#no like i get it techs are the like enemy of the common worker any tech call and we shit on the company it’s absolutely harmless

[lilgynt]

supervisors not explaining things clearly at all even when i say hey i have never done this and then i can hear the merchants making fun of how long this call is taking in the background

[arcticdementor]

In the summer of 2014, I gave birth to a baby boy. He was born with a perfect Apgar score, after a very easy delivery. But my labor had not been smooth—in fact, throughout the day and a half of contractions, I believed there was something decidedly wrong. I also felt that way as I held him for the first time, and he writhed violently under my hands. In a video taken about 10 minutes after he was born, he can be seen lifting his head up off my chest. “Ooooh, look at how advanced he is!” someone can be heard trilling in the background, before her voice is overtaken by my own. “Don’t do that, love,” I say. Then, to the camera: “Does he seem like he’s in pain to you?”

It took my husband and me three years to understand that in fact I was right that day in the delivery room. Our son was hurt. And it will take him years to heal—longer than it should have, and that is on top of the injustice of the original wound—though I thank God every day that we figured it out.

The first breakthrough came when my husband David remembered a book about brain science he had read a decade earlier, by a doctor named Norman Doidge. It changed our lives, by allowing us to properly understand our son’s injury (and to understand why we couldn’t manage to get a straight answer about it from any of the “experts” we had seen). It’s been a tough road, but from that moment on, we at least knew what to do—and why.

A year or so later, we met Doidge and his wife, Karen, for dinner, and it is here that the story may become pertinent for you.

After we ordered, I told Norman I had a question I’d been wanting to ask—and that I wanted his honest answer to it, even if it meant that I had done something wrong. I proceeded to relay to him the entire tale, from the very beginning to that very moment, of what felt to me like our Kafkaesque medical mystery journey.

How was it, I then asked, that it took my husband and me—both children of doctors, both people with reporting and researching backgrounds, among the lucky who have health insurance, and with access through family and friends to what is billed as the best medical care in the country—years to figure this out, and that in the end we only did so basically by accident?

Norman looked at us sympathetically. “I don’t know how else to tell you this but bluntly,” he said. “There are still many good individuals involved in medicine, but the American medical system is profoundly broken. When you look at the rate of medical error—it's now the third leading cause of death in the U.S.—the overmedication, creation of addiction, the quick-fix mentality, not funding the poor, quotas to admit from ERs, needless operations, the monetization of illness vs. health, the monetization of side effects, a peer review system run by journals paid for by Big Pharma, the destruction of the health of doctors and nurses themselves by administrators, who demand that they rush through 10-minute patient visits, when so often an hour or more is required, and which means that in order to be ‘successful,’ doctors must overlook complexity rather than search for it ... Alana, the unique thing here isn’t that you fell down so many rabbit holes. What’s unique is that you found your way out at all.”

I had barely started processing this when Norman moved to change the subject: “Now, can I ask you two something? How come so much of the journalism I read seems like garbage?”

Oh, God.

David and I looked at each other, simultaneously realizing that the after-school special we thought we were in was actually a horror movie. If the medical industry was comprehensively broken, as Norman said, and the media was irrevocably broken, as we knew it was ... Was everything in America broken? Was education broken? Housing? Farming? Cities? Was religion broken?

Everything is broken.

…

For seven decades, the country’s intellectual and cultural life was produced and protected by a set of institutions—universities, newspapers, magazines, record companies, professional associations, cultural venues, publishing houses, Hollywood studios, think tanks, etc. Collectively, these institutions reflected a diversity of experiences and then stamped them all as “American”—conjuring coherence out of the chaos of a big and unwieldy country. This wasn’t a set of factories pumping out identical widgets, but rather a broad and messy jazz band of disparate elements that together produced something legible, clear, and at times even beautiful when each did their part.

…

This was the tinder. The tech revolution was the match—one-upping the ’70s economy by demanding more efficiency and more speed and more boundarylessness, and demanding it everywhere. They introduced not only a host of inhuman wage-suppressing tactics, like replacing full-time employees with benefits with gig workers with lower wages and no benefits, but also a whole new aesthetic that has come to dominate every aspect of our lives—a set of principles that collectively might be thought of as flatness.

Flatness is the reason the three jobs with the most projected growth in your country all earn less than $27,000 a year, and it is also the reason that all the secondary institutions that once gave structure and meaning to hundreds of millions of American lives—jobs and unions but also local newspapers, churches, Rotary Clubs, main streets—have been decimated. And flatness is the mechanism by which, over the past decade and with increasing velocity over the last three years, a single ideologically driven cohort captured the entire interlocking infrastructure of American cultural and intellectual life. It is how the Long March went from a punchline to reality, as one institution after another fell and then entire sectors, like journalism, succumbed to control by narrow bands of sneering elitists who arrogated to themselves the license to judge and control the lives of their perceived inferiors.

Flatness broke everything.

…

Today’s revolution has been defined by a set of very specific values: boundarylessness; speed; universal accessibility; an allergy to hierarchy, so much so that the weighting or preferring of some voices or products over others is seen as illegitimate; seeing one’s own words and face reflected back as part of a larger current; a commitment to gratification at the push of a button; equality of access to commodified experiences as the right of every human being on Earth; the idea that all choices can and should be made instantaneously, and that the choices made by the majority in a given moment, on a given platform represent a larger democratic choice, which is therefore both true and good—until the next moment, on the next platform.

…

“You might not even realize you’re not where you started.” The machines trained us to accept, even chase, this high. Once we accepted it, we turned from willful individuals into parts of a mass that could move, or be moved, anywhere. Once people accepted the idea of an app, you could get them to pay for dozens of them—if not more. You could get people to send thousands of dollars to strangers in other countries to stay in homes they’d never seen in cities they’d never visited. You could train them to order in food—most of their food, even all of their food—from restaurants that they’d never been to, based on recommendations from people they’d never met. You could get them to understand their social world not as consisting of people whose families and faces one knew, which was literally the definition of social life for hundreds of thousands of years, but rather as composed of people who belonged to categories—“also followed by,” “friends in common,” “BIPOC”—that didn’t even exist 15 years ago. You could create a culture in which it was normal to have sex with someone whose two-dimensional picture you saw on a phone, once.

You could, seemingly overnight, transform people’s views about anything—even everything.

The Obama administration could swiftly overturn the decision-making space in which Capitol Hill staff and newspaper reporters functioned so that Iran, a country that had killed thousands of Americans and consistently announces itself to be America’s greatest enemy, is now to be seen as inherently as trustworthy and desirable an ally as France or Germany. Flatness, frictionlessness.

The biological difference between the sexes, which had been a foundational assumption of medicine as well as of the feminist movement, was almost instantaneously replaced not only by the idea that there are numerous genders but that reference in medicine, law or popular culture to the existence of a gender binary is actually bigoted and abusive. Flatness.

Facebook’s longtime motto was, famously, “Move fast and break shit,” which is exactly what Silicon Valley enabled others to do.

The internet tycoons used the ideology of flatness to hoover up the value from local businesses, national retailers, the whole newspaper industry, etc.—and no one seemed to care. This heist—by which a small group of people, using the wiring of flatness, could transfer to themselves enormous assets without any political, legal or social pushback—enabled progressive activists and their oligarchic funders to pull off a heist of their own, using the same wiring. They seized on the fact that the entire world was already adapting to a life of practical flatness in order to push their ideology of political flatness—what they call social justice, but which has historically meant the transfer of enormous amounts of power and wealth to a select few.

Because this cohort insists on sameness and purity, they have turned the once-independent parts of the American cultural complex into a mutually validating pipeline for conformists with approved viewpoints—who then credential, promote and marry each other. A young Ivy League student gets A’s by parroting intersectional gospel, which in turn means that he is recommended by his professors for an entry-level job at a Washington think tank or publication that is also devoted to these ideas. His ability to widely promote those viewpoints on social media is likely to attract the approval of his next possible boss or the reader of his graduate school application or future mates. His success in clearing those bars will in turn open future opportunities for love and employment. Doing the opposite has an inverse effect, which is nearly impossible to avoid given how tightly this system is now woven. A person who is determined to forgo such worldly enticements—because they are especially smart, or rich, or stubborn—will see only examples of even more talented and accomplished people who have seen their careers crushed and reputations destroyed for daring to stick a toe over the ever multiplying maze of red lines.

So, instead of reflecting the diversity of a large country, these institutions have now been repurposed as instruments to instill and enforce the narrow and rigid agenda of one cohort of people, forbidding exploration or deviation—a regime that has ironically left homeless many, if not most, of the country’s best thinkers and creators. Anyone actually concerned with solving deep-rooted social and economic problems, or God forbid with creating something unique or beautiful—a process that is inevitably messy and often involves exploring heresies and making mistakes—will hit a wall. If they are young and remotely ambitious they will simply snuff out that part of themselves early on, strangling the voice that they know will get them in trouble before they’ve ever had the chance to really hear it sing.

…

I’m not looking to rewind the clock back to a time before we all had email and cellphones. What I want is to be inspired by the last generation that made a new life-world—the postwar American abstract expressionist painters, jazz musicians, and writers and poets who created an alternate American modernism that directly challenged the ascendant Communist modernism: a blend of forms and techniques with an emphasis not on the facelessness of mass production, but on individual creativity and excellence.

Like them, our aim should be to take the central, unavoidable and potentially beneficent parts of the Flatness Aesthetic (including speed, accessibility; portability) while discarding the poisonous parts (frictionlessness; surveilled conformism; the allergy to excellence). We should seek out friction and thorniness, hunt for complexity and delight in unpredictability. Our lives should be marked not by “comps” and metrics and filters and proofs of concept and virality but by tight circles and improvisation and adventure and lots and lots of creative waste.

And not just to save ourselves, but to save each other. The vast majority of Americans are not ideologues. They are people who wish to live in a free country and get along with their neighbors while engaging in profitable work, getting married, raising families, being entertained, and fulfilling their American right to adventure and self-invention. They are also the consumer base for movies, TV, books, and other cultural products. Every time Americans are given the option to ratify progressive dictates through their consumer choices, they vote in the opposite direction. When HBO removed Gone with the Wind from its on-demand library last year, it became the #1 bestselling movie on Amazon. Meanwhile, endless numbers of Hollywood right-think movies and supposed literary masterworks about oppression are dismal failures for studios and publishing houses that would rather sink into debt than face a social-justice firing squad on Twitter.

[usashirtstoday]

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[emperorsfoot]

New chapter of my shamefully self-indulgent Entrapdak Arranged Marriage AU. 

This chapter features Imp’s adorable antics, a broken ceiling, Hordak and Entrapta meet for the first time, and Catra is very frustrated. 

...

“Entrapta! Entrapta! Grr!” Catra threw her arms up in exasperation, fur of her tail frizzing out, fangs barred with a snarl to vent her frustration.

Their ship had already started its descent to the planet’s surface and Entrapta wasn’t even dressed.

That wasn’t accurate.

Entrapta was dressed. As a mechanic. A menial worker.

Not the sovereign ruler of an industrial titan like Dryl that she was.

She could not meet her future spouse –never mind that- she could not meet the Emperor of the Known Universe and his brother, looking like the person they had their servants call to service the palace ventilation systems.

The ship gave a violent lurch as they hit a pocket of turbulence in Horde World’s atmosphere and Catra was thrown off balance. She landed on her feet –she always landed on her feet- but the trunk containing Entrapta’s wardrobe was thrown across the cabin, spilling the Princess’ gowns all over. Catra heaved another snarl. She longed for a simpler life, a war-orphan, or an underappreciated soldier. Anything had to be better than a lady-in-waiting to a tech Princess who thought measuring the pH balance of the atmosphere and how it affected the ship’s hull was more important that making sure she was ready to meet the Emperor of the Known Universe, or her future spouse.

“Hey, don’t worry so much.” Scorpia, another Princess and Entrapta’s friend, bent down to help Catra pick up the strewn clothing. “Entrapta’s a little quirky, but she agreed to do this because she knows it’s important. She’ll be ready in time.”

Catra sighed. In defeat, not relief. Scorpia was nice, but she did not seem to grasp the importance of first impressions. Entrapta was actually really amazing –once a person got to know her- but she made a terrible first impression.

Then it was Scorpia’s turn to sigh. Clasping her pincers together –still holding one of Entrapta’s dresses- and staring out through one of the view ports at the dusty and barren landscape of Horde World. “Isn’t it romantic.” She gushed. “Two people, crossing the stars to meet. Strangers coming together for the good of a nation. At first, just for duty. But then! A tender glance! A gentle touch! Gazes locking… and sparks fly… It’s true love!”

Catra just stared at her. Dead-eyed. Unimpressed and unmoved.

“It could happen!” Scorpia insisted.

“It’ll never happen if we can’t get Entrapta ready by the time ship lan-“ Catra was cut off as the ship gave another lurch as the pilot decelerated for their final approach to the Imperial landing site. Catra only hissed, showing more teeth.

“I’ll help with Entrapta.” Scorpia nodded, realizing maybe Catra’s concerns were more legitimate and pressing than she originally thought.

But the moment the ship did actually landed, Entrapta disappeared to explore the alien palace that was the heart of the Horde Empire and Catra had no idea where she went.

…

Hec-Tor bared his teeth at the scale, displeased by the result. He managed to go a full year and a day without any weight loss from his condition and in the span of only twenty-four hours had somehow managed to lose two-hundred grams of body mass.

He stepped off the scale, waited for the number to clear, then tried again. Double checking the result. When the number showed the same. He triple checked. When all three attempts yielded the same result, he was forced to record the data in his health tracker app. He was losing weight again.

That hadn’t happened since Keldor disappeared. Hec-Tor twisted the ring he still wore on the third finger of his left hand. Keldor’s ring. In another few days, he would have to take it off and replace it with a different ring. Entrapta’s ring. Slipping the band off his finger, he looked at the inscription. ‘By the Power…’ Keldor never really explained what it meant beyond ‘it’s just an Eternian thing’. Slipping the ring back on his finger, Hec-Tor stealed himself to face the day.

Today was going to be a bad day.

His intended’s ship landed some time in the early hours of the morning. Hec-Tor was glad he was not made to greet her first thing upon her arrival. He would not have been in the best of sorts to make an acceptable first impression. He was rather confident that he would not make any kind of good first impression at all. But then, he thought the same thing before his marriage to Keldor and in the end, first impressions turned out not to matter all that much.

Hec-Tor was younger back then. He was sullen and quiet and had adhered to protocol as best as one could while also looking at their feet and not making eye-contact. While Keldor was unlike anyone Hec-Tor had ever met up to that point. Instead of reciprocating the ceremonial bow with one of his own, the Eternian Prince had laughed –just a short, half stifled laugh behind his hand, but still a laugh- and asked Hec-Tor if he did more than posture and pose. Horde Prime frowned in displeasure, and Keldor’s father, King Miro, gave his son a strongly worded reprimand. But it succeeded in reminding Hec-Tor that the marriage had been arranged for Keldor just as much as it had been for him. They were both of them being forced into this and that was one thing they had in common.

Remembering that, Hec-Tor reminded himself that this was arranged for his current intended just as much as it was for him. While a small platoon of servants combed and gelled his hair, dabbed at his cheeks with foundation and concealer, lined his eyes with kohl, painted gloss on his lips, fitted decorative plugs in his ports, and just generally groomed him to look his best, Hec-Tor read over the dossier on his intended.

Princess Entrapta. While she kept the title of ‘Princess’ in reality, she was the Queen of her territory. She was the sovereign and sole ruler of Dryl, which was not its own planet, but a small mountain nation located on Etheria.

Hec-Tor paused at that. Recognizing the name. Etheria was a planet that shared a solar system with Eternia –Keldor’s home planet. Entrapta and Keldor were practically neighbors! However, unlike Eternia, which was unified under one monarch, Etheria was a confederacy of multiple independent states.

Dryl was small in terms of land coverage. But it was an industrial titan that specialized in weapons manufacture. Weapons that combined highly advanced technology with complicated magic. Weapons that could be powered by their wielder’s ‘fighting spirit’ rather than limited battery packs that needed to be recharged. Armors and shieldings that were just as resilient and strong as phitanium, but easier to shape, more efficient to manufacture, and –best of all- cheaper since they wouldn’t have to pay Queen Elmora’s premiums. Heck! Dryl even made bots that could be sent into battle in place of living soldiers.

That explained why Horde Prime wanted her in the family.

With Entrapta married to the Emperor’s own brother, her loyalty would be to the Empire –which her children might have a chance to inherit one day. That would ensure that Dryl would not be selling their weapons to the Empire’s enemies.

Scrolling through the file, Hec-Tor realized that the vast majority of the information was on Dryl and its arms industry. There was very little information on Princess Entrapta herself. Hell! The file didn’t even include a picture of her.

Hec-Tor sighed. Of course, the file wouldn’t contain much information on her. Horde Prime did not arrange this marriage to make his brother happy. He didn’t care about Princess Entrapta the person. All Horde Prime cared about were the weapons and power she could bring to the Empire. Who cared if Hec-Tor was miserable for the rest of his life? Not every arranged marriage could be as lucky as his first one to Keldor. Not everyone could fall in love with their intended.

His chair was turned around and Hec-Tor examined his reflection. They did everything but put contacts in his eyes to give him pupils. He sighed. This was far more opulent than his brother made him dress up for his first engagement. Horde Prime must really, really want those weapons.

With a sigh, Hec-Tor stood from the seat. He needed a break from all the primping and preening. Maybe get some real work done. There were a few items from yesterday that he never managed to get around to. At the time he thought there would be time to deal with them today. That was before his brother took the liberty of changing his entire agenda for the rest of the week –and his life. At the very least, he needed to address the blight on Antares. Horde Prime probably wouldn’t let him dispatch soldiers to either Krytis or Denebria until after the wedding, the Emperor would want to keep the military close until then.

But if he could just get to his office and do something productive.

Anything productive.

Even if it was just hitting ‘read’ on a non-critical memo.

He stalked down the corridors of the residential wing to his office, wearing nothing more than a dressing gown, with a head full of so much product he looked sculpted out of paste.

A door to his left burst open and Imp dashed out, in a similar state of half-dressed but very well make-uped. He saw his father standing in the corridor and skirted around to hide behind the older man’s legs. Just in time for a trio of servants to follow –tripping- out of the same room after the little… imp.

Imp hissed at them.

Only one seemed brave enough to approach, addressing Hec-Tor. “Your Highness, we are trying to make the Prince ready to meet your intended and he is not cooperating. Could you… speak to him, please?”

Hec-Tor looked down at the child clinging to his calves. Imp glared up at him. He did not like playing dress-up any more than Hec-Tor did.

“If I have to suffer through this, so do you.” He informed his son.

The boy gave a screech of disagreement, abandoned his father as an ally, and climbed up a wall instead. Imp shot his father a scathing look of betrayal before wiping half the makeup and cream from his face and smearing it on the expensive wallpaper. Then he disappeared into an air vent.

“Imp!” Hec-Tor shouted after him. Forget ‘feral’ that child could be outright wild sometimes. He got it from Keldor. He was also always a little wild.

Forget doing something productive. Now all Hec-Tor cared about was finding his son in the complicated and labyrinthine ventilation systems of the Imperial palace.

He turned suddenly anxious eyes and misplaced anger on the trio that had been grooming Imp or the introductions. “Find him!”

They ran to comply.

Hec-Tor headed in the opposite direction, long ears piqued. Listening for any movement in the walls that could indicate his errant son. Imp was spry and fast. Of all the members of the Kur family that Hec-Tor had known –both living and dead- Imp was by far the most healthy. His physical defects were extra limbs in the form of wings –that actually functioned!- and a pointed tail. He was also a little under sized for his age, but that just made it easier for him to pull stunts like this!

But the worst part was that Hec-Tor knew, if Keldor were here, he would be egging their child on. Encouraging Imp to make trouble and be an agent of chaos. Keldor would think it was funny. Keldor would be proud.

Damn. Hec-Tor made himself sad.

Before their wedding, during a heavily chaperoned stroll through the grounds of the castle in Eternos, Keldor not only convinced Hec-Tor to ditch their escorts and sneak out, but actually succeeded in doing it! Climbing up a tree close to the castle wall and pushing Hec-Tor over it before the Imperial Prince even knew what was happening. Keldor then took Hec-Tor on a tour of the back-allies of Eternos, a side of the city he was sure no Prince was meant to see.

Imp definitely got this rebelliousness from his other father. It certainly didn’t come from Hec-Tor!

He came to an intersection in the corridors and froze, closing his eyes, listening hard for any scuffling or scurrying sounds that could be Imp trying to evade him. Just barely picking up a faint sound, Hec-Tor made a turn a followed the sound out of the private residential wing and into the business section. If anyone dared give him an odd look for stalking the halls in what was essentially a bathrobe, he snarled at them.

The moment Hec-Tor found an access panel large enough for him, Imp was going to be in so much trouble!

A louder scuffling in the walls.

Imp must be closer!

Hec-Tor leaned against the wall. His ear just a hair’s breadth away from touching the wall –he was still mindful of all the cosmetic work he’d sat through already and did not want to sit through it again.

He followed the scuffling sound. Listening to the metal of the vents shift with the weight of a body. Funny, Imp was never heavy enough to make the vent paneling shift and bow before. But then, Imp was a growing boy.

He followed the movement in the walls he was almost in the public areas of the palace now. A place he did not want to be walking around in a bathrobe and little else. But he wanted to find his son more.

Then he heard Imp give a startled and confused little chirp. And his journey moving in the walls came to a halt. Now the scuffling in the wall was located in only one spot and it was fast and frantic.

“Imp?” Hec-Tor called, hoping the boy could hear him through the drywall and vent plating. “Are you stuck?”

Imp couldn’t answer, of course. While he might be the most physically healthy member of the Kur family, he was also born mute. His vocal cords not forming right during gestation in the vitrine. The only sounds he could make were guttural chirps and squawks. With a wall between them cutting off any visual communication, there was no way for Imp to make his situation and his needs known. Hec-Tor just had to guess and hope he took the appropriate action.

He grabbed the first person he saw, not caring if they were palace staff, or a visiting dignitary (or extended staff) there for his wedding. “You! Get me the head of palace maintenance! Immediately!”

Not sure what else to do, it was all the hapless passerby could do to nod an affirmative and run away the moment Hec-Tor let go of them.

Another squak of dismay drifted through the wall and Hec-Tor once again pressed his ear to the wall. This time he did smear his makeup, but he didn’t care. Some things were more important. “Imp? What is going on in there? Are you injured?”

The only answer he got was a string of confused chittering and trills.

“Imp!?”

People were casting uncertain glances at him now. What if mental instability was another of the Prince’s defects? He was literally yelling at a wall.

“Oh. Well, hello little guy?” Then another voice drifted through the wall. One Hec-Tor had never heard before. Pitchy and nasal.

Was this the head of maintenance come to extricate Imp from the wall for him? It had better be! He did not like the idea of a complete stranger being in a dark enclosed space along with his son whom could not communicate in words.

“Who’s in there?” He demanded.

“Is that your friend out there?” Asked the voice. “Are you stuck?”

Hec-Tor dragged his talons down the decorative wallpaper. He wanted to see what was going on in there. Who was in there with Imp? What were they doing?

“Hang on.” Said the other in the wall. “The thing with old castles and palaces like this is that all the ventilation was built in a closed system so that it’s harder to get inside for regular maintenance and service. See how the plating it warped here? Probably happened over the last hundred years by particles that made it past the first battery of filters. I heard the winds on Horde World can carry rocks as big as a fist a hundred kilometers in the air. I know something that big shouldn’t be able to make it through filters, but when the wind can throw it that high, they can also throw it clean through carbon fiber mesh. Something like that bouncing around these vents, no wonder you got your tail stuck in a warped section.”

Was- was the speaker giving Imp –a five year old child- a lecture on engineering? While they were both stuck in a wall!? Who was this person?

“Almost got ya… there!” There was a metallic popping sound.

Then Imp gave a grateful and relieved little trill.

Hec-Tor sighed. His son was okay. Still in the vents. But unharmed.

“I think I saw an outlet over there.” Presumably, the owner of the voice was pointing, but Hec-Tor could not see it. “C’mon. I’ll show you and make sure you don’t get stuck again.”

The shuffling and scuffling began again. This time moving up. To the ceiling. Hec-Tor looked up, trying to follow the sounds with his eyes.

Then a crack appeared on the ceiling.

Oh! Oh, no! No, no, no! Didn’t the voice in the wall just say this palace was old! If they were a fully grown adult being, they should not be putting their full weight on the ceiling panels. They were meant to be decorative and cover the unsightly support beams and insulation. They were not meant to hold weight!

“Oh.” Apparently, the voice realized this too late. “I might have miscalculated the addition of your weight.”

That was the last thing they said before the whole ceiling came caving down.

A cascade of broken panels and insulation that should have been replaced decades ago came crashing down in the center of the room. Among the debris, a ball of lavender hair came tumbling out. It rolled a few meters away from the main pile.

The hair slithered. Disentangling itself frown around the body of an alien female. Copper skin and fuchsia-red eyes. Wearing dark purple overalls like a menial worker. Maybe she was the head of maintenance. And held in her gloved arms was Imp. He was fine. Cradled and shielded from the debris by her body and hair.

“Well, you’re out.” She announced. Then glanced back at the mess in the middle of the room. “Though, I have a feeling I might be in trouble…”

“Give me my son!” Hec-Tor all but snarled at her.

“Oh. Sure.” She opened her arms and Imp fluttered his wings, flying into his father’s waiting arms. Then the woman paused, as if actually noticing him. “Why are you wearing a bath robe? Oh! Did I drop in on a bathroom!? I’m so sorry! I just wanted to observe the adaptations your architects have made to compensate for the harshness of Horde World. This building is an engineering marvel and I find it fascinating!”

“Who are you?” Demanded the Prince.

“Oh. Uh,” she twiddled her hair.

Under any other circumstances he would have found the fact that her hair moved like limbs quite interesting. But at the moment, he was unimpressed.

“This is a little awkward.” She confessed. “You see, I’m not actually from Horde World. I just came for the wedding. Oh! Maybe I’ll see you there. I should say ‘hi’ at the reception!”

That did not answer his question.

But then, another voice shouted across the room.

“Entrapta!”

A magicat and a scorpioness came running up to here.

Entrapta? Did they just call her ‘Entrapta’? As in Princess Entrapta? His intended. The person he was arranged to marry. This dirt-covered, vent-lurking, inelegant, creature could not possibly be the one his brother meant for him to marry!

“We are so, so sorry!” Said the scorpioness. She lifted ‘Princess Entrapta’ up into her arms.

“Where have you been!” Snarled the magicat. “Not only are we behind schedule, you’re an absolute mess! You can’t meet a Prince of the Horde Empire looking like this!”

Hec-Tor just stood there, staring at them. Did none of them know who he was?

“Let’s get you cleaned up.” The scorpioness said in a much gentler tone. “Maybe the Prince won’t mind. Maybe he likes quirky partners.”

He most certainly did not!

Well, okay. Keldor was pretty quirky. And Hec-Tor loved him. A lot. But Keldor was special! Just going off this first impression, Hec-Tor was not going to like this purple, prehensile haired, vent germline one bit!

This marriage was going to be a disaster.

[autismgavemychildvaccines]

A quick peek inside Satan’s quivering anus.

Also known as the company running ICE detention centers. So, all of us already know that these places are concentration camps. Most of us also know that these are incredibly inhumane places that show the true character of what we have allowed ourselves to become. And some of us have even heard that it’s costing $775 per day, per inmate to house these detained individuals. $775. That’s a lot. In fact, that means if 2 families of 2 parents and 3 kids are detained for a year (360 days actually), we as taxpayers are paying more for these people to be locked up in bullshit conditions than we are allotting funds to prevent public health emergencies in the average ENTIRE FUCKING STATE (California and New York excluded in this, because they are special cupcakes with super high populations and extra threat sprinkles on top).  Now, the humanitarian side of me has had my grits boiling since this shit started going down, but if there are any libertarians or fiscal conservatives reading, that bottom line, if nothing else, should piss you the fuck off too. Not just for the theoretical bit of it, but for the fact that the average detention stay per immigrant in 2019 has been 91 days, and nearly half of immigrants detained stay in detainment from 2 to 4 years. Sources sort of vary at how many are detained at CHS facilities (I’ll get to them in a moment, but for now know they are the reason for the $775 figure), but the ballpark spans from 20,000 to roughly 52,000 people. So let’s do some quick math here and do a best/worst/average. Say that figures have been inflated (that happens) and there’s only 9,000 people incarcerated at CHS facilities. Average length of stay has been 91 days this year, so we have a nice, simple... Carry the one... Holy fucking shitballs. 819,000 person-days. That’s $634,725,000.  That is $14 Million dollars more than the CDC spends during a full FUCKING YEAR in ensuring that EVERY health department can protect the WHOLE GODDAMN POPULATION with medical countermeasures to a terror event or pandemic outbreak. FOR 9,000 FUCKING PEOPLE. FUCK THE OTHER EXAMPLES, THAT’S THE BEST CASE, FUCK.  I’m just going to step away for a moment..   Okay.. Deep breaths. Back on track. Right. Ahem. So. Everyone else finish changing their pants after shitting bricks over the fact we’re spending national level budgets on a population smaller than  Anaconda-Deer Lodge County, Montana (I swear on any God you believe in, that’s a real name) ? Good.

I mentioned CHS earlier. Amazingly, it doesn’t stand for Child Herder Services, or Cold Heartless Sinners, or Cheeto Humping Slimeballs, though they’d all be more fitting. They are a private company, called, and get your asscheeks ready for this one: Comprehensive Health Services. 

COMPREHENSIVE HEALTH SERVICES  ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME?

So this  company. Thiiiiis fucking company, owned by Caliburn International has the FUCKING BALLS to put health in their name despite keeping populations in cages with no water outside of the toilet, with no hygiene supplies, and the absolute minimum in terms of keeping people alive (with the most common issue being, you fucking guessed it, HEALTH complications) is charging us to detain people that most of us don’t even want detained, $775 a day. We’ve seen good chunks of these facilities, and they look fucking awful. Understaffed, overcrowded, minimal resources, and the treatment of (some) workers and (all) detainees as livestock. Does that sound, I don’t know, AT.  ALL. FUCKING. FAMILIAR?  So where is our money going? Our over half a billion dollars, of which even the tiniest scrap could give these people at least decent fucking detention areas (not that I believe they should be there as Asylum seekers anyways, mind you)? Let’s actually make this a game. Is it:  A) Corporate Interests with a heavy Lobbying Presence B) Some group of mostly anonymous investors that would likely feast on a newly starved child’s cheeks as they are “delectable and tender” if cooked properly   C) Some Trump Lackeys that got the contract  D) A company that also sells health insurance services Okay, 10 seconds on the clock.  And time! Okay, so how many picked A? Nice, nice. B? Okay.. Keep in mind I don’t know if they actually eat babies but they may just as well. It’d at least make them less human and thus easier to identify as an enemy. C? Aaah, that’s the high number I was expecting and that means D comes in with a small but decent following. WELL CONGRATS, YOU’RE ALL WINNERS! Here’s how:  A) CHS is part of Caliburn, which also owns DC Capital Partners, one of the bigger and well established lobbying firms in the country. And as any lobbying group does, they ensure that politicians bend to their will, increase their dividends, and weed out competition where they can to avoid a power struggle. Ever wonder why the NRA can never be competed with by a gun owners organization that doesn’t simultaneously deep throat their glocks while twisting their heads into their own asses?  B) Frankly, a lot of these funds are going straight to the private market and boy oh boy, does cruelty mean big business gains and a sturdy portfolio. That being said, you cannot separate the act of investing from the actions of the company you are investing in. If they do something fucked, you are essentially an enabler and an accessory to that action. Well, this isn’t ENTIRELY true. As it happens, some months ago they closed off an IPO of CHS specifically (an odd thing to do for a growing company) and cited “market forces” as the reason. How very suspicious.  C) Does this surprise anyone? So, while the actual list of investors is made private, there are an executive board of orange cocksuckers d’jour that have made this their golden parachute, or in the case of one asshole, was a lobbyist for DCCP, then in the Trump Cabinet, then went over to CHS. Here’s a quick list:  Former Chief of Staff John Kelly (aforementioned lobbyist)  Former Deputy Secretary of State Richard L. Armitage Former Ambassador Michael Corbin Former Commander-in-Chief of CENTCOM, Anthony Zinni Former Director of Science and Tech for CIA, Donald Kerr Former Head of CIA Michael Hayden (WHO PUBLICLY DENOUNCED THESE SORT OF PLACES AND ACTIONS AS BEING SIMILAR TO NAZI EFFORTS LAST YEAR) 

Former director of the office of the Budget for the U.S. Navy, Stephen Lotus.  Wow, that’s a lot of love between Trump’s appointees and a contractor, who yes D) also sold insurance services.  So that’s pretty fucked. And sliiight detour now. So, when I started out, like really started out, my first task was dealing with budgets. I still help from time to time, and have to work with contractors fairly often. Now, it’s usual that even if we know suspect that these contractors will give us the best deal every time, we have to do something called “competitive bidding”. That’s where we essentially throw the offer to the air, and whoever gives us the best deal, wins. Now this can be kinda manipulated a bit but in general, these records are open to the public so it’s better for us to just waste the time and actually go through a competitive bidding process than have the explain how we aren’t corrupt while looking pretty corrupt.  You know what didn’t happen here? Competitive bidding. It was a closed off contract. Completely in the dark. How very peculiar, isn’t it?  So, all in all, we have a bunch of fuckwits booted from the White House, sent to a company that has perhaps the most profitable contract of all time, acting like literal nazis, stealing from taxpayers and profiting off racism, suffering and inhumane treatment, all because they could with some bullshit nationalism narrative that’s been pushed by an asshole who can’t even spell check his fucking twitter rants.  Do what you can. But certainly don’t complain to companies who are giving resources to these groups to continue their round ups, for instance, all those vans which are owned by Enterprise. Certainly don’t contact them at 855-298-0346, whatever you do. They are busy people trying to make lots and lots of money. Don’t call your representative and tell them if they support this, they will lose by going to this website: https://www.house.gov/representatives/find-your-representative . And above all, DO NOT use your available resources to try and disrupt this “carrying out of justice” in any way you can safely. Heavens no, because this is America, and children, America doesn’t care if you’re an immigrant or a nationalized citizen. Nooo no no no. It cares about whether you can turn a profit. 

[foeseekerwriter]

Let’s Shred Voltron

Here’s a rather rambling, non-comprehensive breakdown of the ways VLD has royally screwed over its entire cast. Because I’m fed up and needed to get some of this off my chest so I could move on with other projects.

Allura is now a Workaholic Married to the Job. This girl is being made to do everything—be the team’s main diplomat and the leader of the Voltron Coalition (whose alleged size and scope makes the UN look like a children’s play group; this unto itself is a job for at least ten people), be the heart of Voltron by encouraging the rest of the team and giving them advice, pilot the Blue Lion (which entails plenty of dangerous and exhausting aerial and hand-to-hand combat), generate wormholes, be the “support brain” with her knowledge of alien tech/culture/races/etc.—the list could probably go on. This poor girl has been turned into the show’s workhorse, and not even realistically so either. She should be exhausted, worn out, maybe not broken—at least in her resolve—but completely drained by being pulled every which way all the time. But she’s the same enthusiastic, inspiring, almost peppy girl we met at the beginning, which implies that either Alteans have utterly incomprehensible reserves of energy or that the writers don’t care about writing her realistically, they just want her to do all their work for them.

This noble princess has also now been effectively dethroned, with the loss of the Castle and her crown—despite the fact that there are Alteans still out there who, now that Lotor is gone, will quite possibly be looking to her for leadership. This loss of any significant position of power or status aside from being the pilot of the Blue Lion was made abundantly clear when Allura, technically the ruler of the Altean diaspora and leader of the Voltron coalition, was put into a Galaxy Garrison cadet uniform. This was an insult to all the paladins, but most especially to Allura, as it indicates she is now subservient to a government military organization for a country and planet she isn’t even a resident or citizen of (a la the Avengers submitting to a government agency via the Accords in CA:CW). Allura has been stripped of any and all reasons for recognition except her status as a paladin. That (aside from her doing almost all the work to get everything done) is the only reason she still remains relevant.

She’s also been put into relationship roulette. I am thoroughly convinced that Monsanto was setting her up to be paired with Keith during the first two seasons (they spend a lot of time together, and aside from Keith and Shiro’s relationship theirs was developed by far the most out of anyone on the team during that time). Then, when the fans didn’t jump on board that ship and (at least when Allura was involved) tended to look more toward Lance or Shiro as possible romantic interests for her, they did their usual waffling routine and backed off, sticking a toe into the Shallura pool (the “hand touch” bit in S2 and the seesawing tension between Allura and Kuron) before doing their level best to get Shiro out of the story completely and sticking Allura with Lance instead. Now, I’m not against the trope where the guy has a crush on the girl and the girl at first doesn’t like him but eventually comes around (see Han Solo and Princess Leia for one of my favorite examples of this being done properly), but in this particular instance it feels more like the girl being turned into a plot device and stuck with whatever guy the writers decide doesn’t have enough payoff in the story otherwise. It’s fully possible that, written right, Lance and Allura could have ended up together quite plausibly. But the way it has actually been done—extremely arbitrarily with little development of their relationship or healthy growth of either character—it’s a travesty for both of these wonderful people.

Shiro has been taken from his position as The Leader and The Hero, which he filled far more effectively than Keith (see my Sorting Hat Chats analysis of the characters, as well as below) and been turned into fourth tree from the left (right alongside Coran, Krolia, and Romelle). He’s been given the consolation prize of piloting the ridiculous and totally stupid and unnecessary Atlas, but aside from that he—rather like Allura with her status as Blue Lion pilot—has no other relevance to the story.

Plus (and this is a major bone I have to pick with Monsanto) he was arbitrarily given a magic muscle disease that has never been mentioned or alluded to at any point before S7—and then Word of God revoked its existence in the show’s present time because “he’s technically a clone so he’s magically cured.” Aside from this appalling behind-the-scenes wand-waving being an absolute and total writing mortal sin, it makes absolutely no sense because Keith apparently knew about it and yet made no mention of it for six seasons, even when his friend, who apparently needed magical wristbands to keep him healthy, was in an alien prison for a year with no treatment. Shiro should be a total decrepit wreck in 1x01 after going that long without proper treatment. Yet he’s not only fine, he’s able to engage in hand-to-hand combat with five enemies less than two days after escaping (see the 1x01 fight in the cruiser hangar). This is deus ex machina at its absolute and total worst.

And… okay, I’m going to really rant for a bit. Buckle up, buttercups, it’s about to get messy.

So down to brass tacks: Shiro and Adam’s relationship. I don't care if you want to view it as romantic or platonic. Any way you slice it, portraying this relationship as loving, affectionate, and admirable in canon or fandom is an insult to anyone who has loved ones willingly going into danger or away from home for long periods of time—astronauts, military members, law enforcement, firefighters, pilots, sailors, students studying abroad, missionaries and social workers in foreign countries, heck, let's throw in a good chunk of scientists for good measure, as well as the canon characters Colleen and Katie Holt, the McClain and Garrett families, and Mr. Kogane. And that's just the first ones that come to my mind. There are many, many others.

Let’s take a look first at exactly what was involved in the infamous “don’t count on me being here” scene. Shiro has some weird disease that means his health is going to decline in a few more years (see the bone picking above). Despite protests from higher-ups (which, this being a military organization, an admiral saying that a lieutenant cannot/should not participate in a mission should have utterly slammed the door on even the possibility of Shiro going), Shiro has decided to go on the Kerberos mission. Back in 1x05 Sam Holt referred to being in space for “the next two months”. Because Pidge, normally a very accurate scientist, said “it takes months for our ships to get out here” in 1x01 when passing Kerberos, I’m going to give Sam the benefit of the doubt and assume the “two months” is referring to the trip to Kerberos only. So, two months there, two months back, probably no more than two weeks exploring (this is to a degree a token voyage, after all; presumably after its success more rigorous explorations would be conducted). So I’ll give it a generous total time of five months, at most. Five months. Foreign exchange students are gone from home longer than that. And, considering the amount of contact modern astronauts are able to have with people back on Earth, I highly doubt the Kerberos guys were radio silent during their trip. And despite his apparent muscle problem there are no health ramifications for Shiro going on the mission (as in, going won’t make his condition worse). So we’re looking at five months of long-distance relationship, essentially. This is way, way better than many people with loved ones in, say, the military get.

Now, "Don't count on me being here when you get back"—this is emotional manipulation, plain and simple, using threats to the relationship as leverage to get what the speaker wants out of the other person. It is almost identical to saying "if you do X I'll never speak to you again" or "if you do X I'll break up with you", a common verbal threat tactic in abusive relationships. I have a good friend who was in a relationship like this, and the ugliness of that breakup has ramifications even years later, both socially and in my friend's mental well-being. I also knew other people in (non-romantic) friendships with somebody who used similar types of phrases and manipulation to get them to do what she wanted. The strain ultimately tore apart the friend group. These sorts of phrases and tactics are red flags of the highest degree and indicate a relationship that is in no way, shape, or form healthy.

So. Adam doesn't want Shiro to leave for the five-month trip, ostensibly for Shiro's health. But we have no indication that the Kerberos Mission poses any sort of risk to Shiro's health, preexisting medical conditions included. Which means what's really at stake here is Adam just doesn't want Shiro to go and is using any possible reason or tactic, no matter how flimsy or manipulative, to push that goal. This is horribly self-centered and appears to be based entirely in a selfish desire to have Shiro around as much as possible for as long as possible without any consideration for Shiro's desires and dreams (it's made pretty clear that the Garrison, space exploration, and the Kerberos Mission have been Shiro’s dream and goal for years if not his whole life). To even consider this as anything less than selfish possessiveness is dangerous and downright insulting to Shiro, as well as to every single person who has loved ones gone for long periods of time and/or in dangerous circumstances.

Net result: no matter how you read Shiro and Adam's relationship, we should all be glad that Shiro GOT OUT.

(And relationship drama is possibly one of the oldest, cheapest methods for easy plot tension out there. It requires little to no effort on the part of the writer and can create lots of drama without anybody getting developed, just lots of “but you said you loved me!” type stuff ad nauseam. The families of the other paladins have gotten developed, or at the very least been given cameos; why not, instead of using a cheap relationship trick to give fourth-tree-from-the-left Shiro any sort of interest in S7 at all, give us some background info on him? All we know about him is that he worked for the Garrison. We know nothing about his parents, if he has any siblings… we could have gotten so much more, and yet the writers stuck us with this idiotic hogwash.)

Okay, mini-mega-rant over. Moving on…

Keith’s been strongarmed into a leadership role for which he is painfully not suited. To make this square-peg-in-round-hole setup work the writers have copy-pasted a good chunk of Shiro’s personality on top of the erstwhile lone wolf, turning Keith into a schizophrenic who oscillates wildly between inspiring noble leader and the shy, blunt, anger-prone guy we all came to love in the first two seasons. (That is not to say Keith is incapable of being a good leader; see aforementioned Sorting Hat Chats analysis. But this is not the way to get Keith to be a good leader.) To prevent this poor jerry-rigged human from being completely outshone, Shiro has, as I said before, been stripped of almost all personality and pushed as far back into the scenery as possible without disappearing entirely (and Monsanto has outright said they think he’s dumb and boring and wanted to get rid of him. But they were afraid of fan backlash when, for some weird reason, the fans actually liked him. So they didn’t kill him off and opted instead to be their usual spineless chicken selves and not pick a plotline, nominally keeping him around while making Shiro pretty much useless).

Lance is being made to operate as “Voltron’s right hand,” which runs counter to the lore established in S1 and 2 and, thanks to Keith’s writer-induced schizophrenia, means he’s actually leading Voltron by proxy because Keith has latched onto him as the strategist and moral compass (when Keith’s “Shiro personality” isn’t coming out). This has locked Lance into a particular role, when he actually operates best shifting to fit whatever role the situation calls for (again, see the Sorting Hat Chats analysis for more on this). The poor guy is really starting to come across as dragged over the coals and put on the rack; he’s take an awful beating at the hands of the writers and is worn down and damaged with no sign of relief. He seems to be getting Allura as a consolation prize, but as I said before this is a disservice to both of these characters and really just throws Lance’s suffering in his face.

Hunk and Pidge have largely been left by the wayside. Hunk was barely a step up from joining the line of trees in the first place, as the balmera arc was the only place he really shone (he’s had a few bits in episodes here and there, maybe—maybe—once a season, but more as a “look, we haven’t forgotten he exists!” thing than any sort of real character development). And Pidge, once she completed her “find my family” arc, faded into the background right along with Hunk. She tends to be a smidge more prominent than he does, if only because she’s the computer geek—and because she’s the team’s other girl, since Monsanto is all over that doggone “representation” bandwagon—but she’s largely served her purpose and now is simply the tech whiz plot device.

And… oh, good Lord. Don’t even get me started on the rest of the cast. Coran has never gotten a huge amount of development, but to be fair he’s always kind of been a goofy Alfred so it makes sense that we wouldn’t peel back his layers too much. He’s nominally interesting but largely there to help the other characters do their thing. But all the Holts have pretty much just been pawns in Pidge’s arc—we’ve seen so little of Matt Holt as to have no real idea of his personality at all (most of what we “know” is actually fandom-developed), and although Sam proved useful for the “return to Earth” bit he’s only gotten a little more development than his son. Krolia too was pretty much just a plot device for Keith’s arc and finding the Altean colony; since then she’s just disappeared into the scenery to become second tree from the left. Romelle has earned true MacGuffin status, as the literal only thing she has done for the story is reveal Lotor’s treachery (despite the fact that she, along with Krolia, is a powerpack of a character and could probably take down the empire single-handed if given the opportunity).

Plus the villains have been shortchanged along with everyone else. Part of the reason, I think, so many people loved Lotor as a bad guy was because he actually had a pretty good motive and a well-developed personality. He was a whole person. Zarkon kinda was, a bit, since he was obsessed with the Black Lion and that at least gave him some sort of drive. But Haggar? Who, by the way, we haven’t seen since S6? Sendak? Pshh, please. Why on earth would Monsanto bother to give the bad guys motivation and personality? That would distract from Keith’s leadership arc, and Allurance! And—and space wolf! And explosions! And look, Voltron has a new power, so don’t look at the man behind the curtain through the plot holes you could drag a planet through!

I am so done with all this nonsense. So I’m going to go fix everything with fanfiction. Bye.

P.S. “Monsanto” is my admittedly derogatory version of “Monsantos”, the contraction I’ve often seen used to refer to Lauren Montgomery and Joaquim Dos Santos, the executive producers and master-not-minds of VLD.

[stepphase]

Cyberpunk 2077 Download for PC? Official Video Games

Cyberpunk 2077 has invited you to explore Night City. Of course, there is a fictional metropolis on America’s west coast that is jam-packed with the crime, opportunity, and anything your black heart desires. After all, it is based on Mike Pondsmith’s tabletop RPG. As well as, Cyberpunk is a bleak game that sees the corporations.

In fact, both domestic and foreign keeps a stranglehold on the military tech, drugs, health care, virtually, cybernetic advancements. Everything in common person could need or want. As well as, you can play as a mercenary V. In fact, a person is caught up in a job that is lasting in repercussions throughout its story campaign. As well as, you must hack, shoot, and slice your way out of trouble in a sprawling, open-world action-RPG. After all, this is a highly anticipated PC game offers that is thrilling gameplay that you will love it. Also, atmosphere-oozing sights also sound and those hours of story that have heavy missions but it feels undercooked because of large and small bugs.

The State of Affairs

After all, the Cyberpunk 2077 society has spiraled in a state of Weimar like debauchery and decadence. With advertisements which is peddle of everything from the snacks to the sex plastered on nearly city facet. As well as, the Humankind has embraced cybernetic modifications. Also, every dinky neighborhood across town have a cybernetic mod. Which is called a Ripperdoc, also eager and they are ready to slap new and also, horrifying body enhancements in you for right price.

In fact, You will play as V. Of course, the mercenary who will takes odd jobs across the Night City vast underworld. After all, the game will start that you can customize V look, stat and background. As well as, its character creator is not particularly robust. After all, there are many interesting option which is to explore like tattoos and cybernetic facial implants. In fact, You are starting to stats boost specific talent that once you are into the game proper. like for an example I boosted V's Cool stats and Reflex. So its weapon and stealth and weapon perks opened up relatively early in my playthrough.

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After all, The background that you have select is determines V's prologue tutorial. And those impacts how you will tackle mission objectives. As well as, a side quest tasked a Nomad-based character with searching for a cop. Who has rocked the proverbial boat by investigating the criminals with clout than she had anticipated? In fact, no one knows the cop location. So it was up to if I will ask around. After all, an odd hooker recognized her, but the demand is a cash for the intel. Of course, V recognizes Nomad in the neighborhood who offer intel after a few if conversation. As well as, it's letting me bypass the sex worker extortion. After all, these Scenarios pop up regularly throughout 2077's campaign.

The Future You Chose

After all, this game is classic and future-noir tropes. As well as, its content is familiar to anyone who has played the Deus Ex games or seen the Blade Runner films are not present in the main storyline. In fact, they are prominently featured in Cyberpunk 2077 a lot of side missions. As well as, its campaign paints the world which has moved beyond its ethical quandaries which are trans-humanism raises. As well as, its Technology and synthetic is a part of everyday life. And its concepts like organic barely exist. Of course, everyone is enhanced in some ways and its culture is grown to embrace also fetishize cybernetic technology.

In fact, This campaign does not ask for big questions that set an action-packed journey through the flashy and bizarre Night City streets. After all, its side quests are where are the story's of the heart truly lies. Of course, it is similar to Assassin Creed Valhalla. In fact, Cyberpunk 2077 side quests flesh is out from the world and people in ways that its campaign does not. Also, the backstories add more to the narrative which should not be optional. In fact, they are essential for playing if you are ready for the full Night City experience.

Blast, Hack and Slash

After all, there are many ways that are to build V. As well as, you can go all-in just on hacking. That will give you the multitude of saboteur abilities that will let you hijack the cameras, defense enemies, and systems. If you will find yourself outgun, and hack grenades on your assailant’s belt and blow him. So nearby compatriots to kingdom come. Or else you can just use a local network to infect the enemies with the debilitations to prevent them from moving. The cool stat of umbrella houses all the assassination and sneaking abilities that you could want in. After all, if the poison, or silent movement, and the bonus damage undercover are more in your speed. This is the place where you have to invest your level-up points.

As well as, the skill trees are massive that is bloated by the passive boosts like reload speed, damage, or critical-hit chance. In fact, that is not to say that the unique moves and the abilities are not there. Also, you can build for melee damage, stealth, evasion, gunplay, and other combat styles. In fact, the skill tree is not nearly as expansive as it initially seems. After all, you will make many incremental improvements to your character rather than the larger ones that are more noticeable. In fact, I would have perks that are consolidated to have more impact. That delivers a smaller and more concise, skill tree system.

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After all, the combat is satisfying so thanks to the game's play style and the weapon variety. As well as, the Power Weapons is fancy lingo for the ballistics like machine guns, shotguns, and revolvers shred targets. Of course, you can easily decapitate assailants if you will pop them into the right place. Also, tech weapons will use railgun-style electromagnets to evaporate anything. If any problem you will aim at the disappears with the pull of the trigger. In fact, the smart weapons will target and curve the bullets around to the cover and corners. which will remind me of the silly weapon scene from The Fifth Element.

In fact, Melee is nothing to sneeze at it either. As well as, the bare knuckles do the surprisingly well in the scrap. But you can not arm yourself with a limb-hacking swords, good old bludgen, grappling mantis claws. Or the other body modifications that will enhance your brutish and physical prowess. After all, the enemies are resilient but not spongey like the shooter-RPGs. In fact, the foes to take a beating but they are stick around enough for you to get the creative that how you kill them. Of course, I had never felt to cheated what the game threw my way. Of course, I run the low ammunition regularly. because I went half on melee and running out of the ammo.

Kinks to Iron

After all, the Cyberpunk 2077 is the fascinating world and the great gameplay systems. In fact, the game is pack with bugs. As well as, sometimes the elevators do not load or do not work. Of course, enemies occasionally bug out and the mindlessly stand around waiting for you that you will shoot them. In fact, the characters teleport into scenes if they did not load properly. Also, NPCs drive through scenery and speed off in sunset. Also, the side quest did not complete correctly. Of course, I force to restart the game from the previous checkpoint.

As well as, these issues are the game-breaking problems and they are frequent. In fact, if you will buy the game at launch then you have to expect to see the bugs at play through. After all, the Developer CD Projekt Red have patch alleviate these issues.

Can Your PC Run Cyberpunk 2077's?

Of course, the Cyberpunk 2077 is open-world games. After all, this is grimy aesthetic off-putting. When compared to Deus Ex then the Mankind Divided's the clean and bright environments. Also, the Night City is larger and more interconnected to the world that is fallen on hard times.

Of course, the Night City is pack with a visual delights. Also, the car is interiors drip to detail and the streets is densely pack ads and cyber-enhanced NPCs. As well as, It is good to drive around the town also in the environments. After all, sitting in the shadow room and conversing with gangsters, clients, and kingpins looks stylish and cool.

After all, the game elements are not pulse-pounding action sequences stories. It is driven around the town during missions and enjoying Night City's sounds and sights. In fact, CD Projekt Red have craft world that visual settings suit PC and the game at best atmosphere.

Cyberpunk 2077 System Requirements

Of course, the Cyberpunk 2077 is the first game in Nvidia GeForce GTX 970 graphics card feel latest. After all, this game is default to the Medium settings on my gaming desktop. With CPU AMD Ryzen 5 3600 / GPU GTX 970 / RAM 16GB. In fact, this setting deliver best visuals that moved at 30 fps. Also, the Low frame rate will dance betweem 40fps and 50fps. But the gameplay is not smooth the visual hit. After all, playing on the High or Ultra High will drop the frame rate to 20s low that is not the trouble.

Of course, to play the Cyberpunk 2077 you have to need a PC that contains atleast the Windows 7 OS / CPU: AMD FX 8310 or Intel i5 3570k / Graphic Card: AMD Radeon RX 470 or Nvidia GeForce GTX 780 / RAM: 8GB / Space: minimum of 70GB or more. After all, the recommended system requirements setting is Intel CPU: AMD Ryzen 3 3200 or i7 4790 / Graphic Card: AMD Radeon RX 590 or Nvidia GeForce GTX 1060 and RAM is 12GB.

In fact, you can purchase the Cyberpunk 2077 at jsut $59.99 from video game stores. As well as, this game is supporting many features of steam like Steam Trading Cards, Steam Cloud, and Steam Achievements. In fact, this is full controller support. There is no way to make character stroll when using a keyboard and mouse.

Unpolished Gem

In fact, I was not impress with the Cyberpunk 2077. Because the distinct west coast grime turn me off and few perks that did not appeal to my play style. After all, I fell so good and fall in love with the Night City. As well as, if bugs can get iron out then the Cyberpunk 2077 is potential Game of the Year candidate. Here’s we are hoping that the CD Projekt Red will push out fixes.

We are here to hear from you

After all, you can contact us to let us know if we are missing something on our page. I hope you like it and thank you for your visit.

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[amourete-blog1]

✔️ :3c ?))

plotting questionnaire | still accepting

Do I know your muse(s): yes | no | a little | tell me about your muse | i always love learning more about sun + talking to you

Setting: our verse | my verse | your verse | modern | alternate universe | other

Pre-established relationships? yes | no | depends on the relationship

Possible relationships: friends | classmate | co-worker | roommate | family, by blood or adopted | dating or blind date | married | friends with benefits | unrequited love | lending a hand | teacher - student | rivals | allies | partner-in-crime | enemies | protector - guarded | business partners | spy - infiltrated | manipulator - manipulated | star-crossed | first meeting | other

I’m in the mood for: fluff | angst | horror | romance | humor | crime | hurt / comfort | action | supernatural | slice of life | crack | dark threads | light threads | any genre | multi-para | shorter para | one-line | any length | plotted threads | unplotted threads | other

Feel free to: message me ooc | message me ic | tell me your ideas | write a starter | answer one of my opens | send a meme | reblog this with your preferences - let’s find common interests!

first of all let me simply say that any and every supernatural au w these two would make me immensely happy beyond words, let’s just get that out of the way

i really love the idea of sun and feli working together on something, possibly up to no good, possibly up to very bad. i also love the idea of sun and feli working on the same sort of under-the-table business for different people - like they’re both sent to break into somewhere, and they both start on the job and encounter each other in a “wait i’m supposed to be stealing this artifact” “but I’M supposed to be stealing this artifact” kind of deal - maybe they need to work together to escape or something

also? please consider: sci fi hacker/agent au. i know sun doesn’t work too much w tech now but iirc they did at one point? sun orchestrating stuff for feli remotely - a la “sombra the door” and possibly fucking with each other as a result

the protector/guarded au makes me think of like, one of them being assigned as a bodyguard for the other, which is super funny bc neither of them needs protection and they KNOW it so all i can think of is the protected one being so fucking indignant and the guard dreading their job but they end up becoming friends just bc they spend so much time together so they have the opportunity to talk

[racingtoaredlight]

Opening Bell: May 17, 2019

One of the most significant architects of the 20th century, I.M. Pei, died yesterday in New York City at the age of 102. Pei is credited with reinventing the modernist style of architecture and adding personality to what had previously been a sleek and yet Spartan, cold design form. Perhaps most famously, Pei designed the new entrance to the Louvre Museum in Paris; a series of large glass pyramids in the courtyard of the former royal palace whose art collection was opened to the public at the height of the French Revolution in 1793. I.M. Pei also designed the National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C. and the Morton H. Meyerson Symphony Center in Dallas, Texas, his only music-related project. The Meyerson is emblematic of Pei’s style: the slabs of stone and concrete with large glass windows inlaid along the edges, emerging out of a rounded base. It is not, in terms of design a complex design—the engineering, I’m sure, is a different story—but it still evokes modernist architecture without resorting to a plain approach. Pei’s influence cannot be overstated within the architectural world or upon 20th century America. That Pei was himself an immigrant who planted roots in this country after attending MIT and Harvard, is also the story of much of the United States in the 20th century.

 Yesterday, the White House unveiled a comprehensive immigration system reform plan, which would make significant changes to the green card process, place restrictions on the number of family members which can accompany a green-card seeker, and place greater emphasis on enforcement. The plan, which was formulated by President Donald Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, would replace the current green card process with a points-based system which would reset each year; the current green card process can take 9-24 months to prepare and, depending on the applicant’s birth nation, can take several more years until the actual Adjustment of Status can be filed. There are no proposed changes to temporary visa categories such as H and L visas. At its core, the current worker visa and employment-based green card process system is over-subscribed, particularly with applicants from India and China, because those two countries produce large numbers of software engineers who fill a need for fast-growing American tech companies that American engineering schools simply do not have the capacity to meet. Because of this economic interest, American companies were highly critical of previous proposals put forth by Republicans in Congress, so the Kushner plan is an improvement. The general consensus seems to be among both immigration providers and congressional correspondents, is that this plan is still unlikely to gain any traction. This is to say nothing of the fact that stewarding complex reform legislation through Congress requires a fair amount of good faith negotiation and political capital, two things this White House seems incapable of offering. Expect the current system to remain in place.

Just under a year ago, Environmental Protection Agency chief Scott Pruitt resigned under pressure after numerous reports emerged that he had used government transportation and tax-payer funded travel, for his own benefit. Pruitt was not the first member of the administration, or even the first cabinet level official, to resign after getting caught using tax payer funds to pay for personal travel: Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price left the administration over his use of a private jet, while FEMA director Brock Long resigned for personal use of government vehicles. Yesterday, the EPA’s Inspector General issued a report which recommended that Pruitt reimburse $124,000 in travel expenses to the government, a fraction of the $985,000 in travel bills Pruitt accrued over a ten month period. This report by the IG officially closes its probes into Pruitt, but it remains to be seen whether Pruitt, who is now a coal industry consultant, will cut a check as Price did in 2017.

As Facebook continues to expand its base of users both in the United States and around the globe, the need for the social network to police the posts of its users. To keep Facebook’s feeds clear of videos of murders, suicides, other violent deaths, conspiracy theories, racism, misogyny, and nudity, Facebook employers through third party vendors an army of thousands of moderators. About two years ago, I posted an article about what the daily experience of merchandise runners inside of fulfillment warehouses for online retailers. The piece focused on work conditions, imperious supervisors, and the constant threat of being fired. The Facebook moderators, who work for a vendor named Cognizant in a business park in Phoenix, Arizona, earned about $28,000 a year, receive two 15 minute breaks and one 30 minute lunch break per day, are expected to review and make the correct decision on approximately 400 posts or videos per shift and achieve a 95% accuracy rate. They review everything from execution videos filmed and posted by Mexican drug cartels, to racist or anti-Semitic rants, to obscene sexual behavior. To combat the psychological effect of viewing hundreds of such images or posts per shift, moderators resort to smoking marijuana during breaks, drinking concealed booze, and having sex with coworkers in a room reserved for new-mothers to pump breast milk. There are two threads here: the personal toll of viewing the worst humanity has to offer on a daily basis, and the zeal by which a large corporation seeks to scale upwards its capabilities while still maximizing profits. I encourage everyone to read this all the way through, and imagine sitting through a single shift as a Facebook moderator.

In the fall of 1995, John F. Kennedy, Jr. the scion of the 35th President of the United States, and widely considered one of the most eligible bachelors in New York, called a press conference in Manhattan. Most of the media who attended expected the press conference to center on his suspected recent engagement to Carolyn Bissette, but instead JFK Jr. was accompanied by two men, including David Pecker, then president of Hachette Magazines (and, for now, the owner of the National Enquirer). JFK Jr. stood at minimalist mental podium and turned a board mounted on a pedestal to reveal a magazine cover with supermodel Cindy Crawford dressed like George Washington, including powdered white wig. George Magazine was, in JFK Jr.’s vision, a glossy environment where politics and society could merge; cover photos of models, celebrities, and athletes either dressed in or posing with clothing or paraphernalia from the early United States were common. At the time in the mid-1990s, political magazines were generally restricted to outlets like The National, National Review, New Republic, and a few others. Their monthly subscribers were in the hundreds of thousands and featured advertisements from universities at the same time that Vanity Fairy had over a million monthly readers and had advertisements from General Motors and major cosmetics company. Few expected George to succeed and it was considered the half-baked idea of New York playboy who had failed the bar twice after graduating from NYU Law a few years earlier. In this piece, however, Esquire makes the argument that George, in many ways, presaged the salient nature of politics in American society as it collided with and was subsumed into popular culture. The first cover after JFK Jr.’s untimely death in the summer of 1999, was a cover featuring Donald Trump and covering his political ambitions, at a time before The Apprentice, when Trump’s biggest claim to fame was his multiple bankruptcies in the 1990s. In some ways, George can be seen to be a predictor of the Trump presidency, where the celebrity of reality TV has crossed over into politics; George was the first to blur the line.

In 2014, it was revealed that a well-known Australian male television presenter—in American we would call them an anchor—had worn the same navy blue suit for a year, only dry-cleaning it every few weeks and swapping out shirts and ties. The presenter and his network received exactly zero comments about this; absolutely no one had noticed. His female co-presenter, during that same time, changed her attire on a daily basis and still received comments and critiques from viewers. Karl Stefanovic undertook to wear the same suit everyday to see if any viewer would notice, he suspected they would not, and as a result to highlight the different standards applied to male and female television news personalities. For female meteorologists and weather reporters, the difficulty is even greater; stripes and complex patterns are always prohibitive, as are blues on a bluescreen and greens in front of a greenscreen. As a result, some have noticed the female meteorologists tend to wear very similar, if not the same, quite frequently. Though this is from four years ago, the disparate treatment in male and female media figures is unchanged.

At the height of the First World War in 1917, Britain maintained a blockade of the Germany which caused food stocks to dwindle and prices to rise and deprived the German war machine of certain strategic resources. Germany’s coastline is small and the majority of it lies on the Baltic Sea, which is easily bottled up by an enemy fleet due to the presence of Denmark (a neutral nation at the time). Britain had its own weakness, however, and Germany exploited it with an aggressive U-boat, or submarine campaign. Britain is an island nation and was, and still is (*ahem* Brexiteers) dependent on foreign trade. In 1917, virtually all British staples, including foodstuffs and strategic materials, that were imported, came by ship. The effectiveness of Germany’s U-boat campaign had put Britain on the verge of foot shortages; 13 British merchant ships were being sunk per day, on average. In response, the Admiralty explored numerous solutions to prevent British citizens from enduring starvation. One such idea involved the use of so-called Dazzle Paint on British merchant and warships. Dazzle paint designs were colorful designs, painted on ships in jagged geometric patterns, squares and triangles or bulky rectangles, all designed to visually fool German U-boat captains. U-boats fired torpedoes based upon a guess of where the target ship would be at the time of impact, based on its speed and heading. Dazzle patterns were intended to fool a Germany captain peering through his periscope, causing him to misjudge the size and speed of the ship. The Dazzle program brought in some of Britain’s foremost sport, indoor, outdoor, and poster painters, who used their skills to develop designs which eventually adorned thousands of British merchantmen. The effectiveness of the Dazzle pattern is still in some dispute—sinkings did decline dramatically after its use was introduced, but this also coincided with the implementation of the convoy system—but the Dazzle paint had a notable positive effect on the morale and confidence of the crews, and so it was judged by the Admiralty to be an overall success.

Finally, the Center for Politics, without a byline, considers, based on a tweet by Jerry Falwell Jr., Americans would support pushing back the 2020 election by two years as a result of the “disruption” caused by the Mueller investigation to the Trump presidency. It should not be surprising that a vast majority of Americans favor maintaining regular elections. What should be surprising is that, apparently 16 percent of Americans were in favor of extending Donald Trump’s first term by two years, and that this is even a topic of serious discussion in the first place.

 Welcome to the weekend.

[roosterteethinserts]

The Mad Queen And Her Mad Scientist

AN: Since it’s 2017 already I hope you all have had a good start of the year! Why not start this blog’s posts with my recent favorite, Mica! I’ll try to post bi-weekly since tests and things are increasing and I need to focus on those, but I’ll try my best. Enjoy babes xx

AU-XRay and Vav 

Pairing-Mica x reader

Word Count-1986

Warnings-mentions of homosexual relationship, mentions of kidnapping, mentions of food, lovey-dovey words at the end, 

Summary-Mica and Y/N are dating, but Y/N doesn’t know that Mica is the Mad Queen, the new villain that took the Mad King’s place when he fell out of power. Y/N is a Monarch scientist and is kidnapped by Mica’s men. The truth comes out but just before XRay and Vav try to save the day. 

The dawn of the Mad King encouraged other villians and heroes alike to start their lives, and with the fall of one villain had the chance for another one to rise. The Mad Queen as people quickly called her became the new villain, reigning the city through any sly means she can do to get anything or everything she wanted, and of course stopping Xray and Vav from foiling her plans. It seems that there wasn't much to know about her. Of course, they knew things like what her villainess outfit is and a couple facial features like the color of her skin and her hairstyle, but they couldn't get a set person that was behind all of this.

It was a simple day, and quite ordinary to say the least. I walked my way over to Monarch Labs at the beginning of the day. I always received a sweet good morning text by the time I walked through the front doors, and as if on queue the ding from my phone signalled a text from my loving girlfriend, Mica. 

Grinning, I opened it up as I mindlessly walked towards the elevators. It read 'Have a nice day, babe! I might be late for dinner, so make whatever and I can pick something up on the way home, love you x'. I replied with an okay and to have a nice day as well.

In between the hectic work of the research department in Monarch Labs, the water break gossip between the people that I knew became the idea that the Mad Queen would be making an appearance again in the city tonight. I just brushed it off since I wasn't much interested in the feud between XRay and Vav and the Mad Queen except the fact that they both had relations with Monarch Labs. The two boys had their gadgets come from Hilda, the new CEO, while the Mad Queen supposedly had her family connections to get anything she wanted, especially since the company her family owns is supposedly one of Monarch's greatest allies in the technology industry.

Sighing to myself, I saved my work for the day and said my goodbyes to the people that were still around me. They all bid me their goodnights and to have fun with the lazy day with Mica. Grabbing my purse, I left the building after washing up and putting my lab equipment away.

My phone signalled that I got another text. Curious, I pulled it out of my jacket. I grinned, seeing a cute picture of my beautiful girlfriend, all dolled up. She sent a caption with it, 'Meet me at the Italian restaurant near your work! I have reservations.'

I pouted in response. I didn't look cute enough for a date today, and she had to surprise me by being amazing? I sent out an okay and walked through the cool air to the restaurant. It was one of our favorites to go to; we even went there on our first date. Thinking about it made a smile place itself on my face.

Once I walked through the door, my eyes searched for my girlfriend. She met my eyes, and her face lit up happily when they did.

"You're here!"

A simple peck on the cheeks became our simple greeting.

I nodded my head, "Of course I did."

She gestured for me to sit and I did.

I raised an eyebrow at her, "Why did you set this up? I thought you weren't going to be home until later."

She sighed, "Well, my father wants me to go to the board meeting with Monarch tonight later and I figured that I'd treat you for making up for it ahead of time."

I nodded my head, knowing that even though she wasn't in the family business, that her parents still wanted her to go because they were busy people and this would be the 'family bonding time' that normal families would have. She didn't become the family heir to the tech company Condor Labs which is based in the west coast, hours away by plane ride, but she still was highly educated in technology and science enough to bring another perspective onto the meetings.

Although meetings late at night weren't common, they tended to be the most important ones, therefore I became the supportive girlfriend and told her to do well.

Our conversations went around smoothly, like they always do. I talked about the newest findings of my things, while she talked about her school studies. I felt myself enjoying everything about this date; from our jokes to even the delicious food. We both lost track of time.

Looking at the clock, I jumped out of my seat.

I exclaimed, "Oh babe!! You need to go to the meeting in ten minutes!"

Mica widened her eyes, "I gotta go!"

I paid for the dinner and we quickly rushed back to Monarch Labs. We both saw the usual car the Burtons take when they come here, and we knew that they were already in the building.

The ride up to the meeting's floor was mostly silent. Mica asked if she looked presentable to her parents, which I replied that she was after a quick lipstick application.

We parted when her father was in view. I gave her a quick peck on the cheek as a goodbye, watching as she walked into the meeting room. Once I knew she was in, I turned and made my leave.

In the elevator, I decided to check out the research floor to see if anyone was still working. I knew that a couple of my co-workers were still immersed into their studies when I was about to leave. As one of the lead researchers, I've come to find that I feel like the others are my children. They tend to overwork at times, and I've always had to check in with them during the end of each month since that's when we're evaluated on our work. There was still a little over a week, but it was starting to be crunch time.

The dimly lit hallway of the research floor made me squint as I walked to the main area. On the way there, I grabbed my labcoat as it is mandatory when working, and slipped it on. I buttoned the coat as I looked around for anyone in the vicinity. The whirring of the machines became the usual white noise of the office, and I could hear someone on their computer in the main area. Turning the corner I wasn't expecting who was typing away; a couple of masked criminals going through confidential Monarch files.

I stood there, stunned. One of them seemed to notice me there and they stepped closer.

The one stepped forward, "What do we do, boss?"

The second told him, "Bag her and take her to headquarters. I'm sure the Mad Queen wouldn't want a snitch."

I felt my face pale as I tried to fight back, but wasn't close enough to press the emergency button. The last thing I remembered was the sound of something dropping and a bag going over my face.

What felt like days later, the sound of someone familiar filled my head.

"Take the bag off. I need to see who this is."

Blinding light made me blink many times in order to focus on the figures that kidnapped me. I saw the two men that took me away and my girlfriend, dressed in her outfit, but a mask on her face. I widened my eyes in realization. 

It didn't occur to me that my seemingly sweet and wonderful girlfriend would ever be the Mad Queen, but she was.

She told the men, "leave us. I need to discuss things with her."

They left without another word and I just watched, confused and full of fear.

She dropped her powerful aura the moment the door closed, softening her face and walking cautiously towards me.

She gently told me, "I can explain, I promise."

Anger bubbled inside me, "Explain what? That you're the most powerful villain and you planned something that would take confidential files from Monarch? And if it wasn't me, you'd probably torture one of my co-workers to get what you wanted!?"

She fell silent over my words, trying to quickly think of something.

As she opened her mouth, an urgent knock rang throughout the room. She sighed, annoyed, and turned towards the door.

A man came into the room and uttered, "XRay and Vav are here, and they have reinforcements."

Mica sighed, "Just hold them off. I need to get Y/N out of here."

The man didn't question it as I was untied. I still felt my annoyance over her, but knew that we wouldn't be able to explain everything if we were to die.  She escorted me to the roof, where a helicopter stood. A pilot was already in, so it started. She put me in, and I stopped her, instantly feeling a sense of worry over her.

I told her, "No, what are you doing?"

She shook her head, "Just go. I started this and I need to end it. I can't do it without knowing that you're safe."

Out of the corner of my eyes, I saw the familiar blue and green suits. I locked eyes with XRay and Vav, the superheroes that are enemies with Mica.

Vav proclaimed, "Stop what you're doing, Mad Queen."

XRay added, "We're here to stop you from your evil schemes!" 

Mica raised an eyebrow, "How will you do that, boys? It seems to me like I have the upper hand."  

They were stunned with a stun grenade, with just enough time for Mica to get into the helicopter and make the man fly away. The two boys came to their senses after minutes, vowing to get revenge as they watched the helicopter fly into the distance. 

I couldn't wrap my head around what just happened. Mica seemed to watch me, now unmasked, with a mix of emotions going through her mind.

We arrived at our shared apartment, and all I wanted to do was go to bed. She followed silently, knowing that I wanted to cool off a bit before we talked. I laid in bed as she did the same. I knew that guilt made her not able to sleep, but my fatigue of the day almost made it easy to do so.

In the silence she said, "I'm sorry, for everything. Even from meeting me to what just happened. I can't believe I let you be in danger."

I asked, "Why are you doing it?"

She told me, "I knew Monarch and Condor were doing shady things secretly, and it all started with me getting files from my parents a couple years ago. I didn't know it'd escalate to this extent."

She paused, "But I think I'll stop and disband everything. The hatred of their ideologies surrounding their secret projects has fueled my motivation for so long, but now I have a reason to stop."

We locked eyes and I can tell that she was speaking the truth. A small smile grew on my face.

"As long as you want to. I was going to have to force you sooner or later if you wanted to keep dating me."

She laughed, "Of course."

I teased, "If you're the Mad Queen, what does that make me?"

She grinned, "My Mad Scientist, of course."

I rolled my eyes at the nickname, wanting something more attractive to go by. She laughed at my reaction, but deep down I knew that it was a good name, even though I didn't want it. It had a nice ring to it, so who wouldn't want it? We'd be forever known as the mad couple and it did bother us. As long as we had each other, nothing else would matter.  

[arcticdementor]

So the John de Goes drama recently made me think about a common failure mode for certain people in the culture war: accepting the enemy's frame. In this case, OpFor's philosophy rests on the assertion that bigotry is contagious: if you are friends with someone who is a bigot, or know someone who is a bigot, or permitted someone who is a bigot to speak when you had the opportunity to silence them, you are a bigot too, at which point the circle of potential transmission expands to all of your friends/co-workers/et cetera. (As a fun side note bigotry is also contagious forwards and backwards in time: if you are friends, etc. with someone who many years later becomes a bigot, then their bigotry travels back through time and retroactively infects you. That's how ClarkHat infects de Goes.) And the thing is, once you've accepted this, you're in an impossible position. To remain in the alleged good graces of OpFor, you need to either immediately and obediently denounce the person they've labeled a bigot, or you need to prove that person is not a bigot. Often people try to meet these requirements, thus the endless throat-clearing you find in articles written by the pet conservatives at major media outlets: of course orange man is bad or of course the GOP has to wrestle with its racism, et cetera et cetera, for six or ten paragraphs before they timidly get around to suggesting that hey, maybe it's bad for an armed, masked mob to be beating people in the streets for voting the wrong way. Or de Goes heroically throwing Status 451, who moved heaven and earth to back up his contention that tech conferences should be apolitical, under the bus because a person who wrote for it wrote some uncouth things five years later. Or Gamergate advocates desperately parsing and reparsing everything Milo, Vox Day, or other sketchy alt-right figures clinging on to their cause blurted out in an attempt to explain why their shit-talking is really okay somehow. Et cetera, et cetera. This in turn really craps up any attempt to persuade people, because of that famous rule of politics: if you're explaining, you're losing. Nobody would spend that many paragraphs denouncing a crowd of fringe figures or splitting hairs about some ancient Internet slapfight unless they had something to hide, would they? But far worse, it turns a matter of principle into a matter of evidence, which is always bad for debate -- you can no longer just say that you shouldn't have to care what Curtis Yarvin's politics are if you've just spent hours dissociating yourself from someone else over his politics. You've surrendered, and are just haggling over the price. I've got to think that the solution is to not accept their frame. Refuse to cooperate, refuse to dance to their tune, and do it loudly and proudly. I recognize that de Goes and people like him think they just have to fill out the right forms, denounce the right Goldsteins, and they'll be in the other side's good graces again. They need to understand that will never happen. Play to the crowd, not to the enemy.

qualia of mercy

[terabitweb]

Original Post from SC Magazine Author: Danny Bradbury

Complicated malware infections and cross-site scripting attacks are great techniques to compromise a company, but why use them when you can whisper in someone’s ear instead? Some of the most successful attacks involve nothing more than a phone, some self-confidence, and an innate understanding of what makes people tick. 

Successful data breaches need not require expensive technology, massive deceptions, or even expertly faked credentials. Sometimes all it takes is a phone call to the help desk and a request for assistance logging in. You do not even have to be a legitmate user if you are convincing enough.

Social engineering is one of the least expensive, most powerful tools in a hacker’s toolbox. In the SC Media Special Report My Friend My Enemy, we surveyed the social engineering landscape. In this report, we will venture deeper into topic and detail the reasons why it works and how to defend against it.

Social engineers have two primary goals, according to Steve Healey, chief technical officer at social engineering and security consultancy Pratum. The first is to obtain information. “Depending on the business and the industry there are all kinds of information with different values assigned to it,” Healey says, adding that customers’ records can be a high-value target in industries such as healthcare.

He also sees an increase in corporate espionage, as social engineers manipulate people inside companies to steal intellectual property and other confidential data.

Other goals are as simples as theft or malicious mischief. Sometimes it is financial theft by hijacking a company’s money transfer processes and diverting funds to an attacker’s account, or the attacks can also be ideologically motivated. “Someone might want to target a particular organization because of some vendetta or hacktivist claim,” he adds.

Sometimes social engineering attacks are part of a broader campaign, he notes. Manipulating employees might increase the chance of successfully installing ransomware, again a crime of financial theft.

On rare occasions, the attack might be part of a diversionary tactic to misdirect a company’s resources away from another, high-value attack.

Psychological manipulation

No matter what the goal, the successful social engineer will pursue it by getting inside someone’s head, says Shawn Moyer, CEO and founding partner of penetration testing firm Atredis Partners. Social engineering is a big factor in his penetration testing and red teaming practice where his consultancy works with corporate management to find vulnerabilities in a company’s defenses.

“People tend to like people who are like themselves,” he says. “If you’re doing social engineering in Utah and you’re not a Mormon, there are little pins you can buy on Amazon that Mormons all use to identify themselves to each other,” he says. Using these pins as an example, he adds: “If you’re walking around a building and you have a pin like that, people will be more likely to respond.”

Shawn Moyer, CEO, Atredis Partners

Making someone like you by finding common ground is one of several principles from a favorite book of Moyer: Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion, by Robert Cialdini, a former Stanford professor of marketing, business and psychology. In the book Cialdini categorizes several techniques used to influence people, such as social proof (doing what you see others doing), along with enforced scarcity (limiting the time that you give someone to respond to a request).

This psychological manipulation is the basis of all social engineering, Moyer says, pointing out that the term was popularized by business leaders that wanted to manipulate their employees en masse to improve performance. In fact, social engineering has much deeper roots. Dutch industrialist Jacque Marken coined the term more than a century ago in the 1890s as a way to describe a method of improving what was wrong in the world’s social environment.

Today’s attacker hacks their target’s psychology in similar ways that marketers do, exploiting innate desires and fears to achieve a set goal. “It’s the overlap between social sciences and dirty applications,” Moyer says.

Reconnaissance

Psychological manipulation is where UK-based social engineering consultant Jenny Radcliffe focuses her efforts. As a teenager, she says she would spend her time infiltrating buildings for kicks with her friends to stave off boredom and earn bragging rights. As an adult, she focused her attention on human psychology and eventually became a negotiation trainer. She quickly began mixing these skills to conduct penetration tests for corporate clients, teaching them how to protect themselves from low-tech, old-school con artist attacks.

Radcliffe is an expert at exploiting a company’s biggest weakness: its employees. “I talk about three M’s: Mistake, mischief, and malice. They are the three kinds of insider threat,” she says.

Individuals will often help her towards her goal by unwittingly providing her with sensitive information. She can also manipulate employees to help her by playing on their weaknesses. “There are a lot of people who are not happy in an organization and whose level of loyalty to the company is quite low,” she says. These can be excellent targets for an attacker hoping to get someone on the inside working for them If all else fails, malicious manipulation of an employee through blackmail is an option, although this is a slower process. She draws an ethical line here when engaging in social engineering tests for clients.

Jenny Radcliffe, social engineering consultant

Before she does any of that, though, Radcliffe spends a lot of time simply observing the company, people and processes. She begins most social engineering jobs with a reconnaissance phase. “Once hired, I would look at an organization as a business first. I look at its culture and setup. It’s a macro analysis,” she says. These are the same techniques that she uses in negotiation research.

She reads articles and reports that help her understand how the company celebrates its successes and how it treats employees who fail. She analyzes how the company markets itself, how it grows, and identifies its competition. It gives her a picture of the kind of person that works there. She does all this before she singles out a selection of individual targets.

“Those would be people who are chatty on social media. Those who have left the company, too. I try and narrow it down to between a dozen and 20.”

Advanced reconnaissance helps Radcliffe to prepare her for all future interactions, including physical intrusions.

“By the time I make that initial contact or turn up at that site, I already know as much as any outsider could know and probably a bit more about that company so that it’s natural for me to be there. It’s not a big ask because I’m already familiar with everything that goes on.”

Radcliffe will often use social media to find a person’s weaknesses. She has found evidence of employees’ unusual sexual proclivities online, and also sees staff members consistently posting on social networks about how much they dislike their jobs. Each of these could be exploitable in different ways by a malicious actor, she says.

Moyer’s approach often includes looking for people on the fringes of a company when he is identifying targets. “I go for remote workers, branch offices, and small locations. They won’t be as consistently enforced and inculcated into the culture as the people in headquarters,” he says.

Moyer researches individual targets heavily on social media. He surfs Facebook, Instagram and other social media accounts looking for useful assets. Some people post their business card on their timeline to celebrate a new job, he says. Others scan receipts or other documents using their phone, unwittingly storing them on a public cloud account in the process. Physical access to a building can itself be a useful form of surveillance. If an attacker wants to access digital resources, then stealing a laptop from inside the office is often a great way to do it, explains Moyer. To do this, he uses another of Cialdini’s psychological manipulation techniques: authority.

Social engineers convey authority by merely wearing the right outfit. Moyer has a collection of telecom worker overalls in his office and can often be found walking through a target’s corridors in a uniform with a company logo, having tailgated his way into a building. This gives him access to building layouts and contents. Most people won’t question him because they assume he’s working there, he says.

Some social engineers go for old-fashioned dumpster diving during the reconnaissance phase. Healey uses this old-school hacker technique to find useful insights into a company. This might include anything from a list of employee IDs to a staff directory; even an email printed off with a list of recipients can be helpful when mounting an attack.

Phishing for secrets

Armed with reconnaissance information, the savvy social engineer will then mount an attack on a target. This happens in several ways, but phishing is the most prevalent, experts agree. In many cases, phishing attacks target financial gain. Business email compromise (BEC) scammers either spoof a senior executive’s email account or use stolen email credentials to hijack the real account.

Erich Kron, security awareness advocate, KnowBe4

They then email another executive within the same company or at a supplier, asking for an urgent wire transfer to solve a fake problem such as an outstanding invoice. The victim faithfully sends the money straight into the attacker’s bank account.

These social engineering attacks are now rampant. In February 2018, researchers from a major systems manufacturer identified a massive BEC campaign targeting Fortune 500 companies designed to trick victims into fraudulent wire transfers. The attack started in the fall of 2017 with spear phishing emails that told victims their signature was required on a document about stocks they owned. A fraudulent “DocuSign” portal was used to collect the confidential data. The attacks are believed to have generated hundreds of millions of dollars for the attackers, the vendor’s report said.

In the past, phishers simply altered the headers of their emails to spoof a legitimate address, explains Chris Hadnagy, CEO at Social-Engineer and author of several books on social engineering, including Social Engineering: The Art of Human Hacking. Today, companies use technologies such as Sender Policy Framework (SPF) and DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM) to help thwart those attacks. SPF authenticates the IP address used to send the message against a list provided by the sender. DKIM uses private/public key pairs to encrypt and verify message headers. Finally, messaging parties can use the Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting & Conformance (DMARC) protocol to indicate that they are using SPF and DKIM to protect their messages.

That’s all very well, says Hadnagy, but it doesn’t stop more nefarious phishing methods. These include registering domains that look like legitimate ones at first glance. “Our eyes fill in gaps that we expect,” Hadnagy says.

For example, let us assume an attacker creates an email using the standard Opentype font Cantoria MT Standard found in Microsoft Word and other popular word process applications.  In that email, the attacker is trying to send a victim to a fake website that looks like a valid one. If the site, for example, was app1e.com, it would be almost impossible for the recipient to realize that the site is not actually Apple Inc.’s apple.com site. In the font Cantoria MT Std, the number 1 and the lower-case L look virtually the same — 1 and l. Can you tell which is which? (As of this writing, the domain app1e.com is for sale for $3700 and is not owned by Apple.)

Psyops on the Phone

“Vishing” (voice phishing), also known as pretexting, is another favorite tool. Attackers misrepresent themselves on the phone and use psychological manipulation to achieve their goals.

Pretexting is easier than phishing because phone numbers are notoriously easy to spoof, warns Hadnagy. “This has increased 100fold. Voice servers are cheap and easy to set up,” he says. “Phone lines are still basic, so whatever [number] I shove down the phone line is what pops up on your phone. I can change my phone number to yours. There’s no authentication in the phone system.”

Criminals can use pretexting to siphon funds directly from their targets. In December 2013, crooks telephoned the CFO at U.K. hedge fund Fortelus Capital Management on a Friday night, pretending to be from its bank, Coutts. The caller warned of potentially fraudulent activity and asked the CFO to generate access codes using his smart card. The attackers then transferred some £742,668 ($1.2 million) from the Fortelus account to a variety of other accounts. The company later dismissed and sued its CFO.

Pretexting isn’t unique to cybercriminals; it is used in corporate investigations and espionage, too. Hewlett-Packard admitted that an agency it hired might have used pretexting to obtain access to its own directors’ phone records in 2006.

Following the rules

Having security policies and procedures in place to protect the company is a fundamental requirement, say experts. Always wearing a security badge while in the building and verifying someone’s identity before giving out sensitive information should be standard procedure, but even that is not foolproof; a smart criminal can duplicate security badges as well. The real trick is getting users to follow the policies, says Moyer. Part of that involves using the same psychological techniques on employees, he suggests. “When you’re creating an awareness program and building resilience against different techniques, you’re trying to modify people’s behavior,” he explains.

As an example, he uses another of Cialdini’s psychological pillars: Commitment and consistency. This technique relies on an individual’s need to live up to what they have publicly said they will do and have written down. Making someone declare that they are a custodian of sensitive data and that their job matters — and to feel that sense of responsibility — is a powerful tool, he asserts. “When you train someone that they have those feelings of responsibility and accountability, you’re setting up commitment and consistency.”

Social engineering’s low barrier to entry has always been part of the allure of the attack. As companies improve their technical protections, social engineering is becoming a go-to technique for criminals and spies. While technology protections grow stronger, human weaknesses stay the same. The challenge companies face today in reducing vulnerabilites is not only becoming more secure by breaking bad habits that some employees have, but breaking some good ones too.

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Go to Source Author: Danny Bradbury Manipulating human nature Original Post from SC Magazine Author: Danny Bradbury Complicated malware infections and cross-site scripting attacks are great techniques to compromise a company, but why use them when you can whisper in someone’s ear instead?

[thecoroutfitters]

Written by R. Ann Parris on The Prepper Journal.

Beyond individual and small-group home, property, and self-defense, we increasingly hear a call for citizens to stand up as modern minutemen. The term is relatively new, but the idea isn’t.

Many preppers have always expected that at some point, they’ll either be joining a group or family, friends, and neighbors with the need to engage an enemy force of some kind. While some of those expectations come from fictional sources, there are some fairly recent precedents that make a compelling argument for the ability to band together.

Images: Koreatown business owners on guard during the LA riots (L.A. Times); business owners during Ferguson’s riots 20 years later (Riverfront Times).

There are also realistic “what-if” situations where a functional independent force not unlike a ramped-up community watch has reasonable applications, long before we start entertaining way-out scenarios involving EROL troops and foreign NWO invaders.

Before we start really looking at individual skills and basic gear, there’s a few key areas that can make or break the success of a Modern Minuteman. They’re things to account for before we gather our gear to march to our woods and fences, and things to ensure any group we join has considered before we sign on, whether we’re signing up now or later.

First, Understand the Minuteman

No, I’m not going to dissect the myths and truths of yesteryear’s minutemen (although… http://www.revolutionarywarjournal.com/minuteman-myth/). I’m not even going to split hairs between minutemen and the militia of the era.

I just want to point out that a minuteman was – just like today’s reservists and guardsmen and many fighting forces large and small for centuries and millennia before and after them – a yeoman, tapped to fight when needed.

They were first and foremost workers. Not soldiers.

For the greatest breadth of that history – all the way up to the modern eras – most of those yeomen were involved in production and trades/crafts, and much of that production involved foods.

While a pyramid helps start to make that point, they still don’t accurately represent the consumerism and contributions of each group. The stepped versions of trophic/energy graphs start getting closer, but it’s still really difficult to appreciate the magnitudes and exponential’s of input required at each level to sustain a single member of the tier above.

Why am I harping on this opening and seemingly tangential point so much?

Because it’s expensive to maintain all the specialists within a society – any type of specialist, to include part-time and full-time soldiers.

When the American minuteman was born, he was led and organized by landowners and businessmen who were mostly still tied enough to the earth to understand production and man-hours – even the city boys.

Many of our founding fathers and the local militia and minuteman organizers were deeply involved in breeding better crop and livestock varieties for the regions, developing management techniques for timber, and fine-tuning stoves, housing, transportation, and tools to better work the land and make efficient and maximum use of resources.

While they understood the need to fight once letter-writing and overseas discussion trips failed, they already inherently understood the need for a populace to feed itself – especially with supply lines about to be disrupted.

(Fun quickie reads: http://www.edisonmuckers.org/founding-father-inventors/, https://www.varsitytutors.com/earlyamerica/jefferson-primer/agronomist)  

Their citizen soldiers were also deeply tied to production. Even the urbanite craftsmen and tradesmen, the accountants and scholars, were much more aware of their larder needs, and of the seasons – harvests and planting, hunting and livestock, foraging and wood cutting.

They understood time with a powder horn instead of a plow and hammer would impact life.

While it doesn’t get the attention other aspects of the Revolutionary citizen soldiers do, the quote traced back to Napoleon was in full effect:

“Amateurs discuss tactics; professionals discuss logistics.”

He’s not the first, last, or only to emphasize it. Alexander the Great is credited with saying that his logicians were humorless, because they knew if his campaign failed, the supply chain was going to be investigated first.

Antoine-Henri Jomni described logistics as the means through which tactics and strategy could be implemented, and the main factor in creating those strategies and tactics.

Those logistics range throughout training and deployment, from mobility of troops and supplies, to types of supplies and sourcing them. Everyone involved in every step of that process has to be fed and kept shoe’d, rested, and housed.

As Sun Tzu said, “the line between disorder and order lies in logistics”.

(Fun fact: Today’s home canning methods came about due to Napoleon’s logistical challenges.)

The minutemen largely fought close to home, not called away as often or as far as the standing army and militia. The same is likely to be true of the Modern Minuteman. Even so, and even though we’ll presumably be better trained than the Revolutionary minuteman, we’re at a disadvantage.

See, we’re now largely what would have been the exception among those citizen soldiers and their organizers.

We very rarely have ingrained understanding of our larders or household supplies like water and fuel, of reasonable production/foraging yield expectations, or of the logistics involved with outfitting even short-term, short-distance yeoman fighters.

That Needs to be the First Focus.

Whether we expect to stand up in mostly “normal” conditions or during a Big-time Event, get the larder and daily-use supplies sorted. Get self- and home-defense taken care of if you’re vulnerable.

Get basic repairs for water, windows, vehicles, and roofs prepped. Know how to handle common injuries like sprains, burns, and foreign objects in eyes.

*It also wouldn’t hurt to remember how often in history yeomen – right up to today’s irregular/guerrilla/insurgent forces – spend some portion of their time producing food, and start practicing that.

Then spend time and money on the sexy run-n-gun goodies.

Next Step: Intel & Comms – No intel, no comms, no mission.

From the most elite modern warriors to cavemen with bone clubs, we rely on information. Even on a personal level – say, a home intruder – if we don’t know there’s a problem, and what it is, we don’t know that we need to react, let alone how to best respond.

Sun Tzu also weighed in on that front. Importantly, he emphasized honest self-assessment and understanding of the community at large along with accurate assessments of the opposing force.

That self-assessment is enormous.

It factors hugely in choosing when and how to engage. And disengage. And when and how to not engage at all.

Being good at making that call is one of the things that made successful resistance fighters difficult to counter even before the Swamp Fox dove around fences and trees instead of lining up to engage Brits with big “X marks the spot” on their chests. It has continued to run empire-ruling armies ragged in the centuries since.

Images: Brits in the First Anglo-Afghan war, and Russian troops fighting the same never-quite-conquered enemy 120 years and several wars later. 

Whichever extreme we choose for our scenarios – commonplace likely events that occur even today or restoring order or freedom during or after something huge – the Modern Minuteman can expect to be facing larger numbers and-or better-equipped professional militaries, just like the guerrilla and insurgent forces before them.

They, too, are going to rely on accurate self-assessment combined with accurate calculation of both the local community and the enemy to successfully engage.

Images: Italian, South Vietnamese, and Greek civilian home-guard militia and resistance fighters of WWII and Vietnam.

Denying enemy intel on us is also a biggie. After all, they’re using information the exact same way we hopefully are.

Communication Is Key.

Again, it’s “no intel, no comms, no mission”. Without the ability to trickle information both ways, intel does no good. Willing, able parties with the best training and all the gear in the world can be rendered totally inoperable without communication systems.

Those minutemen had to be rallied, remember.

Somebody had to tell them where they were massing, and then somebody had to decide on a plan of action based on available information. Unit and individual assignments and instructions had to be passed.

The most likely scenarios leave phones and texting an option for Modern Minutemen. We also have regular ol’ Motorolas. I’m a fan of SSB-CB for middling distances due to cost, ease, lack of regulation, and the possible ranges without repeaters, but there’s also HAM radio – which will also send texts and email these days – and even field phones from various eras.

We can also make arrangements for a low-tech Twilight Bark https://www.theprepperjournal.com/2017/03/04/radio-silence-communication-without-electronics/,  some of which offer pretty decent ranges if we have line of sight.

For near-area alerts that we should check something like a flag, hobo symbols, or message board system, or to tell neighbors on standby that it’s time to rally or to man their stations, we might also consider things like canned-air stadium squealers and boater’s fog horns.

(Having a variety of grid-down comms systems has all sorts of benefits even if A Big Thing never occurs. It also applies to things that have nothing to do with gun-toters: riding to the rescue for births, warning about fires and rising water or stock-killing loose dogs, saving steps and time to call people in for breakfast, telling neighbors we’re sick/injured, helping each other with planting and harvest…)

The Modern Minuteman

The idea of a fast-response or defensive force citizen soldier isn’t new. Nor is it fading away anytime soon. It’s not just tactics, though, or the gear each individual and team needs to employ them. It’s not even the basic skills and abilities required to engage in a fight.

Before we go whole-hog on the combat aspects of the Modern Minuteman, take some time to seriously game plan the basic tenets of logistics, comms, and intel.

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[archiveofprolbems]

If You Don’t Have Bread, Eat Art!: Contemporary Art and Derivative Fascisms by Hito Steyerl

Is art a currency? Investor Stefan Simchowitz thinks so. He wrote with uncompromising clarity about the post-Brexit era: “Art will effectively continue its structural function as an alternative currency that hedges against inflation and currency depreciation.”1 Have silver paintings become a proxy gold standard?2 How did it come to this? During the ongoing crisis, investors were showered with tax money, which then went into freeport collections, tower mansions, and shell companies. Quantitative easing eroded currency stability and depleted common resources, entrenching a precarious service economy with dismal wages, if any, eternal gigs, eternal debt, permanent doubt, and now increasing violence. This destabilization is one reason the value of art looks more stable than the prospects of many national GDPs. In the EU this takes place against a backdrop of mass evictions, austerity, arson attacks, Daesh run amok, and Deutsche scams. Results include child poverty, debt blackmail, rigged economies, and the fascist scapegoating of others for widely self-inflicted failed policies. Art is an “alternative currency” of this historical moment.3 It seems to trade against a lot of misery.

Christie's auctioneers vend a Mark Rothko painting.

Meanwhile, reactionary extremism intensifies in many places. I won’t bore you with specifics. There’s always another attack, election, coup, or someone who ups the ante in terms of violence, misogyny, snuff, or infamy. Derivative fascisms4continue to grow, wherever disenfranchised middle classes fear (and face) global competition—and choose to both punch down and suck up to reactionary oligarchies.5 Ever more self-tribalized formations pop up that prefer not to abolish neoliberal competition—but instead eliminate competitors personally. Derivative fascisms try to fuse all-out free trade economics with (for example) white nationalism[6] by promoting survival of the fittest for everyone except themselves. Authoritarian neoliberalism segues into just authoritarianism.

A permanent fog of war is fanned by permanent fakes on Facebook. Already deregulated ideas of truth are destabilized even further. Emergency rules. Critique is a troll fest. Crisis commodified as entertainment. The age of neoliberal globalization seems exhausted and a period of contraction, fragmentation, and autocratic rule has set in.

The growth of the global auction market from 2005 to 2015, according to data from Auction House, ArtNet, and AMMA.

Alternative Currency

Art markets seem not overly concerned. In times in which financial institutions and even whole political entities may just dissolve into fluffy glitter, investment in art seems somehow more real. Moreover, as alternative currency, art seems to fulfill what Ethereum and Bitcoin have hitherto only promised.6 Rather than money issued by a nation and administrated by central banks, art is a networked, decentralized, widespread system of value.7 It gains stability because it calibrates credit or disgrace across competing institutions or cliques. There are markets, collectors, museums, publications, and the academy asynchronously registering (or mostly failing to do so) exhibitions, scandals, likes and prices. As with cryptocurrencies, there is no central institution to guarantee value; instead there is a jumble of sponsors, censors, bloggers, developers, producers, hipsters, handlers, patrons, privateers, collectors, and way more confusing characters. Value arises from gossip-cum-spin and insider information. Fraudsters and con artists mix helter-skelter with pontificating professors, anxious gallerists, and couch-surfing students. This informal ecology is eminently hackable, but since everyone does it, it sometimes evens out—even though at highly manipulated levels. It is at once highly malleable and inert, sublime, dopey, opaque, bizarre, and blatant: a game in which the most transcendental phenomena are on collectors’ waiting lists. Further down the food chain, media art, like Bitcoin, tries to manage the contradictions of digital scarcity by limiting the illimitable. But for all its pretense to technological infallibility, Bitcoin is potentially just as dependent on group power8 as art-market values are dependent on consent, collusion, and coincidence. What looks like incorruptible tech in practice hinges on people’s actions. As to the encryption part in art: art is often encrypted to the point of sometimes being undecryptable. Encryption is routinely applied, even or especially if there is no meaning whatsoever. Art is encryption as such, regardless of the existence of a message with a multitude of conflicting and often useless keys.9 Its reputational economy is randomly quantified, ranked by bullshit algorithms that convert artists and academics into ranked positions, but it also includes more traditionally clannish social hierarchies. It is a fully ridiculous, crooked, and toothless congregation and yet, like civilization as a whole, art would be a great idea.

In practice though, art industries trigger trickle-up effects which are then flushed sideways into tax havens. Art’s economies divert investments from sustainable job creation, education, and research and externalize social cost and risk. They bleach neighborhoods, underpay, overrate, and peddle excruciating baloney.

This does not only apply to art’s investor and manager classes. The lifestyles of many art workers also support a corporate technological (and antisocial) infrastructure that whisks off profits into fiscal banana republics. Apple, Google, Uber, Airbnb, Ryanair, Facebook, and other hipster providers pay hardly any taxes in Ireland, Jersey, or other semisecret jurisdictions. They don’t contribute to local services like schools or hospitals and their idea of sharing is to make sure they get their share.

But let’s face it—in relation to the scale of other industries, the art sector is just a blip. Contemporary art is just a hash for all that’s opaque, unintelligible, and unfair, for top-down class war and all-out inequality. It’s the tip of an iceberg acting as a spear.

“The online art market has continued to grow strongly (up 24 percent to $3.27 billion) despite the global art market slowing in 2015,” states the foreword of this art insurer's report.

Degenerate Art

Predictably, this leads to resentment and outright anger. Art is increasingly labeled as a decadent, rootless, out-of-touch, cosmopolitan urban elite activity. In one sense, this is a perfectly honest and partly pertinent description.10Contemporary art belongs to a time in which everything goes and nothing goes anywhere, a time of stagnant escalation, of serial novelty as deadlock. Many are itching for major changes, some because the system is pointless, harmful, 1 percent-ish, and exclusive, and many more because they finally want in.

On the other hand, talk of “rootless cosmopolitans” is clearly reminiscent of both Nazi and Stalinist propaganda, who relished in branding dissenting intellectuals as “parasites” within “healthy national bodies.” In both regimes this kind of jargon was used to get rid of minority intelligentsia, formal experiments and progressive agendas; not to improve access for locals or improve or broaden the appeal of art. The “anti-elitist” discourse in culture is at present mainly deployed by conservative elites, who hope to deflect attention from their own economic privileges by relaunching of stereotypes of “degenerate art.”

So if you are hoping for new opportunities with the authoritarians, you might find yourself disappointed.

Authoritarian right-wing regimes will not get rid of art-fair VIP lists or make art more relevant or accessible to different groups of people. In no way will they abolish elites or even art. They will only accelerate inequalities, beyond the fiscal-material to the existential-material. This transformation is not about accountability, criteria, access, or transparency. It will not prevent tax fraud, doctored markets, the Daesh antiquities trade, or systemic underpay. It will be more of the same, just much worse: less pay for workers, less exchange, fewer perspectives, less circulation, and even less regulation, if such a thing is even possible. Inconvenient art will fly out the window—anything non-flat, non-huge, or remotely complex or challenging. Intellectual perspectives, expanded canons, nontraditional histories will be axed—anything that requires an investment of time and effort instead of conspicuous money. Public support swapped for Instagram metrics. Art fully floated on some kind of Arsedaq. More fairs, longer yachts for more violent assholes, oil paintings of booty blondes, abstract stock-chart calligraphy. Yummy organic superfoods. Accelerationist designer breeding. Personalized one-on-one performances for tax evaders. Male masters, more male masters, and repeat. Art will take its place next to big-game hunting, armed paragliding, and adventure slumming.

Yay for expensive craft and anything vacuous that works in a chain-hotel lobby. Plastiglomerate marble, welded by corporate characters banging on about natural selection. Kits for biological “self-improvement.” Crapstraction, algostraction, personalized installations incorporating Krav Maga lessons. Religious nail paint will slay in all seasons, especially with a Louis Vuitton logo. Hedge-fund mandalas. Modest fashion. Immodest fashion. Nativist mumbo jumbo. Genetically engineered caviar in well-behaved ethnic pottery. Conceptual plastic surgery. Racial plastic surgery. Bespoke ivory gun handles. Murals on border walls. Good luck with this. You will be my mortal enemy.

Just like institutional critique was overtaken by a neoliberal Right that went ahead and simply abolished art institutions, the critique of contemporary art and claims for an exit from this paradigm are dwarfed by their reactionary counterparts. The reactionary exit—or acceleration of stagnation—is already well underway. Algorithmic and analogue market manipulation, alongside the defunding, dismantling, and hollowing-out of the public and post-public sector,11 transforms what sometimes worked as a forum for shared ideas, judgment, and experimentation into HNWI interior design. Art will be firewalled within isolationist unlinked canons, which can easily be marketed as national, religious, and fully biased histories.

Game of Thrones lends itself to serving as a metaphor for fanstastic precarity.

An Alternative Alternative Currency?

Now what? Where does one go from here?

Let’s put the next paragraph into brackets. It just indicates a hypothetical possibility.

If art is an alternative currency, its circulation also outlines an operational infrastructure. Could these structures be repossessed to work differently? How much value would the alternative currency of art lose if its most corrupt aspects were to be regulated or restructured to benefit art’s larger communities? How about even a minimum of rules in the market—gallery contracts, resale-time minimums, artist fees,12 remunerated internships? Introducing blockchain public records for the production, transaction, and locating of artworks in order to reign in tax fraud and money laundering?13Declining the most mortifying sponsor and patron relationships instead of artwashing fossil extraction, weapons manufacturing, and banks bailed out with former cultural funding? How about asking for fees on resales similar to those asked on photocopies to pay for art workers’ health insurance? Or on any offshore art-related transaction? Could art as alternative currency not only circulate within existing systems but even launch not-yet-existing economies (publics, institutions, markets, parallel art worlds, etc.)?

But to expect any kind of progressive transformation to happen by itself—just because the infrastructure or technology exists—would be like expecting the internet to create socialism or automation to evenly benefit all humankind. The internet spawned Uber and Amazon, not the Paris Commune. The results may be called “the sharing economy,” but this mostly means that the poor share with the rich, not vice versa. Should any less unilateral sharing be suggested, the bulk of capital will decamp immediately.14 One of the first steps towards parallel art sectors would thus be to organize even partial sustainability in the absence of bubble liquidity and barely limited amounts of free labor. Whatever emerges will be a new version of art-affiliated autonomy

In contrast to the modernist autonomy of art schemes, this autonomy is not solitary, unlinked, or isolated. Nor will it come about by some fantasy of progress in-built into technology. On the contrary it can only emerge through both a conscious effort and exchange among diverse entities. It’s an autonomy that works through circulation, transformation, and alchemy. The links it could build on exist as weak links (aka, air-kiss links) and reshaping them would need to happen within a compromised mess of contradictory activities. But simultaneously people can try to synch with the art-related undercommons15 by building partial networked autonomy via all means necessary. If art is a currency, can it be an undercurrent? Could it work like an Unter, not an Uber?

How to do this? People are used to perceiving the art world as sponsored by states, foundations, patrons, and corporations. But the contrary applies at least equally well. Throughout history it has been artists and artworkers, more than any other actors, who have subsidized art production.16 Most do so by concocting mixed-income schemes in which, simply speaking, some form of wage labor (or other income) funds art-making. But more generally, everyone involved also contributes in all sorts of other ways to art’s circulation, thus making it stronger as currency. Even artists who live “off their work” subsidize the market by way of enormous commissions in relation to other industries. But why should one sponsor VIP prepreviews, bespoke museum extensions without any means to fill them, art-fair arms races, institutional franchises built under penal-colony conditions, and other baffling bubbles? This bloated, entitled, fully superfluous, embarrassing, and most of all politically toxic overhead is subsidized by means of free labor and life time, but also by paying attention to blingstraction and circulating its spinoffs, thus creating reach and legitimacy. Even the majority of artists that cannot afford saying no to any offer of income could save time not doing this.17 Refusing sponsorship of this sort might be the first step towards shaking the unsustainable and mortifying dependency on speculative operations that indirectly increase authoritarian violence and division. Spend free time assisting colleagues,18 not working for free for bank foundations. Don’t “share” corporate crap on monopolist platforms. Ask yourself: Do you want global capitalism with a fascist face? Do you want to artwash more insane weather, insane leaders, poisonous and rising water, crumbling infrastructure, and brand-new walls? How can people genuinely share what they need?19 How much speed is necessary? How can artistic (and art-related) autonomy evolve from haughty sovereignty to modest networked devolution?20 How can platform cooperatives contribute to this? Can art institutions follow the lead of new municipalist networks and alliances of “rebel cities”?21 In the face of derivative fascisms, can local forms of life be reimagined beyond blood, soil, nation, and corporation, as networks of neighborhoods, publics, layered audiences?22 Can art keep local imaginaries curious, open-minded, and spirited? How to make tangible the idea that belonging is in becoming—not in having been?23What is art’s scale, perspective, and challenge in de-growing constituencies? Can one transform art’s currency into art’s confluence? Replace speculation with overflow?24

Art’s organizing role in the value-process—long overlooked, downplayed, worshipped, or fucked—is at last becoming clear enough to approach, if not rationally, than perhaps realistically. Art as alternative currency shows that art sectors already constitute a maze of overlapping systems in which good-old gossip, greed, lofty ideals, inebriation, and ruthless competition form countless networked cliques. The core of its value is generated less by transaction than by endless negotiation, via gossip, criticism, hearsay, haggling, heckling, peer reviews, small talk, and shade. The result is a solid tangle of feudal loyalties and glowing enmity, rejected love and fervent envy, pooling striving, longing, and vital energies. In short, the value is not in the product but in the network; not in gaming or predicting the market25 but in creating exchange.26 Most importantly, art is one of the few exchanges that derivative fascists don’t control—yet.

But as a reserve system for dumb, mean, and greedy money, art’s social value (auto)destructs and turns into a shell operation that ultimately just shields more empty shells and amplifies fragmentation and division. Similarly, arts venues are already shifting into bonded warehouses and overdesigned bank vaults inside gilded, gated compounds designed by seemingly the same three architects worldwide.

It’s easy to imagine what the motto for art as the reserve currency of a fully rigged system might be. Just envision a posh PR lieutenant policing the entrance of a big art fair, gingerly declaring to anyone pushed aside, displaced, exploited, and ignored: “If you don’t have bread, just eat art!”

×

Thank you to Sven Lütticken, Anton Vidokle, and Stephen Squibb for very helpful comments.

Hito Steyerl is a filmmaker and writer who lives in Berlin.

© 2016 e-flux and the author

Source: http://www.e-flux.com/journal/76/69732/if-you-don-t-have-bread-eat-art-contemporary-art-and-derivative-fascisms/

[uniteordie-usa]

Attack on RT Is Another Step Towards Sovietization of American Media

http://uniteordiemedia.com/attack-on-rt-is-another-step-towards-sovietization-of-american-media/ http://uniteordiemedia.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/USSA-600x333.jpg Attack on RT Is Another Step Towards Sovietization of American Media This week the US Department of Justice Criminal Division forced the Russian-funded television network RT (formerly Russia Today) to register as a “foreign agent” under the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA). Failure to comply would have risked arrest of RT’s management and seizure of its ass...

This week the US Department of Justice Criminal Division forced the Russian-funded television network RT (formerly Russia Today) to register as a “foreign agent” under the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA). Failure to comply would have risked arrest of RT’s management and seizure of its assets. The move comes on the heels of Senators’ recent demands that terrified tech giants Twitter, Facebook, and Google act as ideological filters.

With no discernable defenders among America’s media establishment, RT rightly denounced the selective FARA mandate as an attack on media freedom – which it is. But more ominous is what the move against RT says about America’s rulers’ further intention to limit the sources of information available to its subjects.

As Daniel McAdams of the Ron Paul Institute writes:

“RT America is a news organization operating in the United States that is funded at least partly by a foreign government. So is the BBC. So is Deutsche Welle, France24, Al-Jazeera, and numerous other foreign media organizations. It is assumed that they all to a degree reflect the editorial interests of those who pay the bills.

“The same is true with other, non-state funded media outlets, of course. It’s up to us to factor these things in when we consume media. That’s what it means to be a free people.

“A core value in a free society is that our own government has zero power over what we read, what we watch, how we think, how we come to interpret current events, the conclusions we draw based on these inputs, and so on. These are private matters over which any government that is not tyrannical should have no sway.

“The real insidiousness of tyrannical systems is that the government most lasciviously seeks control over most private spaces — including the most private space called our brain, our intellect, our conscience. We must be free to follow our interests down whatever path they may lead us so that we may reach our own conclusions and then perhaps test them ourselves in the marketplace of ideas.”

The attack on RT (and another Russian network, Sputnik, which evidently has not yet been given a deadline for registration) is a milestone in the degeneration of the American official (call them what you want – corporate, legacy, mainstream) media into PR agencies for the governing establishment and its ideological imperatives. We’ve been moving along this path for a while now, and it’s going to get worse.

Long gone are those halcyon days of yore when Americans could just sit back and watch CBS’s Walter Cronkite with total confidence they were getting the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. (For youngsters who have no idea who the hell Cronkite was, just Google “most trusted man in America.”) Back in the naïve infancy of the TV age, from about the 1950s until the beginning of the 1990s, there was a common national media culture that reflected the established, generally liberal, mainly Democratic tilt of the American inteligentsiya that was almost uniform among the (then only) three networks and a handful of major newspapers and magazines. To be sure, that was also a ruling class media of a sort, but it reflected a broad and deep social consensus.

Those days are no more. Perhaps the unraveling of media trust and social consensus alike started in earnest with Vietnam. But still, for decades afterwards there still seemed to be plenty of empty cranial receptacles for government and corporate propaganda of the first Gulf War under Bush 41, Bill Clinton’s phony humanitarian wars in the Balkans, Bush 43’s Iraq War, and Obama’s Libyan and Syrian imbroglios. Sadly, there are many such cranial receptacles even today.

By its attack on RT, the US government is officially telling us that only the mainstream media (MSM) can be regarded as are purveyors of Truth (with a capital T) and that anybody not on the approved list is fake. How do we know? Why, the MSM themselves tell us! The Washington Post’s “Democracy Dies in Darkness.” CNN’s “Facts First.” The New York Times’ “The Truth is Hard.” (The fact that certifiably authoritative and truthful media are militantly hostile to Russia, not to mention to Donald Trump, is purely coincidental.)

A lot of Americans don’t buy it anymore, though. Some of the skepticism falls along purely partisan lines reflecting increasing moral and political polarization: our media (which I exclusively consult) tells the truth, but your media (which I don’t consult) are liars. About one-third of Americans get their talking points from, say, Michael Moore, and from Rachel Maddow on MSNBC, with their related internet echoes, while another third gets theirs from Rush Limbaugh, and from Sean Hannity on Fox News, and their internet echo chambers. Increasingly, there is nothing like a national dialogue on anything, but rather two entirely separate, diametrically opposed ideological cultures – and alternate realities – each demonizing “them.” This is why when after Barack Obama’s election the Tea Party appeared, the GOP fell over itself trying to co-opt them, while the Democrats denounced them as a mob of racists and subversives. When later the “Occupy” and Black Lives Matter movements broke out on the Left, the Democrats tried to figure out how to channel it while top Republicans denounced it as gang of commie anarchists and losers.

With the election of Donald Trump the divide intensified further to one of latent civil war.

At some point the false picture of pseudo-reality (as Alain Besançon called it in the late Soviet propaganda context) diverges so far from real reality that the official media narrative becomes useless and even counterproductive. While a majority of Americans probably are still glued to the partisan outlets of “their” side of the political divide, there is a growing sense across the spectrum that not only the MSM but even partisan media like Fox News and MSNBC are untrustworthy.

In the past, notably in the totalitarian societies of the 20th century, maintaining the credibility of official media required the physical repression of alternatives. Today, such a crude approach is unnecessary and almost technologically unfeasible, even for such undemocratic countries as Iran, Cuba, and Saudi Arabia (though North Korea may be successful through the sheer unavailability of modern communications technology to most of the population). Instead of suppressing dissent, is it sufficient to maintain major media’s role as gatekeeper and certifier of reliability.

Which brings us back to the impact of foreign media like RT, Sputnik, Strategic Culture Foundation, Al-Jazeera, CGTN, Press TV, often in parallel with alternative media like Zero Hedge, Lew Rockwell, Antiwar.com, Ron Paul Institute, and others, to break through the information firewall but arguably then being influenced by the agenda of the sponsoring foreign governments. In any case, a growing segment of the American public is discovering a skill once well-honed by the citizens of the former communist countries: reading between the lines of the official media (which is assumed to be full of lies) and making informed comparisons to samizdat alternative media, foreign sources, and the rumor-mill to guess what the truth might be.

Make no mistake – what has started with RT won’t end with RT. Our betters have decided they need to protect our minds from “propaganda” penetration that might cause us to doubt the truth of what CNN and the Washington Post tell us.

Citizens! Be grateful for such wise leaders and dedicated information workers! Smash the enemy voices that seek to undermine our democracy as we march boldly into the radiant future!

Read More: https://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2017/11/18/attack-rt-another-step-towards-sovietization-american-media.html

[dive-into-marketing]

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