#meta search

[vorestarr]

ascended astarion and vampire spouses

so I've been reading the dnd 2e manual "Van Richten's Guide to Vampires" for fic/game inspiration, and there's this really interesting chapter on vampire brides and grooms. after reading it, it's very clear to me that Astarion didn't turn Tav into a typical spawn, but into a vampire spouse, which are two very different rituals with very different outcomes.

the typical vampire spawn creation process is exactly what Astarion describes happening to him: a painful death, a painful rebirth into undeath, fighting his way out of his own coffin, and Cazador's complete control over him. this is described pretty clearly in the guide to vampires:

According to most related tales, a vampire can create another simply by killing a mortal either with its life-energy draining power (draining all the character's experience leveIs) or by exhausting the mortal of his or her blood supply. If the victim's body is not properly destroyed, it arises as a vampire, under the control of the creature who killed it, on the second night following the burial. [...] Most vampires remember the instant of their death and the nature of their killer, and understand immediately their new nature. Certainly their new hunger gives them a good idea of what they have become. They must immediately free themselves from their grave. either by breaking it open from within or by assuming gaseous form and diffusing out.

so that's definitely what happened to Astarion, but that's not what happens to Tav. after ascended Astarion turns Tav into a vampire, they can ask him what happened, and he describes the following:

Astarion: You are so beautiful... And you will be beautiful forever. Thank you for trusting me. Player: What exactly happened? Astarion: You were drained dry, and at the height of your delirium, I granted you one drop of my own blood. Things will be a touch different for you than they were for me when I was a spawn. I'm imbibed with unfathomable new talents. I am fairly certain I can extend Mephistopheles' blessings unto you. Player: Does that mean I need not fear the sun? Astarion: You need not fear anything. You will be stronger, swifter, sharper, but you won't be different. You were already perfect before. It's hard to improve.

for reference, this is how the guide to vampires describes the ritual for vampire spouses:

To actually create the bride, the vampire bestows what is known as the "Dark Kiss". lt samples the blood of its mortal paramour—once, twice, thrice—draining her almost to the point of death. This process causes the subject no pain; in fact, it has been described as the most euphoric, ecstatic experience, in comparison to which all ether pleasures fade into insignificance. Just as the subject is about to slip into the terminal coma from which there is no awakening, the vampire opens a gash in its own flesh—often in its throat—and holds the subject's mouth to the wound, As the burning draught that is the vampire’s blood gushes into the subject's mouth, the primitive feeding instinct is triggered, and she sucks hungrily at the wound, enraptured. With the first taste of the blood, the subject is possessed of great and frenzied strength (Str 18, if the character’s Str isn't already higher), and will use it to prevent the vampire from separating her from the fountain of wonder that is its bleeding wound. lt is at this point that the creator-vampire's strength is most sorely tested. He is weakened by his own blood loss, and also by his own rapture as the "victim" of a dark kiss. Overcoming the sudden loss of strength and the inclinations of lust, the vampire must pull her away from its own throat, hopefully without harming her, before she has overfed. Should the subject be allowed to feed for too long (more than 2 rounds), she is driven totally and incurably insane, and will die in agony within 24 hours. Once the subject has stopped feeding, she falls into a coma that lasts minutes or hours (2dl2 turns), at the end of which time she dies. Several (1 d3) hours later, she arises as a Fledgling vampire—and her creator's bride.

this to me sounds like what Astarion describes. he drains Tav almost dry, and at the very last moment, gives them a single drop of his blood. (also interesting reading this guide, the single drop avoids the problem of the vampire spouse being driven ravenous with hunger for the vampire creator's blood and attacking them. did Astarion know this and give them one drop on purpose to avoid that and Tav potentially being driven mad by it? or was he being selfish and this is just a nice but unanticipated outcome?)

i kept reading and there's a lot more interesting information about vampire spouses, but the most interesting thing I found related to the game was this:

Although there are some folk tales that describe the bride of a vampire as its slave, in much the same way that offspring are slaves, a bride is free-willed from the moment of her creation. The creator vampire does have great influence over the bride. however although this control is totally nonmagical. When a vampire is created in the traditional manner—that is, when a victim's life energy is completely drained away—the new fledgling instinctively understands much about the vampiric way of unlife, and about its own strengths, weaknesses* and needs. Not so the bride.

so basically, the vampire spouse is not tied to the vampire creator in the same way as a spawn (i.e., not able to be fully controlled) but is still extremely reliant on the vampire creator to teach them how to live as a vampire. the guide goes on to describe that some vampire creators may lie to their vampire spouse about the control or powers they have, in order to exert more control over them.

interestingly, if you ask Astarion if he can compel you the way Cazador compelled him, he doesn't give a straight answer, he just says this:

Player: Cazador could compel you - can you compel me? Astarion: Why would I need to? You're going to be wonderfully obedient.

to me, all of this says that Astarion was telling the truth when he told Tav that they would be different from him as a spawn, and also in emphasizing that they are not a spawn but a consort. he didn't create a spawn, he created a vampire spouse. he married Tav, and because of this Tav also retains their free will.

of course, Astarion doesn't say this. if he knows, he withholds this information in much the way that this guide describes, as a way for the creator to maintain more control over their spouse. but still, extremely interesting implications for the ascended Astarion romance, imo.

other interesting facts about vampire spouses from the guide to vampires:

the married couple has telepathic communication that can span miles -- so Tav and Astarion can potentially have a telepathic bond even after the tadpoles are gone. (another note, this communication has to be consensual both ways for it to work, so you can't just dig around someone's mind if they don't want it.)

the vampire creator is extremely jealous and possessive. (yeah lol)

their life forces are linked, so one suffering a great deal is felt by the other.

the bond can be broken, but the ritual to do so has to be initiated by the creator. to break it, they both spill their blood on the ground and allow it to mix. this dissolves all aspects of the bond (i.e., telepathy and linked life forces), but the spouse stays a vampire.

[hunxi-guilai]

so I know that a lot of chinese names are references to specific poems. Is there a way to determine this (vs general auspicious meaning) and which poem specifically? I'd love to be able to figure this out for character names and I haven't been able to find any resources (in case it's helpful, I'd say I'm my understanding is maybe HSK4-level so I can clumsily make my way through the chinese internet with the help of a dictionary)

feel free to make this public so that others can benefit if you have any suggestions

oof... unfortunately I suspect that this, along with one's repertoire of chengyu, is something that one simply Just Learns with reading more. my personal repertoire of poetry is embarrassingly thin, so the horrible horrible process I've been going through is, well, throwing the name into a search bar and hoping for the best.

here's an example of how I (think I) went about doing this for Xiao Xingchen's name, way back when I wrote this post:

I went ahead and dropped "星尘 诗词" ("Xingchen poetry") into the search bar, which turned up this:

Generally speaking, I'll only put the name (minus the surname) because putting the character's full name into a search bar will probably turn up the character themselves, and if someone's name is being derived from a poem, it's usually independent of the surname anyway.

Xiao Xingchen's name is an interesting example because it doesn't quite come from a poem, but it doesn't not come from a poem. you can see that the search engine has automatically assumed that I am looking for poems about constellations, as "星辰" and "星尘" are homonyms, and one of these is more commonly seen. I usually consider that a solid indication that "星尘" (the name) is a novel formation of characters in a name, and not likely a poetic reference.

but! in for a penny, etc. I'm a huge fan of the first search result, gushicimingju, since it's a solid database of poetry and some prose. clicking into that listing informs me that gushicimingju is turning up. oh my. 119 possible matches:

note that these are matches for "星辰" (constellation), not actually our character's name. still! you can click in and peruse the selection if you'd like.

now that you're on gushicimingju's site, you can also use the search function within the site to search for more exact matches, without worrying that you'll accidentally activate the fandom itself.

looks like there's a few matches for "晓星," but nothing for the full name.

so! gushicimingju is a solid database I like to refer to most of the time. if for some reason I'm feeling particularly academically rigorous, I might also do some searches on ctext as sometimes names will come out of famous turns of phrases (a la Zhao Yun 赵云 / Zhao Zilong 赵子龙 from that post I linked earlier) rather than poems. searching the dictionary sometimes (Pleco, or zdic) doesn't hurt either. basically, I throw spaghetti at the search engine wall to see what results come back for these characters in this particular order to try and get the original referent (if any) to show up; I'll probably give up after a few permutations of search terms if nothing is actively jumping out at me

but back to the search results: sometimes, if your character is famous enough, straight up searching for "what poem is this character's name from?" will help you find like-minded people on baidu zhidao (basically yahoo answers):

although of course, take baidu zhidao result with all of the salt you would take with any yahoo answers (look for alternate sources to validate, good for a laugh most of the time)

best of luck!

[sleepyskydraws]

So I triple crowned Freminet

[imustbenuts]

nuts reading trigun in japanese 3 - "weirdo" and vash's pronoun switching

disclaimer: my jp reading posts are all for triangulation purposes and nothing else. scanlating mangas is tough work. @-@ i know this.

"Weirdo"

the word 'weirdo' in 2024 english carries connotations of neutral-bad or positive depending on the context of the speaker. depending on how one curates their internet space, weirdo often leans more positively with the same meaning as eccentric, but not always.

however, but in JP, "weird" is more specific and often negative. there's the well known, hentai 変態 (ie. deviant, pervert, freak, extremely negative in tone), and in this case, kimochi warui 気持ち悪い (gross, off-putting, bad vibes). eccentrics are more as 変人 henjin and carries a more neutral tone.

in this panel here papa nebreska uses 気持ち悪い in katakana キモチワルイ in reaction to vash busting his ass saving people and putting out of harms' way. vash's vibes are so off putting to this wanted man he's actually creeped out.

this is particularly interesting to me bc the english translation didn't end up portraying how utterly weird vash's mindset is fully. it wasnt until wolfwood points out how flawed vash's pacifist mindset do i get a proper frame of reference of norms in this world, but i might be having skill issues in english comprehension. ;w;

Pronoun switching

quick. 俺 Ore! 僕 Boku! 私 Watashi! they all mean "I", and there's 2 spectrum of expressions going on here thats commonly believed. 1st being Masculinity to Femininity. what's the 2nd?

the answer is... Rudeness/Assertiveness to Politeness. and gosh does vash switch a lot between Boku and Ore in the first 4 chapters of this manga lmao.

(to be clear, while i am aware of trans hc thats very popular in the fandom, im not at all diminishing or talking about gender expression specifically. im talking about what vash is presenting himself as in context.)

so to perhaps oversimplify this, in JP the idea of politeness and hierarchy is so super duper important, its very built into the language itself. and Japanese is a very high context language. if someone of a higher or equal standing uses "Ore", its totally fine. but if someone of a lower standing uses "Ore", they've committed a social faux pas.

as an obvious example, if a fresh new employee approaches his Boss with "Ore", he's potentially getting dressing down in the company. maybe in front of his coworkers. if this employee forgoes polite speech (keigo) and uses a too Assertive and Casual speech, they've Really Fucked Up and are one foot out the door.

this is also tied up in gender to some extent, hence why girls using Ore is incredibly uncommon, but guys would use Watashi in certain contexts such as talking to their Boss. (woo woo the forces of hierarchy/patriarchy... or something.)

so. vash switches his pronouns for the same effect. when he uses Ore, he's making himself sound more assertive and confident. when he uses Boku, he's often making himself sound less threatening, smaller, open, and trying to avoid conflict.

sound familiar?

bc if you translated all of that into a character design instead of relying on just jp pronouns, we'd get TriStamp Vash.

slight spoilers, but this is even true in one of the tensest moments between vash and wolfwood, where the latter provokes vash and tears into his pacifism ideology. vash sticks with boku in this scene as he says his piece.

if he ever uses watashi, it's bc he wants to be polite straight out of the gate with an air of formality. (this is japanese manners and the proper approach to talking to strangers. mainly to get a feel for each others standing without offense until context changes.)

i also wanna point out maybe something obvious here but.

real life pronoun switching in japanese is a COMMON thing. no one ever really sticks to 1 pronoun bc of Good Manners and the aforementioned hierarchical systems in place. it is only mostly in anime/manga and video games where characters overly prefer 1 due to this being a good shorthand for characterization. this being how rude or polite they are, and in some cases, Gender.

[mercymornsimpathizer]

per request of (checks notes) two people….the premises of my interpretation of the plot of gideon the ninth vis a vis cytherea and john are as follows:

i. the actions taken by cytherea and john are not consistent with their stated motivations

ii. this is on purpose

iii. we can work backwards from these characters' actions to determine their real motivations

because i am a funny poster and because i love my followers i will explain further under a readmore. abandon all sanity ye who enter here etc.

why canaan house: john and john's motivations

while john does not appear "on screen" in gideon the ninth, his actions set the plot into motion and shape the conflicts the arise. (1)he sends letters to the scions of each house, requesting that they come to canaan house with their cavaliers and no one else. he does not request the leaders of each house, or the best necromancers of each house, or the most experienced. (2)he does not provide information of what the lyctorhood trials will entail, either in the initial letters or upon arrival at canaan house. (3)during the creation of the first lyctors, he did not inform anyone that the death of the cavalier is not necessary, and (4)he interfered in the ascension of anastasia/samael, (5) the pair who spent the longest studying the lyctorhood process and (6)who we can presume were closest to achieving "true lyctorhood," which we can presume is (7)more powerful than "normal lyctorhood" and (8)does not kill the cavalier.

(9)the stated purpose of the events at canaan house is to create new lyctors to replace those that have (really or apparently) died to the resurrection beasts. (10)john further states that he did not intend for any unwanted deaths; (11)that he intended for the necromancers and cavaliers to enter into lyctorhood willingly; and (12)that, if the necromancers and cavaliers decided not to enter into lyctorhood, he intended that they should have been allowed to leave peacefully. (13)we can presume he also intends that any new lyctors created would be loyal to him, or at least not a threat to him.

are these actions consistent for these motivations? in my correct opinion, they are not. the secrecy of what the lyctorhood trials entail and the choice of very young, competitive people as postulants do not lend themselves well to the postulants making wise, well-informed choices. if john wanted the postulants to enter into lyctorhood willingly, and leave peacefully if not, he could have informed them of what the trials and lyctorhood entail, encouraged cooperation between the houses, and stated explicitly that they could leave at any time.

one way to interpret this mismatch is that john was careless or negligent in how he set up the trials, which is possible but not consistent with his characterization otherwise. another interpretation is that john was not sincere in stated motivations 10-12, and that he rather set things up as he did to create uniquely easy to manipulate per 13, which both makes sense and is in character but is not consistent with his other actions.

why canaan house 2: cytherea and cytherea's motivations

while john shapes much of the plot of gideon the ninth, cytherea as the primary antagonist drives the plot more directly. (14)she kills dulcinea and adopts her identity to pose as a postulant in the lyctor trials, and she poorly reanimated protesilaus's corpse. (15)she presumably is responsible for disposing of the transports, stranding the postulants at canaan house.  (16)she kills first the fifth house and the fourth house. (17) she prompts the ninth to complete the avulsion trial. (18)she attacks gideon, harrow, and camilla after being confronted by palamedes, but (19)repeatedly offers to spare gideon. (20)throughout her murder spree, she writes on the walls, questioning or criticizing  john for the events of her own ascension. (21)she did not participate in dios apate and is not mentioned by mercymorn or augustine as being party to their conspiracy to kill john (i think...correct me if this is wrong!). (22) her identity is not revealed by teacher or the other constructs at canaan house, despite the fact that they presumably would recognize her. (23)she does not contact or encourage the other postulants to contact john or anyone else for help.

(24)cytherea states that her motivation is to sabotage the creation of new lyctors and (25)to draw john to the nine houses, putting himself and the nine house in danger from the resurrection beasts. (26)she strongly implies that this is in revenge for her cavalier or possibly all of the original cavaliers. (27)presumably, she also wants both to survive long enough to accomplish these aims, though (28)she does not seem to intend to survive for very long beyond the events at canaan house.

are these actions consistent with these motivations? again, in my correct opinion, they are not. she does not send a distress call to draw john to canaan house, and she does not encourage anyone else to do so. she kills jeannemary and magnus, even though killing isaac and abigail would prevent the fourth and fifth from ascending; while it could be argued that she would have had to kill magnus to protect her plan, but this isn't true of jeannemary's murder. she further lets other necro-cav pairs live, despite the fact this allows for the opportunity for them to ascend. her stated goals (24 and 25) could be well achieved by (a, for 25) killing (simply or gruesomely) all or most of the necromancers, while allowing the cavaliers to live, and/or (b, for 24) calling or encouraging someone else to call for help or otherwise alert someone that things have gone wrong; neither of these actions would contradict her other stated or implied motivations.

(as an aside: i think many people believe that cytherea killed the fifth first because she suspected they were likeliest to figure out her plan, which is possible but doesn't explain why she would kill the fourth next or why she wouldn't kill the sixth or third.)

one interpretation of this mismatch is that she planned sloppily or haphazardly. while this doesn't directly contradict anything we know about her, it doesn't make much sense to me -- i don't think anyone, let alone a very powerful and reasonably intelligent person, would half-ass a revenge/justice plot as their last hurrah, even if she did not have long to plan or if her plan changed upon realizing that gideon is john's daughter. another interpretation i've seen is that cytherea is simply sadistic and/or dramatic, and that her actions are motivated by a desire to make the postulants paranoid and afraid. i think this is on the right track, but doesn't itself explain everything she does (and the things she does not do).

why be perfect when you could be normal: the original lyctors and perfect lyctorhood

what is "perfect lyctorhood" and under what conditions does it occur? when i use the term "perfect lyctorhood," i'm referring to a situation where both the necromancer and the cavalier ascend to lyctorhood and share their newfound power; this is in contrast to what i'm calling "normal lyctorhood," wherein the necromancer kills and consumes the cavalier and uses them as a power source. in text, john and alecto are the only example we see of "true lyctorhood," while the other original lyctors (and ianthe) are "normal."

while the creation of the original lyctors is not thoroughly described in the text, we do know some details. it is strongly implied that (29)mercymorn and augustine, the first two lyctors, ascended under duress after their cavaliers forced their hands, presumably by killing themselves. much later, (30) anastasia and samael attempted to ascend after (5)spending a long time studying the process, but are (4)interrupted by john, who kills samael. (31)john states this he interfered because anastasia and samael had made a mistake. (32)at no point does john inform anyone that perfect lyctorhood is possible or that the cavaliers do not need to die.

i think it's reasonable to conclude that (33)very skilled necromancers, with strong bonds of mutual respect with their cavaliers, given the right resources (i.e. the trials at canaan house, or something equivalent, and sufficient time) could achieve perfect lyctorhood, or at least come close to it. (34)fear, pressure, and devaluation of the lives of cavaliers, on the other hand, push necromancers towards normal lyctorhood.

i think it's also reasonable to conclude that, in line with (13)his motivation to maintain power over the lyctors, john does not want perfect lyctors to be created, and that (4)his interference in the ascension of anastasia and samael was not because (31)they made a mistake but rather (35)to prevent them from achieving power that would rival his own.

connecting the red string

if john and cytherea's actions are not sufficiently explained by their stated motivations (or of them the motivations commonly attributed to them by fans), what motivations would explain their actions? because john (by asking for young people as postulants, and by being secretive about the lyctoral process, and by not stating that postulants could leave) and cytherea (by killing people, and by preventing people from leaving, and by generally encouraging competition and paranoia among the postulants) both created an environment of fear and pressure at canaan house, and because cytherea (by letting both necromancers and cavaliers live in other cases) john (by not providing a deadline, and by not forbidding or obscuring parts of the trials, and by not directly or indirectly supervising the trials) otherwise do nothing to prevent to an outcome that they does not want, i think we can draw the following conclusion: john and cytherea are both attempting to ensure that normal lyctors, and only normal lyctors, are created at canaan house.

in other words, i think john tasked cytherea with going to canaan house to put pressure on the postulants to ascend quickly and to prevent them from leaving alive if they were likely to not ascend. i think he did this because he did not want the postulants to become perfect lyctors, and because he did not want the secrets of lyctorhood to be known to the nine houses in general, and because he did not want to take responsibility for the deaths. i think cytherea likely did want revenge against john, and likely did not want to live beyond canaan house, but did not want to kill john; rather i think she wanted to be killed by john or by one of the new lyctors.

i think that tamsyn muir is a talented writer who has demonstrated an ability to create twisty, multi-layered plots where characters are often working on incorrect or incomplete information and where characters are often not forthcoming or are dishonest about their actions and motivations, and that therefore the mismatch between characters' actions and stated motivations are intentional. i think my conclusion sufficiently explains the actions taken (and not taken) by both cytherea and john in the gideon the ninth, and while it contradicts their stated motivations, i do not think it contradicts any of their actions or any of their demonstrated motivations. moreover i think it is consistent with their characterization in general: cytherea is dramatic and emotionally distraught over her own ascension, but she is not part of the plot against john, and she encourages gideon in her role as cavalier; john is very smart, and has few compunctions about doing horrible things to children (especially to maintain his own power), but does not want to be blamed for the things he does, and so often outsources the dirty work to his followers.

[nelkcats]

King and Joker

The bats were confused when Joker announced he gained a companion. His partner (or sidekick) is strong and has too many powers but looks sad. They tried to ask him if something was wrong but he remained silent. Joker liked to call him "The King", but he insisted that he was only "Phantom". The clown didn't care and continue with the nickname.

"King Phantom" tends to ignore when civilians are evacuated, feign ignorance when someone tries to escape, and has offered the bats bandages and medicine a couple of times. But when The Joker is present he becomes completely desperate and aggressive, as if he is fighting for something.

On the other hand, Joker got a completely new weapon, it was a green sphere that produced lightning but Phantom winced every time he saw him use it. On one occasion Tim swore he heard him whisper "Ellie".

Danny was scared, Ellie was unstable and anything he did could be fatal. When he arrived in Gotham looking for her missing core he didn't expect to find it in the hands of a clown. The clown realized that he had something to bribe him (although he didn't know how important it was) and began to order him around.

Danny hated it, he held back most of the time because he was fighting humans, not revealing many of his powers. And he would have killed the clown a thousand times if it weren't dangerous for Ellie. Joker would never break away from the core by saying it was "good luck", and would lock it in a ghost-proof cell, which is probably where he found it originally. The halfa just wanted his the girl back.

[haveihitanerve]

Bruce makes it in time to get to Jason. But… is it enough to save him?

“Master Bruce-“ “I’m almost there Alfred.” Bruce bites back, almost breaking his wrist by how hard he twists the motorcycle accelerator. And he is. He can see the warehouse. Bruce lands, not even bothering to slow, leaping off the bike as it crashes into the trees and he sprints for the doors, terrified he’ll make it too late, that he won’t be fast enough for his son. The door slams open, Bruce not even bothering to check if it’s locked or not, just plowing it down, and hurries inside, spotting his son within a moment. Jason opens his eyes in surprise, mouth curving to form a perfect O. “Br- Batman.” He whispers, voice hoarse with disbelief. Bruce rushes to his side, cupping his cheek, cradling the boy- his boy, to his chest. “Jay. Jay bird. Jaylad. Hey firecracker. Hey bud.” Jason’s eyes fill with tears and Bruce does his best to wipe them away, to press a kiss to his son's forehead. “You came.” Jason whispers, tears clogging his throat. “Of course baby.” Bruce murmurs, rocking back and forth. “Of course I came, baby. I will always come for you. Always.” He presses another kiss to Jason’s head. “I love you son. I love you, I love you, I love you.” “I love you too-“ Jason rasps, but his eyes catch something on the wall behind him. “Dad, wait- the bomb-“ the explosion shakes the very earth, and Gotham seems to curl in on herself, screaming with a pain and rage that is unimaginable. In a basement cave in the middle of Gotham, a butler's hands go cold. A man, wearing a blue mask a city over, suddenly feels a chill sweep over him, and something inside him, probably his heart, feels like it’s been torn in two.

Their bodies are found, or at least what’s left of them, two days later, the larger man wrapped almost completely around the smaller, cradling his boy to his chest. Nightwing almost beats Joker to death and is only stopped by three others, all of which seem just as inclined to kill him, but resist. Gotham mourns, earthquakes shaking the ground, warehouses crumbling to dust, and Joker is found drowned in the harbor, the fishes whisper of a presence so old and strong even the biggest fish feared her, and Aquaman shudders. Gothamites mourn their fallen Prince and his adopted son, but Gotham mourns her prodigal sons, her children, her oldest and youngest, and cradles the last survivor to her chest, cloaking him in shadows and gifting him all the things she did not give the others, the things she thought they wouldn’t need so long as they had each other, the things she had not yet granted them ready for. She drapes them over the young, jaded hero, gifting him sight and smell and sound, allowing him to control her shadows and her streets and most of all… gifting him flight, the way his namesake first claimed, the way her firstborn child and her youngest were never able to. The Vulture takes to the Gotham skyline like a moth to open flames, perhaps a little less withdrawn with his punches, perhaps a little more protective of young boys, but belonging to Gotham all the same. The Joker stole something from her, and she will never allow it to happen again. The Vulture gains followers, friends, the Starling, the Goldfinch, the Owl, the Crow, the Cardinal, and Robin, all under Gothams protection, and she has him watch, from his watery prison, as they protect her, defend their city from the ilk like him, not giving in to their rage and revenge, but helping, rebuilding Gotham in his image. Their image. The man who saw hope, and his son. Batman and Robin.

(In case it was unclear, the three people pulling dick away from Joker are Babs, Kate and Luke, and then the Vulture is dick, and his friends, in order as listed, are Stephanie, Duke, Babs, Cass, Tim, and Damian. Also Gotham does kill Joker because she knows dick cannot but she also keeps him half alive, suspended in time, destined to drown for all eternity and watch as the bats succeed in honor of Batman the man he fought against.)

[mostlysignssomeportents]

This is your brain on fraud apologetics

In 1998, two Stanford students published a paper in Computer Networks entitled “The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine,” in which they wrote, “Advertising funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of consumers.”

https://research.google/pubs/pub334/

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/2023/02/24/passive-income/#swiss-cheese-security

The co-authors were Lawrence Page and Sergey Brin, and the “large-scale hypertextual web search-engine” they were describing was their new project, which they called “Google.” They were 100% correct — prescient, even!

On Wednesday night, a friend came over to watch some TV with us. We ordered out. We got scammed. We searched for a great local Thai place we like called Kiin and clicked a sponsored link for a Wix site called “Kiinthaila.com.” We should have clicked the third link down (kiinthaiburbank.com).

We got scammed. The Wix site was a lookalike for Kiin Thai, which marked up their prices by 15% and relayed the order to our local, mom-and-pop, one-branch restaurant. The restaurant knew it, too — they called us and told us they were canceling the order, and said we could still come get our food, but we’d have to call Amex to reverse the charge.

As it turned out, the scammers double-billed us for our order. I called Amex, who advised us to call back in a couple days when the charge posted to cancel it — in other words, they were treating it as a regular customer dispute, and not a systemic, widespread fraud (there’s no way this scammer is just doing this for one restaurant).

In the grand scheme of things, this is a minor hassle, but boy, it’s haunting to watch the quarter-century old prophecy of Brin and Page coming true. Search Google for carpenters, plumbers, gas-stations, locksmiths, concert tickets, entry visas, jobs at the US Post Office or (not making this up) tech support for Google products, and the top result will be a paid ad for a scam. Sometimes it’s several of the top ads.

This kind of “intermediation” business is actually revered in business-schools. As Douglas Rushkoff has written, the modern business wisdom reveres “going meta” — not doing anything useful, but rather, creating a chokepoint between people who do useful things and people who want to pay for those things, and squatting there, collecting rent:

https://rushkoff.medium.com/going-meta-d42c6a09225e

It’s the ultimate passive income/rise and grind side-hustle: It wouldn’t surprise me in the least to discover a whole festering nest of creeps on Tiktok talking about how they pay Mechanical Turks to produce these lookalike sites at scale.

This mindset is so pervasive that people running companies with billions in revenue and massive hoards of venture capital run exactly the same scam. During lockdown, companies like Doordash, Grubhub and Uber Eats stood up predatory lookalike websites for local restaurants, without their consent, and played monster-in-the-middle, tricking diners into ordering through them:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/09/19/we-are-beautiful/#man-in-the-middle

These delivery app companies were playing a classic enshittification game: first they directed surpluses to customers to lock them in (heavily discounting food), then they directed surplus to restaurants (preferential search results, free delivery, low commissions) — then, having locked in both consumers and producers, they harvested the surplus for themselves.

Today, delivery apps charge massive premiums to both eaters and restaurants, load up every order with junk fees, and clone the most successful restaurants out of ghost kitchens — shipping containers in parking lots crammed with low-waged workers cranking out orders for 15 different fake “virtual restaurants”:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/12/01/autophagic-buckeyes/#subsidized-autophagia

Delivery apps speedran the enshittification cycle, but Google took a slower path to get there. The company has locked in billions of users (e.g. by paying billions to be the default search on Safari and Firefox and using legal bullying to block third party Android device-makers from pre-installing browsers other than Chrome). For years, it’s been leveraging our lock-in to prey on small businesses, getting them to set up Google Business Profiles.

These profiles are supposed to help Google distinguish between real sellers and scammers. But Kiin Thai has a Google Business Profile, and searching for “kiin thai burbank” brings up a “Knowledge Panel” with the correct website address — on a page that is headed with a link to a scam website for the same business. Google, in other words, has everything it needs to flag lookalike sites and confirm them with their registered owners. It would cost Google money to do this — engineer-time to build and maintain the system, content moderator time to manually check flagged listings, and lost ad-revenue from scammers — but letting the scams flourish makes Google money, at the expense of Google users and Google business customers.

Now, Google has an answer for this: they tell merchants who are being impersonated by ad-buying scammers that all they need to do is outbid them for the top ad-spot. This is a common approach — Amazon has a $31b/year “ad business” that’s mostly its own platform sellers bidding against each other to show you fake results for your query. The first five screens of Amazon search results are 50% ads:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/28/enshittification/#relentless-payola

This is “going meta,” so naturally, Meta is doing it too: Facebook and Instagram have announced a $12/month “verification” badge that will let you report impersonation and tweak the algorithm to make it more likely that the posts you make are shown to the people who explicitly asked to see them:

https://www.vox.com/recode/2023/2/21/23609375/meta-verified-twitter-blue-checkmark-badge-instagram-facebook

The corollary of this, of course, is that if you don’t pay, they won’t police your impersonators, and they won’t show your posts to the people who asked to see them. This is pure enshittification — the surplus from users and business customers is harvested for the benefit of the platform owners:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys

The idea that merchants should master the platforms as a means of keeping us safe from their impersonators is a hollow joke. For one thing, the rules change all the time, as the platforms endlessly twiddle the knobs that determine what gets shown to whom:

https://doctorow.medium.com/twiddler-1b5c9690cce6

And they refuse to tell anyone what the rules are, because if they told you what the rules were, you’d be able to bypass them. Content moderation is the only infosec domain where “security through obscurity” doesn’t get laughed out of the room:

https://doctorow.medium.com/como-is-infosec-307f87004563

Worse: the one thing the platforms do hunt down and exterminate with extreme prejudice is anything that users or business-customers use to twiddle back — add-ons and plugins and jailbreaks that override their poor choices with better ones:

https://www.theverge.com/2022/9/29/23378541/the-og-app-instagram-clone-pulled-from-app-store

As I was submitting complaints about the fake Kiin scam-site (and Amex’s handling of my fraud call) to the FTC, the California Attorney General, the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau and Wix, I wrote a little Twitter thread about what a gross scam this is:

https://twitter.com/doctorow/status/1628948906657878016

The thread got more than two million reads and got picked up by Hacker News and other sites. While most of the responses evinced solidarity and frustration and recounted similar incidents in other domains, a significant plurality of the replies were scam apologetics — messages from people who wanted to explain why this wasn’t a problem after all.

The most common of these was victim-blaming: “you should have used an adblocker” or “never click the sponsored link.” Of course, I do use an ad-blocker — but this order was placed with a mobile browser, after an absentminded query into the Google search-box permanently placed on the home screen, which opens results in Chrome (where I don’t have an ad-blocker, so I can see material behind an ad-blocker-blocker), not Firefox (which does have an ad-blocker).

Now, I also have a PiHole on my home LAN, which blocks most ads even in a default browser — but earlier this day, I’d been on a public wifi network that was erroneously blocking a website (the always excellent superpunch.net) so I’d turned my wifi off, which meant the connection came over my phone’s 5G connection, bypassing the PiHole:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/04/28/shut-yer-pi-hole/

“Don’t click a sponsored link” — well, the irony here is that if you habitually use a browser with an ad-blocker, and you backstop it with a PiHole, you never see sponsored links, so it’s easy to miss the tiny “Sponsored” notification beside the search result. That goes double if you’re relaxing with a dinner guest on the sofa and ordering dinner while chatting.

There’s a name for this kind of security failure: the Swiss Cheese Model. We all have multiple defenses (in my case: foreknowledge of Google’s ad-scam problem, an ad-blocker in my browser, LAN-wide ad sinkholing). We also have multiple vulnerabilities (in my case: forgetting I was on 5G, being distracted by conversation, using a mobile device with a permanent insecure search bar on the homescreen, and being so accustomed to ad-blocked results that I got out of the habit of checking whether a result was an ad).

If you think you aren’t vulnerable to scams, you’re wrong — and your confidence in your invulnerability actually increases your risk. This isn’t the first time I’ve been scammed, and it won’t be the last — and every time, it’s been a Swiss Cheese failure, where all the holes in all my defenses lined up for a brief instant and left me vulnerable:

https://locusmag.com/2010/05/cory-doctorow-persistence-pays-parasites/

Other apologetics: “just call the restaurant rather than using its website.” Look, I know the people who say this don’t think I have a time-machine I can use to travel back to the 1980s and retrieve a Yellow Pages, but it’s hard not to snark at them, just the same. Scammers don’t just set up fake websites for your local businesses — they staff them with fake call-centers, too. The same search that takes you to a fake website will also take you to a fake phone number.

Finally, there’s “What do you expect Google to do? They can’t possibly detect this kind of scam.” But they can. Indeed, they are better situated to discover these scams than anyone else, because they have their business profiles, with verified contact information for the merchants being impersonated. When they get an ad that seems to be for the same business but to a different website, they could interrupt the ad process to confirm it with their verified contact info.

Instead, they choose to avoid the expense, and pocket the ad revenue. If a company promises to “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful,” I think we have the right to demand these kinds of basic countermeasures:

https://www.google.com/search/howsearchworks/our-approach/

The same goes for Amex: when a merchant is scamming customers, they shouldn’t treat complaints as “chargebacks” — they should treat them as reports of a crime in progress. Amex has the bird’s eye view of their transaction flow and when a customer reports a scam, they can backtrack it to see if the same scammer is doing this with other merchants — but the credit card companies make money by not chasing down fraud:

https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/rosalindadams/mastercard-visa-fraud

Wix also has platform-scale analytics that they could use to detect and interdict this kind of fraud — when a scammer creates a hundred lookalike websites for restaurants and uses Wix’s merchant services to process payments for them, that could trigger human review — but it didn’t.

Where do all of these apologetics come from? Why are people so eager to leap to the defense of scammers and their adtech and fintech enablers? Why is there such an impulse to victim-blame?

I think it’s fear: in their hearts, people — especially techies — know that they, too, are vulnerable to these ripoffs, but they don’t want to admit it. They want to convince themselves that the person who got scammed made an easily avoidable mistake, and that they themselves will never make a similar mistake.

This is doubly true for readerships on tech-heavy forums like Twitter or (especially) Hacker News. These readers know just how many vulnerabilities there are — how many holes are in their Swiss cheese — and they are also overexposed to rise-and-grind/passive income rhetoric.

This produces a powerful cognitive dissonance: “If all the ‘entrepreneurs’ I worship are just laying traps for the unwary, and if I am sometimes unwary, then I’m cheering on the authors of my future enduring misery.” The only way to resolve this dissonance — short of re-evaluating your view of platform capitalism or questioning your own immunity to scams — is to blame the victim.

The median Hacker News reader has to somehow resolve the tension between “just install an adblocker” and “Chrome’s extension sandbox is a dumpster fire and it’s basically impossible to know whether any add-on you install can steal every keystroke and all your other data”:

https://mattfrisbie.substack.com/p/spy-chrome-extension

In my Twitter thread, I called this “the worst of all possible timelines.” Everything we do is mediated by gigantic, surveillant monopolists that spy on us comprehensively from asshole to appetite — but none of them, not a 20th century payment giant nor a 21st century search giant — can bestir itself to use that data to keep us safe from scams.

Next Thu (Mar 2) I'll be in Brussels for Antitrust, Regulation and the Political Economy, along with a who's-who of European and US trustbusters. It's livestreamed, and both in-person and virtual attendance are free:

https://www.brusselsconference.com/registration

On Fri (Mar 3), I'll be in Graz for the Elevate Festival:

https://elevate.at/diskurs/programm/event/e23doctorow/

[Image ID: A modified version of Hieronymus Bosch's painting 'The Conjurer,' which depicts a scam artist playing a shell-game for a group of gawking rubes. The image has been modified so that the scam artist's table has a Google logo and the pea he is triumphantly holding aloft bears the 'Sponsored' wordmark that appears alongside Google search results.]

[artbyblastweave]

Funniest thing I've seen recently, and not funny in a ha-ha way, more funny in a "the endless entropic void gnawing at my will to live" way, was somebody asking around for alternatives to Neil Gaiman, in the light of Neil Gaiman's ongoing fall from grace. As though what we're currently sitting through isn't the collapse of the carefully curated "Good Guy Neil" image that caused people to parade Gaiman as the same kind of preferred progressive alternative to, say, Rowling. As though we won't be in the same goddamn situation in a few years or months, with some number of the new progressive sci-fi/fantasy darlings- not all of them, to be clear, but at least some of them- when their impeccably-curated marketing implodes in on itself and they're revealed to be the same kind of sex pest or abuser. Can you not see the wheel to which you are strapped. The game of human pinball you are condemning yourself to with this mindset. Maybe you do see, and you're just resigned to taking it one soul-crushing disappointment at a time, one "I never would have guessed" after another. I mean I think we all need to get resigned to that one way or another, sun's gonna go out before it stops happening

[yujinmikotoba]

thinking about how susato basically dedicated her whole life to kazuma. how she saw this older boy who was hurting and needed support and decided to do everything in her power to make sure he got it. because she understands the pain of not having a father around, but unlike hers, kazuma’s father never returned to japan.

she studied law for him, she became his judicial assistant despite the rampant ridicule and misogyny she would’ve faced for it. she was going to go to great britain with him. all the while she’s only a 16 year old girl.

when she thinks kazuma is dead, even then she still does everything in her power to preserve his legacy. she extends her assistance to ryunosuke despite not knowing him very well, she trusts kazuma’s belief he can carry on his ideals. they arrive in britain together and take on an assortment of cases.

she can’t bear to even think of the possibility that kazuma could be alive because it’s too painful but when that possibility becomes undeniable she grabs it with both hands. unlike ryunosuke who can barely form a sentence around the masked disciple, susato, who’s often soft spoken and reserved yells out “kazuma-sama!” and that’s the first step in kazuma regaining his memories.

but once he does things aren’t the same. like ryunosuke, this past year of experiences has fundamentally changed susato. she experiences so many cases and court battles first hand. she represents her girlfriend best friend in court not just as a judicial assistant but as the case’s main defense attorney. her connection to the legal world has become so much deeper than merely supporting kazuma’s endeavours.

but now that kazuma has returned and is now a prosecutor, there’s this expectation that she will fall in line with what he wants to do. but she doesn’t want that. she can’t be assistant to a prosecutor because well, she has a defense attorney’s spirit. through and through.

so she goes to kazuma and asks for his blessing to go back to japan with ryunosuke instead. and though she is going with him, this isn’t about her choosing ryunosuke over kazuma, it’s about choosing herself. her getting to follow her own path after all these years.

she gives herself the space to put herself first.

[greatandquestionablecontent]

An introduction to narrative styles of the Locked Tomb series, care of me rambling about it on discord

Book 1 is like LMAO BONES. And hot girls 😏 Murder mystery dinner party, with sciency magic but mainly we just understand the swords. Protag has no idea what’s going on but that’s actually very helpful for helping the reader understand what’s going on.

Book 2 is like Psychedelic Celestial Griefcore, with very complex magic Sci Fi that gets elaborated on at length. Dark. We are In Space for most of the book. God is there. Protag has no idea what’s going on because her brain is fucked and it’s… sad? And extra confusing for the reader.

Book 3 is like Sunshine and Rainbows! Too much sunshine for most people actually! All the surrounding characters are living in a shitty urban sci fi dystopia but the narrator is full of love and joy in her city of riots and poverty and sweltering sun. Protag no idea what’s going on because she’s only been alive for 6 months. Love & Light 🥰

[adh-d2]

All in favor of christening that maneuver the Phee Fall say 'aye'

[realpokemon]

do you know any blogs like yours? ive tried looking them up but im strugglin

use the notes of my pinned post! or if anyone thinks their blog is similar to mine then hit up the reblogs on this post

[jojo-schmo]

I wish I could tell the original artist that this drawing permanently changed the entire direction of my life in 2009. I want to shake their hand, look them in the eye, and admit I would not be who I am today if this drawing didn’t exist.

EDIT: Original artist is @ivynajspyder !!!!

[lifeismarvelous]

I miss the early 2010s :(((((

[herefortheships]

Why do you think he fell in love with Lydia? see, it's much stronger than it was for Dolores, I'm not going to ask when because it would be complicated Bj and Lydia have such opposite personalities

Love this question! And to be honest, ever since I watched BJBJ I've been wondering about this. Because, to me, at least when I first watched the movie, I got to the conclusion that he must have fallen in love with her over the years; that he never had any true romantic inclinations towards Lydia in the first movie. So I had to wonder, what changed?

This answer got long... So I'll put a little summary, Tl;Dr answer here: I think there's an in-canon reason he fell for her and a meta reason why Tim Burton and co decided to make Betelgeuse be in love with Lydia in canon. The in-canon reason: Opposites attract. She is exactly his type: a dark, mysterious beauty. Plus her calm demeanor suits his unhinged nature. Their energies play nicely off each other, completing and balancing each other in a way no one else could, whether Lydia realizes it now or not. Lydia also never seemed to mind ugly, scary, dark things, and Betelgeuse is kind of all of that. At some point he grew fond of her and started needing this sweet, dark beauty in his (after)life. The meta reason: Lydia and Betelgeuse are a favorite "Burton Couple", almost right there with Jack and Sally, at least to a LOT of people.

Now to the long answer, because I totally always write a lot (below the read more cut bc this one got pretty long):

I think to properly answer why he fell in love with her, I do need to get into the when. And this is where I might have to put a "trigger warning" just in case, since I will touch upon how he felt towards Lydia in the first movie, when she was a teenager. Anyone uncomfortable with that needs to click away now. We're going to analyze this with the context and nuance of Betelgeuse's backstory. Context and nuance tend to be overlooked a LOT when the purity factions of fandom want to impose moral superiority upon other members of the fandom, so maybe placing the "trigger warning" may not be enough, but, anyway, you've been warned about the topics of this post.

The context and nuance: Betelgeuse, when alive, lived in the time of the bubonic plague, this means he was alive during the 1300s, presumably in Italy. At that time, marrying a 15-16 year old was socially acceptable and normal. Heck, even younger than that (as unacceptable as that seems to us today in our modern times). So it wasn't that strange as it is today. The reason is that people often didn't get to live past 30. The average, oldest age of death around the time was 60 years old. It was also common for men of the time (and where Betelgeuse lived in Italy, and Europe, as I’m reading in these articles) to marry much later than women, as in it was common for men in their 30s and 40s to marry a 14 year old (which I believe is even younger than Lydia was in that movie, not sure). All of that is in that article. That depends entirely on social ranking though; if he was lower class often people married for convenience and I'm not sure but I think age wasn't a factor to consider when people were struggling. In Europe even in the 1800s you'd see age gaps in marriages. //Edit: and America! For some reason my brain when I wrote this at midnight thought Poe was European 💀.// Edgar Allan Poe married a 13 year old when he was 27, for example (which I totally find super weird, personally, but at their time it wasn't a super weird thing as it is today, as far as I've read; it was also normal to marry a cousin around that time in the upper class and upper middle class, or so I've seen). Was Tim Burton aware? Who knows. But at least I'm putting this out there as the context why it isn't weird for Betelgeuse the character to see a teenager as someone of marrying age. We also know he didn't want to marry her in the first movie because he was in love with her; she was a means to an end, more than anything, regardless of any interest he had in her due to her looks etc.

Ok, so now that that's out of the way we can keep talking. Even though I joined the Beetlebabes fandom only after the second movie, and shipping these two characters never once crossed my mind throughout the years of me watching the first movie, after some thought and after rewatching the movie with the knowledge of where the story goes after the events of that movie, I can definitely see that Betelgeuse became interested in Lydia ever since the first movie, and also why he's head over heels for her in the present.

Even though I still think he fell in love over the years after the events of the first movie, I think he became smitten with her since the first movie. Here's why he fell for her: For starters, she is a dark and mysterious beauty, and that seems to be his type (look at Delores, also a dark beauty). We can actually see the moment he first shows interest in her in the first movie, when he saw her while in his snake form. She was the only one he did not hurt. He only stared at her, almost like he was taken aback by her. When Barbara banishes him back to the model, we have that little moment when he mentions he feels the only one he can make a deal with in that house is "Edgar Allan Poe's daughter", meaning Lydia. And we have the little horny joke, so if you wanna throw that one in there as evidence he became interested in her here, then sure you can. As this happens directly after he's seen Lydia face to face... Rember the context above before you want to call him a pdfler or something... please. He is Not.

Then later when she meets him in his real form, she doesn't seem startled or scared that she's in the presence of a demon/ghost. In fact, she just simply asks him "are you a ghost, too?" and that's when he starts making some conversation. He realizes she can see him and communicate with him. You can tell at this point he is intrigued by her. She is the only one he's shown a sort of sensitivity to in the entire movie. He asks her "why?" when she says she wants to go in to the after life (essentially, that she wants to di e). He doesn't try anything naughty with her; instead, next time he sees her when she asks for his help, he proposes the marriage.

Now, at the time I don't think he loved her or even cared much about her; at this time he just wanted out and here was an eligible woman, who was not only beautiful and available, she could also see him and needed his help, which he used as his way to try to get out of the afterlife. I think once they got rid of him, and he realized he could still connect with her over the years, his interest in her grew and he started really growing fond of her until inevitably he fell in love.

Lydia is physically his type, but there's also a calmness to her that plays against his unpredictable, unhinged personality. She's someone who can balance him, and he's someone she could hold on to; there's an energy in him that she can use. Of course Lydia doesn't yet see how she'd be compatible with someone like him, but from an outsider's perspective, they really compliment each other's personalities. She's calm and quiet; he's crazy and loud. She's reserved; he's outgoing. She's a dark cloud; he's high-energy, like sunshine. Etc. Opposites attract. 💚

Now finally, the meta reason: Lydia and Betelgeuse seem to be a favorite "Burton couple" not only to Tim Burton himself (and the cast of the movie themselves!) but also to a great number of people. There's people who grew up watching the Beetlejuice cartoon series and didn't even watch the first movie, who for years had the idea that these two characters actually adore each other. There were people who were going in to watch this movie with that context only. And there were even people who were going to watch the sequel as their introduction to Beetlejuice (like my mom's best friend, for example! She loved the sequel but has NEVER watched the first movie nor the cartoon. She also wanted Betelgeuse and Lydia to end up together after watching this one, by the way). From a meta perspective, Lydia and Betelgeuse are just a fan favorite couple and an inseparable pair. So partly the choice to make it canon that at least he is absolutely in love with her comes from this expectation that many people had for these two characters. It just feels natural; they're just an iconic Burton pair.