#lossie writes

[lossie92]

I went back to working on a short story for @iamdusttoo. They have sent me a prompt forever ago and I wanted to write something special for it. I feel like I've finally figured out the plot I want to go with and hopefully I can finish this soon.

The below is a snippet from that story. Hope you enjoy! ❤️

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Warnings: none

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Though he was somewhat confused by his husband's unyielding determination to woo him – and it was indeed wooing, no doubt about it – he felt warmed by it as well. 

Nobody else has ever put so much effort into getting to know the real him. Similarly, there had been very few instances of others calling him beautiful and he had yet to hear anyone apart from Madara referring to his mind as an absolute wonder. His husband had even prepared a dedicated space for him so he could continue working on seals and jutsu if he so pleased! There was never a time when Madara had refused to listen to him talk about those subjects and he often contributed to the conversation, which resulted in the two of them having heated debates about subjects such as chakra theory or the creation of jutsu.

There were many, many other things Madara had done that had endeared him to Tobirama, of course. Simple, but nevertheless meaningful things such as always having a pot of his favourite tea ready, adjusting traditional Uchiha recipes to suit his palate, making sure to bring a shawl or a jacket when they went out for a stroll so he wouldn't never be cold, bringing home knick-knacks he would like, gifting him flowers just because, respecting his boundaries and not trying to push past them…

What would he do with himself, he wondered, if he was robbed of it all? How could he possibly endure if he could no longer see the glint in Madara's eyes as they discussed chakra theorems or played shogi, or the soft smile on his face when he told him “you are beautiful” as if it was the most fundamental truth in this world?

Would he survive never seeing Madara again? Never holding him again? Never talking to him again?

He didn't think he would.

Madara stood up and turned before reaching for the light armour made of leather that hung neatly on the gusoku lake. He had seen Madara prepare it the night before after dinner so he knew what it looked like already, but it was different to see it now in the grey, dim light of early morning.

Hesitating only for a second, he crossed the distance between Madara and himself, one of his hands coming to rest against Madara's hand that was already holding onto the armour's breastplate.

“Let me,” he said quietly.

Madara looked at him for a moment before he let go and stepped back. 

“Of course, wife,” he said. “Thank you for your help.”

Tobirama said nothing in response as he picked up the breastplate and helped Madara put it on, and fastened it in place. He remained equally silent while tying the kawan kote around his husband's forearms, the haidate to his thighs, and the suneate to his calves. 

He thought briefly that kneeling before Madara didn't feel degrading or humiliating. It was an act of reverence; a way to show his husband he hadn't wanted, but cared for now that he wanted him to be safe.

[dragonomatopoeia]

like as interesting as an Object or Action or Individual can be, i'm just as interested in the representation/presentation/interpretation. because seeing how someone else processed or transformed the original thing sheds a lot of light on that person as both audience and creator. and can also say a lot about myself re: how i choose to interpret their interpretation. and i'm constantly thinking about communication's capacity to simultaneously gain and lose meaning.

[tacetnix]

>// Wow I'm really glad that my job is telling me '"Oh you can just stay home this week. OR you could drive 3 hours and live out of a hotel because that's the only thing we have for you, despite being told right when we fired you to hire you onto this project that you couldn't do that."

Thankfully I have a phone interview on Monday, and another job 50m away that's sort of lined up if the interview doesn't go well. But god it's gonna be tight.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

AI is a WMD

I'm in TARTU, ESTONIA! AI, copyright and creative workers' labor rights (TOMORROW, May 10, 8AM: Science Fiction Research Association talk, Institute of Foreign Languages and Cultures building, Lossi 3, lobby). A talk for hackers on seizing the means of computation (TOMORROW, May 10, 3PM, University of Tartu Delta Centre, Narva 18, room 1037).

Fun fact: "The Tragedy Of the Commons" is a hoax created by the white nationalist Garrett Hardin to justify stealing land from colonized people and moving it from collective ownership, "rescuing" it from the inevitable tragedy by putting it in the hands of a private owner, who will care for it properly, thanks to "rational self-interest":

https://pluralistic.net/2023/05/04/analytical-democratic-theory/#epistocratic-delusions

Get that? If control over a key resource is diffused among the people who rely on it, then (Garrett claims) those people will all behave like selfish assholes, overusing and undermaintaining the commons. It's only when we let someone own that commons and charge rent for its use that (Hardin says) we will get sound management.

By that logic, Google should be the internet's most competent and reliable manager. After all, the company used its access to the capital markets to buy control over the internet, spending billions every year to make sure that you never try a search-engine other than its own, thus guaranteeing it a 90% market share:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/21/im-feeling-unlucky/#not-up-to-the-task

Google seems to think it's got the problem of deciding what we see on the internet licked. Otherwise, why would the company flush $80b down the toilet with a giant stock-buyback, and then do multiple waves of mass layoffs, from last year's 12,000 person bloodbath to this year's deep cuts to the company's "core teams"?

https://qz.com/google-is-laying-off-hundreds-as-it-moves-core-jobs-abr-1851449528

And yet, Google is overrun with scams and spam, which find their way to the very top of the first page of its search results:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/24/passive-income/#swiss-cheese-security

The entire internet is shaped by Google's decisions about what shows up on that first page of listings. When Google decided to prioritize shopping site results over informative discussions and other possible matches, the entire internet shifted its focus to producing affiliate-link-strewn "reviews" that would show up on Google's front door:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/24/naming-names/#prabhakar-raghavan

This was catnip to the kind of sociopath who a) owns a hedge-fund and b) hates journalists for being pain-in-the-ass, stick-in-the-mud sticklers for "truth" and "facts" and other impediments to the care and maintenance of a functional reality-distortion field. These dickheads started buying up beloved news sites and converting them to spam-farms, filled with garbage "reviews" and other Google-pleasing, affiliate-fee-generating nonsense.

(These news-sites were vulnerable to acquisition in large part thanks to Google, whose dominance of ad-tech lets it cream 51 cents off every ad dollar and whose mobile OS monopoly lets it steal 30 cents off every in-app subscriber dollar):

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/04/saving-news-big-tech

Now, the spam on these sites didn't write itself. Much to the chagrin of the tech/finance bros who bought up Sports Illustrated and other venerable news sites, they still needed to pay actual human writers to produce plausible word-salads. This was a waste of money that could be better spent on reverse-engineering Google's ranking algorithm and getting pride-of-place on search results pages:

https://housefresh.com/david-vs-digital-goliaths/

That's where AI comes in. Spicy autocomplete absolutely can't replace journalists. The planet-destroying, next-word-guessing programs from Openai and its competitors are incorrigible liars that require so much "supervision" that they cost more than they save in a newsroom:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/29/what-part-of-no/#dont-you-understand

But while a chatbot can't produce truthful and informative articles, it can produce bullshit – at unimaginable scale. Chatbots are the workers that hedge-fund wreckers dream of: tireless, uncomplaining, compliant and obedient producers of nonsense on demand.

That's why the capital class is so insatiably horny for chatbots. Chatbots aren't going to write Hollywood movies, but studio bosses hyperventilated at the prospect of a "writer" that would accept your brilliant idea and diligently turned it into a movie. You prompt an LLM in exactly the same way a studio exec gives writers notes. The difference is that the LLM won't roll its eyes and make sarcastic remarks about your brainwaves like "ET, but starring a dog, with a love plot in the second act and a big car-chase at the end":

https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/01/how-the-writers-guild-sunk-ais-ship/

Similarly, chatbots are a dream come true for a hedge fundie who ends up running a beloved news site, only to have to fight with their own writers to get the profitable nonsense produced at a scale and velocity that will guarantee a high Google ranking and millions in "passive income" from affiliate links.

One of the premier profitable nonsense companies is Advon, which helped usher in an era in which sites from Forbes to Money to USA Today create semi-secret "review" sites that are stuffed full of badly researched top-ten lists for products from air purifiers to cat beds:

https://housefresh.com/how-google-decimated-housefresh/

Advon swears that it only uses living humans to produce nonsense, and not AI. This isn't just wildly implausible, it's also belied by easily uncovered evidence, like its own employees' Linkedin profiles, which boast of using AI to create "content":

https://housefresh.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/Advon-AI-LinkedIn.jpg

It's not true. Advon uses AI to produce its nonsense, at scale. In an excellent, deeply reported piece for Futurism, Maggie Harrison Dupré brings proof that Advon replaced its miserable human nonsense-writers with tireless chatbots:

https://futurism.com/advon-ai-content

Dupré describes how Advon's ability to create botshit at scale contributed to the enshittification of clients from Yoga Journal to the LA Times, "Us Weekly" to the Miami Herald.

All of this is very timely, because this is the week that Google finally bestirred itself to commence downranking publishers who engage in "site reputation abuse" – creating these SEO-stuffed fake reviews with the help of third parties like Advon:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/03/keyword-swarming/#site-reputation-abuse

(Google's policy only forbids site reputation abuse with the help of third parties; if these publishers take their nonsense production in-house, Google may allow them to continue to dominate its search listings):

https://developers.google.com/search/blog/2024/03/core-update-spam-policies#site-reputation

There's a reason so many people believed Hardin's racist "Tragedy of the Commons" hoax. We have an intuitive understanding that commons are fragile. All it takes is one monster to start shitting in the well where the rest of us get our drinking water and we're all poisoned.

The financial markets love these monsters. Mark Zuckerberg's key insight was that he could make billions by assembling vast dossiers of compromising, sensitive personal information on half the world's population without their consent, but only if he kept his costs down by failing to safeguard that data and the systems for exploiting it. He's like a guy who figures out that if he accumulates enough oily rags, he can extract so much low-grade oil from them that he can grow rich, but only if he doesn't waste money on fire-suppression:

https://locusmag.com/2018/07/cory-doctorow-zucks-empire-of-oily-rags/

Now Zuckerberg and the wealthy, powerful monsters who seized control over our commons are getting a comeuppance. The weak countermeasures they created to maintain the minimum levels of quality to keep their platforms as viable, going concerns are being overwhelmed by AI. This was a totally foreseeable outcome: the history of the internet is a story of bad actors who upended the assumptions built into our security systems by automating their attacks, transforming an assault that wouldn't be economically viable into a global, high-speed crime wave:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/04/24/automation-is-magic/

But it is possible for a community to maintain a commons. This is something Hardin could have discovered by studying actual commons, instead of inventing imaginary histories in which commons turned tragic. As it happens, someone else did exactly that: Nobel Laureate Elinor Ostrom:

https://www.onthecommons.org/magazine/elinor-ostroms-8-principles-managing-commmons/

Ostrom described how commons can be wisely managed, over very long timescales, by communities that self-governed. Part of her work concerns how users of a commons must have the ability to exclude bad actors from their shared resources.

When that breaks down, commons can fail – because there's always someone who thinks it's fine to shit in the well rather than walk 100 yards to the outhouse.

Enshittification is the process by which control over the internet moved from self-governance by members of the commons to acts of wanton destruction committed by despicable, greedy assholes who shit in the well over and over again.

It's not just the spammers who take advantage of Google's lazy incompetence, either. Take "copyleft trolls," who post images using outdated Creative Commons licenses that allow them to terminate the CC license if a user makes minor errors in attributing the images they use:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/01/24/a-bug-in-early-creative-commons-licenses-has-enabled-a-new-breed-of-superpredator/

The first copyleft trolls were individuals, but these days, the racket is dominated by a company called Pixsy, which pretends to be a "rights protection" agency that helps photographers track down copyright infringers. In reality, the company is committed to helping copyleft trolls entrap innocent Creative Commons users into paying hundreds or even thousands of dollars to use images that are licensed for free use. Just as Advon upends the economics of spam and deception through automation, Pixsy has figured out how to send legal threats at scale, robolawyering demand letters that aren't signed by lawyers; the company refuses to say whether any lawyer ever reviews these threats:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/02/13/an-open-letter-to-pixsy-ceo-kain-jones-who-keeps-sending-me-legal-threats/

This is shitting in the well, at scale. It's an online WMD, designed to wipe out the commons. Creative Commons has allowed millions of creators to produce a commons with billions of works in it, and Pixsy exploits a minor error in the early versions of CC licenses to indiscriminately manufacture legal land-mines, wantonly blowing off innocent commons-users' legs and laughing all the way to the bank:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/02/commafuckers-versus-the-commons/

We can have an online commons, but only if it's run by and for its users. Google has shown us that any "benevolent dictator" who amasses power in the name of defending the open internet will eventually grow too big to care, and will allow our commons to be demolished by well-shitters:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/04/teach-me-how-to-shruggie/#kagi

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

https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/09/shitting-in-the-well/#advon

Image: Cryteria (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HAL9000.svg

CC BY 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en

--

Catherine Poh Huay Tan (modified) https://www.flickr.com/photos/68166820@N08/49729911222/

Laia Balagueró (modified) https://www.flickr.com/photos/lbalaguero/6551235503/

CC BY 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/

[canmom]

reading Herbert Mason's translation of the Epic of Gilgamesh, as you do!

I went with Mason's translation after I saw it quoted here and there and seemed pretty solidly written - but it isn't precisely right to call it a translation, more a retelling of the story as Mason understands it. so it's not a line by line translation, and some major parts of it are presumably interpolations or paraphrases.

i knew the broad outline of the story but it's fascinating to put it in context, and discover parts of the story i hadn't heard about. for example, i didn't realise the concept of droit du seigneur was part of this story - I'd thought that was basically a goofy myth about the medieval period, but here in the oldest surviving written story, it's just a thing the mythological king Gilgamesh does. though the exact translation seems a little contentious - Mason writes:

As king, Gilgamesh was a tyrant to his people.

He demanded, from an old birthright,

The privilege of sleeping with their brides

Before the husbands were permitted

But Wikipedia quotes a different translation by Stephen Mitchell which says:

He is king, he does whatever he wants... takes the girl from her mother and uses her, the warrior's daughter, the young man's bride.

The general thrust is similar in both cases, but the details of the custom are different. I don't have Mitchell's translation so I can't find how he describes the moment Enkidu arrives to interfere with Gilgamesh doing one of these kingly rapes (like let's not beat around the bush here, it's a different social context and whatever but you can't possibly say no to the demigod king).

Moving on...

Viewed with modern eyes, the transition between the first chapter and the second is kind of abrupt. We've got this great establishing story for Gilgamesh and Enkidu having a rather homoerotic fight and becoming best bros, but then we abruptly skip forward to Gilgamesh declaring that they're going to go fight a monster called Humbaba, and Enkidu is all like, no, that guy is way too high level, you'll die! Modern writing advice would hold that you'd want to spend some time building up Gilgamesh and Enkidu's relationship 'on screen' here, and perhaps foreshadow the existence of Humbaba a bit sooner to build up the threat a bit - but then I'm not carving this into stone tablets, I can afford to be a little bit roundabout, and who knows what's been lost? (scholars of the Epic probably have some idea lol)

The word used for Gilgamesh and Enkidu's relationship is 'friend'. This feels like it's probably a bit of a lossy translation to me - would lover/boyfriend be projecting too much? I obviously don't know the nuances of Sumerian that well, so maybe this is the best available word, but their relationship has a lot of physicality and a lot of affection.

The woman who goes to Enkidu in the wild and has a bunch of sex until he becomes civilised is described here as a 'prostitute'. My understanding was that she belongs to a religious role here, harimtu, that's usually translated as 'sacred prostitution' but apparently this identity is contested, and also she has a name, Shamhat? I don't know why Mason doesn't use her name. Shamhat has a pretty big role in changing Enkidu and convincing him to come meet Gilgamesh, but her own motivation isn't really explored.

Still, I don't want to come off as only complaining. Whether they originate in the Epic or with Mason, I'm enjoying a lot of the poetic turns of phrase in this version - the style is just the right level of minimal - simple appropriate words, but effective for that. Mason writes in verse, but doesn't rhyme - I'm not really familiar enough with meter to say more than that. There are a lot of fairly short, declarative sentences, mixed up with an occasional much longer metaphor across multiple lines. I think you could fairly easily delete the line breaks and just have prose, but having them makes it flow in an interesting way, like waves? Poetry is not my bailiwick so I'm probably describing some fairly basic facets of the medium, but it's interesting to observe.

I'll add more when I've read a bit more, I'll be in this train a while...

[lotus-tower]

Why do we talk like that about Gintama?

So this is something I've already talked about a lot here and there, but I thought I would condense my thoughts on the topic in its own post.

We've joked a lot about math zeitgeist, but why in the world are we furiously mathposting about Gintama? Why did I write 28 pages of actual essay for it? Where does kraniumet get all those images from? (I've always wondered this.) Essentially, what's driving us to analyze these themes and motifs over and over again... and why can they be analyzed over and over again?

When I first wrote My Orochi Stood Up, I made it clear that this was an original framework made for the same purpose as all analytical frameworks and models: to enable me to gain certain key insights about the series, to account for all of its innumerable bits and pieces, and to arrange their relationships to one another in a cohesive, legible way. In short, as I wrote in my essay, it provides me with symbolic technology.

In the same vein, when I wrote my spontaneous math post, I said that so much of math is about things that don’t exist and yet become real, not just because they help you articulate something but because they help you arrive at a solution. This is the purpose of things like imaginary numbers--or negative numbers for that matter.

I know that we should never live life in accordance with the fake hater in our heads that we imagine saying stupid things to us so that we can respond to them in smart, cool ways. I'm sure Zura lives like that though, and we all think he's charming, so maybe we should reconsider this idea. What I mean to get at is that I've never once tried to claim that Sorachi literally intended any of what I describe in my ouroboros framework. I don't think he sat down one day and planned to make his motifs compatible with western alchemy, I don't think he had the creation myth of the island of Japan in mind, and I don't actually think he read Barthes.

But what's undeniable is that there is something so bizarrely consistent, coherent, and plentiful about Gintama's thematic flourishes--even though in many, many ways, Gintama is filled with bad, and worse, mediocre, writing. What sets Gintama apart from other series isn't the inherent quality of its writing (which has stark ups and downs). If you'll forgive the confusing and somewhat contradictory wording, what makes Gintama distinct isn't a quantitative difference (as in, more goodness), but a qualitative difference. What does this qualitative difference boil down to?

First is structure. This part we've gone over a lot, so I'll try to keep it brief (or novel?). Gintama is a series with basically just one favoured literary technique, and it uses it again. and again. and again. and again. and again. Parallels upon parallels upon parallels--and there are only a few key thematic ideas that Sorachi is interested in exploring. You can describe it as consistency, or, if you want to be uncharitable, repetitiveness. But it is, frankly, absurd the amount of parallels--or rather, the degree of parallelism--this series contains. What's interesting about it is its effects on how we engage with the story.

By making it obvious that this is a conscious and explicit writing decision (through various means, mainly dialogue), any characters with suitable parallelism to a prototypical character A are all connected to one other--let's call these the A-sided characters. This holds even if they're all a bit different from each other. Imagine all these A-sided characters spread out in line, like hostages tied to each track of a train track or the rungs on a ladder. They lose similarity with each rung, like loss of clarity in a game of telephone--let's call this "reflection lossiness." Even though characters in the top rung and the bottom rung may not have much in common, they may both be within "lossiness range" (<- I just made this up) of a character in a middle rung, and therefore able to communicate indirectly with one another.

Moreover, because the prototypical character A has a foil in prototypical character B, all A-sided characters are also connected not only to any individual foils they may have, but potentially to all other B-sided characters. Since it's easier to identify characters' thematic affiliations through their interactions and dynamics with other characters, the consistency of the A-B foil formula, when combined with the fact that animanga foils are generally made very obvious, helps us perceive these diagonal relationships. Thus, the reader can squint at the interactions of almost the entirety of Gintama's enormous cast with valid suspicion, with less difficulty than in other works with more complex structures. The series' sheer length also ensures that there is an abundance of material to comb through, so much so in fact that this careful inspection, through rereading again and again, becomes necessary.

For instance, the interactions between any given pair of characters may not seem directly relevant to our protagonist at first glance, but once you know the magic A | B schema, you may notice that that pair's interactions resonate with that of a different pair, one involving an A-sided character with less reflection lossiness from the top and who therefore reflects much more of what happens to them onto Gintoki. In this way, the original pair, who are probably just a couple of minor side characters who appear once in a weird arc and then never show up again, can make you go, "hey wait a minute. what if?"

What if?

Let's look at a concrete example. Housen and Utsuro don't seem to have much to do with each other at first glance. However, because we know that he parallels Kamui, and that Kamui | Kagura parallel Takasugi | Gintoki, who in turn can be mapped onto Utsuro | Shouyou, we can arrive at a Housen-Utsuro connection that wasn't previously obvious. What is the utility of this connection? For one, it sharpens our ability to articulate how the hole-sided flee from the things they fear and yearn for by adding Housen's infamous avoidance of the sun into the analysis. It also provides new ground for exploring potential ideas comparing, say, Kamui choosing to leave with the Harusame and walk in Housen's footsteps, with Oboro's resigned embrace of the Naraku and Utsuro. Additionally, since Housen was defeated in Hinowa's lap, this also helps us draw a Hinowa -> Kagura connection, which helps us arrive at a Hinowa-Shouyou connection, which helps to reify that Shouyou is a milf.

By inserting one or two blatant instances of foreshadowing and parallelism early on in the series, instances that are impossible to pass off as coincidence, Gintama primes the reader to suspect that similar nuggets might be hiding anywhere, to check every garbage can we encounter from there on out like in the Pokemon games.

Whoops. In attempting to explain the math zeitgeist I succumbed to using math in my explanation. It's irresistible.

But that's structure. Let's move on now to something arguably even more important: motifs.

It's undeniable that for a shounen series that's half gag-manga, Gintama has a strange amount of analyzable motifs, and a clear loyalty to them. Regardless of how extravagantly people on tumblr dot com may want to overanalyze their favourite Shounen Jump series, their efforts are usually restrained to theme and characterization. Their ravings do not usually resemble the ravings of the Gintama Salon. If you've read this far, I don't think I need to explain this to you, or what Gintama's most prominent motifs are. But why is Gintama so motif-ful? The sword's importance is obvious, expected even, but what differentiates Gintama from, say, Bleach, where the characters' swords also literally represent their souls in a way?

In the end the answer is what I already discussed in My Orochi Stood Up, the foundation of my entire framework, in fact its very title: the dick joke.

Sorachi's immature sense of humour is the glue holding the entire thematic and narrative structure of Gintama together. Why do we search obsessively for meaning in the flotsam of Gintama's less narratively charged moments? Because, quite frankly, many things are phallic. The sword is no longer simply a sword--by being imbued with the spirit of the dick joke, it becomes not only valid but textual to associate it with the head of the nation (shadow juice squirt), the motif of the dragon (thank you Elizabeth), and castration. What I mean is not whether the sword can be read as a dick--obviously, phallic logic has been prominent through all of human history--but the way in which Gintama's sexual humour gives us--and itself--an impetus to equate motifs in the first place.

Comparing very serious things to dicks is funny--the more abrupt, the more shocking, the more mood whiplash, the funnier is. Therefore, for Gintama's toilet humour to be as effective as possible, tone dissonance is ideal, pushing it towards the intermingling of comedy and tragedy that we know it so well for today. This in turn validates and reinforces the meaning-making role that these phallic jokes play in the story as a hole. It is not only that we cannot separate the dick jokes from the serious delivery of the plot, but that in many arcs important information is given to us through ridiculous gag devices (ball gags?).

The logic of basic sex jokes is extremely simple, intuitive, and easy to understand. The prominence of the pole necessarily implies the presence of the hole. I've talked about that enough in my essays, so I won't go into detail here, but the reason that I wrote my essays in the first place is because of how easy it is to map a procreative framework onto a series filled from beginning to end with phallic gags. As much as I may joke about it, the underlying logic of "the pole and the hole" is powerful and compelling, providing connective tissue to seemingly disparate motifs with ease. When combined with the "sorting" power of the A | B structure, the ability to associate any particular character with any particular motif easily gives us the ability to analyze how a given set of characters interacts with a motif; equally, where the motif sits in Gintama's playing ground of phallicism can inform a given character's dynamic with others.

I've already written at length about the role that wordplay plays in this as well. To save on time, I'll just quote from My Orochi Stood Up:

Gintama’s insistence on wordplay enables interesting meaning to be derived from these dirty jokes and their interaction with other motifs in the story. After all, the name of the series itself elevates the spirit of the balls joke, even if unintentionally, to the same level as the other metaphor in the title: “silver."

But perhaps the singularly most important example is the -tama in Gintama, with its plethora of potential meanings, each of them just silly and dirty enough that you have to take it seriously. Beyond the obvious joke on kintama (balls) and the “silver soul” meaning, we’ve seen that tama is also easily conflated with atama (head), and even with tamago (egg). This is clearly demonstrated with the series’ fixation on beheading leading to the salvation of the soul, and the bodyswap arc hinging on the pun between soul and egg.

In short, it is the comedic aspect of Gintama that fuels the series' own willingness to conflate and play with its motifs, and that validates--provokes--our mad efforts as readers to draw unlikely connections and dig through dirt. Though it may seem more ridiculous on the surface to be taking such a magnifying glass to such a profoundly silly series, it is in fact more justified for Gintama than it would likely be for a more serious series, one where the paths between motifs are not pre-paved, let alone lubricated with shadow squirt juice.

I was recently introduced to a theory of comedy where comedy was posited as an interplay between excess and lack. How this maps on to Gintama is obvious; but one thing that comes to mind now is how easy it would be to characterize our scholarly efforts in examining Gintama, a series one could humorously characterize as "lacking", as a kind of excess. Which is to say, I think Gintama has pulled its penultimate trick on us (because it's still coming out with more stuff for the anniversary. I believe it.) by making us part of its comedy.

[rad-roche]

Hello there! I've been admiring your amazing writing for... *checks notes* about 7 years now, and I wondered if you had any tips or advice you'd be down to share? no worries if, hope you have a wonderful day!

aw, thank you very much!! god i'm withering to dust as i type this. all this stuff is pretty subjective, and i think a lot of how-to writing advice is 'how to write like me' so i'd take all of it, especially mine, with a pinch of salt

if you write fanfiction (lord knows i do!) keep a varied media diet. books, obviously, movies, television shows. love fic to bits, but having it sit too large in your reference pool can lead to bad habits. lots of media, but especially challenging media. picking up a random book and hating it enough to put it down two pages in is a fantastic use of your time, because that develops taste. why do i hate this kind of plot? how would i do it? why? and so on, ask yourself questions. save paragraphs you love from novels and keep them somewhere, stare at them sometimes. oh, engage in analysis where possible! you'll notice writing isn't happening yet, unfortunately that has to come last.

this is more a pet peeve of mine, but try to be aware of dialogue that's too representative of what a character is really thinking. it's a little hard to explain if you've never seen it, but have you ever read a book or played a game or the like and it's kind of... too snug where it shouldn't be? it feels a little like a children's show, but for adults? it's that. too many 'i think' 'i feel' statements in spoken dialogue from characters who are otherwise not that emotionally intelligent. the human animal is a messy, temperamental creature, and we're stuck conveying gigantic ideas at the height of emotion through an incredibly lossy communication format. say you're writing a couple, and one says to the other 'when you don't do the dishes, i feel unappreciated', and the other says 'i hear that, but when you don't trust me to do them after i recover from my shift, i feel like you don't understand how hard my job is'. wonderful regulation skills. terrible to read. have somebody blow up, or say something that's accidentally mean, or storm off, or smash a plate or shoot somebody, or not say anything at all. have them be outright wrong about how they feel because they don't understand it. anything you can do to fray that little thread between brain and mouth, just a touch

biggest thing: write for yourself. the more specific, the better. if needed, expand to a group chat of sickos who'll post fire emojis. if you do have an audience in mind, never write for the most incurious person in it. the minute you worry somebody won't 'get' it, you'll write homiletic prose, and the people who will suddenly won't either. you get it. anybody else is a bonus. good luck!!

[oliveroctavius]

your collage on Harry's schizophrenia drives me up the wall, because it's SUCH a cool and well-executed idea and inspires me to try something similar, but comics are so uniquely perfect for it and none of the topics I'd want to focus on are comics. </3

(I guess I don't really have a point to this ask, I just think abt that collage a LOT)

Oh, I absolutely get that frustration, wanting to do something similar with non-comics things!

A comics collage is kind of like an AMV: it lets you relive something you know but cut up to be punchier, and with an additional layer of ideas on top helping reinterpret what you see. Unlike with an AMV, though, the collage makes it equally as easy to use an academic paper as your reinterpretation-medium as it is to use poetry. Or both! At the same time!

The comic format is unique in that... Okay, I'm going to get into an Amateur Media Theory ramble here, so bear with me.

Audio is a one-dimensional medium: you can only go backwards or forwards in it along an axis, and it drags you along at a predetermined speed.

Text is also one-dimensional (there is only one "correct" order in which to read a paragraph), though you can set your own speed.

Images are two-dimensional. Your eye can explore at its own speed up, down, left, or right.

Video is three-dimensional, but the time dimension is not controlled by you (like with audio) and limits your ability to explore each individual image.

The fragmented text of comic books extends some of that user-controlled two-dimensionality to the way you approach words. I can use a combo of comic images + cut-up poetry techniques to change how the reader experiences the texts I'm using as a source.

Anyone writing an essay has to decide on an order in which to introduce their ideas. But what if you wanted to approach your concept as a cloud, or a tree with multiple parallel but contradictory branches? What if you wanted to leave visible gaps in your argument to demonstrate that some parts may be left out on purpose?

I love the idea of "web-weaving" that's popular on tumblr right now. It encourages ideas to be considered together without having to commit to just one linkage or interpretation. Like with comics, it can include images beside text, skipping the necessarily lossy attempts to convert one to the other.

But despite the "web" idea, it's usually presented as discrete chunks of text (or images) for the reader to consider one after another. The reader may construct a web of connections themselves. But in the comics collage, I can show the reader the overlaid jumble of wordless connections, contradictions, and associations much closer to how it appears in my head. High dimensionality, high information density, high creative control--and it all looks pretty darn cool.

[loki-zen]

with regard to some recent discourse:

there is a skill that in LIS gets called information synthesis.

this is the skill required to condense and summarise sources in a readable and minimally lossy way.

the skill of writing in a way people actually want to read comes on top of this; perfect infosynth at best gets you ‘very readable due to its simple digression-free format and well-labelled sections which are presented in a logical order’.

infosynth does/can contain knowing your precise target audience - maybe even the precise question they want to answer - and tailoring your summary appropriately.

infosynth is pretty obviously an important skill in today’s world! there is ever more information and even experts cannot keep up with it all. Doctors increasingly rely on medical librarians to read and summarise the latest research for them, because even within a very narrow sub-specialty it is simply not viable for them to keep up with it all themselves.

And people are increasingly producing and reading infosynth-type products in other fields. However, few people get any sort of explicit training in information synthesis.

We don’t really have the notion of a class of expert/professional whose role centres around information synthesis. (the General We that accepts that most ppl think librarians just shuffle books all day.) like there are a few field-specific Types of This Guy but they’re all off doing their own things and not considering themselves Information Synthesists who might share a skill set and a professional knowledge sharing community with other Information Synthesists.

and that’s a shame. people are always reinventing things from the LIS world and failing to like draw on the LIS world’s established work about how to do them out of ignorance that we are here and do those things. sad

[belsaas]

An ode to the iRiver iHP-120

For whatever reason, I've found myself deeply nostalgic for high school as of late. And for me, that is intractable from nostalgia for what is perhaps the peak mp3 player ever made:

The iRiver iHP-120 was released in 2003, my sophomore year of high school, and it changed my life. This thing held an astounding 10GB of music—for comparison, most mp3 players at the time were flash based, and held 128 or 256 MB of music. The only big competitor at the time was the 1st generation iPod, a mac-exclusive device that transferred data over firewire and had to be synced using the fledgling iTunes. Juxtapose that to iRiver, who took what I like to call the "we don't give a fuck" approach:

When you plugged in the iHP-120 with USB 2.0, it just showed up as an external hard drive—you could throw whatever you wanted on there. Naturally, it could read mp3 files, but this thing introduced me to the world of audio codecs and processing in a way nothing could have prepared me. WMA files worked fine (a big deal at the time because of DRM issues, during the heyday of KaZaA and Limewire). You want to play uncompressed .WAV files? No problem, put them on there. FLAC files? Absolutely, let your audiophile freak flag fly. Fucking OGG Vorbis files played on this thing. Hell, you could put text files on here and read them.

(The firmware for these was also basically open-source, and people did even crazier stuff with them. By the time I retired my player, it could do gapless playback, crossfading, 10-band equalizing, normalization and more. I think I also changed the boot screen to a picture of Sailor Moon.)

But the magic didn't end at uploading music to the iHP-120—controlling this thing was more intuitive than any other device around at the time. All of your music was displayed on the player in whatever folder structure you loaded onto the device—navigating the music was as simple as using Windows Explorer. You had your standard play/pause, skip forward/back and volume controls on the front joystick, but what are the other buttons for?

Yeah. This thing was also a portable recorder. At anytime you could just hold down the Rec button and start recording with the onboard mic, or using an external input (more on that later). On the right side, an A-B Interval control. You ever wanted to just listen to one part of a song on repeat to learn the lyrics? Just hold down the button. Lastly a hold switch to disable control inputs while it was in your pocket—no accidentally pausing the music.

Okay, back to the external input mentioned before. The top of the iHP-120 is wild.

The top I/O panel of the iRiver iHP-120, with 4 jacks.

From right to left, you have a 3.5mm headphone jack (naturally), a 2.5mm microphone jack, the remote control port (more on this in a bit), and in white you have Line In/Out jacks which you could use to record as well as just plug in a second pair of headphones for a friend—jacks which support both 3.5mm analog input, as well as 3.5mm TOSLINK optical cables.

The TOSLINK 3.5mm male plug. A plug I only ever encountered on this device and the Sound Blaster X-Fi Titanium, a sound card I wrote a review of in 2009 which seems to still be up at PC Gamer and reading it now I don't know how any of my writing was ever published, let alone in print.

Chances are good you've never encountered this, it's phenomenally uncommon, and TOSLINK as a whole largely died with the emergence of HDMI—but this fucking mp3 player could both record and transmit fiber optic audio in uncompressed stereo or lossy 7.1 surround sound. In high school, I would plug the iHP-120 into our home theatre and listened to Porcupine Tree's Stupid Dream on repeat (side tangent, I'm pretty sad 5.1 album recording never really caught on, but the Dolby Atmos music format is better in every way, and I'm grateful Apple is bringing it into the mainstream).

"Okay, so we have an music player/text reader/voice recorder with optical audio, and basically every codec under the sun, what else could you go on about Erika?"

-you, the person reading this

THE REMOTE

Let me take you back to 2003. I was a depressed theatre kid teenager who would listen to Rooney on repeat on my Koss UR40s while crying over a girl who wanted nothing to do with me.

The Koss UR40 Headphones I wore like a fashion accessory everyday.

The other thing I wore everyday besides those headphones? Baggy cargo pants (it was acceptable at the time, I swear). Inside the right cargo pocket was my iRiver iHP-120, and clipped to the velcro flap of that cargo pocket was the iHP-115R remote control.

The iHP-120 remote unit

Every function of the iHP-120 could be controlled from this little fucker. Play/pause and stop buttons. Volume, skip track and recording are all here on rocker switches. You could even change the fucking bitrate of playback on this little thing, all without taking the actual mp3 player out of your pocket because the LCD screen on the remote has all the same info you'd get on the main unit.

The remote itself connected to the iRiver with that big plug you can see in the picture above (shamelessly stolen from Nathan Edwards who I worked with at PC Gamer in the late 2000s and only while writing this post discovered has already written a much more professional ode to the beauty of the iHP-120 this year).

You would plug your headphones into the remote, (or in my case you could also plug in your 1988 Chevrolet 2500 suburban's tape deck adaptor and have controls at your fingertips. No more distracted driving).

An image of a 1988 Chevorlet 2500 diesel Suburban. Not super relevant but god I miss my high school suburban. We would take the rear and middle benches out and put a queen-size mattress in the back, which 9 of my friends would ride on as we went to Little Caesar's for lunch. Also, cars just looked way fucking better back then.

I think I'm about done waxing nostalgic, but I really do miss the days of discrete devices—I kind of find myself fighting back against my smartphone. I have a camera I carry around, a pen and paper planner and writing notebook, and a kindle for reading. There's something appealing about not having my phone be my access to music either—rather, having a device that I just threw my music on and it plays it really well was rad. The iHP-120 was really fucking rad.

[lossie92]

Hello, sorry for the mistakes, English is not my native language.

I've been following your fanfictions for a few years, I love your Thrandiel. Right now I'm reading them again because we don't have much content like that and I really like it a lot.

Please don't stop producing!

A new year full of success and health.

Hi there,

Thank you so much! I'm glad you love those stories ☺️ I don't plan on quitting writing and hopefully I can get back to that fandom at some point!

Thank you once again and happy new year to you as well!

[consistencydotcom]

That can bother a real variant teacher and take it around and you need to go back and evolve that a riddle of rain teenager and takes a rally out and take your right teacher completely out of here it's so much of couthey're out did you write Kendrick I'm pretty idiot some of the questions is that humor you're smart and intelligent I will continue to expect you to be smart and touch it at a time though it uses fsen's butts to procrastinate reasons no it's adults here because I could want yo and you've you want to use the brain and says I'll go gave you one slut it'll never go and keep on setting all of our gun and you'll get it right here I'm pretty Italian somebody

Getting together at best HB settings and we're around behind me background let's set the refrigeratory powder bless me your whole that house keep your hawk oil a little bit a little bit of a original opinion stands I'm going to show oh I'm not gonna keep your stand now and longed you're gone it's a procedure of return as an overturned horse mine is the dominant heroes there's the resource when you're in a hall so I can't be able to do that you can't be able to talk to us you can't be personal about taking that very personal posts and you definitely cannot do an internet search if you can't even learn you also surely sell up not behold me or spell it at a disposition therapy to Hutter it's my honor to contend it didn't mind she's doing with you

Keep doing what you're doing and you're going to have to stop and hear yourself to some self Terms & Conditions I have submitted a horrible letter by infollowing I Don't Know if She uses it's antibiotics in progressive and you're All In all out all the link like a white there isn't a shady Gray hair no worthlessness no being Butterfly like it or and not being brought up to Black in the next month She just likes to put it lossy evolved in the museum of Girls Don't Fall asleep with Teenagers like me Quiet on the internet you're kind of wearing become a wearing background welcome as your Girlfriend and my Girlfriend comes Here and therefore equally with your play

Umm

[thejuicethatmakesyougay]

“Lamore Compre stinkz!!” -his bother, Extrae Tertia

typing quirk: censors swears with [honk] in brackets, only writes in lowercase and doesn’t always use punctuation

name pronunciation: La-more Com-prey

name meaning: idk it just kinda jived in my brain as sounding nice + i thought “hmm lossy compression…”

personality: he’s pretty nice but he also sucks at social cues, and he’s pretty miserable like 80% of the time. self-conscious as hell and his bother doesn’t make it any easier

[mostlysignssomeportents]

This day in history

I'm in TARTU, ESTONIA! AI, copyright and creative workers' labor rights (TOMORROW, May 10, 8AM: Science Fiction Research Association talk, Institute of Foreign Languages and Cultures building, Lossi 3, lobby). A talk for hackers on seizing the means of computation (TOMORROW, May 10, 3PM, University of Tartu Delta Centre, Narva 18, room 1037).

#20yrsago Japan jails academic for writing P2P app https://web.archive.org/web/20040512194433/http://straitstimes.asia1.com.sg/latest/story/0,4390,250207,00.html

#20yrsago Blogger redesign notes https://stopdesign.com/journal/2004/05/09/blogger.html

#20yrsago TheyRule: applying information design to corporate directorships https://theyrule.net

#20yrsago Don’t just protect the unconceived: protect the inanimate! https://fafblog.blogspot.com/2004_05_02_fafblog_archive.html#108411098508640046

#15yrsago Brit MP saw undercover cops egging crowd to riot at G20 https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2009/may/10/g20-policing-agent-provacateurs

#15yrsago Elsevier has an entire division dedicated to publishing fake advertorial “peer-reviewed” journals https://science.slashdot.org/story/09/05/09/1514235/more-fake-journals-from-elsevier

#10yrsago Against the instrumental argument for surveillance https://www.theguardian.com/technology/blog/2014/may/09/cybersecurity-begins-with-integrity-not-surveillance

#10yrsago Congressmen ask ad companies to pretend SOPA is law, violate antitrust https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2014/05/pols-ad-networks-pretend-we-passed-sopa-and-never-mind-about-antitrust

#10yrsago Japanese man arrested for 3D printing and firing guns https://kotaku.com/japanese-man-arrested-for-having-guns-made-with-a-3d-pr-1573358490

#5yrsago Americans with diabetes are forming caravans to buy Canadian insulin at 90% off https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/nova-scotia/americans-diabetes-cross-canada-border-insulin-1.5125988

#5yrsago Big Tech is deleting evidence needed to prosecute war crimes, and governments want them to do more of it https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/05/facebook-algorithms-are-making-it-harder/588931/

#5yrsago Buried in Uber’s IPO, an aggressive plan to destroy all public transit https://48hills.org/2019/05/ubers-plans-include-attacking-public-transit/

#1yrago KPMG audits the nursing homes it advises on how to beat audits https://pluralistic.net/2023/05/09/dingo-babysitter/#maybe-the-dingos-ate-your-nan

[hologramblue]

besides assigning purpose to purposelessness the other thing that is part of that same thought, about storytelling and politics, is like

you know how history is itself a type of storytelling. this kingdom won a war against that kingdom. this rebellion failed and that one succeeded. the people were happy in this era. such-and-so ruler built these roads.

in order to tell stories about history at that scale, you have to discard details. and those details are the actual material realities that people experienced; the outliers, the nuances, the specifics of who did what with what result, shaved off to simplify the narrative, which is all well and good because it allows you to talk about history and see the broad patterns, but when history is taught as history people don't automatically recognize its lossy quality. people will happily grow up believing the past was a sort of fairy tale where function was purpose and pattern was detail, fundamentally different from their own complex lives, if they only ever know stories of the past

(and of course, because time and space are sort of the same thing, the same thing happens with people's understanding of people and places far away from them.)

this is such an easy trap to fall into because humans like stories, they're a useful tool for social, thinking creatures in an infinitely complex world, they're far better than having no clue what's going on at all. they're also not an adequate substitute for truth.

so because stories occupy this middle ground between truth and fantasy, where we make use of them deliberately for entertainment and deliberately as a teaching tool but also accidentally to simplify reality, they're like...

some belief systems and political ideologies are fundamentally about embracing stories in place of reality. Those People are allies and Those People are enemies. why? because of some fundamental nature, they're characters in our story, they don't have internal complexity. Our People are a coherent and unified body and if you disagree you're a traitor and if you're one of us you're better off with us and if you don't feel that way the problem is you

there's an inherent challenge in telling stories that challenge ideologies like that because a large part of their draw is that those narratives tickle people's brains, they're appealing, people will keep coming up with those ideas independently and accidentally because they feel cool and compelling. so if you are telling a story that's nominally against those ideas, but you feel the urge to write something cool and compelling......watch out.

[anniekoh]

Silicon Valley, despite being a supposed hub of innovation, one separated from the garish demands of regular industries, has culturally grown to resemble an open-air private equity firm where companies are incubated like animals bred for slaughter.

While I’m not saying the Valley is entirely bereft of innovation, the modern tech ecosystem has become an alternative asset market built to enrich the very same people it once claimed to reject. Fred Wilson, the co-founder of Union Square Ventures, said in 2016 that startups that took corporate money were “doing business with the devil,” yet the only remaining difference between the current state of venture capital and private equity appears to be how willing they are to say the quiet part (“we need to make money off of this investment”) out loud. 

Silicon Valley’s key differentiator was that it was theoretically the place where venture capital took risks on interesting and innovative technology, yet the best-funded startups remain siloed in whatever industry venture capital believes will be “big,” even if they haven’t got any true path to profitability.

It may also be a result of the different incentives that bring people to the Bay Area and the tech industry in general. A decade ago, engineers made an average base salary of $92,648 versus $139,729 in 2023. The software industry has created 82 new billionaires since 2010, and the 2019 tech IPO rush created an estimated 5000 new millionaires across eight tech companies. In 2013, there were 39 unicorns (tech companies worth a billion dollars or more). According to CBInsights, there are now over a thousand of them. And because Andreessen and his fellow venture stooges forced so many lossy, unprofitable companies to go public, many of them are underwater (and they have been for some time), with the top 50 Tech IPOs since 2020 losing 59% of their market capitalization as of May 13 2023.

As a result, the Valley is left with the avaricious culture of the finance industry without any of the stability. Venture capital’s elite turned startups into alternative investments, fattened them up to sell, and, when the market dropped out in 2022 and 2023, shrugged their shoulders and blamed the workers. They, along with tech’s leaders, derided a culture of “entitlement” that they themselves created. Oh, workers want food at the office? They want a gym? They want a place to nap? Then why didn’t you fucking complain when companies started offering this shit back in 2015?

Because tech’s elite hates labor, and hoarding talent was a necessity to pump valuations. The tech industry — by which I mean the Valley’s powerful venture arm — spent a decade convincing software engineers that they were an elevated class, promising them the world and oftentimes delivering it without requiring them to build something that improved the world in any way. And the second the party ended — the moment that the economy stopped endlessly providing growth to every single company in the market, and when money stopped being free — tech was ready to eject tens of thousands of workers, and tech’s venture capitalists were ready to stop signing checks and start requiring “hard numbers” for the first time in years.

And the problem with an industry that is led and powered by venture capital is that it doesn’t build any real culture. “Startup culture” is a vague shibboleth that exists to justify labor abuse in exchange for a theoretical massive payday in the future, with the hollow premise that there is something more noble about writing code or “working at an early-stage company” than there is any other job. While there are people doing cool, weird or societally-beneficial shit, they are endlessly drowned out by a combination of founders trying to build “the next big thing,” with “big” referring to how much they can sell it for, and “thing” being “whatever is going to sell to someone.”