#my crypto heroes

[pleasejustletpercyrest]

I haven’t Leo posted in so many…so long…..so much……

[trans-jon-rights]

Let's adress the case numbers in TMAGP !

Spoiler warning up to episode 19

Here are all the cases by categories and ranks :

CAT 1 :

MAGP 1 (Case 1) : 'Some of him' // RBC

MAGP 6 : Needles // RB

MAGP 10 : Bonzo // RB

MAGP 12 : Bonzo // RB

MAGP 14 : Snakes // RB

MAGP 15 : Lady Mowbray // RB

MAGP 16 : Ink5oul // RB

CAT 2 :

MAGP 18 : Corpse talking // RC

MAGP 19* : Newton's science project

MAGP 1 (Case 2)* : Red Canary // RAB

MAGP 3 : Guy who becomes a tree // C

MAGP 5 : Voyeur // RB

MAGP 7 : Charity shop // RC

MAGP 8 : Brutalist Architecture // RBC

MAGP 11* : 'The deep will care for his bones' // RC

CAT 3 :

MAGP 17 : Weirdly successful Double // RC

MAGP 1 (Case 2)* : Red Canary // RAB

MAGP 2 : Tattoo // RB

MAGP 4 : Murder Violin // C

MAGP 9 : Murder Dices // RB

MAGP 11* : 'The deep will care for his bones' // RC

*The Red Canary Case and the 'Deep' Case are labelled as CAT23, so I put them in both CAT 2 and CAT3

MAGP 13 : Murder Crypto // RB

MAGP 19* : Newton's science project

Okay ? Okay.

*MAGP 19 is labelled as CAT13, so I put it in both 1 and 3.

So now I think we can say each category have a thing :

CAT1 is for 'living' manifestations (that used to be human/animal or not)

CAT2 is for specific places (MAGP 3 is a garden and MAGP 5 is the cinema)

CAT3 is for artefacts/non-living manifestations.

About MAGP 1 (Case 2) and MAGP 11, I think they are in both categories because it got to do with both. For Red Canary it was both the Institute and the box he took from there, and for the other it was both the tattoo and the ocean/cliff (unsure if its one or the other).

You could argue that MAGP 5 got more to djo with the movie than the cinema, and I would agree ! However, I think the movie is also part of the cinema, in some way. The whole place was creepy, and if it was only the movie, it could have been done with simply a DVD or something. The fact that it was in a cinema was intentional.

For the ranks, I think it's pretty much self explanatory : RA to RC to categorise the levels of danger.

What is concerning about it however is that :

A) The Institute is ranked AB, which is the highest on this list for now.

B) All 'living' manifestations are ranked B or below, which means that our heroes would be pretty fucked should they encounter a rank A.

C) Some cases (namely, MAGP 3 and 4) are simply labelled 'C' without it being an actual rank. I could pass it off as a typo, but were talking about Jonathan Sims here, folks.

Another theory I have is that the O.I.A.R only handle B-ranked Externals, and eliminate those whose rank is higher. We'll need to verify that once the next External turns up, but until then I'm running with that. Bonzo and the Lady are both indicating that.

The case of MAGP 17 is a bit more tricky. My current theory (see the final comments on this post) is that whatever caused it was the therapy room the subject was in.

MAGP 1.1 and MAGP 18 are a bit similar in the kind of manifestations I think, as both has to do with dead people talking, though the MAGP 1.1 one is seemingly more dangerous.

Here, that was my rambling. Have a good one <3

[ectoentity]

2023 Fanfic Wrap-Up

Happy Holidays!

I didn't write nearly as many one-shots this year, and there was a big portion of the year where I just could not write, so I don't have a whole lot. All of my non-DPxDC fics are on indefinite hiatus, unfortunately. The brainrot is real.

NEW

Fear and Soulmates: DPxDC. Jason's just trying to get groceries. He doesn't want to get caught up in a Scarecrow attack, and he definitely isn't expecting to find his soulmate. (Complete)

Worst First Date: DPxDC. Danny Fenton and Jason Todd are both having awful days. Neither of them want to be going on this blind date their friend set up. Best case scenario, it's going to be a waste of time, right?

Fortunately or not, the best case scenario rarely happens in Gotham. (Complete)

Adventures in Applied Crypto-Anatomy: DPxDC. NSFW. Tim and Danny have been dating for a while when Danny learns about Tim's predeliction towards the unusual. It gives him an idea: what if he uses his shapeshifting abilities to mimic different types of cryptids? (WIP)

CONTINUED

Anima, Animus: DPxDC. There is a darkness growing in Gotham. One that is far different from the comfortable shadows and familiar fiends that the Bat-family is used to. It is preying on their people and making life even more dangerous than usual. They need an expert to find out what is happening to their city.

Halfway across the country, ghostly hero Danny Fenton is having dreams that belong to someone else: his long-lost brother Jason Todd. (WIP)

The Night Will Come but Not to Stay: DPxDC. Jazz is excited about going to Gotham University for college. It’s halfway across the country from Amity Park and anyone who knows about her weird family or ghost nonsense. Finally, she can pretend to be a normal woman who just wants to go into psychiatry. She meets a cute guy named Jason, and they seem to be getting along great.   

Jason finally decided to put aside his vigilante work long enough to get a degree. He’s learning how to be a normal person again, with a family that cares for him. He’s even made a few civilian friends, including a cute girl named Jazz. 

Surely, nothing could come up that would reveal their other lives to each other. (WIP)

Here's hoping that 2024 will be a better writing year for me.

[sincerely-sofie]

Okay the fact that was actually your BF is so cute. You guys are adorable.

(referencing this post)

We're two dorks in love... and you've just activated my "bragging about my boyfriend even more" trap card!!

He's actually playing PMD2 for the first time right now, and he gave the partner and hero in it our real names. We had assigned each other pokemon to represent us, and he edited his save file to make it so he could play as the pokemon I assigned him.

I've drawn fanart a few times of this PMD team that represents him and me and he responded to it with "I LOVE US!!!"

He’s made turning me into a blushing and happily flustered mess a competitive sport.

He drew himself throttling one of my hallucinations after I posted about how awful the experience was.

When he told me he was in love with me I bluescreened while trying to express the extent of how much I loved him back and said “Dude same”— and it’s become a really nerdy and meaningful way for us to express our mutual adoration.

This was his reaction to that one ask about whether I'd rather marry a werewolf or someone who turns into a crypto bro every Thursday:

This guy is the cutest person ever and I am so head over heels for him. He's the love of my life. Your honor, I rest my case.

[deathmetalangel]

ENVY’S MASTERLIST

this includes every character i write for and a link to their current personal master lists if i have works out for them (warnings may vary and minors dni)

this is in no particular order of character btw but my favorites will have a neat little asterisk

refer to what i don’t and do write in my separate post. also this is constantly being updated so don’t mind it much. you can always request a character if it’s not listed there’s no harm in asking :)

ADVENTURE TIME

- marceline*

- princess bubblegum

- marshal lee*

- finn

- fiona

AKAME GA KILL!

- esdeath*

- tatsumi

- akame

- kurome

AMERICAN HORROR STORY

- tate langdon*

- violet harmon

- kyle spencer

- nora montgomery

- moira o’hara

APEX LEGENDS

- bloodhound (no smut)

- wraith

- wattson

- octane

- loba

- revenant

- lifeline

- valkyrie

- crypto

AVATAR

- jake sulley*

- neytiri

- kiri

- neteyam*

- lo’ak

- aonung

- tsireya

AVATAR: THE LAST AIRBENDER

- prince zuko*

- princess azula*

- sokka*

- katara

- aang

- suki

- yue

-jett

- ty lee

- mai

BIG MOUTH

- judd birch*

- val bilzerian*

- connie

- mona

BOKU NO HERO ACADEMIA

- izuku midoriya

- keigo takami

- touya todoroki

- shoto todoroki

- katsuki bakugo

- himeko toga

- tomura shigaraki

- tamaki amajiki

CALL OF DUTY

- simon ‘ghost’ riley

- john ‘soap’ mctavish

- könig

- valeria garza*

- alejandro vargas*

COBRA KAI/ KARATE KID

- robby keene

- miguel diaz*

- johnny lawrence

- daniel larusso

- tory nichols

- eli ‘hawk’ moskowitz*

- demetri alexopoulos

DARLING IN THE FRANXX

- zero two

- hiro

- mitsuru*

- ichigo

DEATH NOTE

- misa amane

- light yagami

- l

DEMON SLAYER

- tanjiro kamado*

- nezuko kamado

- kyojuro rengoku*

- giyu tomioka*

- shinobu kocho

- sanemi shinazugawa*

- genya shinazugawa*

- zenitsu agatsuma

- inosuke hasibira*

- muichiro tokito

- mitsuri kanroji

- iguro obanai*

- tengen uzui

HAZBIN HOTEL/ HELLUVA BOSS

- alastor* (i fully respect his asexuality so no smut :3 since he’s not canon aro i still write for him)

- angel dust

- charlie morningstar

- vaggie

- loona

- millie

- moxxie

- verosika mayday

- stolas goetia

- barbie wire

- striker

- octavia goetia

- adam*

- lute

- lucifer morningstar*

- rosie

- the vees

HOCUS POCUS

- max dennison

- thackery binx

- sarah sanderson

MARVEL

- peter parker

- wanda maximoff

- pietro maximoff*

- tony stark

- natasha romanoff

- k'uk'ulkan*

- killmonger*

- miguel o’hara*

MID90S

- ray*

- fuckshit

- fourth grade*

- ruben (no smut)

- stevie (no smut)

MY BABYSITTERS A VAMPIRE

- jesse white

- sarah fox

- ethan morgan

- benny weir*

- rory keener

- erica jones

NARUTO

- naruto uzumaki

- sasuke uchiha*

- sakura haruno

- minato namikaze

- hinata hyuga

- neji hyuga

- itachi uchiha*

- shisui uchiha*

- kakashi hatake*

- haku yuki

- pain*

- konan

- sasori

- deidara

RED DEAD REDEMPTION 2

- arthur morgan*

- sadie adler

- dutch van der lide

- mary linton*

- john marston

- lenny summers

- javier escuella

- mary-beth gaskill

SCREAM

- ethan landry*

- billy loomis

- stu macher

- sydney prescott

- tatum riley

STARDEW VALLEY

- alex*

- harvey

- haley*

- sam

- abigail

- emily

- shane

- sebastian

- elliott

- maru

- penny

- leah

STAR WARS

- din djarin*

- anakin skywalker*

- padme amidala*

- poe dameron

- luke skywalker

- leia skywalker

- ahsoka tano*

- han solo

- bo katan kreze

THE MIGHTY DUCKS

- charlie conway*

- adam banks*

- guy germaine

- dean portman

- julie gaffney

- connie moreau

- luis mendoza

THE SUMMER I TURNED PRETTY

- conrad fisher*

- steven conklin*

- jeremiah fisher

- belly conklin*

- taylor jewel

TWILIGHT

- alice cullen

- jasper hale*

- rosalie hale

- edward cullen

- jacob black*

- paul lahote

- leah clearwater

- seth clearwater*

- bella swan

- alec volturi*

- jane volturi

- victoria

[rottenraccoons]

Not sure if this has already been asked yet, but how did the team come up with the four love interests in the first place? I feel like the hardest part of developing a character is figuring out how to start. All four feel so wonderfully complex, and are not very "trope-y," which is what I struggle with the most. Thanks!

Aw, thank you! I love answering stuff like this, so I decided to go through my process on Keir and rambled a bit. I'll put my answer under a readmore for brevity.

For us, we started building Obscura with the idea that we wanted to do something dark and mature, and began with developing a setting. Once we picked and started building out the marketplace under the mountain, we could start asking ourselves "why would anyone go to this place?" and work from there. (Vesper's fractum anima is one answer to this question that we really liked for the MC.)

"Thief" feels like a pretty natural role for a marketplace, and Tobi made it clear that she wanted to develop a very dark character, so I thought a more heroic Robin Hood-type character would be a nice contrast. My original concept of Keir was for a thief who burns for justice in a deeply unjust setting; think shounen-anime hero and you're in the right neighbourhood. Pretty tropey, and I say that with love! Proto-Keir would be a delight to write in a different story.

But the rest of the team didn't think that type of character really suited the dark tone we wanted to work with, and they were right. So we took the trope and twisted it. Yes, he's a good man who burns for justice in an unjust world; and he is extremely burned out. And that twist on the formula unlocked Keir for me and the rest of the team. Burned-out Keir could be exhausted and sarcastic and even cynical about the world, bitter about the state of the marketplace and very protective of Mouse Hole as a place he can improve.

This isn't to say that "burned-out activist Robin Hood" is an original characterisation that's never been done before; TV Tropes has a whole page on the Knight in Sour Armor, which deals with similar characters. But it was the foundation we could build on as a team to make a character that felt strong enough to be a romantic interest.

I've mentioned this before, but one of the inspirations I draw from when I write about the marketplace is the awful Web3/crypto environment, a topic I enjoy reading about mostly for the schadenfreude and ended up learning about as a consequence. For Keir, I use concepts like activist burnout and compassion fatigue, things I learned about much more intimately in 2020 (you can guess why). Taking these real life ideas and bringing them into my writing is my favourite way to add depth and texture to characters and settings. If you're looking to do the same, try looking outside fiction and see what things interest you, then bring them back to your fiction.

Not to say that tropey characters are a bad thing! I could write a whole other essay on the utility of character tropes, especially in the world of romance games. Tropes can be a great place to start constructing characters to ensure that they all have their own appeal, and they're just fun to experience as a reader, especially when it's one of your faves. There's no shame in being a bit tropey, if it suits the story you want to tell!

(And if you're looking for a bit of extra ~secret sauce~: give your characters two things they want super badly, but getting one thing will compromise the other. Safety and love are a classic pair; safety often means staying closed off from other people to avoid being hurt, love requires opening up to others. Then let them struggle with those competing wants.)

[transhawks]

as a fandom, I hope in 2023 my fellow villain stans (and those of us who identify as anarchists or socialists/communists and still try to find something ideologically worthy in this copaganda) realize that the League of Villains are not revolutionaries or antifa or any of the brave people standing up to fascism, and are incredibly traumatized people mostly on suicide missions led by a megalomaniacal man whose political views are best described as fascist. It's just not happening, y'all.

Spinner's embracing of Tomura led to his depersonalization and dehumanization. Twice's blood is being used in the worst way possible; his ultimate fear of being a clone while the original is dead is now realized and utilized. Dabi's grasping at anything to hurt his father while burning himself to death since he can't beat Shouto and because he's realized that people will use any excuse to not care about abuse victims, and he gave them the biggest one by trying to destroy society. Toga has given up on trying to make the world love her and discarded her need for it. Compress entrusted a society where the rich can't exploit the poor to Tomura, but actually managed to entrust it to a man whose plan involves tanking local economies so he can control them. They aligned with an ancapitalist-crypto-fascist army that preaches eugenics to achieve so much of their goals.

Tomura spent months trying to show he was his own person outside of All For One only to end up possessed. All For One wasn't kidding when he said it was all for him.

This is not a good end for them. This is not any shape or way or form of good. They're not going to come back from this sort of thing alive unless the heroes assigned to them save them.

Yeah, this is pessimistic, but someone really needs to wake y'all up. wake the fuck up. The League aren't happy. And they haven't managed to be happy. Tomura never wanted to be happy, either, even if he respected the wishes of his allies. He says it over and over because his trauma made him a depressed nihilist who justifies his lack of will to exist over and over again.

It's just so fucking frustrating, and I know I played a role in this for years, this beating of the drum of how much Hero Society is shit. it is shit, but the League aren't offering solutions. They're too hurt and traumatized to and some of you should really read upon on trauma-based politics and its short-comings.

Please, in 2023, get your head out your asses.

Boku no Hero Academia is a story with liberal values and ideals about reforming the status quo, not breaking it. You are not going to find far-left of center ideas actively pushed in this manga even if they are entertained, because in the end, the story will not have the League "win".

The ending to BNHA will not be revolutionary but reform, which means the saving of the villains will fall down to hero kids. You will not get amazing parables about how the villains should save themselves in this story because that's not what this story wants to tell. Please be realistic, for fuck's sake.

I'm so tired of reading takes that hinge on the idea that the League is a tight-knit family of antifascists and antistatists who love each other and will destroy the hegemonic systems around them. No, that's not what's happening. I'd fucking love if it did, but that's not Boku no Hero. Learn to read.

I love you all, but I truly think you would have happier times in fandoms if you started expecting less and less and realizing that the majority of the media produced in our zeitgeist is far from perfect and will also not cater to leftist ideals. Certainly not something published in Shounen Jump.

[mathsandcomedydotcom]

‘qōhélet͡h’ or: ‘Churchman’:

I am working on a translation of Ecclesiastes, and drew this image of what I imagine Ecclesiastes, the hero of our Biblical book, to look like. I translate: ‘Ecclesiastes’, to mean: ‘Churchman’. The Hebrew word: ’קֹהֶ֫לֶת‚ or, transliterated: ‘qōhélet͡h’, means: ‘assembler’ or: ‘gatherer’, however the etymology of ‘ekklēsĭ́ā’, is essentially an ‘out-gathering’. ‘ek–’ in Greek means: ‘out’ and ‘kăleîn’ means: ‘to call’. Thus, in the political sphere, an ‘ekklēsĭ́ā’ is a ‘called-out assembly’ i.e.: ‘a parliament’, and in the religious sphere, an ‘ekklēsĭ́ā’ is a ‘called out body of believers’ i.e. a ‘congregation’ or ‘assembly’ or: ‘church’. I call Qohelet ‘Churchman’ rather than ‘The Preacher’, as I believe that this fits him better. Qohelet wears a turban. When turbans are mentioned in the Old Testament, the KJV calls them ‘mitres’. One of the aims of the KJV is to legitimise the ordaining of Bishops.

The turban also looks kinda like a papal Tiara. Zarathustra’s cloak resembles a Papal Fanon. The stick that Zarathustra carries could easily be a papal staff or a bishop’s crozier. Thus, I translate ‘qōhélet͡h’ as: ‘Churchman’.

I drew Qohelet as the Zoroastrian prophet, Zoroaster, or Zarathustra, as I get the same energy from him as I get from Zarathustra in Nietzsche's (1844–1900) ‘Thus Spake Zarathustra’ (1883). In Nietzsche's work, Zarathustra ascends, worships the sun, and then descends, and preaches atheism to all and sundry.

Given that Nietzsche's father, Carl Ludwig Nietzsche (1813–1849), was a Lutheran Pastor, I am almost tempted to suspect that Nietzsche’s Zarathustra is based on Qohelet.

I get the same energy from Qohelet as I do from Nietzsche’s Zarathustra. Qohelet exclaims: ‘vapour!’ and then begins to preach a crypto-atheistic sermon for those who have eyes to see and ears to hear. There is some god-talk in the Book of Ecclesiastes... however, this, in my view, is merely an attempt by the author to cover his tracks. This is an author, let us bear in mind, who managed to sneak an atheist book into the Bible! This is no minor achievement! The denial of an afterlife, in this book, is repeated and explicit.

[mariacallous]

It only took a jury four hours to decide that former FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried had committed large-scale fraud—and that included their dinner break. Leading politicians, investors, and observers, not to mention a number of high-profile journalists, in contrast, managed to stay oblivious to it for years. Two recent books illustrate how and why he got away with it, at least for a while.

The first one, Going Infinite: The Rise and Fall of a New Tycoon by Michael Lewis, illustrates it by example. Early reviews alerted me that the book took a charitable view of SBF and his enterprise, and yet I still struggled to believe what I was reading as I started making my way through it. The preface is a flashback to 2021. Interesting, I thought—Lewis is taking us back to the day when he fell for SBF’s narrative of crypto-fueled do-goodery. That assessment was overly optimistic.

The first real chapter of the book is a litany of examples of Bankman-Fried behaving like an unbearable, childish jackass who lies a lot … written in the manner of a hagiography. “The funny thing about these situations was that Sam never really meant to cause them.” Lewis writes. “He didn’t mean to be rude. He didn’t mean to cause chaos in other people’s lives. … With him it was never personal. If he stood you up, it was never on a whim, or the result of thoughtlessness. It was because he’d some math in his head that proved that you weren’t worth the time.”

It does not improve much from there. Somehow, the villain of his book is John Ray, the current FTX CEO, who was appointed after the crypto exchange’s bankruptcy, and whose filings suggest that he has made significant progress in recovering missing customer funds.

The second book, Easy Money: Cryptocurrency, Casino Capitalism, and the Golden Age of Fraud by Ben McKenzie with Jacob Silverman, illustrates Bankman-Fried’s rise and fall by painting a picture of the whole crypto industry as a hive of scams and villainy. Its basic argument runs as follows. Loose monetary policy after the global financial crisis of 2007-09 and bailouts of chunks of the financial industry produced a context of distrust that facilitated the creation of cryptocurrencies as an alternative to sovereign money.

A new wave of easing was set loose when the COVID-19 pandemic triggered an economic crisis and led to a situation where asset bubbles were more likely. The main bubble that flourished was crypto, and with bubbles come fraudulent schemes—or so the story goes.

The juxtaposition of the two stories highlights an interesting aspect of SBF’s rise and fall: the class markers that convinced those around him that he was a genius, not a spoiled con artist. Sure, macroeconomic conditions mattered. In response to concerns about currency debasement and expansionary monetary policy as drivers of cryptomania, I would make note of the generous U.S. fiscal response to the pandemic that gave households plenty of cash to speculate with, as well as the boredom of especially the first months of the pandemic. I ended up watching all of the films Jeanne Dielman and Sátántangó for the first time; far be it from me to blame people for turning to drinking or gambling.

But macroeconomic conditions alone do not account for Lewis’s sympathetic approach to SBF. Lewis wrote The Big Short! The heroes of that story are the likes of Steve Eisman and Meredith Whitney, not Joseph Cassano and Howie Hubler: the people who saw through the bubble, not the people who gambled and lost. A Going Infinite­-style account of the global financial crisis would find a man who behaved obnoxiously while assigning incorrect ratings to collateralized debt obligations and treat him sympathetically, if not admiringly. And that’s even before we get to the fraud that Bankman-Fried so clearly committed.

While the macroeconomic context may offer a partial explanation for the crypto bubble, it does not explain why Lewis and many others admired SBF the way they did. Nor do the regular features of every bubble—the fact that lots of money is involved, or that riding a bubble until (just before) it bursts can be very profitable, while shorting one is difficult.

A number of idiosyncratic characteristics of the crypto bubble, and of SBF and his firm, may better explain their appeal. First, there is the nature of the technology—can we say of the securities?—itself. While the underlying assets in the global financial crisis were tangible, cryptocurrencies, with their reliance on algorithms and distributed consensus and proof-of-work or proof-of-stake mechanisms, are very much unlike real estate. Who are we to doubt those who know magic?

There was a deep conviction among those who didn’t understand crypto that there must be something to making money out of thin air, even as skeptics pointed out that it was, in fact, just as stupid as it sounded.

All that was happening was large-scale gambling: Will the price of Dogecoin, featuring the face of a Shiba Inu dog, continue to go up? Will the official cryptocurrency of the Cameroonian separatist entity of Ambazonia appreciate further? What will this non-fungible token representing Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey’s first tweet sell for tomorrow? Nothing but a continued inflow of speculative cash could keep these bets afloat; no value or income was being generated by the underlying technologies.

Then there was the ideological edge of the movement. While the housing bubble was aligned with a political push to promote homeownership and a broader ownership society, those ideas never inspired the kind of commitment that crypto does among its biggest fans. That commitment is fueled by skepticism of government-issued currencies and an appreciation of some level of privacy (or an even more hard-line libertarian attraction to the ability to pay for illegal goods and services, or to evade taxes).

McKenzie highlights a related aspect of the crypto craze: its cultlike nature. The loss of trust in traditional financial institutions that he diagnoses created a desire for community that manifested itself in the creation of multilevel marketing (MLM) dynamics of enthused individuals spreading the gospel of the new currencies. The get-togethers and online communities that he describes in the fourth chapter of his book highlight how this works in practice—a world where “being scammed is a necessary educational experience in order to be reborn in the community of the free.”

For a more recent illustration of the bizarre groupings forming around blockchain technology, I refer you to a Bored Ape Yacht Club event that took place in Hong Kong earlier this month, where attendees who had paid thousands of dollars to say they owned digital art of an ape gathered to accidentally get blinded, reportedly by shoddy ultraviolet lights. Cryptocurrencies and related technologies are better suited for MLM schemes, because unlike mortgage derivatives, retail investors can easily access this gambling technology.

But to some extent, all of that was for the rubes, and SBF was playing at a very different level—one where he was able to con people as smart as Lewis. The cult-like scene most important to SBF’s appeal to intellectuals was a different one: the world of so-called effective altruism.

This is a movement focused, at least in theory, on doing good effectively and efficiently. It is associated with ideas ranging from the purely altruistic—such as kidney donations—and the relatively uncontroversial—cost-benefit analysis: dollar for dollar, do mosquito nets save more lives than water sanitation projects?—to more speculative ones, such as an emphasis on long-term catastrophic risk and “earning to give.”

Assessments of existential risk often come down to calculations involving small, hard-to-estimate probabilities, as well as difficult decisions around modeling uncertainty and the relative value of benefits enjoyed by future generations. This leaves a lot of room for rigging the numbers—especially when science-fiction fantasies about the impact on future generations come into play. Why eradicate malaria today when you could save billions of lives in the future from the threat of super-intelligent artificial intelligence—by investing in a buddy’s project?

That suspicion was not alleviated by the calculations a prominent effective altruist produced to show that donating $50 million to his buddy’s congressional campaign would serve humanity better than donating it to various charitable purposes. Earning to give, which SBF claimed to engage in, is the idea that instead of working directly toward one’s cause, one should maximize one’s earnings and use the proceeds for good.

This should, of course, trigger at least two concerns. One, how do you commit to using the proceeds that way as opposed to channeling them to your relatives? Two, once you place yourself at a remove from the good works, what constraints remain? Does consequentialism force you to violate rules, norms, and basic accounting standards?

Effective altruism is important to the story of FTX both directly—Bankman-Fried recruited a good number of self-described effective altruists to work for his firm, and he used the network to raise money for his crypto exchange—and for our purpose of figuring out why SBF was and remains so appealing to at least some outside observers.

A few examples: In May 2022, commentator Matthew Yglesias wrote a piece titled “Understanding Effective Altruism’s move into politics” with the subheading “SBF is for real,” a judgment based, among other things, on the academic work of Bankman-Fried’s mother: “SBF was raised by a leading consequentialist moral theorist.”

Writing for the New Yorker, Gideon Lewis-Kraus argued earlier this month that “one can’t help but feel like the existence of the trial, as necessary as it is, seems a little arbitrary” because Bankman-Fried might well have gotten away with his crimes. Perhaps long-termism, taken to an extreme, leads one to think that of life as a mere game of probabilities without real stakes, not unlike the video games that he so obnoxiously used to play (not very well) during video calls.

Either way, effective altruism gave SBF, and crypto with it, a veneer of respectability that it might not have had otherwise. The alternatives, like the argument that the purpose of our large-scale gambling is to give the unbanked access to financial services, were not an easy sell.

The effective altruism connection does not matter solely because of the ideas and human resources it brought SBF. The movement is one with close ties to elite academia, associated with academics such as Will MacAskill at the University of Oxford, who served on the board of a grantmaking operation funded by FTX and was a close SBF associate, or Peter Singer at Princeton University. Bankman-Fried’s father is a professor at Stanford Law School, though he also worked for FTX for 11 months. His mother is a professor emeritus at Stanford Law School, where she specialized in the field of legal ethics, such as it is.

These connections—and these are certainly not the only ones—may explain some of the sway that SBF had over America’s intellectuals. “None of what the Bankman-Frieds did was for show; they weren’t that kind of people,” writes Michael Lewis.

FTX’s post-bankruptcy lawyers allege that the couple enriched themselves by accepting $26.4 million from their son. Surely our kind of people wouldn’t do such a thing.

[halt-kun]

My Hero Academia Chapter 427 - Who was Togura Shigaraki, really ?

Should I be working on my PhD ? Maybe

But I also need to read that chapter

Anyway

Okay so a tv special on Shigaraki

well, he did kill a lot of people

I wonder where this is going

Because if I ever watched a documentary on some random murderer dictator-wannabe and they ended it with "but he was a misunderstood child with trauma", I would riot !

But let's see what's the angle there

OOOO SPINNER CHAPTER

I'm HYPED

the guy with an unrequited crush

what happened to the quirk AFO gave him ?

Thanks Doctor

clearing things up, pleases me

Well that's a bit ironic considering what Shigaraki did to mostly random civilians that weren't actively against him but yes Deku is a murderer technically.

Even though he just gave AFO what he wanted, his quirk

Well now he's calming down

Spinner really gives me the same vibes as Sensui and Itsuki

Well I'm crying, this hits home a bit with the rise of the far right in France (though we (the left) won). My brothers long for destruction in a similar way because they feel rejected by the system (even though they're ciswhitestraightdudes)

So : CAN Deku save Spinner ???

This could destroy me

Spinner really gives the black incel from the countryside vibes

Deku is calm

Spinner, he was your hero of course, and at least for someone who would probably be akin to some alt right geek, at least, your "hero" was rooting for you and thinking about you.

Not just using you for your money because you think you're a loser who won't amount to anything worthwile

Shigaraki's last words to spinner in an alternate dimension : "you should invest in crypto bro, you'll get rich and have women"

I'm noticing now that I don't know enough about the japanese political system to really understand what is represented here. Spinner and Heteromorphs were definitely supposed to mirror the civil rights movement from the US and yet, did he really try to represent somealt right incel there.

Or is it just a byproduct of Spinner character he didn't realize would come to be ?

To my knowledge, Hikikomoris can share this aspect of incel geeks in japan but I don't really know how it's been lately.

I thought my cultural background was closer than that between US and Japan but it's true I've followed US politics more lately

Let's continue though

Well it hurts Spinner, I understand

But you'll have to move forward and accept his legacy, he didn't only affect you but a lot of other people too and not just "positively"

You'll have to move forward at some point, if not for you, for him.

He's not here anymore, take the time to process your grief, but you need to becomes your own hero from now on.

I truly hope you can fight on your own and take part in the reconstruction of Japan toward a better country.

YES

YES

YES

YES

VERY GOOD

YES I KNEW HE WOULD GET IT

You can be a hero Spinner, to yourself but also to others

you have to begin with yourself too

will you join us ?

And save all the Shigarakis laying in wait, ready to succumb to despair ?

Hahaha nice Deku

but yeah, he won't forget about Shigaraki for as long as he lives

TEARED UP AGAIN

yay Shoji, the GOAT, he saved you too in a sense

Oh shit, does it mean Chisaki interacted with Eri ???

Not a good idea, how'd it go ?

Well, even them will work toward redemption it seems

I doubt Eri will forget too

she's traumatized and it's probably lying somewhere, repressed very deep into her psyche.

Thanks Tsukauchi, but a good psychiatrist would be a better idea, she already has a good support system

she needs professional help to complement it

if needed

Oh first years already !? Too bad they'll get expelled in a matter of hours

Oh god no please

fangirls

and Mineta

kill him right now if he even dares to go back to his perverted mind

Is there even a guy in there ?

Anyway, very good chapter

Is MHA going to have one of the best conclusions among mangas (especially big WSJ mangas) ? I'm starting to believe it !

[buckpaws]

sometimes my ideas go so fast i cant keep up with them anyway

literally obsessed with caustuit role reversal just straight up being the most crazy happenstance thing. yeah theyre completely reversed like. he is younger she is older, things happen differently. but if they were to witness it they would be completely blindsided by the mundaneness of how their alternative lives play out. alexander is a hero dragging people on fire out of humbert labs during an (actual) accident, when all caustic did was correct the valve pressure in one silo on one random day when he was younger. rowenna remembers SO vividly that monarch with the symbol of the nexus sun... only if she were 20 years older she would have been the pilot of that titan. and her opinions would be different. she would have worried herself sick over the power vacuum left after the monarchy was overthrown, how diwa (also a pilot) would have given everything. and so. she did it first. her last command to her beloved monarch was to detonate and end the conflict. rowenna died a hero but conduit has more to undo.

its literally the same fucking caustuit dynamic i love in reverse. alexander is straight up like i have cancer and im dying in 6 months if im lucky. dont tell me what i desire. AGUHHHHH *hitting head against my cage bars* ive written this exact thing. but having young zesty alexander with a whole life ahead of him. still shrewd and calculating but not cruel. that beautiful woman with dark eyes that almost flicker with affection when she sees the athletic reckless genius idiot trying to help her. the streaks of gray in her messy hair and the lines around her eyes that crinkle when he makes her grin beneath her mask. HDFGNSNFVAaygh aUUUGH YAY TROUBLED MILFS!!!!!!!!!!!!! FUCK

also yeah diwa fulfils a crypto-esque role here and completely susses her out immediately. maybe even..joins the apex games for her family and to save her wayward sister...he.he.heh..... i really love these characters. btw if ur wondering tae joon and mila are chilling at home (worrying about their brother and the syndicate) but i have a drawing planned for that so ill save it..

[oceanicartgal]

Introduction posttt

Heya! Thought I should do one of these introduction post things so you could get an idea of who I am and what I do here!

My name is Oceanic (you can also call me Ocean!)

-21 years old

-she/her

-Autistic

-Bisexual

I'm just a fellow artist who likes to draw stuff! Most of the time being things like making and designing OCs, making fanart for things that I am fixated on, and also OC x Canon stuff which is a big comfort thing for me! So this blog will mostly feature art and doodles I will make! (Along with some random ramblings too-)

I am on the autism spectrum and I deal with anxiety and tend to struggle with conveying my thoughts on things a lot which may be why I might not be super talkative at times, so please be mindful of that! It doesn't mean I don't want to talk, I just have a harder time formulating what I want to say and I would really appreciate the patience!

Fandoms/Stuff I'm interested in

ok ko let's be heroes

undertale/deltarune

undertale yellow

smile for me

cuphead

pokemon

warioware

cartoon planet/the brak show

danganronpa (to an extent)

mixels

the amazing digital circus

billie bust up

DNI/Boundaries stuff

DNI if you support / draw / or are:

Racist/xenophobic (antiblack, anti Asian, islamophobic, etc.)

Homophobic, transphobic, TERF (or just LGBTQphobic in general)

Sexist

Ableist

Nazi/antisemetic

Zionist/pro-Israel

Fatphobic/body shaming

Proship/lolicon/pedo/zoophile legit any "fiction doesn't affect reality ☝️🤓" kinda creeps gtfo

Idolize/fetishize SA

AI "art"/NFTS/Crypto/etc.

PLEASE just be a decent person I implore you.

Aaaaand yeah that's all I really got to say here. I may come back every now and then to add on to this whenever I think of anything sooo yeah-

Enjoy your stay!

[dilatorywriting]

Just finished watching the little mermaid and the first thing I thought about was your heroes vs villains series with Azul😭 Although I have some issues with it, the movie was pretty fun! Especiallly the parts with sebastian, HE'S SO ADORABLE. Have you seen the movie?

Also, part 3 for our capitalist octopus?..👉👈

I admittedly haven’t watched any of the live action remakes past Beauty & The Beast. They’re not really my cup of tea so I tend not to bother. Or give the Mouse more money. I already feel guilty that I fork over my 3.99 or whatever it is a month for my Twisted Gems 😭 But I’m happy you liked it!!

And oh, our dearest Azul. I’ve been a bit out of it writing and existence wise this past week. But I have been sneakin little bits of him into the Siren nonsense I was working on before I got Crypto Sniped. So hopefully there will be more of him once I’m out of my little quarantine corner 🐙

[mitchipedia]

Cory Doctorow’s “Red Team Blues” is the most exciting technothriller about a 67-year-old accountant you’ll read this year 📚

“Red Team Blues,” the latest novel by the prolific Cory Doctorow, is a gripping technothriller about billion-dollar cryptocurrency crime. I don’t often encounter fiction that pulls me in as hard as “Red Team Blues” anymore—I’m a jaded reader. But “Red Team Blues” kept me up well past my bedtime on more than one night, and I staggered around bleary-eyed at work the next day. I should send Cory a bill.

“Red Team Blues” is a departure for Cory. His fiction is mostly near-future science fiction. “Red Team Blues” is an old-fashioned private-eye novel crossed with a technothriller.

Also, Cory’s biggest novels are mostly about people in their teens and 20s coming of age. The hero of “Red Team Blues,” Marty Hench, is an old man. He’s 67 years old, a private investigator doing one last gig before retiring.

Marty is a big reason why “Red Team Blues” is compelling. He’s the first-person narrator of the book, and he speaks to the reader like an old friend, telling his story over fine scotch in a comfortable dive bar.

Marty is a callback to the classic detectives of the mid-20th Century. Like his antecedents, Marty Hench is a lone wolf. He has no wife and no family, though he has many friends. And he likes it that way.

Marty’s home is a luxury tour bus, called the Unsalted Hash, which he accepted as payment from a former client, an aging rock star. Marty drives his home wherever work or his fancy takes him.

One more thing about Marty: He’s an accountant. A forensic accountant to be precise. He investigates financial crime. And there’s plenty of that in Silicon Valley, where Marty often parks his bus.

At the beginning of “Red Team Blues,” Marty is called on by an old friend, who became a billionaire late in life after decades of pursuing a passion for fundamental crypto technology. An important secret relating to that technology has been stolen. It’s worth billions of dollars and could be used to sabotage global financial empires. Marty is hired to recover the secret—discreetly.

Marty does the job, but in so doing he gets on the wrong side of wealthy financiers who operate at a rarified multi-billionaire level where there’s no significant difference between legitimate business and criminal cartels. The financiers have already tortured a few people to death to get at the valuable crypto secret—and now they’re after Marty.

Through the course of “Red Team Blues,” Marty takes us on a tour of present-day Silicon Valley, where the early idealistic dreams of using technology to transform the world and make it better have given way to sheer greed. Marty moves from the luxury high-rises of the super-wealthy to homeless encampments just a short way away.

The setting of “Red Team Blues” reminds me of the 1930s Los Angeles of classic noir yarns, such as the novels of Raymond Chandler and James Ellroy, as well as the movie “Chinatown.” The LA of those stories is still new, but already corrupt and foul under the glittering surface. The Silicon Valley of “Red Team Blues” is like that.

Cory writes about the similarities and differences between “Red Team Blues” and classic noir detectives in this essay: Silicon Valley Noir

Aging is another theme of “Red Team Blues.” Marty Hench and the people he interacts with are mostly in their late 60s and 70s. They’ve been wildly successful professionally, but their careers are closing. They’re thinking about their legacy, and what they’re going to do next.

Marty is physically fit, but at 67 he’s not going to win any brawls or firefights—not when he’s up against pros, anyway. He thwarts the villains with his wits, not his fists or guns.

Like the heroes of classic detective stories, Marty attracts the ladies. He likes beautiful, intelligent women and they like him back. But here’s a thing that I like about “Red Team Blues:” The relationships are age-appropriate.

In detective stories about aging heroes, the heroes are often men in late middle age, and the women are at least 30 years younger. I find that kind of thing uncomfortable reading, because the writers are themselves often aging men, like their heroes. Reading those books can feel like the writers are sharing their own fetishes and insecurities in ways I would just as soon not be privy to. In “Red Team Blues,” Marty becomes involved with several beautiful, sexy women, and all but one of them are his age.

Additionally, Marty exhibits a refractory period that would be admirable in a man 20 years younger.

One of Cory’s great talents as a fiction writer is that he mixes compelling characterization with social issues. His “Little Brother” novels are about surveillance run amok. “Walkaway” and “Pirate Cinema” are about capitalism turned predatory. Like those novels, “Red Team Blues” is about social justice, but Cory never loses sight of the characters and the readers‘ need to care about the characters as people.

“Red Team Blues” is the first novel of a series. Chronologically, the series is unusual, in that each novel takes place before the previous novel. In “Red Team Blues,” we’re introduced to Marty at the end of his career; in follow-up novels in the pipeline, we’ll meet Marty at the midpoint of his career, and then at the very beginning, when both Marty and Silicon Valley are young.

And now for a brief tangent

Novelists who write series about the same characters over a course of decades have to decide what to do about the aging process.

Arthur Conan Doyle wrote over the course of decades about Holmes and Watson, and aged them more or less in real time. They are young men in their first adventure and old men in their last. Michael Chabon’s “The Final Solution” picks up Holmes’ life as a centenarian, with England on the verge of World War II; because of copyright, Chabon’s detective hero is never named, but he’s a retired detective, once famous, who now lives in the countryside and keeps bees.

Nero Wolfe and Archie Goodwin’s ages remain unchanged throughout the series. Nero is 52 and Archie is early 30s. In the first book, “Fer-de-Lance,” published 1934, they’re celebrating the end of Prohibition. In the final novel, “A Family Affair,” published 1975, Nero Wolfe, still 56 years old, is obsessed with the Watergate scandal.

In the first Robert B. Parker Spenser novel, “The Godwulf Manuscript,” published 1973, the detective gives his age as 37. He’s a Korean War veteran, an ex-cop who boxed professionally as a young man, and once fought Jersey Joe Wollcott. Spenser ages throughout the series, but slower than real-time; a fan developed a complex, tongue-in-cheek formula for determining Spenser’s age in any of the novels, and determines that in the 2006 “Dream Girl,” Spenser is 49-1/2, aging at a rate of slightly less than 1 year for every two that pass in the real universe. But Spenser’s aging isn’t linear; in some of the middle novels he talks about needing glasses to read and being less tolerant of coffee, and then Parker gives that up. Parker died in 2010, but Spenser lives on, in a series of novels written by Ace Atkins. (I’ve read a few—they’re good.)

And of course “MASH” was on the air for 11 years, while the Korean War lasted only three. The characters aged with the show. They had to; back then there was no CGI magic to make the actors appear younger.

I’m not aware of any series that runs backward in time, like the Marty Hench novels. So Cory scores a first there.

Disclaimer

Those of you who follow me here regularly know I’m a huge fan of Cory’s work; I link to him here often, sometimes once or twice a day. He’s also an old friend. But despite my flagrant conflict of interest, you can trust this review. If I didn’t like this book, I just wouldn’t say anything about it.

This is not a courtesy I extend solely to friends. I don’t like giving negative reviews of creative work anymore. Even if a book or movie is a stinker, a lot of people worked hard on it. Let somebody else do the job of steering you away from bad work; I’d rather shine a light on work you might enjoy.

Also, I’m fortunate enough to be friends with a few successful science fiction and fantasy writers, and I’ve found that how I feel about them personally has no bearing on how I feel about their work. I can like a writer just fine as a person, and not care for their work. In fact, that’s usually the case with my writer friends. And I can think of at least one writer whose work I’m very fond of, but who is unpleasant in person. Cory is a rarity for me—a writer who I like a great deal both as a writer and a person. I sincerely enjoyed “Red Team Blues,” and I hope you do too.

[indierockdoc]

I’m one of those insufferable people that is like, “I loathe mainstream music,” but if you think my British Romantic Poet obsessed ass, who’s culminating project in undergrad was all about Lord Byron—could listen to Folklore and not come away at least a little bit of a crypto-swiftie, you’re wrong.

And I was dragged out to the Rep tour by a friend of mine, so did not start out liking Taylor’s music. She won me over... I used it for fanfiction bc it was some of the most girly pop music out there.

Anti-Hero was 💯 inspired by Lord Byron, one of the most infamous poets in British History. He was openly bisexual and inspired the first vampire.

It was Byronic af, and not to be a conspiracy theorist or anything, but you know what he was exiled for 7 years for?

Take a guess, I’ll wait:

HOMOSEXUALITY.

There are several characteristics defining a Byronic hero, and one of them is isolation/exile, and that’s especially important when folklore’s entire album was about Romanticism.

https://youtu.be/osdoLjUNFnA

I think her music is pure poetry, and it has a depth to it a lot of mainstream music is lacking, probably bc the studio heads dictate what they can and cannot write. Her use of color imagery is unmatchable, and I appreciate it.

[swearingcactus]

pleeeeease tell us more about jamie i already love him soso much

oagh anon you've done it now. jamie started as a joke in the distant yell discord server when we (okay, mostly me) were talking about wacky far cry 7 possibilities:

the idea was that he's another jay-name from America (like Jason and Ajay), and Jamie could also work as a girl name so if they pulled another Dani Rojas-esque protag it'd still work. here's a few doodles I've done of him when I was figuring out how he'd look: ranging from crypto bro, to your average American backpacker, to bbno$:

eventually I thought it'd be cool to just lean into the whole "you're not the hero you think you are" formula of Far Cry and finally have a protag that is treated as a villain of sorts. (hence why he's wearing red! which i talked about here as a theory that ubisoft sticks with the red is for villains, blue is for friends dresscode) a 'protag' who's so engrossed in having fun and causing chaos for any revolutionary local group that asks him for help, and for the real-life players to enjoy... and remains oblivious that his actions wouldn't hold up in the long run. It'd be somewhat hilariously tragic that within 20-30 years, an American called Huntley came in a failing state, wreaked havoc with his actions, and left. Truly his daddy's son.

The snake charmer nickname/inspired look is just something from a Saint Motel song. I figured he'd be a little snake-like as a character, inherently cunning and slips through cracks by nature. Also, the 'snake eyed' thing is funny because snakes (and Jamie) have poor eyesight, and my idea of FC7 would include a mission where he loses his rose-tinted glasses and the game makes it 240p mode for the duration of the mission.

some other trivia facts i dreamed up about him includes: his mom (Willis's ex-wife he mentioned in Far Cry 3) remarried, and he has twin step-sisters. He is also Down Bad, and is even hornier than Jason but that's neither here nor there, because you don't really need to manipulate him to get him to do your dirty work.

Also I made a playlist for him because of course I did. 🐍