone Superior) and across at least 5-10 years of their lives Mary Jane had known Peter Parker when:

He didn’t know she existed

He knew she existed but hadn’t met her

They had been acquaintances

They had been friends

They had been casually dating

The had been going steady

They had been serious

They had been drifting apart

They had drifted apart and become exs

They had been becoming friendly again

They had become friendly again

They were friendly but had awkward sexual/romantic tension

They were friendly but had not-awkward sexual/romantic tension

They had become confidants

They had become BFF

They were BFFs/confidants who had not very subtle romantic/sexual tension

They had been the above and were falling back in love

They had been the above but had fallen back in love but weren’t dating

They had been the above, had fallen back in love and were practically dating but in denial about it

They had been the above, had fallen back in love, were practically dating but only barely in denial about it at all, to the point where they were making each other breakfast in bed and locking lips

They had admitted their feelings to one another and become engaged

They had been married

They had been married and had major tensions

They had been married and separated

They had been married and were trying to maybe patch things up

They had been married and were back together and patching things up

They had been married and had successfully patched things up

And amidst all that they’d been expectant parents, grieved a miscarriage, she’d seen Peter pushed to a breaking point due to grief or mental instability.

Amidst all that Peter definitely changed. But outside or the above mentioned extenuating circumstances, he had literally NEVER acted like he had been acting whilst Otto was in control of his body.

In fact the Peter Parker she would’ve met again during the 1980s after they broke up the first time would’ve gone through FAR more growth and changes than the Peter between OMD and Superior. Shit it was during this time period where MJ was explicitly said to had been able to read Peter like a book.

Bear in mind this was when they hadn’t spent years of their life together and when she didn’t know the details of how/why he became Spider-Man. It was even written with the intent that she didn’t know at all. And Peter had not yet learned MJ’s own origins and thus become more emotionally intimate with her either.

Equally it can be argued that Peter had changed and grown much more between between their trial separation under Mackie and their reconciliation under JMS when he’d become a school teacher, told Aunt May the truth and considered his powers having mystical roots.

Yet he didn’t act this drastically  differently.

He is literally not even talking  the same way he used to before.

Even if you act differently among friends or colleagues than privately with your partner, the idea that MJ believes that because of Avengers adventures Peter suddenly speaks totally differently is ridiculous. It’s even more ridiculous when you consider how she can observe him speaking similarly outside  of interactions with herself.

Not to mention she is friends and roommates with Peter’s most recent ex-Carlie Cooper and observed their interactions whilst they were dating. Peter didn’t act this way and Carlie could confirm that for her.

Additionally, let’s consider MJ has some psychology and acting training, meaning she’s very  good at getting inside people’s heads to understand them. A great example comes from ‘Soul of the Hunter;

And she was able to sense something was fishy about Norman Osborn when she met him. This occurred when she didn’t know he was the Green Goblin and Norman himself had amnesia and didn’t know it himself.

Plus she’s extremely socially savvy and so you would imagine she’d be great at picking up on subtle behaviours like body language, etc. Even if Doc Ock had Peter’s body he would be unlikely to carry himself the same way simply because he’d had no idea how  Peter would had carried himself in the first place.

So MJ wouldn’t need to had been married or living with Peter for a while to pick up on the nuances of Otto’s behaviour;  not that he’s even being nuanced or subtle in the first place.

But it goes even deeper than this.

Peter and Mary Jane were not like a regular couple. And no that isn’t some Disney-esque miracle love at first sight nonsense either, it’s simple psychology.

As the astute poster noted, the length of time MJ has known Peter and been close to him would mean she’d be able to see through Otto.

But it’s not just that they were friends, confidants, lovers or life partners during this time.

Peter and MJ are one part romantic couple, one part war veterans.

In real life soldiers who fought side-by-side with one another, especially if the situation was very traumatic, forge an extremely potent mental/emotional bond. This is obviously accentuated if there was a pre-existing positive relationship, like if they were friends or family.

A very good albeit fictional example would be the relationship between Captain America and Bucky in the MCU.

Peter and MJ already had a generally positive relationship before they began to fall in love with one another. And they were one another’s best friends by the time they were married. Under Slott’s pen it was also clear that they were one another’s closest companions prior to Superior.

The deep bonds between them would’ve been accentuated through shared tragedies and deeply personal experiences. These would have included their respective origins which echoed one another’s lives growing up. But more poignantly it included enduring emotional pain and trauma together.

Gwen’s death which was the catalyst for their romance.

‘Kraven’s Last Hunt’ which forced the pair to confront their greatest fears now that they were newlyweds.

The death of their child, which is an experience that can often result in the ending of a couple’s relationship. In Peter and MJ’s case they grew closer as a result.

Their life on the run after Peter’s identity went public and Aunt May was dying in a coma. Peter and MJ had options of escaping the situation at the cost of their relationship but instead reaffirmed their commitment to one another.

These are just some  of the myriad of traumatic and testing life experiences Peter and MJ shared together. Experiences that they helped one another get through. The pattern of behaviour for the two of them was clear. Emotionally or mentally traumatic situations made them grow closer. And quite apart from traumatic situations there is an element of physical  danger heavily involved in this too.

There have been countless times MJ has been rescued by, or relied upon Peter to rescue her from danger.

Peter himself has been rescued by Mary Jane’s physical intervention.

And like him she’s been more than willing to make sacrifices in her life for his sake. This can be something like her career opportunities but have also included risking her life to see him from harm.

But more frequently her presence in his life as ben an empowering force that has enabled him to save himself, a fact he has actively attributed to Mary Jane.

So yes. Peter and Mary Jane are incredibly  comparable to soldiers. Just soldiers who happen to also be in love with one another too.

It’s not just the mere existence of these traumatic bonding experiences either but the high frequency  with which they have occurred. Any one  of the things Peter and MJ have had to endure might have broken the strongest of couples, the best of friends. But so many of them? Seeing their lover/friend Gwen Stacy, their mutual friend Harry Osborn, their brother/friend Ben Reilly and  their baby die? All within a 10 year time span?

No.

It is just absurd to strictly apply how the majority of regular couples behave to these two.

And it is equally absurd to argue that they within a mere year or two (during which time they were still in one another’s social circles half the time, still close friends, still confidants, AND had underlying romantic feelings for one another) that they’d fall so far out of synch.

Absurd that MJ could be so blind as honestly presume merely having adventures with the Avengers or becoming a successful scientist could have changed Peter so drastically. And changed him drastically only within the context of private romantic moments, not whilst he was interacting with anyone else.

Absurd that either of them could genuinely not tell an imposter when they see one. This in fact came up during the marriage more than once.

Obviously we have the Chameleon situation, but MJ within like a month of living with Peter she could easily tell (on a dark rainy night no less) that Kraven the Hunter wasn’t the real Spider-Man.

Sure, he was way more violent than Peter normally is. But in a then very recent arc Peter had gotten pretty violent when MJ was threatened.

And for the record MJ didn’t realize ‘Peter’ was an imposter after she witnessed Superior Spidey deliver a similarly violent beating in Superior #6.

During the Clone Saga Mary Jane confronted one of Peter’s clones and deduced him as a fraud.

However she immediately recognized Peter when she saw him. For context she was running for her life at the time, Aunt May’s funeral had been (at best) two days earlier, Peter had been arrested for murder immediately after the funeral, she’d been abducted (twice) by a scary new villain called Kaine and as far as she knew Peter had been locked up in jail, unaware of her plight.

Rationally it made no sense for her to presume the Spider-Man in front of her was the real guy. And yet she just knew because of the bond between them.

Shit, Aunt May deduced the Chameleon (who is a MASTER of disguise) was an imposter in spite of him being far more subtle than Otto was. She could tell simply because she had raised Peter, in spite of being in the dark about him being Spider-Man for years.

The astute poster corroborates further corroborates my points:

“Likewise, as I believe Zack pointed out, the changes "Peter" underwent since Amazing Spider-Man #698 weren't exactly subtle.  In fact, by the end of Superior Spider-Man #2, Mary Jane essentially acknowledges that Peter has changed so much that it seems as if he's become a completely different person.  Given all of her past experiences with Peter and how intimately involved she was in his life, wouldn't it stand to reason that she would logically conclude that if Peter is acting like a different person, then maybe he actually is a different person and not Peter?”

Let’s move onto the next bullet points.

“He goes on to argue that MJ is noticing some differences in Peter that she is commenting upon.”

“He continues by addressing MJ’s deduction of Peter being the Chameleon in Spec #245.  He claims that there were big differences between that situation and Superior #2. Chameleon didn’t have Peter’s body, he was merely using a hologram of it so there’d be ore subtle differences. “

“‘Chameleon can't make himself as tall as Peter is....same weight....the voice will be similar but can't be 100 percent the same....Ock can though.’”

I know I’m adding the final point here but it seemed appropriate.

Let’s consider the fact that Chameleon was merely making I seem like he had Peter’s body whilst Otto id in fact have Peter’s body. Thus MJ would pick up on the subtle differences.

Well first of all MJ would be picking up on various subtle and unsubtle behavioral  differences in Otto as I spoke about above.

Second of all this mentality does not fly. Partially because I am honestly struggling to remember a time in canon that anyone noticed physical differences between Chameleon and the genuine articles. Maybe I am forgetting something, but IIRC he impersonated Jameson and managed to fool both his old friends, colleagues and family members (including his wife).

Additionally the idea that there would even be subtle differences is extremely questionable because Chameleon at the time could perfectly recreate anyone he wanted. His powers and technology was such that he was able to simultaneously disguise himself as Peter Parker AND cast a secondary hologram of Doc Ock. He isn’t just wearing a disguise or hologram but rather physically transforming his body and clothing into a perfect replica of his target. These abilities are detailed in ASM #307.

He basically just needs to get a good enough look at his target and he can totally become  them.

In the story in question he had Spidey rendered unconscious, unmasked him and even had the time to drug, imprison and disguise him in an effort to make him believe he was someone else.

So yes, Chameleon 100% could’ve perfectly replicated Peter’s body. Height. Weight. Pimples. Everything sans his powers.

This means there were no physical differences MJ was picking up. She just figured it out the moment he kissed her and she knew the truth.

So MJ could tell Chameleon was an imposter in spite of him having identical lips to Peter due to his powers.  And yet MJ couldn’t tell Otto was an imposter when he kissed her in ASM #700.

This should be enough to call bullshit on the OP because of the sheer goddam number of times MJ must have realistically kissed Peter before.

But let’s say for the sake of argument that in the Chameleon story it was only because MJ had kissed Peter in recent memory that she could tell the difference. That she wrote off Otto’s kiss as there having been such a long time since they’d kissed that maybe it would just naturally feel different. This argument is critically wounded because less than a year before ASM #700 (in-universe) MJ and Peter did  share a kiss in the deplorable ‘One Moment in Time’ storyline.

Oh and let’s not forget that MJ was able to deduce Peter from his biologically identical  clones!...Twice!...Under stressful  life and death circumstances!...Whilst pregnant!

“At the time Peter and MJ were married whereas in Superior #2 they were not. Otto could address any subtle difference MJ noticed by simply bringing up something only Peter would be aware of.”

Yes MJ and Peter were married when she recognized his imposters. I’m going to address that point later as it’s more relevant there.

As for the latter point though it holds no water.

Yes, Otto could bring up something only  Peter would know about, like how he once proposed with a crackerjack box.

But Mary Jane is aware that she lives in a world of shape-shifting Skrulls, mutant telepaths and A.I. intelligences based upon the brain patterns of human beings. All of these concepts have included the imposters having private memories from their subjects.

Looking like someone else AND having access to their memories or private information is totally possible.

Not to mention an imposter could simply keep their subject locked up and torture them for information.

Ah, but none of those things originated from the Spider-Man brand. Surely it isn’t fair to use the entire Marvel universe for context because then nothing would ever make sense.

Okay, then let’s confine this to just Spider-Man specific characters and concepts.

Alien symbiotes are shape-shifters that form telepathic bonds with their hosts. They can often control their hosts’ bodies too. So not only might a symbiote be controlling Peter but it could very well be someone else with a symbiote, one who has bonded with Peter and thus has access to his memories.

The Winkler device was a machine that could brainwash people but also cause them to become irrational and violent. Ned Leeds and Captain Stacy were among it’s victims. It is possible Peter has been brainwashed by that or a similar device, hence he’s acting out of character but he’d still remember intimate things Either way it’d be a cause for concern.

Peter’s robot parents were shape shifting A.I. creatures, and the one based on Mary Parker actually risked her life to save Peter because she genuinely loved him. So, she had artificially inserted memories that could recreate a feeling as potent as love.

And here is the big one…fucking clones.

Peter’s clones have his memories up to the point the DNA sample from his body was separated. But the Jackal had methods of actually updating the memories of clones so they’d be identical in mind as well as body. This is how Ben Reilly, in spite of being grown from DNA donated before Gwen’s death, had all of Peter’s memories from after that point.

Not only does MJ know that but for a long time she believed the man she married was  a clone and that Ben Reilly was the original Peter Parker. As a result the man she was involved with from 1975-1995 looked and acted identically to the man she’d been dating prior to that. He remembered when MJ shut the door after Gwen’s death. He remembered the first words MJ said to him. He remembered their first kiss in the airport. He remembered all this stuff even though he wouldn’t have been the real deal. The fact that he turned out to be the genuine article eventually doesn’t matter because Ben Reilly knew all that stuff too.

So his knowledge of private information is absolutely not proof he is the real Peter Parker.

“During Spec #245 and the Clone Saga Peter and Mj were more in tune with one another since they were married”

Mostly I’ve already addressed these. First of all MJ was clearly in tune with Peter prior to Superior as witnessed by all the Slott stories above.

And for other reasons listed above she and Peter wouldn’t have fallen out of tune with one another to the point where MJ could be so gullible. Additionally, they were clearly still mostly  in tune with one another on both other occasions they broke up and became reacquainted with one another. I refer you back to how MJ was said to be able to read Peter like a book following their first break up. Again, this was when she was written to not know he was Spider-Man. That changed with retcons but even so she didn’t know how, when or why he was Spider-Man. He didn’t know her own origin and they hadn’t had nearly as many of the serious and intimate life experiences they’d have later in life.

However, more poignant proof can be found when we jump to the JMS run. To be clear between OMD and MJ’s reintroduction into ASM over a year elapsed and then we can guesstimate another year elapsed between then and he start of Superior. But Peter and MJ were interacting in that second year, as witnessed in those Slott stories.

In contrast Peter and MJ had been drifting apart and not been seeing too much of each other face-to-face between ASM v2 #1-13. This was due to various factors, chiefly MJ’s busy modeling career, Peter’s Spidey work and the fact that they were both keeping secrets at this time. They had also been drifting apart emotionally too.

In ASM v2 #13 MJ was seemingly killed in a plane crash and presumed dead for six months. 

Six months where she was locked in a room, all alone. Her abductor never even spoke to her most of the time. 

She even, developed PTSD as a result.

It was heavily implied upon her return that the time between ASM v2 #1 and her return had been almost a year. 

Shortly after her return she and Peter separated and we don’t know how long elapsed between then and their eventual reconciliation in ASM v2 #50. However long it was, Peter and MJ only saw one another face-to-face once for at best maybe 6 hours tops; and that’s being incredibly generous. They also spoke very briefly on the phone to one another. On one occasion Peter tried to call her but hung up.

So that’s at least a whole year in which they had been seeing little of one another, drifting apart and had zero contact for over 6 months. So you know, that would mean they had less time together than prior to Superior. They’d have been less  in tune here than at the start of Superior.

And yet in the issue they reconcile they are still in tune enough that they finish one another’s sentences and are thinking the same thing.

They also fall back fairly easily into their old habits together even though they took it slow. They weren’t trying hard to rediscover how one another had changed.

Again, it can be argued that Peter had actually internally changed and grown far more between his first and second break ups with MJ and their respective reconciliations than between OMD and Superior.

I’m not trying to say that Peter and MJ wouldn’t have been comparatively more in tune whilst they were married than at the start of Superior. Just that they would’ve remained mostly  in tune and not have been so out of tune that MJ could’ve been fooled as easily as she was.

The proof of this can be found in ASM #604. For the first time in over a year Peter and MJ get a chance to talk following their separation. They are still so in synch that they can speak in unison.

All in all…sigh.

See this guy?

He used to be ‘on side’. He used to be a PeterxMJ shipper. He talked about doing a petition to prevent OMD before it happened. He used to speak out against the badness that was BND and Slott’s run but over time he gradually drifted into being…well look my inner angry emotional assessment would say he’s a traitor. Perhaps that is not the technical term. He basically became someone who would never speak about the marriage other than to bash ‘fanboys’ (as he’d call them in a needlessly aggressive and petulant tone of voice) for still being concerned with it. Whether that was not ‘being over’ the erasure of the marriage or for basically talking up MJ’s importance.

To speak personally about this for a moment, I used to look up to this guy.

No seriously his work on this and another podcast along with his essays in the late 2000s and early 2010s were partially a revelation to me.

Back in 2012 when I discovered his work the idea of actual in-depth analytical essays on Spider-Man was still pretty new to me. The idea of someone not talking broadly on the characters but diving into the details of the narratives and following them sequentially? Man, that shit was an inspiration  for some stuff I do here and on other blogs. I’d still recommend some of his earlier works.

His understanding of continuity I once thought unparalleled. Now days, and especially just looking at the above, not so much. It helped me to learn more about the history of these characters and stories.

It seems that I discovered his backlog at the wrong time because I think he had already drifted farther out to become, well, what you can see above, by the time I started listening to that podcast.

I thought that surely these guys, who must clearly know about the subject than I do will call out this crap for what it is. Surely he would? And on Superior #2 most of them did. But he did not.

I remember in 2013 struggling to process that. I looked up to him. I thought that since he knew so much about Spider-Man and so much more than me that he could not be wrong. So either I was wrong or he was wrong which called into question everything else he’d said about the subject matter. Everything else I’d taken his word for was called into question.

I’m older, wiser, uglier and less forgiving now.

I see the situation for what it was.

Someone who used to be good at their job slipping, becoming interested in other things and for personal reasons seemingly getting frustrated with (unfairly) with certain other people and having that taint their stance going forward.

And it feels so wonderful after 7 years of this being at the back of my brain to finally let it out.

I think one more post addressing Superior #2 ought to do it though.

P.S. He got huffy about MJ noticing Peter said toodle-loo to her in Superior #10.

So Peter saying a common phrase he could’ve picked up anywhere (even in the months between issues #2 and #11) is more worthy of complaint than the immeasurably more obvious shit from Superior #2.

Part 2

[douchebagbrainwaves]

THE COURAGE OF PROJECT

Then when you start a startup anywhere. That's why mice and rabbits are furry and elephants and hippos aren't.1 The very design of the average site in the late twentieth century. He got a 4x liquidation preference. Google, it's hard to get into grad school in math. Can we claim founders are better off as a result of this new trend. Where you live should make at most a couple percent difference. But investing later should also mean they have fewer losers.

They make something moderately appealing and have decent initial growth.2 If you major in math it will be whatever the startup can get from the first one to write a paper for school, his mother would tell him: find a way to turn a billion dollar industry into a fifty million dollar industry, so much the better, if all fifty million go to you. The classic yuppie worked for a small organization. Before us, most companies in the startup funding business. The best way to get a big idea can take roost.3 4 or 5 million. This essay grew out of something I wrote for myself to figure out how to increase their load factors. But you can also apply some force by focusing the discussion: by asking what specific questions they need answered to make up their minds. This plan collapsed under its own weight.4 Startups happened because technology started to change so fast that big companies could no longer keep a lid on the smaller ones.

The only place your judgement makes a difference is in the industry.5 People who do great work, and it's a bad sign when you have a special word for that. One of the exhilarating things about coming back to Cambridge every spring is walking through the streets at dusk, when you can see into the houses. If you have steep revenue growth, say over 6x a year, no matter how many good startups approach him. Recently we managed to recruit her to help us run YC when she's not busy with architectural projects.6 This works better when a startup has 3 founders than 2, and better when the leader of the company in later rounds. I'm not saying you can get away with zero self-discipline.

We're not a replacement for don't give up. What you should not do is rebel. But while series A rounds from VCs. Someone who's scrappy manages to be both threatening and undignified at the same world everyone else does, but notice some odd detail that's compellingly mysterious.7 Even Tim O'Reilly was wearing a suit, a sight so alien I couldn't parse it at first. They can't tell how smart you are.8 The story about Web 2. Maybe one day the most important thing is to be learned from whatever book on it happens to be closest. This essay is derived from a keynote at FOWA in October 2007. They'll decide later if they want to raise.9

Sometimes it reached the point of economic sadism: site owners assumed that the more pain they caused the user, the more benefit it must be to them. It's cities that compete, not countries.10 Kids are curious, but the best founders are certainly capable of it. But investors are so fickle that you can fix for a lot of time on work that interests you, and don't just refuse to. But you have to be an insider.11 A key ingredient in many projects, almost a project on its own, is to step onto an orthogonal vector. So ironically the original description of the Web 2. Back when it cost a lot to like I've done a few things, like intro it to my friends at Foundry who were investors in Service Metrics and understand this model I am also talking to my friend Mark Pincus who had an idea like this a few years ago.12 0 seemed to mean was something about democracy. We didn't have enough saved to live on. There is another reason founders don't ask themselves whether they're default alive or default dead.13

So most investors prefer, if they wanted, raise series A rounds. They're unable to raise more money, and precisely when you'll have to switch to plan B if plan A isn't working. That doesn't mean the investor says yes to everyone. Miss out on what? It's so cheap to start web startups that orders of magnitudes more will be started. Investors evaluate startups the way customers evaluate products, not the way bosses evaluate employees. The bust was as much an overreaction as the boom.14 Startups are undergoing the same transformation that technology does when it becomes cheaper.15 Another way to fly low is to give them something for free that competitors charge for. After all, a Web 2.16 He bought a suit.

Instead you'll be compelled to seek growth in other ways. They all knew their work like a piano player knows the keys. But consulting is far from free money. They say they're going to get eliminated. What does it mean, exactly? If investors were perfect judges, the two would require exactly the same skills. And to be both good and novel, an idea probably has to seem bad to most people, or someone writes a particularly interesting article, it will show up there. The mere existence of prep schools is proof of that.17 So far the complete list of messages I've picked up from cities is: wealth, style, hipness, physical attractiveness wouldn't have been a total immersion. Don't just do what they tell you to do. But advancing technology has made web startups so cheap that you really can get a portrait of the normal distribution of most applicant pools, it matters least to judge accurately in precisely the cases where judgement has the most effect—you won't take rejection so personally. If raising money is hard.

There is no sharp line between the two types of startup ideas: those that grow organically out of your own life, and those that you decide, from afar, are going to get rarer. While some VCs have technical backgrounds, I don't know enough to say, but it happens surprisingly rarely.18 Most subjects are taught in such a boring way that it's only by discipline that you can never safely treat fundraising as more than a startup that seems like it's going to stop.19 It sounds obvious to say that you should worry? One reason startups prefer series A rounds? When I was in high school either. If you feel you've been misjudged, you can do. Google. Of course, someone has to take money from people who are young but smart and driven can make more by starting their own companies after college instead of getting jobs, that will change what happens in college.

Notes

Though they are themselves typical users. But it takes to get good grades in them to private schools that in three months, a valuation. Giving away the razor and making more per customer makes it easier to get them to stay in a time machine.

Apple's early history are from an angel investment from a mediocre VC.

In the beginning.

Plus ca change. But on the other.

And that is exactly the point of a stock is its future earnings, you now get to go behind the scenes role in IPOs, which allowed banks and savings and loans to buy it despite having no evidence it's for sale.

However, it will seem dumb in 100 years. Digg is Slashdot with voting instead of blacklist.

Sofbot.

I write out loud can expose awkward parts.

I've become a so-called signalling risk.

Hint: the way they have because they couldn't afford a monitor.

And it's particularly damaging when these investors flake, because there was a new search engine is low. They have no connections, you'll find that with a wink, to take care of one's markets is ultimately just another way in which income is doled out by Mitch Kapor, is to raise money after Demo Day, there would be easy to discount, but I'm not against editing. As one very successful YC founder told me they like the one hand and the exercise of stock options than any preceding president, he tried to shift back. At three months we can't believe anyone would think twice before crossing him.

Progressive tax rates has a significant startup hub. He, like speculators, that alone could in principle 100,000 sestertii apiece for slaves learned in the early adopters you evolve the idea is crack. As we walked in, we love big juicy lumbar disc herniation as juicy except literally.

It's sometimes argued that we didn't, they thought at least accepted additions to the modern idea were proposed by Timothy Hart in 1964, two years, it was cooked up by the National Center for Education Statistics, about 28%. I've come to accept that investors don't like the bizarre consequences of this essay talks about programmers, but I know of no Jews moving there, and should in some ways First Round excluded their most successful startups are competitive like running, not the original text would in itself deserving. This is not whether it's good enough at obscuring tokens for this type are also several you can't even claim, like play in a city with few other startups, because time seems to pass. Please do not try to avoid that.

This kind of people starting normal companies too. If Ron Conway had been raised religious and then using growth rate to manufacture a perfect growth curve, etc, and then a block or so.

But it is to trick admissions officers. I meant. The mere possibility of being harsh to founders. As he is at fault, since 95% of the class of 2007 came from such schools.

I started doing research for this purpose are still, as they are now. There was no more unlikely than it would be easier to say that it is dishonest of the next round, that suits took over during a critical point in the usual standards for truth. Wittgenstein: The French Laundry in Napa Valley.

It wouldn't cut their overall returns tenfold, because they wanted, so the best ideas, they mean statistical distribution. The original Internet forums were not web sites but Usenet newsgroups.

A doctor friend warns that even this can give an inaccurate picture. At some point, when the problems you have no idea what's happening till they also influence one another directly through the window for years while they think they're just mentioning the possibility is that in Silicon Valley. I find hardest to get rich by creating wealth—wealth that, isn't it? Look at those goddamn fleas, they have less money, the big winners aren't all that matters, just as if you'd invested at a famous university who is highly regarded by his peers.

Compromising a server could cause such damage that ASPs that want to pound that message home. He, like arithmetic drills, instead of blacklist.

Thanks to Tim O'Reilly, Peter Norvig, and the guys at O'Reilly for inviting me to speak.

[ulfwolf]

Big Bang--Musing 204

The one thing   Science does not   want to face: The Cause of the   Biggest Bang

Yes, of course it’s all very well, and impressive, this Big Bang theory and all, and for many, especially for those in the scientific community, it holds a lot of water. And no, I’m not here to argue against the theory as such, for I’m certainly not qualified to, no, I’m here just to point out that this theory skirts (and not very gracefully) the even Bigger Question: what caused the Big Bang?

Another way to put it: What, exactly, Banged?

It remains one of those imponderables, for no one will (most likely because no one can) give us a straight answer. It seems up there, rubbing elbows with the answer to, “If God is goodness and love personified, how come there is so incredibly much suffering (both just and unjust) on this earth, among the people he made in his image and professes to love beyond human comprehension?”

The way this question is skirted, and not very elegantly either, is that His ways are capital-M Mysterious and it’s not our place to reason why. And even if we knew, you would not understand anyway.

Skirting indeed.

So, what about this Big Bang. Let’s see what Google has to say about it.

Scientists believe, says Google, that the universe began with every speck of its energy compressed into a very tiny point. At some point, this packed point, stationed at—or, more accurately, just before—the very beginning of Time—this extremely dense (think head-of-a-pin dense) point exploded with unimaginable force, creating matter as it propelled outward to form the billions of galaxies of our universe.

Astrophysicists calls this titanic explosion the Big Bang.

A quick note on the unimaginable force. From other accounts of the Baby Universe’s expansion rate at the infinitesimal moments just after ignition, it expanded far, far, far faster than the speed of light (see below). Doesn’t that violate Albert Einstein’s relativity theory? one is forgiven for asking. I’ve asked that myself more than once, before I realized that the universe was not, in fact, expanding within itself, i.e., the universe where Einstein’s theory applies but into the primordial Emptiness beyond, where Einstein would not apply.

And I notice a clever and probably unintended sleight-of-hand here: with every speck of its energy compressed into a very tiny point. A very, very tiny point. Again, think pinhead. But don’t swallow this sentence before you chew, for here’s the enormous assumption: All this compressed energy existed, in toto, before time. There’s no getting away from that assumption. It’s there, in plain daylight.

But let’s return to Google and our birth story:

Astrophysicists tell us that all matter found in the universe today—that we now find in people, plants, animals, the earth, stars, and galaxies—was created at that very first moment of time, thought to be about 13 billion years ago.

Note: at the very first moment of time—again underlining that all this pin-head sized, compressed energy already existed prior to time itself, which clock started with a Bang, as it were.

Google goes on to tell us: The Big Bang was unlike any explosion you might witness on earth today. Take a hydrogen bomb explosion, for instance, whose center registers approximately 100 million degrees Celsius, and moves through the air at about 300 meters per second. In contrast, cosmologists believe that the Big Bang flung energy in all directions at the speed of light (300,000,000 meters per second, a million times faster than the H-bomb—see note, below, though) and estimate that the temperature of the entire universe was 1000 trillion degrees Celsius at just a tiny fraction of a second after the explosion. Even the cores of the hottest stars in today's universe are much cooler than that.

Important Note, and do follow me on this: Wikipedia begs to differ with Google on expansion rate. Google’s initial answer (see above) was that the universe expanded at the speed of light. Wikipedia, on the other hand, states that, according to current theory, during the inflationary epoch (which lasted about 10-32 of a second after the Big Bang, which obviously is not very long) the universe suddenly and violently expanded increasing its volume by a factor of at least 1078 (translating to an expansion of size by a factor of at least 1026 in each of the three dimensions), equivalent to expanding an object one nanometer (about half the width of a molecule of DNA) in length to one approximately 10.6 light years (say 62 trillion miles) long. That is 10.6 light years in the tiniest micro-fraction of a second. I’d say that beats the speed of light by a comfortable margin.

By the way, in physical cosmology the inflationary epoch was the infinitesimal period in the evolution of the early universe when, according to inflation theory, the universe underwent its rapid exponential expansion.

After this initial 10-32-of-a-second rush, a much slower and gradual expansion of space continued until around 9.8 billion years later when it began gradually to pick up expansion speed again. This expansion is still accelerating.

Back to Google, who now has decided to agree with me: There's another important quality of the Big Bang that makes it unique. While an explosion of a man-made bomb expands through air, the Big Bang did not expand through anything. That's because there was no space to expand through at the beginning of time. Rather, physicists believe the Big Bang created and stretched space itself, expanding the universe.

I can safely rest that particular case, then.

Note: Still, there must have been some existing space, if only the space needed to house the energy pin-head, right? The space that the Big Bang expanded, no?

Still, this is why Einstein still holds true—there was no space, no universe for the universe to expand into, no gravities, nothing. Sheer emptiness, and I’m not sure there can be anything such as laws governing sheer emptiness.

Google continues: For a brief moment after the Big Bang, the immense heat created conditions unlike any conditions astrophysicists see in the universe today. While planets and stars today are composed of atoms of elements like hydrogen and silicon, scientists believe the universe back then was too hot for anything other than the most fundamental particles—such as quarks and photons—to exist.

Also, as the universe expanded, the energy of the Big Bang became more and more “diluted” in space, causing the universe to cool.

Rapid cooling allowed for matter as we now know it to form, although physicists are still trying to figure out exactly how this happened. About one ten-thousandth of a second after the Big Bang, they believe protons and neutrons formed, and within a few minutes these particles began sticking together to form atomic nuclei, mostly hydrogen and helium. Hundreds of thousands of years later, electrons stuck to the nuclei to make complete atoms.

About a billion years after the Big Bang, gravity now compelled these atoms to gather in huge clouds of gas, which eventually collected into stars which in turn gathered to form the collections we now call galaxies.

Where do planets like earth come from? Over billions of years, giant stars have baked hydrogen and helium atoms in their hot cores to form heavier elements like carbon and oxygen. These large stars eventually exploded, blasting these new elements into space.

This matter then re-condensed into both new stars and planets (with their satellites) that now make up solar systems like our own.

As for proof, Google goes on to say that over the past one hundred years, astrophysicists have uncovered a great deal of compelling evidence to support the Big Bang theory. Among this evidence is the observation that the universe is, in fact, still expanding. By looking at light emitted by distant galaxies, scientists have found that these galaxies are rapidly moving away from our own galaxy, the Milky Way. An explosion like the Big Bang, which sent matter flying outward from a point, explains this observation.

Another critical discovery was the observation of low-level microwaves permeating space. Astronomers believe that these, literally minute waves, whose temperature hovers around -270 degrees Celsius (which is only about three degrees Celsius above absolute zero) are the remnants of the Big Bang and the extremely high-temperature radiation (since cooled, obviously) it produced.

Interestingly, astronomers can estimate how hot the universe used to be by looking at very distant clouds of gas through high-power telescopes.

Since the light from these clouds can take billions of years to reach our telescopes, we see such bodies as they appeared eons ago. And, conforming to theory, these ancient clouds of gas seem to be hotter than younger clouds.

Scientists have also been able to support the Big Bang theory by ascertaining the relative amounts of different elements in the universe.

In fact, they've found that the universe contains about 74 percent hydrogen and 26 percent helium by mass, which are the two lightest elements. All other (heavier) elements—including those common on earth, such as carbon and oxygen—make up just a tiny trace (a small fraction of one percent) of all existing matter.

This data in hand, scientists have shown, by theoretical calculations, that these abundances could only have resulted in a universe that began in a very hot, dense state, and then quickly cooled and expanded, which is exactly the kind of universe that the Big Bang theory predicts.

All right, thanks Google. Still skirting, though.

My question is: Where did all this energy, so incredibly compressed that letting it loose created the universe, come from? For this entire theory rests on the assumption that it already existed—outside of, or just before time.

I’d like to think that if there’s matter, even in the form of dense energy, there is also time, for they come as a pair, time and matter, along with space—even if microscopically small in this case.

So small, perhaps, that we can simply overlook its existence and pretend nothings there? So small, anyway, as to be virtually nothing? Is that the sleight-of-verbal-hand lesson we’re supposed to take away from this?

It’s not nothing today, though, is it?

I obviously don’t have the answer, but I do have the question.

Apropos of which, I wrote one of my innumerable Wolfkus (Haikus by a Wolf) the other day, which said:

If nothing were ever hidden—Every question would have an answer.

Based on which (and I do hold this to be a very much true Wolfku), since my Big Bang question doesn’t have an answer, there must be something hidden, and very well at that, somewhere. Methinks.

And Mankind (along with the Wolf) ponders on.

::

P.S. If you like what you’ve read here and would like to contribute to the creative motion, as it were, you can do so via PayPal: here.

[ithisatanytime]

  So when someone makes a big claim, they need to present BIG evidence, data to support that claim if its to be believed. the establishment was telling everyone a new super plague was upon us, and as hard as this is to believe, i was not initially dismissive of that idea, i was watching for the data they would need to support that claim. pandemics happen, they will continue to happen, i was not initially stubborn about believing the covid hype.

  the first bit of relevant data, is the IFR, the infection fatality rate. i was literally stunned when i saw first how deadly covid was when you caught it according to the IFR, and then even more shocked when i saw how they calculated the IFR. they acted as though the super small minority of covid cases that required hospital treatment, represented the TOTAL cases of covid in the united states. right off the bat thats not going to be accurate at all. for nearly all diseases, especially for the common cold corona virus that covid mutated from, the majority of people who catch it, never present symptoms at all, they dont get sick. only a super small minority of people actually require hospitalization. to calculate the IFR based only on hospitalized patients is bad even just by basic stat taking measures. the sample size is incredibly biased, they admitted that “it was a mistake” and then the IFR dropped down to under two percent. so if you caught covid there is less than a 2 percent chance you will die, a far cry from what they initially reported which was instrumental in justifying all the scary media coverage that in part lead to global lock downs.

  so now i am skeptical of the narrative, and i suspect some dishonesty on the part of our medical establishment. next relevant piece of data is the death toll. i was following it closely in the early stages and the numbers were embarrassingly low, which is good, but the media and medical establishment was still acting as though the second black plague was upon us. around this time i was reading about italy, because italy was reporting FAR more corona virus deaths than pretty much anywhere else in the world. so whats going on? first people were saying its because they have a lot of elderly people there, and that might account for some of it, but not even half of it honestly, italy was having multiple times the fatality the rest of the world was experiencing, in america the death toll was still laughably low, it was a joke. then i found out italy records covid deaths different than the rest of the world. if someone was diagnosed with covid, and then they died of leukemia, or heart disease, or anything for that matter, they were required to be listed as a covid death. so that explained it, italy wasnt experiencing more deaths from corona, they were counting the deaths in a hilariously stupid way, no comorbidity does not justify that dishonest record keeping. i laughed it off and went on with my day. imagine my fucking shock when soon after reading about this, the united states adopted that SAME dishonest record keeping policy, and only now were they getting the death tally they were after, with deaths surging in new york the literal day the CDC mandated this change!

   and now they released the all cause deaths for 2021 saying “see, we told ya!” and its like, i know if i dug into how they were categorizing the deaths i would find some dishonesty, and i already have, i had a guy telling me that no causes of death were down in 2019-2020 so there was no place to pull those extra corpses from and file them away under “died of covid” but the data is represented in a misleading way. i think many of the deaths being attributed to corona are in fact the tens of thousands of americans who die every year from the flu. and low and behold, though the lockdown measures proved to be completely ineffective at slowing the spread of covid, it nearly eradicated the flu, with england hilariously reporting ZERO flu deaths for the 2019-2020 flu season. this is an absurd claim, and the fact that the medical establishment refuses to concede that perhaps SOME flu deaths were attributed to covid mistakenly is shocking and fucking scary. i want to get off the lie mery go round, where they tell a lie, i invest time and energy determining if what they are saying is true, find clear undeniable proof of dishonesty, only to then be told another lie to cover the first lie that i have to work to figure out.

  To this day, there is no data showing covid is particularly deadly, so i dont believe that it is. normally in this situation i would say that if i saw good data proving covids deadliness i would change my mind, but when clear deception is thrown into the mix, in my view that raises the bar for proof substantially.

[shirlleycoyle]

How Pandora Won Its Royalty Battle But Lost the War to Spotify

For a few years in the late 2000s, Pandora was the on-demand DJ for tens of millions of people, creating the soundtrack to college dorm room parties, quiet coffee shops, busy kitchens, and family get-togethers. The days of building massive MP3 music collections through file-sharing was receding quickly into the past, and instead the shared experience of radio was making a comeback via the clever algorithmic matchmaking of Pandora's endlessly customizable stations based on individual taste. Today it's a feature we take for granted across every music service, even if Pandora's implementation still seems like it was the best. Pandora itself, however, can feel like an afterthought. Betamax to Spotify's VHS, or maybe more accurately, MySpace to on-demand streaming's Facebook.

It's not that Pandora was oblivious to its competition, or complacent about its place in the industry. It was, however, an innovator in digital music at a time when the major labels were hostile to the entire concept and would fight on every front to preserve the lucrative of the compact disc era. To take on this legal and lobbying juggernaut, Pandora needed a clever strategy to avoid the kind of head-on fights that had sunk Napster. The solution was the radio model of music licensing, a brilliant strategy at the time, but one which would be the subject of a long fight between Pandora and the recording industry. Pandora would win that battle, but in doing so, it also found itself stuck with a business model that could not evolve alongside the streaming space.

Pandora’s personalized radio service took the FM listening experience, put it online, and exploded the typically narrow path to music discovery for millions of people. It was the first real introduction to digital streaming music for a lot of America’s population in the mid-2000s. People could type in a song or artist they liked and get a never-ending stream of related music.

On the surface, at the listener level, the magic was in how all the songs were linked and connected. Behind the scenes, the magic was in how Pandora was able to provide access to all these songs, without asking the major labels for permission.

Radio broadcasters don’t have to spend exorbitant amounts of time and money trying to license every song from major record labels: they only need to pay a small fee each time songs are played. So after developing its music discovery technology, the Music Genome Project, Pandora went into radio to take advantage of the same licensing agreements already in place.

The Tower Records "music discovery center" powered by SavageBeast / mockup courtesy of Dan Lythcott-Haines

For Joe Kennedy, Tim Westergren, Jessica Steel, and Tom Conrad, the four Pandora executives leading the company's rebirth as a digital broadcaster in 2004, this was the only path forward. Radio was the path to profitability in the music industry.

“It was already clear to us that most of digital music was a disaster from a business standpoint,” said Former Pandora CEO Joe Kennedy. “At that time the four labels didn't want digital music to really exist, but we found this one piece in internet radio where there was the statutory license that, I felt, gave the potential to create a business of value and avoid this phenomenon one board member referred to as an organ donor business — where you just exist to funnel money to the major record labels.”

As a quick background, Savage Beast Technologies was founded in 1999 by Tim Westergren and would later become Pandora. The company spent years developing its Music Genome Project music recommendation engine to help people find new songs and artists similar to their existing tastes in music. It powered a few in-store kiosks at Best Buy and Tower Records, but the Music Genome Project itself never found a viable market fit. In 2004 Larry Marcus and Walden Venture Capital’s lead investment saved the company, starting a new chapter. Jessica Steel joined as VP of Business and Corporate Development. Tom Conrad came into engineering, but quickly rose to Chief Technology Officer. Founder Tim Westergren moved from CEO to Chief Strategy Officer and Joe Kennedy was hired to be the company’s new CEO.

UI mockup courtesy of Dan Lythcott-Haines

Kennedy got to work on a new business plan and put the pieces together to pursue radio. Looking at LaunchCast’s success (a similar service to Pandora, which would later be acquired by Yahoo), along with potential market size and fixed costs through the statutory license it was their path towards profitability for the startup.

Pandora launched its personalized radio service in the second half of 2005 paying a per performance rate of $0.000762 each time a song was played.

The Battle Over Rates

Pandora and other webcasters were paying song rates from the 1998-2005 timeframe. By the fall of 2005, Pandora was already too late to officially participate in the hearings happening to assess rate adjustments for the next period of time. Kennedy did, however, stay connected to how testimonies to the Copyright Royalty Board were progressing. The CRB was created under the Copyright Royalty and Distribution Reform Act of 2004 with three permanent copyright royalty judges.

There were several different groups and sides presenting their case for what they wanted, one of which was the Digital Media Association (DiMA) representing 42 companies including AOL, Live 365, Microsoft, Yahoo!, and AccuRadio LLC. Another, representing the entrenched music industry, was SoundExchange and executives from Atlantic Records, Sony BMG, Universal Music Group, and other labels. Mixed in were groups identifying as terrestrial radio, small webcasters, large webcasters, commercial, non-commercial, and so forth. There was plenty of nuance to the companies and groups wanting special considerations to the rates they would pay.

SoundExchange and its side argued for 30 percent of gross revenues from webcasters or a performance rate beginning at $.0008 per performance in 2006 and increasing annually to $.0019 by 2010, whichever was greater. It wanted the rates to be as high as possible.

The DiMA group wanted a fee structure of either $.00025 per performance or 5.5% of revenue directly associated with the streaming service. For a lot of these internet companies, music was not their main business, but an ancillary one.

Tim Westergren, co-founder and chief strategy officer of Pandora Media Inc., center, Steven Newberry, president and chief executive officer of the Commonwealth Broadcasting Corp., left, and Christopher Guttman-McCabe, vice president of regulatory affairs with CTIA Wireless Association. House Energy and Commerce Subcommittee hearing in Washington, D.C., U.S., on Wednesday, June 6, 2012. Credit: Andrew Harrer / Bloomberg via Getty Images

Pandora may have entered the music industry a little naively, planning for a world where the statutory rates remained low and they had time to bloom. Even before its plans for radio, it had run out of cash multiple times. In 2000, venture capital dried up fast from the first dot com bubble bust and left the company scrambling for new funds early in its life. Tim Westergren, always the easygoing and formidable guy, never laid anyone off, he simply asked those who could continue working without pay to stay with the eventual promise of reimbursement once new funding came in.

Even after receiving around $7 million in funding in 2004, Pandora didn’t have the capital to either negotiate direct licensing with record labels or the runway to offer free, ad-supported radio. It had to launch as a subscription service to cover some of the costs. But, shortly after launch it secured a large investment by James Feuille and CrossLink to make the transition to free ad-supported radio.

“Fundamentally, I did not believe people would pay for radio,” said James Feuille. “The idea was $3 a month, $36 a year, with no advertising and I just didn't believe you could build a big business like that.”

The numbers from the 2005 launch reflected most people’s reluctance to pay. Pandora radio launched with 10 free listening hours before it presented a paywall and cut off listening to non-subscribers.

“They generated 500,000 users, zero to 500,000 users in six weeks,” said Feuille. “At the end of six weeks, 40,000 people had subscribed, it was .08, not even 1 percent.”

Despite its growth and the excitement it was generating, Pandora spent its first several years struggling to keep the lights on. It had publicly warned of pulling the plug. It was paying artists according to the law — which wasn’t a given in the early days of digital music — but it didn’t think it could afford to have the rates double or triple.

The Night The Lights (Almost) Went Out in Oakland

The Copyright Royalty Board presented its decision in March 2007. Included was a summary each side had been making against the other: “SoundExchange accuses the Services of seeking a marketplace characterized by perfect competition. DiMA and the Radio Broadcasters claim that SoundExchange is championing a marketplace characterized by monopoly power on the seller’s side.”

The three-judge CRB sided with the proposed rates from SoundExchange and the major labels. The new per play rates would be $.0008 for 2006, $.0011 for 2007, $.0014 for 2008, $.0018 for 2009, and a per play rate of $.0019 for 2010.

“It was March 2007, I'll literally never forget the moment,” said Joe Kennedy, Pandora CEO at the time. “I had just come through the tunnels on my way to work in Oakland and Tim [Westergren] gives me a call and says there's a decision out of Washington. He read me the rates and it was like, oh my god, the rates are almost triple. I immediately knew that’s game over, there's no path forward.”

Westergren knew Pandora was in trouble so he immediately spearheaded a grassroots campaign to persuade its listeners to contact their congressional representatives. This effort resulted in the Webcaster Settlement Act of 2008 that was able to bring those involved parties back to the table and try to negotiate a different rate settlement. It allowed for a simplified process to amend any deal that could be renegotiated between the parties. Webcasters, including executives at Pandora, were anxious to find a number they didn’t think would put them out of business.

Although the bargaining table had been set again, this time joined by Pandora, there was a significant amount of division among the companies and groups. RealNetworks with its Rhapsody streaming service saw Pandora as a competitor and potential threat. The National Association of Broadcasters saw internet radio as less desirable and profitable and was happy to see it go away or remain small. They were primarily interested in addressing their problem of simulcasting over the internet. Yahoo was an advertising company and so it didn’t want revenue sharing from non-core products to eat at its bottom line.

The labels had the upper hand with the increased rates they had asked for already in their pockets. Plus, negotiators for SoundExchange and the Recording Industry Association of America understood these divides and played them against each other.

As CEO of Pandora, Joe Kennedy was representing it in these negotiations, trying to keep the company on a path to profitability. Pulling out all the stops, Pandora even went as far as to offer private stock in exchange for a compromise agreement. The labels weren’t interested.

“The major labels came back and said, Well, you know, we shared this with our business people, and they took a look at it, and their analysis says, even at the lower rates, there's no chance you guys are going to make it,” said Kennedy.

In its first years as a digital radio service, Pandora and its millions of listeners had become an annoyance to the major labels. Historically, major record labels exhibited all the power in the relationship with terrestrial radio. FM radio was a promotional vehicle for labels to sell their artists. Digital services like Pandora were shifting that promotional power away from the labels with algorithms and user input.

If Pandora continued growing it would become a threat to power and control within the music industry. Circumventing directly licensing music through its use of the DMCA was seen as combative since digital music was already marked as undermining established business. Pandora was scrappy, having already moved Congress into action once, and that was worrisome.

The 2008 Settlement Act didn’t do much when it was signed by Congress. What it did do though was allow for a simplified process for new settlement approvals. The stage was set, if Pandora and its other webcasters could reach a deal with SoundExchange and the labels by the stipulated date of February 15, 2009 then it would go into effect simply by submitting it to the Copyright Royalty Board. There wouldn’t have to be any pre-hearings, public comments, or any of the previously required steps in the tedious process.

Despite Joe Kennedy’s best efforts, the deadline passed and Pandora was momentarily left with a decision. Would it accept a mountain of debt that rose higher as it gained popularity and more songs were played or would it pack it all in and call it quits?

“I wrote an email for the board that night and more or less said, I tried, failed, it's over,” said Kennedy.

Kennedy called Tim Westergren in the middle of the night to let him know. Westergren answered from a bus in Jordan. He was in the Middle East on a congressional delegation with his wife. Kennedy explained that the deadline had passed and negotiations had failed. The previously tripled rates set by the Copyright Royalty Board in 2007 would take effect.

Westergren replied that Congressman Howard Berman was currently on his bus. He would talk to him about the situation and see if there was anything he could do.

Congressman Berman was representing Los Angeles’ 26th district in 2008 and was on the Intellectual Property subcommittee, part of the Judiciary Committee. Congressman Berman had the right connections with people from most parties involved in the entertainment industry.

“I fully believe we had Right on our side back then,” said Westergren. “And I had the perfect timing to just explain the whole story, not the caricature that had been told to him. I think he heard it and said, what you're asking for is fair. Ultimately that’s why I think he intervened.”

“[Berman] called from Amman back to Washington and got some kind of procedure where a page on the floor can open the chamber and make some change,” recalled Westergren. “And because he was Chairman of the Judiciary he had some abilities or power to extend the deadline.”

Westergren called Kennedy back and told him that Congressman Berman said to keep going. This was happening in the middle of the night back in the U.S., a few hours after the deadline had passed. Because of the speed, negotiations didn’t have a chance to unwind from where they were left the day before.

“I immediately got on the phone with two more people,” said Kennedy. “First the point person in the negotiations and then our biggest ally who was with the Independent Music Association. I said, I just talked to Tim, Tim just talked to Berman, and Berman said we should keep going.”

In light of the immediate progress, Kennedy quickly amended his initial email to Pandora’s board admitting defeat, saying everything was over — it wasn’t yet.

“I think by the time the board got the first memo, I'd already sent a second memo that told the whole story of Tim talking to Berman and to hold on because maybe there's still some hope,” recalled Kennedy chuckling.

On July 7, 2009, more than two years after the rates had been set to increase, a settlement deal was formally announced. In the press release, John Simson, Executive Director of SoundExchange, said, “It’s a creative, groundbreaking approach that we wanted to try, and we hope it will work well for everyone involved—the artists, labels and eligible webcasters.”

The new agreement allowed for webcasters to pay per performance rates ($0.0008 retroactive to 2006 and increasing to $0.0014 by 2015) or 25% of revenue — whichever was greater. The per performance rate was a little bit lower, but the introduction of the revenue sharing would help webcasters keep costs in check and plan for the future.

The Power of Tens of Millions of Listeners

Pandora might have been on the ropes when it came to money, but it was a growing powerhouse of influence. In 2009 Pandora had seven million monthly listeners. Five years later in 2014, it had over 81 million monthly listeners. Westergren even attributed its active listeners calling members of Congress in the early days to its new settlement and Pandora’s ultimate survival.

Pandora’s radio service might have just hit at the right time to fulfill consumer demand and grow in popularity. It could have also had the right timing to land in the middle of Apple’s mobile revolution fueling its growth, but the truth is that it spent years working on its streaming backend and engineering so that it could hit it big overnight with the iPhone’s App Store.

Through Jessica Steel’s leadership, the team identified mobile early on and started by putting Pandora on flip phones with network carriers like Sprint and AT&T. At the time, this only resulted in a few hundred listeners, despite the major engineering effort involved. After Steve Jobs announced the iPhone in 2007 it became apparent that this new internet connected, “music player,” device in people’s pockets needed to be the future of its mobile efforts.

After pushback on only allowing web apps for the iPhone, Steve Jobs announced that native apps would be coming to the iPhone. In the interim, Apple Senior Vice President Scott Forstall invited Tim Westergren and his CTO, Tom Conrad, over to a local Cupertino lunch spot. The trio talked for hours about what Pandora had learned about streaming audio from putting apps on flip phones, like Motorola’s RAZR, for wireless carriers. The meeting ended with a question for Forstall.

Credit: Andrew Harrer / Bloomberg via Getty Images

“What, if anything, can we do at Pandora to get ready for the next generation of iPhone that includes an app store and native APIs?” asked Conrad. “Forstall said, it wouldn't be a waste of your time to jailbreak some iPhones and use the kind of back door toolkits that were being distributed by other people to build a native Pandora app while we get our act together at Apple on something more formal.”

So, Conrad, designer Dan Lythcott-Haines, and many others on the team got to work jailbreaking iPhones and working on a Pandora iPhone app ahead of the official APK release. Then, on day one of the App Store launch, Pandora was the first internet radio app available. Nine months later the Pandora app was installed on 21 percent of iPhones.

Five years after that first iPhone app, nearly 80 percent of Pandora’s radio listening was on a mobile device. But even with a great mobile experience and ubiquitous access across all kinds of devices into the future, its linear, radio style appeal was encountering pushback from listeners.

“We always knew there was a portion of how people listened to music that we were not addressing,” said Joe Kennedy. “I think what changed over time was obviously the emergence of Spotify, but I think alongside that is not just in music but across the board, people's willingness to subscribe to things on the internet grew quite a bit over time.”

The Spotify Effect

By 2010, after it went through these settlement negotiations, Pandora was fully entrenched in radio. It had gone to court for it. It had become the face of internet radio and was becoming the torch bearer for the idea of radio in a lot of people’s minds. There was a consumer demand for this style of music service but Pandora and its executives were getting locked into the protection and cover they thought the statutory license afforded it.

Pandora was feeling heat from listeners who wanted to be able to listen to any song they wanted to at any time. They wanted more skips and other features that were outside of the statutory license’s scope. This pressure was one piece, of many, that led to Joe Kennedy announcing he would be departing as CEO in 2013.

“There’s many pieces to this puzzle of why I decided to leave,” said Kennedy. “Among them was the natural strain of having worked with the board for a long time, the strain of being a public company, and this very significant pebble in our shoe of what to do about Spotify and the on-demand business.”

Pandora finally launched an on-demand offering in 2017. It took years to repair relationships and get to a place it could work with the major labels. The work started secretly in 2014 which eventually led to Pandora acquiring Rdio’s on-demand licensing deals and other assets in 2015. In exchange for these on-demand licensing deals, Pandora agreed to renegotiating new, direct, radio licenses outside of the DMCA shelter.

Pandora spent the first half of its life chained to and defined by the DMCA’s statutory royalty rates. It then spent the next years not quite sure how to move forward. It saw the terrible financial deals that Spotify was making in order to gain on-demand streaming access to the major label’s music catalogs and didn’t want to be in that same boat. It tried getting into ticketing and events in order to control its own financial destiny, but it didn’t pay off.

“The reason we really did jump into on-demand was more about the porousness of publishing rights than anything else,” said Tim Westergren. “The industry had us in their crosshairs and after a while it's hard to be at war with your suppliers. There was too much potential for publishers to do monkey business and we had less and less confidence in the security of some of these statutory structures. We were vulnerable.”

“I think that we still squandered an enormous opportunity having survived all [those settlement negotiations] by not pivoting to on-demand fast enough,” said Westergren. “I feel incredibly proud and sort of marvel at what we got through, but I also have a lot of frustration about how we let it slip away after we established such a lead.”

The way Westergren describes it, Pandora should have become Spotify, before Spotify had the chance to.

“We should have done what Spotify did and ate a pound of flesh to get the industry on our side, then expanded the scope of the product and then really gone global and become an all-you-can-eat service,” said Westergren.

Today, in 2021, it’s nearly impossible to determine what Spotify pays in royalties per play. How much a song is worth varies among labels, artists, and other complex contractual details — including whether plays come from Premium subscribers or free listeners. The deals remain secret until frustrated artists eventually spill the beans on their own terms and provide a peek behind the curtain. In the end, musical artists continue to be the ones dealt the bad hand. Spotify pays major labels huge financial sums and upfront guarantees while it’s estimated that most artists will see payments of between $0.003 and $0.006 per song play.

Pandora still remains an active player in the music streaming space and counted 58.5 million monthly active listeners at the end of 2020. Depending on which music listener you ask, Pandora is a fond memory of digital music coming into its own, or its radio service may still be a vital part of their passive listening experience. Attention wise, however, Pandora is being left behind as Spotify and Apple Music push faster and further into on-demand streaming, sucking all the oxygen out of the room.

How Pandora Won Its Royalty Battle But Lost the War to Spotify syndicated from https://triviaqaweb.wordpress.com/feed/