#make the purge easier on all of us | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

olderthannetfic · 6 months ago

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hi, as someone who is tragically gen Z and only ever read AO3, can I ask: what was so great about LiveJournal? Like, I know that there were fics posted there (and I've even read about the "purge", so I get why it isn't used anymore) and that it was sort of a forum-type thing. But what I don't understand, wouldn't Tumblr fill in the latter function? How was that site any different? I see a lot of people reminiscing about it and I'm confused

A big factor in LJ's greatness is timing and nostalgia.

It was genuinely great, but it wasn't quite as great as all of the Lo, shall the Golden Age ne'er come again? posts suggest.

LJ arrived at a pivotal time in the development of the internet both in terms of technical stuff and how many people had access. Many fans who are now in their thirties to fifties first discovered fandom through LJ and many were at a time in their lives when they were feeling energetic and up to making lots of new friends—and to figuring out how to make a site work for them.

I got on LJ in 2002 when it required invites. Fandom arrived in droves in 2003, first via coordinated campaigns to get invites to key people and then when LJ opened up free account creation to everyone. Back then, LJ's features sucked. It was impossible to search properly, among other things. At its height (2005-7, let's say), there was a reasonable site search, and fans had developed all sorts of community resources for finding each other.

People often remember this phase but not the early days of suckitude.

This development parallels how Tumblr used to not have that private chat feature and how a lot of fuckyeah[whatever] type tumblrs have helped curate the site and make it much more usable for fans. Fandom draining away from LJ after strikethrough also parallels people draining away from Tumblr after the purge.

There are people who talk about Tumblr the way my cohort talks about LJ...

And to the shock of no one, they are people who came of age on Tumblr, who found fandom via Tumblr, who were on Tumblr during pivotal times in their lives and ones when they had energy to make friends and figure out how a site worked.

Those same Tumblrites are now making all the same geriatric-sounding posts we LJers do about how other sites lack the required features to be good for fandom while missing that 90% of tumblr's "features" at its height (2012-2016, let's say) were actually fan-created and were basically the same as any fandom newsletter or links page or all the versions of this kind of personal curation stretching back to long before the internet existed.

What life phase you hit a site at matters.

With all of that said, no, LJ was not a forum. It was a blogging site with threaded comments.

The key point to understand is that conversation was always happening in a specific person's space. Unlike on a true forum, people were in the comments on a particular post in a journal owned by another fan. (On a forum, there's the first post in a thread, but it's still more of a communal space with less of a hierarchy.)

Overall, the LJ format can have a feeling a bit like you're over at someone's house for tea. There's more of a sense of intimacy and also behaving yourself in front of community members.

Tumblr being obscure and impossible to find anything in does give it some of the same vibe relative to Twitter, but it's still part of modern social media that tries to shove every rando into the face of every other rando.

But it wasn't just vibes: LJ also had robust privacy features where you could lock a post to this or that group of friends. You could moderate your comments section properly. Tumblr has far fewer controls to force people to behave or leave on a technical level.

The biggest thing many people miss about LJ is the threaded comments. At least by late LJ and on Dreamwidth, you can expand and collapse threads, making it far easier to deal with a massive comments section. But more than that, things are properly threaded with multiple levels of hierarchy that are all easily visible in the same place.

On Tumblr, it used to be extremely difficult to find all of the actual commentary on a post. Nowadays, it's far easier, but you still have to scroll chronologically, and multiple versions of a post with a long chain of commentary may be much more divorced from each other than what would happen in a LJ comments section.

But could we use Tumblr pretty much how we used LJ?

We could.

I do.

The key things that people tend to miss about LJ, aside from the younger and more excited version of themselves or the friends they've lost since then, are:

Heavily text-based

It may sound odd on the modern internet, but there are a lot of people whose brains don't like or handle an image-heavy site well. They were everywhere in SF book fandom. They were everywhere on the early internet. Today, they're hanging out on Dreamwidth and still going to their SF cons. They're usually not on Tumblr.

You could follow the discussion

Threaded comments help, but a lot of it is about having some place you can check for updates. It wasn't actually that easy to follow big LJ discussions unless you were subscribed to comments and reading along as things were happening instead of coming along after the entire mass of comments had been left.

The tone of the discussion is intellectual and one's enemies are "idiots", not "problematic"

All this requires is a penchant for longwindedness and an itchy blocking finger to remove anyone slinging ad hominems from the comments section.

On tumblr, it's as simple as conversations happening in the replies on a popular account and that person not tolerating suibaiting and threats.

(And make no mistake, a lot of LJ discussion was in the comments on popular accounts, not spread equally between everyone's.)

It does require that multiple people like that tone and want to engage in that way, but lots of people do want to.

These days, I interact with tumblr by checking my askbox and reading my activity page. The vast, vast majority of my posts are ones where I'm the OP, so if I block someone, they're booted from the discussion entirely.

For me... yeah, Tumblr functions almost exactly like LJ.

Also like LJ, while I'm hosting the conversation, if you hang around, you'll see the same people again and again in the comments. They may or may not also host that kind of conversation in their space, and there's a larger pool of lurkers who have some notion of which people count as regulars. Other people are watching from the shadows, enjoying or deriding the takes of the usual crowd.

People presumably do like reading my lengthy commentary or they wouldn't be here, but my tumblr wouldn't be popular like this without a healthy pool of other people who chime in regularly. It's not just that there are more people: it's that you see the same people over time. There's a bit more sense of place and community than on some parts of the internet.

So, in my opinion, the failure to just recreate LJ fandom on Tumblr was a skill issue.

Threaded comments were great, but LJ culture came from mailing lists, and mailing lists had the same issue as tumblr with the diverging threads.

We solved that back then by clipping out only the parts we wanted to respond to (you'd write "snip" around the quotation to show it was incomplete). We solved the smaller LJ issue by linking to other posts we were referencing and doing discussion link roundups. We solve it on tumblr by, again, linking to what we're talking about and even quoting multiple reblog chains in our own reblog of just one chain.

Tumblr's technical features and even general crap-ness aren't really the problem. 90s and early 00s sites regularly went down for periods of time unthinkable today.

The missing piece is people.

When one is in an active fandom with others who curate or with friends who let one know what's up, a site with imperfect features is easy to figure out and retrofit for fandom's needs. When one already feels out of touch and is between fannish passions—or at least fannish passions anyone else cares about—seeing the potential in a new site is hard.

Threaded comments are different and better.

LJ's built-in way to see everyone's blog in your own style was better. The automatic timestamps and the ease of seeing a paginated archive of an entire blog was better than tumblr's endless scroll and lack of clear date labeling. But some of that can be fixed with xkit or knowing your way around tumblr well.

A lot of it is nostalgia for the lj era and a refusal to take the time to figure out how to use tumblr in an oldschool internet way.

So by all means, people, weigh in about what made LJ great or how the culture felt at the time...

But if I see one more god damn response going "You can't have a conversation on tumblr!" in reply to my tumblr, which contains nothing but conversation, I am coming for you.

#fandom history #fandom meta

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multidimensionbb · 3 months ago

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The Great MCYT WIP Purge 2024: Info Post!

EVENT DETAILS ARE HERE!

For this event, artists of all mediums and stripes (cosplayers, artists, writers--anyone!) are encouraged to pick up a WIP, whether half-finished and shared, just a random Discord DM to a friend, or 95% done in your Google Docs, and finish it to your desired finish level! Those who choose to battle their creative demons will take up the mantle of a WIP warrior (warrior for short) in the event. Only one WIP will be allowed per person, due to the structuring of the event, but you are encouraged to work on other WIPs if you finish yours early and are feeling it!

If you do not wish to fight on the front lines, keep reading, because we still have desperate need of you! Those who do not wish to take up arms can still help from the sidelines as our amazing support roles. There will be three main kinds of support roles: doodlers (who are capable of sketching motivational doodles), betas (those who check over work to polish it; though they are usually readers, in this event, they may also check over the quality of other mediums if asked!), and duckies (those who help the warriors problem solve their way around creative blocks with cooperative brainstorming sessions). Any supporter may sign up as multiple of these roles for one person--sign up for whatever you're comfortable and capable of helping out with!

Warriors and supporters will be paired in teams of two based on an anonymous summary of the warrior's work. If a warrior wishes to fight solo, they can simply let a mod know, and if they already have a supporter in mind, they can also let a mod know! We would like to keep teams in pairs, if possible, but we can make exceptions if a warrior's team is pre-selected.

A participant may also choose to sign up as a warrior and a supporter. Please be mindful of your workload if you do this, however--we don't want you to burn out!

EVENT RULES:

If you need to drop the event, please let a mod know right away! No shame at all, we just want communication!

13+ please, to comply with Discord's TOS.

You must have a Discord account to participate, as the vast majority of this event will be hosted there!

No E-Rated fics! Sorry! If you are concerned about your WIP crossing the line, please DM a mod during the idea finalization phase of the event.

Shipping is permitted for this event; however, we request that you keep ship-related discussion and art to the specific keyed Discord category, to respect other participant's personal preferences!

Conversely, no ship-related harassment will be tolerated. Do not be surprised when an event that allows shipping has shipping in it and do not argue with others about their ship preferences. Mods will not be censoring projects based on relationships or content as long as those projects follow our other rules.

WIPs must be MCYT-related! Any corner of MCYT will do--we're not picky (this is just to make teaming easier than a multifandom event, to be quite honest).

If you need any clarification or elaboration, please check our multidimensional asks tag to see if the question has been answered; if it hasn't, feel free to shoot us an ask or an individual DM!

To see the event timeline, look here!

To meet the mods, look here!

To sign up, look here!

#mod lunarblazes #mdwp #mdwp info

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mostlysignssomeportents · 2 months ago

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Doublethink sump linkdump

On OCTOBER 23 at 7PM, I'll be in DECATUR, presenting my novel THE BEZZLE at EAGLE EYE BOOKS.

Trigger warning for #eikositriophobia: this is my 23d linkdump (Hail Discordia!), an erratic Saturday purge of the open tabs I haven't managed to blog this week; here's the previous 22:

https://pluralistic.net/tag/linkdump/

When I was a kid, I idolized Harlan Ellison. I loved his prose styling, his stage presence, the way he blended activism and fiction, and the way he mixed critical nonfiction with fiction. As a 17 year old, I attended a writing workshop that Ann Crispin was giving at a local science fiction convention and she told me that I had the makings of a great writer, just as soon as I stopped trying to be Harlan Ellison.

But Harlan was a complicated figure. I attended the Clarion Workshop in 1992 specifically because he was our instructor, and came away bitterly disillusioned after he targeted one of my fellow students for relentless, cruel bullying, a performance that was so ugly that the board fired the director and permanently barred him from teaching the workshop.

Later on, Harlan became the kind of copyright maximalist who called for arbitrary internet surveillance and censorship in the name of shutting down ebook piracy. During a panel about this at a sf convention, he called one of the other panelists a "motherfucker" and threatened to punch him in the face. He took to badmouthing me in interviews, painting my position – whose nuances he certainly understood – in crude caricature.

But Harlan and I had many friends in common, people I really liked, and they were adamant that Harlan's flaws were not the whole story: if Harlan liked you, he would do anything to stand up for you, no matter the cost to himself. Famously, when Harlan taught Octavia Butler's Clarion, he demanded to know why she wasn't writing full time, and she replied that there was the inconvenient matter of making rent and groceries. He replied, "If that's all that's stopping you, come live in my guest house for as long as it takes, eat my groceries, and write." Which she did.

Which is great, but also: one of my own Clarion students told me about when his then-teenaged mother met Harlan at a sf convention and told him that she dreamed of becoming a writer, and he propositioned her. She was so turned off that she stopped writing forever (her son, my student, is now an accomplished writer).

So Harlan was a mixed bag. He did very, very good things. He did very, very bad things. When Harlan died, in 2018, I wrote an obit where I grappled with these two facts:

https://memex.craphound.com/2018/06/28/rip-harlan-ellison/

In it, I proposed a way of thinking about people that tried to make sense of both Harlans – and of all the people in our lives. There's an unfortunate tendency to think of the people that matter to us as having their deeds recorded in a ledger, with good deeds in one column and wicked deeds down the other.

In this formulation, we add up the good deeds and the bad deeds and subtract the bad from the good. If the result is a positive number, we say the good outweighs the bad, and therefore the person is, on balance, good. On the other hand, if the bad outweighs the good, then the person is bad, and the good deeds are irrelevant.

This gets us into no end of trouble. It means that when someone we admire slips up, we give them a pass, because "they've earned it." And when someone who's hurt us does something selfless and kind and brave, we treat that as though it doesn't matter, because they're an asshole.

But the truth is, no amount of good deeds can wipe away the bad. If you hurt someone, the fact that you've helped someone else doesn't make that hurt any easier to bear. And the kindnesses you do for other people make their lives better, no matter what bad things you've done to others.

Rather than calculating the balance of our goodness or badness, I think we should just, you know, sit with our sins and virtues. Let all the harm and joy exist in a state of superposition. Don't cancel out the harm. Don't wave away the good. They both exist, neither cancels the other, and we should strive to help more, and to do less harm. We should do everything we can to help those we harm. No one owes us a pass because of the good we've done.

That's the lesson Harlan taught me, and he taught it to me by absolutely failing to live his life this way – a fact that exists alongside all of the good he did, including the great art he made, which I love, and which inspired me.

Not long after Harlan's death, I got a phone call from J Michael Straczynski, Harlan's literary executor. As part of his care for Harlan's literary legacy, Joe was editing a new anthology of short stories, The Last Dangerous Visions, and did I want to contribute a story?

https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/harlan-ellison-last-dangerous-vision-1235117069/

Of course I did. Harlan edited Dangerous Visions in 1967: a groundbreaking anthology of uncomfortable science fiction that featured everyone from Philip K Dick to Samuel Delany. The followup, 1972's Again, Dangerous Visions, was, if anything, even more influential, including Le Guin's The Word For World IS Forest, as well as work by Joanna Russ, Kurt Vonnegut, David Gerrold, and James Tiptree, Jr.

Though some of the stories in these books haven't aged well, together, they completely changed my view of what science fiction was and what it could be. But The Last Dangerous Visions was a different (ahem) story. For complicated reasons (which all cashed out to "Harlan being very difficult to work with, sometimes for damned good reasons, other times for completely petty ones), TLDV was, at the time of Harlan's death, fifty years behind schedule. It was "science fiction's most famous unpublished book." Harlan had bought early work from writers who had gone on to have major careers – like Bruce Sterling – and had sat on them for half a century.

Then Joe called me to tell me that he was starting over with TLDV and did I want to contribute a story – and of course I did. I wrote a story for him with the title "Jeffty Is Five," part of my series of stories with the same titles as famous works of sf:

https://locusmag.com/2012/05/cory-doctorow-a-prose-by-any-other-name/

Joe liked the story, but not the title. He thought Harlan wouldn't have approved of this kind of appropriation, and he wanted to do right by the memory of his old friend. My first reaction was very Harlan-like: this is supposed to make you mad, it's my art, and if it offends you, that's your problem.

But I remembered the most important lesson I learned from Harlan, about good deeds and bad ones, and I thought about Joe, a writer I admired and liked, who was grappling with his grief and his commitment to Harlan's legacy, and I changed my mind and told him of course I'd change the title. I changed the title because Harlan would never have done so, and that's rather the point of the story.The story is (now)) called "The Weight of a Heart, the Weight of a Feather" (a very Harlanish title), and it's about the legacy of complicated people, whose lives are full of noble selflessness *and careless or deliberate cruelty. It's about throwing away the ledger and just letting all those facts sit together, about lives that are neither washed of sin by virtue, nor washed of virtue by sin.

It's a good story, I think, and I'm proud of it, and I'm interested in what the rest of you think now that the book is out:

https://www.blackstonepublishing.com/products/book-fyhm

Harlan was the writer who made me want to get good at reading my stories aloud. I was a charter member of the Harlan Ellison Record Club, as you can see for yourself from the time Harlan (accidentally) doxed me:

http://harlanellison.com/text/paladin.txt

After nearly 20 years of podcasting, I'm actually pretty good at this stuff. I'm going to be podcasting a reading of this story – eventually. I am nearly done "de-googling" my podcast feed, ripping it out of Feedburner, a service that I started using nearly two decades ago to convert a WordPress RSS feed to a podcast feed. In the intervening years, WordPress has come to support this natively and Feedburner has become a division of Google, so I've been methodically removing Feedburner's hooks from my feed, which is now proudly available here, without any surveillance or analytics:

https://craphound.com/feeds/doctorow_podcast

I'll be writing up the process eventually. In the meantime, I'm about to embark on another podcast fiction project, serializing my novella Spill, a "Little Brother" story that Tor's Reactor just published:

https://reactormag.com/spill-cory-doctorow/

The first part of "Spill" will go out tomorrow or Monday. Reactor also just published another "Little Brother" story, "Vigilant," which I read in last week's podcast:

https://craphound.com/littlebrother/2024/09/29/vigilant-a-little-brother-story/

One of my long-running beefs with Harlan was his insistence that the answer of copyright infringement online was to create an obligation on intermediaries – like ISPs – to censor their users' communications on demand from anyone claiming to have been wronged by a post or upload.

This would be bad for free expression under any circumstances, but it's an especially dangerous vision for ISPs, who are among the worst-run, most venal businesses in modern society ("We don't care, we don't have to, we're the phone company" -L Tomlin).

It's hard to overstate just how terrible ISPs are, but even in a field that includes Charter and Comcast, there's one company that rises above the pack when it comes to being grotesquely, imaginatively awful: Cox Communications.

Here's the latest from Cox: they sell "unlimited" gigabit data plans that cost $100 for the base plan and $50 to add the "unlimited" data. But – as Jon Brodkin writes for Ars Technica – Cox uniquely defines "unlimited" as severely limited:

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2020/06/cox-slows-internet-speeds-in-entire-neighborhoods-to-punish-any-heavy-users/

Now, you're probably thinking, ho-hum, another company that offered unlimited service and then acted like dicks when a customer treated it as unlimited, ::laughs in American Airlines::

https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesasquith/2019/11/13/unlimited-first-class-flights-for-lifehow-american-airlines-made-the-most-expensive-mistake-in-aviation-history/

But that's not the Cox story! Cox doesn't just throttle "unlimited" customers' internet to 2006-vintage DSL speeds – they slow down the entire neighborhood around the unlimited customer to those speeds.

As Brodkin writes, every Cox customer in the same neighborhood as an "unlimited" customer named "Mike" had their upload speeds reduced by more than two thirds, from 35mbps to 10mbps, to punish Mike. And they're not the only ones!

https://www.reddit.com/r/GNV/comments/gkicjg/comment/fr670cx/

Cox confirmed they were doing this, saying "performance can be improved for all customers in the neighborhood by temporarily increasing or maintaining download speeds and changing upload speeds for some of our service tiers."

Cox has been on a roll lately, really going for the shitty-telecoms-company gold. Back in August, 404 Media published a leaked pitch deck in which Cox promised advertisers that they were secretly listening to their customers' smart devices, transcribing their private conversations, and using them to target ads:

https://www.404media.co/heres-the-pitch-deck-for-active-listening-ad-targeting/

This isn't just appalling, it's also almost certainly fraudulent. As terrible as "smart" devices are (and oh God are they terrible), the vast majority of them don't do this. That's something a lot of security researchers have investigated, doing things like hooking up a protocol analyzer to a LAN with a smart device on it and looking for data transmissions that correspond to ambient speech in earshot of the gadget's mic.

My guess is that Cox has done a deal with a couple of the bottom-feedingest "smart TV" companies (as a cable operator, Cox will have relationships with a lot of these companies) to engage in this conduct. Smart TVs have emerged as one of the worst categories of consumer technology, on every axis: performance, privacy, repairability. The field has raced to the bottom, hit it, and then started digging to find new lows to sink to. This is just my hunch here, but I think it's highly likely that if there's a class of devices that are bugging your living room and selling the data to Cox, it's gonna be a smart TV (top tip: buy a computer monitor instead, and use your phone or laptop to stream to it).

Ask a certain kind of very smooth-brained, Samuelson-pilled economist about the enshittification of smart TVs and they'll tell you that this is a "revealed preference":

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revealed_preference

As in, sure, you may say that you don't want your TV to secretly record your private conversations and sell them to Cox, but actually you quite like it, because you have a TV.

While this is a facially very stupid argument, it's routinely made by people who think they're very smart, a point famously made by Matt Bors's "Mr Gotcha":

https://thenib.com/mister-gotcha/

Comics turn out to be a very good medium for stringing up the revealed preferences crowd on their own petards. This week, Juan Santapau's "The Secret Knots" added to the Mr Gotcha canon with an equally brilliant webcomic, albeit one with a very different vibe, entitled "Remind Me Later":

https://thesecretknots.com/comic/remind-me-later/

Santapau really catches the zeitgeist with this one, which is more of a slow burn than a zinger, and which shows how online "revealed preferences" nonsense grooms us for the same bullshit in every corner of our lives, even our psychotherapist's office. Highly recommended – an instant classic.

"Revealed preferences" comes from the Chicago School of Economics, a field that decided that a) economics should be a discipline grounded in mathematical models; and b) it was impossible to factor power relationships into these models; so c) power doesn't matter.

Once you understand this fact, everything else snaps into focus – like, why the Chicago School loves monopolies. If you model an economy dominated by monopolists without factoring the power that monopolists wield, then you can very easily assume that any monopoly you discover is the result of a lot of people voluntarily choosing to spend all their money with the company they love best.

The fact that we all hate the monopolists we have to deal with is dismissed by these economists as a mirage: "sure, you say you hate them, but you do business with them, therefore, your 'revealed preference' shows that you actually love them."

Which is how we end up with absolutely outrageous rackets like the scholarly publishing cartel. Scholarly journals acquire academics' work for free; get other academics to edit the work for free; acquire lifetime copyright to those finished works; and charge the institutions that paid those "volunteer" academics salaries millions of dollars to access their publications:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/08/16/the-public-sphere/#not-the-elsevier

These companies don't just lock up knowledge and tie an anchor around the scientists' and scholars' ankles, dragging them down. Their market power means that they can hurt their customers and users in every way, including through rampant privacy violations.

A new study from SPARC investigates the privacy practices of Springerlink, and finds them to be a cesspit of invasive, abusive conduct that would make even a Cox executive blush:

https://zenodo.org/records/13886473

Yes, on the one hand, this isn't surprising. If a company can screw you on pricing, why wouldn't they scruple to give you the shaft on privacy as well? But The fact that a company as terrible as Springer can be the dominant firm in the sector is still shocking, somehow.

But that's terminal-stage capitalism for you. It's not just that bad companies companies thrive – it's that being a bad company is a predictor of sky-high valuations and fawning coverage from the finance press.

Take Openai, a company that the press treats as a heptillion-dollar money-printer whose valuation will eventually exceed the rest of the known universe. Openai has a lot of problems – a mass exodus of key personnel, a product that doesn't work for nearly all the things it's claimed as a solution to – but the biggest one is that it's a bad business.

That's the theme of a fantastic, characteristically scathing-but-deep Ed Zitron article called (what else?) "Openai is a bad business":

https://www.wheresyoured.at/oai-business/

Zitron does something that no one else in the business press does: takes Openai's claims about its business fundamentals – its costs, its prices, its competitors, and even its capabilities – at face value, and then asks, "Even if this is all true, will Openai ever turn a profit?"

The answer is a pretty convincing "no." Zitron calls it a "subprime AI crisis" in a nod to Tim Hwang's must-read 2020 book about the ad-tech bezzle, Subprime Attention Crisis:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/12/06/surveillance-tulip-bulbs/#adtech-bubble

The fascinating thing about both Zitron and Hwang's analysis isn't that there are big companies that suck – it's that they are able to suck up so much money and credulous excitement, despite how badly they suck.

That's where power – the thing that neoliberal economists say doesn't matter – comes in. Monopoly power is a self-accelerating flywheel, as Amazon's famous investor pitch explains:

https://vimeo.com/739486256/00a0a7379a

Once a monopolist or a cartel wields market power, they can continue to dominate a sector, even though they're very bad – and even if they use their power to rip off both their customers and very powerful suppliers.

That's the lesson of Michael Jordan's lawsuit against NASCAR, as Matt Stoller explains in his latest BIG newsletter:

https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/michael-jordan-anti-monopolist

Jordan is one of the most famous basketball players, but after retiring from the game, he became a NASCAR owner, and as such, has been embroiled in a monopoly whose abuses are both eerily familiar to anyone who pays attention to, say the pharmacy benefit manager racket:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/09/23/shield-of-boringness/#some-men-rob-you-with-a-fountain-pen

But on the other hand, the fact this is all happening to race-cars and not pharmacies makes it very weird indeed. As with, say, PBMs, NASCAR's monopoly isn't just victimizing the individuals who watch racing, but also the racecar teams. These teams are owned by rich, powerful people (like Jordan), but are "almost always on the verge of bankruptcy."

Why is that? NASCAR rips them off. For example, teams have to buy all their parts from NASCAR, at huge markups, and the purchase contract prohibits them from racing at any rival event. There are a million petty schemes like this, and NASCAR carefully titrates its bleed-off to leave its victims almost at death's door, but still (barely) solvent enough to keep racing.

NASCAR also bought out all the rival leagues, and most of the tracks, and then locked the remaining tracks to exclusivity deals. Then the teams all had to sign noncompetes as a condition of competing in NASCAR, the only game in town – forever.

Hence Michael Jordan, a person who steadfastly refused to involve himself in politics during his basketball career, becoming a firebreathing trustbuster. Stoller cites Jordan's transformation as reason to believe that the anti-monopoly agenda will survive even in the event that Harris wins but bows to corporate donors who insist on purging the Biden administration's trustbusters.

That's a hopeful note, and I'd add my own to it: the fact that the NASCAR scam is so similar to the pharma swindles, academic publishing swindles, and all the other monopoly rip-offs means that there is a potential class alliance between university professors, NASCAR owners, and people with chronic health conditions and big pharmaceutical bills.

That high note brings me to the end of this week's linkdump! And here's a little dessert in case you've got room for one more little link: Kitowares "Medieval Mules", a forthcoming clog styled as trompe l'oeil plate armor:

https://www.kitowares.la/

Pair with old favorites like lycra armor leggings:

https://loricaclothing.com/collections/leggings-1/products/the-augsburg-legging

And a DIY crotcheted knight's helmet:

https://www.etsy.com/listing/590854477/knights-helmet-w-detachable-visor

Tor Books as just published two new, free LITTLE BROTHER s tories: VIGILANT, about creepy surveillance in distance education; a nd SPILL, about oil pipelines and indigenous landback.

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/2024/10/05/farrago/#jeffty-is-five

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qqueenofhades · 9 months ago

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what's been particularly vile to me is this group of white online leftists who insist that anyone who cares about more than this one issue for the election is a bad person, like, as if us black and brown people are making up reasons to be afraid and not.....believing the gop when they say they are coming for us. believing trump who has said previously that he does not bluff, that he will do the things he's said he will do (i hate what social media has gone to the word gaslighting but it feels like gaslighting. we lived through four years of trump. we saw the damage. stop treating us like we're being dramatic). it must be great to not have to worry about that i guess? "life won't change under trump" is such a telling admission because maybe theirs won't but mine will. and so many others' will.

and it is often again these (white) online leftists that love to call anyone who disagrees with them a white liberal (derogatory) because they know it would be racist (bad) to be this shitty and condescending to poc but they don't want to actually listen to anything black and brown voters are saying. it's easier to just call us white liberals and throw our opinions out, to ignore the work of black people for decades to gain the right to vote, to disregard the weight of telling them to not do that. it's genuinely appalling. they care so much about racism until it's time to engage with poc who have different opinions than their online echo chambers, then we're just stupid liberals with terrible opinions like..... wanting to live. not wanting four more years of trump. so sorry for that.

sorry for this vent in your inbox, i'm just so fucking tired of white people trying to rewrite history as if trump wasn't that bad. he was for my family and countless others and i am terrified for what's to come if he wins.

The thing about (the often-white) Online Leftists is that they have become just as much as a radicalized death cult as the diehard Trumpists. If you don't want to die for The Revolution and/or sacrifice your life, friends, family, the rest of the country, etc., then you're Insufficiently Pure and must be Purged. (Which I think is just complete BS, as none of them could actually handle sacrificing anything, but it's increasingly the only kind of performative rhetoric that is acceptable in leftist-identified discourse spaces.) This is functionally identical to "if you aren't willing to lay down your life for our Lord and Savior Donald Trump and the Great White Christian Nationalist Dictatorship, you're a liberal cuck," but with the names and justification changed. It doesn't change the underlying radicalization, nihilism, and insanity of the premise.

Another thing the Trumpists and the Online Leftists have in common is that they are busily rewriting just how bad Trump was in order to serve their Ideology. Ever since January 6, 2021, the Republicans have thrown everything they have at revising and whitewashing any suggestion that it was an "insurrection," and the Online Leftists have done the same, in an attempt to "prove" their insane point that Trump "would be better" than Biden. This is embodied in the recent ultimate-brainworm-nonsense maximalist-online take that "Biden has to lose so the rest of the world will see that the US rejects genocide!!!" That's right, the message that the rest of the world would take from Biden losing to Trump is that the US rejects genocide. Never mind if Trump literally wants to commit all the genocide possible and to install himself as a fascist theocratic dictator. In the deeply twisted minds of the Online Leftists, this is the only possible interpretation of Biden's loss, so they'll push for it as hard as they can! The Trumpists and the Online Leftists, at this point, are working pretty much in concert to damage Biden for similar insane reasons and get Trump elected. Etc etc., one Nazi and ten people at the same table is eleven Nazis.

Like. Sure. Four years ago, when Trump was president and people were dying by the thousands because he didn't want to wear a mask because it smeared his bronzer, just to name literally one of the terrible things he did every single day (and not even mentioning how much worse a second term would be) we were absolutely better off. Super-duper great. (Sarcasm.) Either that or "there is suffering and evil in the world and the only solution is to drastically increase the suffering and evil for everyone and to destroy what progress we have managed to make because It Does Not Fix Everything Now" is an absolute moral imperative, and either way, yeah. I'm calling bullshit.

#anonymous #ask #politics for ts

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homosexualworkaccount · 5 months ago

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Jason Todd’s “Replacement” nickname for Tim Drake, Origins and Popularisation

So, making a 2500-word essay on how a fanon nickname that only me and like two other people care about is not how I expected to spend my time in between exams.

A lot of Batfam fans are very, very much aware of the fanon “Replacement” nickname Jason has for Tim, and a lot of us very, very much hate it due to the connotations of fanon characterisation that it has. I don’t personally, I think it’s an alright enough one that fits into the established canon ones – but to be fair, I haven’t read the comics in a hot minute, so my memory could be screwy.

I got curious one day on where the nickname came from when a user on TikTok mentioned that it might’ve originated from a Batfam incest fic (They weren’t too sure and told me to take it with a grain of salt) – so shout out to them for starting me down this rabbit hole! I looked over on here and saw that notion repeated, though no one could pinpoint me to a specific fic beyond “It was popularised from a Batfam incest fic.”. I also saw a few people say that it was derived from canon, which piqued my interest further so I decided to go down a rabbit hole of fandom history purely for some fun.

The aim of this essay is just to clear up some misconceptions around the origin of the name, all fun and no harm. Don’t send harassment to people referenced in this either over a silly nickname, it's been well over a decade since they wrote the works used here.

Preface

Alright, first things first – all sources are going to be ones that were published after August 2005, the official date the first issue of Batman: Under the Red Hood was published, where Jason was established to be alive again.

While there could be a chance that the nickname was derived from a website/fanfiction before 2005, it’s highly unlikely due to the fact it was only popularised in the early 2010’s, and well, because Jason was dead and no one gave a shit about him. Also good to remember that most websites that ran before 2005 are defunct and purged from the internet now, particularly fanfiction websites (such as Quidzillia) due to various issues (taboo, copyright, costs to run ect).

Small note to make again – the Batfam fandom was fairly small at the time, the more fandom-y part of the DC community usually sticking to their own websites like Quotev, Quidzilla (again, defunct now), AO3, Fanfiction.net, LiveJournal and independent websites (again, defunct) while the rest stuck to discussion sites, so the entire fandom functioned more as a insular community from what I could tell. I will be working with the assumption that the nickname was created on one of the larger platforms, as any other platform didn’t have large enough influence to popularise the nickname.

The nicknames that I specifically looked for was simply Jason calling Tim Replacement in place of his actual name. Something like “Replacement Robin” was on very thin ice, but still counted as an offshoot. Anything else was off bets.

This whole thing will be split into a few sections to make some things for myself easier. Preface, Sources, Pre-cursor Fanfiction, Fandom Opinion and Language, First usage, Popularisation, Conclusion, Questions, Final Notes.

Sources

Fanfic.net – Created 1998, was and remains one of the larger fanfiction sites. Note; Fanfiction.net had various periods of time where there were large scale purges of fanfictions that held more mature content. Most notable instances were in 2002 and 2012.

Archive Of Our Own – The holy grail for my research. Created in 2008. For the information I got from there I used the search filter Date Updated, tagged Jason’s and Tim’s individual tags and followed from there.

Live Journal – Created 1999 and was used as one of the larger sites for fandom and fanfiction. Was used by DC fandom goers regularly so I used it to get an idea of the fandom at the time.

Tumblr – Created 2007. Theres various people on here who have compilations on DC timelines and comic sourcing that helped me correlate fandom growth with specific comic releases (Shout out to @ectonurites for their meta posts and timeline posts, they were a major source for this!). Dogshit filtering system, so I couldn’t find posts pre 2012 about DC.

Note; Quotev and Wattpad weren’t used in this as their filtering systems don’t account for searching for older fanfictions, so sadly had to be discarded as most fanfictions between 2006-2010 on those websites are now very difficult to find.

Pre-Cursor FanFiction

So, before we get to the actual first proper use I could find of “Replacement”, I first want to mention a fanfiction that had something very similar that I think would be important purely for archiving reasons around how the nickname came to be. And also because it fits the nickname criteria I mentioned earlier.

Published on the 29th of November 2006, last updated on the 28th of November 2007, was the fanfiction My-Enemy-My-Brother on Fanfiction.net by user theunknownvoice – featuring the first use of Jason referring to Tim with a nickname including replacement, Replacement Robin. Kudos to theunknownvoice, they created the very first nickname that would kickstart the rest.

While Jason doesn’t explicitly refer to Tim as Replacement – the main subject of this essay, it comes very damn close, so I wanted to include it. There is a part where Jason repeats replacement in his head multiple times, and I think he’s supposed to be referring to Tim, but the sentence isn’t very clear on that part, so I won’t count it, but it is important to acknowledge.

Though this isn’t the fanfiction that influenced the development of Replacement. This fic had barely enough reach to influence any future works years later. I couldn’t find any connection with this work and later works that officially did just have Jason call Tim “Replacement”

Fandom Opinion and Language at the time

I promise this is important and that I’m not a pretentious linguistic, English isn’t even my first language.

I like to think we all know how fandom discussion just seeps into fanfiction (See; the nickname green bean for Deku from MHA leaking into fanfiction) so I just want to quickly point this out.

Discussion around the two blew up after Jasons return in late 2005, people going “What does this mean” and “What does that mean for Tim”. Through the few posts I could dig up from this time and up to 2011, it seems people came to the conclusion that Tim was Jason’s replacement, and that their dynamic was Jason dealing with the fact that he had one. You can definitely see that in some of the posts and fanfiction written at the time that usually had Jason dealing with Tim being his replacement.

(Just a few examples from LiveJournal but more like this are still floating around, if they aren’t deleted anyway)

It’s very likely that the authors themselves engaged in similar discussions/had independent thoughts that ended in the same conclusions, seeping into the fanfiction itself later. In the comics pre-New 52 I couldn’t find any major instance of Jason explicitly referring to Tim as his replacement (only implied through speech), so this was mostly contained in fandom discussions from what I can tell. (Note, this was probably similar on comic discussion websites, but I couldn’t find any that still exist pre-2007, so I’m going to assume literacy skills are not any better on those sites. See; Batman dick riders)

The fact that Tim is explicitly described as having replaced Jason, and sometimes as “Being the Replacement” on posts/fanfiction definitely had a hand in the creation and popularisation of the nickname, influencing the fan content made around the two.

First usage of Replacement

Cain! Cain! Is the first use of the nickname Replacement really from a Batfam incest fanfiction?

Nope, thank God.

After filtering their character tags together on AO3, going to the oldest page and clicking through over 10 pages, reading every single fanfiction on each one (yes, even the weird ones, I was dedicated) I found the first instance where Jason explicitly refers to Tim as Replacement, that still exists today anyway.

Published on the 24th of January, 2009 by user shiny_glor_chan, is the fanfiction Four Calling Birds, a fanfiction detailing Stephenie Brown returning from faking her death (a whole headache from the comics that I can't be arsed to explain) and getting to meet Jason and Dick for the first time. Genuinely sweet, and a corner stone of fandom history, officially. Hip hip Hooray! Congratulations shiny_glor_chan.

I tried tracing to see if this person had any other accounts that I could find to see where they got the nickname from, but it seems it’s mostly a nickname they thought up out of the fact that they had consistently wrote Jason explicitly stating that Tim was his replacement

And reading through several more pages of fanfiction again, feeling like I want to bleach my eyes out, I found the second instance of the nickname being used. Published on the 26th of May, 2010 by user axiel-neesan, is the fanfiction The Only Piece You Get, where Jason basically acts as Tim’s cabbie and bonds with him. Another corner stone of fandom history, hooray.

These two authors are completely unrelated and have no connections to each other besides both frequenting LiveJournal, having taken prompts and having friends from that website, despite having no accounts I could find. I personally think they had a similar train of thought of “Huh, that would be a sick ass nickname.”. Chances are that axiel-neesan saw shiny_glor_chans fic and got inspired as the fandom was dead small on AO3 at the time – around 20 pages worth of fanfiction from 2008-2010 (And thats being generous if we’re counting now deleted ones)

These two fanfictions are immensely important because it’s the only early instances I could find of the nickname being used, and for about two years after the nickname pops up occasionally – but by no means was it popular, or even regularly used, I had to look for the fanfictions that used it.

Props to shiny_glor_chan and axiel-neesan! I pray that you two don’t see what the fandom thinks of that nickname now.

Popularisation

Early 2012 saw the proper explosion of fandom for the Batfam, and by extension the nickname.

By this point there were so many fanfictions that I couldn’t read them all, so I started picking random ones that tagged Jason and Tims relationship, platonic or not. Pre-April-ish of 2012 the nickname popped up every other page or so, but sometime after mid-2012 the nickname was in almost every fanfiction that I skimmed through – so that’s its official growth period.

Why though? Several factors probably.

The New-52 was in full swing by this time, DC massively promoting the reboot to get new fans interested, so people picked up comics from there. Young Justice – the more mainstream exposure of DC to surface level fans aired its second season in April of 2012, introducing people to Tim Drake and his story and getting them interested. Fanfiction and fandom as a whole was becoming less taboo and more accepted in fan spaces, so encouragement to write it was much better than it was in the early years of the internet (Example; Teen Wolf’s production team)

As for a specific catalyst for the growth of popularity for the nickname? There might be something worth pointing to.

Kudos for @ectonurites for helping me on this (Hi Sam! I was anon!) and giving me a publishing date on Tim’s and Jason’s first New 52 interaction – Red Hood and the Outlaws #8, published on the 18th of April, 2012. It features an instance of Jason and Tim interacting in a very friendly and familial way, Jason explicitly calling Bruce their Dad. Compared to their last major previous interaction of Jason leaving Tim for dead, fans of the two who enjoyed the more familial potential (and tragically, romantic potential) took it and ran with it.

All of these combined in some way to contribute to the popularity of the nickname in mid to late 2012, and lead to it’s infamy in DC fanfiction.

Conclusion

In conclusion, how do I think the nickname came to be?

I think it’s a combination of factors that led to it’s creation. As already established people very much did see Tim as Jasons replacement at the time, and the language could have shortened down from “Tim replaced Jason” to “Tim is Jason’s replacement” to “Tim is the replacement” which I think could be the train of thought the 2006 author went down to create the nickname Replacement Robin.

This definitely influenced the AO3 writers as shiny_glor_chan was present on LiveJournal at the time (where this language was very prominent), so they were already down the line of thinking this and probably went “Huh, replacement is kinda a funny nickname” and added it. As already stated, I think axiel-neesan probably had a very similar train of thought or may have seen shiny_glor_chan’s fic and was inspired.

And from there people saw it, used it in their own works, getting leaked over onto LiveJournal, which was the main website for prompt sharing, getting used a decent amount there before the explosion of fandom in mid-2012 that lead to it’s regular usage in fan works.

Questions

So, is the nickname from a Batcest fic?

Nope! The nickname mostly makes an appearance in platonic fics between Jason and Tim, it’s actually a chore to find it in their romantic ones, as in I think I found one instance of it being used somewhere in late 2010 but I can't think of it in a fanfiction that predates that. All early uses of the nickname were in platonic fics between the two.

I think this rumour is based around three fanfictions specifically on Ao3 that people are pointing to, I think, no one seems to be wanting to name names. They’re the ones that pop up when you search Replacement in the word search after tagging Tim Drake and Jason Todd together.

Wings to Fly. Published October of 2012. Jason Refers to Tim as Replacement. Jason/Tim

Replacement. Published 2009. The title implies it’s referring to Tim, but Jason never explicitly nicknames Tim replacement, the narrator only calling Tim “His replacement”, him being Jason. Jason/Tim. Non-con

The Replacement. Published 2011. Can't figure out if the title is supposed to refer to Tim or is simply just titled that for the sake of it. Jason talks a few times about Tim being his replacement, but the nickname never makes an appearance. Jason/Tim

Does the nickname have any bases in Canon?

From what I can tell, no. I haven’t read all the Batfamily comics Pre-New 52, or from after Batman: Under The Red Hood, I mostly stray towards Hal Jordans comics lol. I don’t think theres any major instance where Jason talks about Tim replacing him by specifically using replacement or replacing (It can be inferred from his speech sometimes, but Jason’s relationship with Tim was much more complex than that. I’d recommend reading @ectonurites metas about the two to get a better idea) Theres a few instances in 2015 post-New 52 reboot where Jason says explicitly that Tim replaced him, but that was way after the nickname was popularised.

Red Hood and Arsenal #7 (2015)

Final Notes

That’s about it! That’s the result of my month long dive into almost twenty years worth of DC fandom history as a fun side project. Please don’t harass anyone linked here, this was just project to pass the time and not a call out post for anyone that did contribute to the popularisation of the nickname.

Feel free to ask me anything else about this or any other DC fandom history and I’ll try to research it!! This was genuinely a fun thing to do to pass the time and work out my research muscles.

#Fun little side project in the mist of my exams #Im finished soon though so I will be going back to regular posting!!!#Fanfiction and other rambles #probably DC and Mortal Kombat #DC #dc comics #Red Robin #Red Hood #Tim Drake #Jason Todd #Jason Todd meta #Tim Drake meta #DC meta #Fandom history #Essay #batfam #batfam meta #batfamily

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natalchartnurtures · 8 months ago

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PAC: A quick and dirty guide to surviving the eclipse season~

WHY DID NOBODY WARN US ABOUT THIS

(pile 1 to 3- left to right)

~~~~~~~~~~

PILE 1:

How is the eclipse affecting you?

I immediately heard 'they don't really care about what others think anymore.' I'm getting that this eclipse really helped you step back into your authenticity in a powerful way. You might've had to revise and purge old wounds that had their roots in childhood. Any addictions of yours (if you have/had any) have been addressed because of this grand 'purging of the old and unwanted.' It's like your defense mechanisms have taken a backseat because of your inner work around the root of your addictions (maybe your addictions were part of your defense mechanisms). You might've had to live with a certain darkness looming in the background, no matter what you did in your life or where you went in life, and it seems like you've really had to look the root of this darkness in the eye. The eclipse didn't really give you an option; you simply had to. Let's talk about this darkness a little, shall we? It seems to me like you had a stark lack of a healthy masculine figure as well as a lack of a healthy feminine figure in your life. You didn't have much support as a result of this, you to felt or still sre felling disempowered in your life as a whole. THIS is what the eclipse helped you to wake up to. Through the chaos that you're experiencing right now, you'll find exactly what you need to nurture yourself (maybe for the first time ever, for some of you). I feel like you guys might end up tending to the health of your root chakra as a result of this inner work.

Your guide to getting through it like a soldier-

-Care for your anxiety. By that, I simply mean don't deny or suppress your anxiety; see where it's coming from, feel into it, and really sit in it because what you feel, you heal.

-Use EFT (emotional freedom techniques) to help yourself really sit in difficult emotions and/or anxiety.

-ALONE TIME is a need!

-Find ways to 'throw up' emotionally. Like, for example, have a hardcore dance session by yourself at 3 am to angry songs if you have been feeling angry lately. OR you could write all your emotions down onto a paper and tear that paper up and then have a big cry session. Whatever allows you to FEEL your emotions, go do it.

-After your heavy 'purge sessions,' seek things that bring you comfort. Indulge in some TLC if and when you can 😊

Some resources to help you get started-

How to Get Rid of Anxiety (A Natural Cure for Anxiety) - Teal Swan

Learn how to experience your emotions fully

Emotional Freedom Technique (EFT)

How To Open Your Root Chakra

Hope this helped! That was your reading, pile 1. Love, light, and support!

~~~~~~~~~~

PILE 2 :

How is the eclipse affecting you?

As soon as I tapped into your energy, I felt extremely light and airy, as if I turned into a cloud of cotton candy floating away into a bright blue sky. Wow, this tells me one very CLEAR thing - you've done your inner work diligently this eclipse season! You've taken the eclipse energies on actively and worked WITH it, absolutely in sync with the universe. Now all that's left for you is welcoming a brand new energy into your life.

How can you do exactly that?

-Actively schedule in things that bring you joy ✨️

-Every now and then when you feel like heavy emotions are rising to the surface, allow them to pass. Let your emotional intelligence shine, sweetheart.

-After you've felt your emotions, it's time to take care of you! TLC all the way, baby. Think long bubble baths, move slower than usual, enjoy yummy foods, wrap yourself in your favorite blankie. Drink some soul-healing soup. You get the vibe.

-Ground yourself. Listen to grounding frequencies whenever you feel like your thoughts carry you away.

-Mother yourself. By that, I simply mean - feed yourself well, allow yourself a consistent sleep cycle, find ways to make your life easier, support yourself in whatever little ways you can 😊

Some resources to help you get started-

Learn how to experience your emotions fully

How to Stop Expecting The Worst (Catastrophizing) -Teal Swan

That was your reading, dear sweet pile 2!

Hope it helped.

Love, light, and support!

~~~~~~~~~~

PILE 3 :

How is the eclipse affecting you?

You're going to have a 'real awakening' this eclipse season 😬 So, apparently, you've been going through your life blissfully unaware of your wounds and how they were blocking you from living a far better life. You operated under the impression that your life as it is right now was good just the way it is and honestly… a reflection of your full potential. But you couldn't possibly be further from the truth. It's like this eclipse was a rude awakening for you to realize just how limited of a life you were leading. Must've been a difficult thing to process? Yes? Since your old cycles have been blowing up in your face lately, you've been in a process of empowering yourself and are slowly opening up to new aspects of yourself that you previously weren't aware existed, the parts of you that are deeply emotional and intuitive. Doing this will really boost your strength and resilience in general. But there's some good news I have for you. You're on your way to feeling much more satisfied in your life, sprinkled in with great relationships all around you. It's like you're headed to a more aligned life. It's beautiful to be honest. It's obviously going to come after this intense period of awakening ripples out into a plateau though after a period of internal discomfort.

So, how can you survive this period to get to where you wanna be?

-Slow. Tf. down. Take your breaks and pace yourself. Easier said than done but pacing yourself will really help you through the chaotic energy floating around right now. Walk slower than usual, eat slower than usual, stare up at the sky and daydream when you're on a bus or something. Do romantic stuff (not necessarily with a partner, simply for yourself).

-Take some time on a regular basis to tune into your emotions. Learn how to feel again. It's really important for you right now and also doing this will greatly expedite your journey as well

-Replace some of your social time with alone time. Use it to reflect on yourself (this might feel way out of your comfort zone by the way).

-Do abundance affirmations (or all areas of life) and affirmations for forward movement.

-listen to subliminals that bring you a sense of abundance in all areas of your life.

-Find ways to feel active in your own life. Dabble in main character (MC) energy. See what it means for you.

Some resources to help you get started-

How To Feel (Learn How to Start Feeling) - Teal Swan

Learn how to experience your emotions fully

Abundance subliminal

Subliminals for positive growth and forward movement

That was your reading, dear sweet pile 3!

Hope it helped.

Love, light and support!

~~~~~~~~~~

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