#panoptic records

[sm0kebreaks]

i think this au exists just to really explore uni jon and his specific gender when we remove academia from the picture

Patreon / Sketchbooks/ Commission / Panoptic Records

[harunayuuka2060]

Twst Unveil Event Part 3

Philomela: I hope everyone had a good night's sleep!

NRC, NBC, and RSA: YES!

Philomela: Great! Because you all are going to experience some body pain today!

The students: ...

Epel: Haha... Not everyone seems excited now.

Yuurin: She's never good in motivating anyone.

Malleus: How come she became your mentor?

Yuurin: My mother.

Malleus: Oh.

Philomela: I'll be explaining to you the mechanics now!

Philomela: Today will be the elimination round! You are free to attack anyone you please! And you have all the permission to use any type of moves even magic to your own advantage!

NBC student A: Eh? Isn't this a wrestling event?

NBC student B: If magic is involved, then we'll have better chances of winning.

RSA student A: Won't it be fair to not use any magic at all?

RSA student B: Yes. It feels wrong.

Philomela: Ha! Why? Do you think you can win just because you use magic?

The students: ...

Rook: Madame is right! There are many factors we need to consider!

Ruggie: Hm. Yuurin, you never used magic in any of your wrestling competitions, did you?

Yuurin: No.

Jack: I see. Does that mean...

Yuurin: Philomela is not impressed to any of them. That's why she's willing to give them a leverage to make this match worthwhile.

Floyd: Ne~ Mrs. Whale~ What other things we should remember for this elimination round?

Philomela: Nothing much, except that you have 30 minutes to fight anyone.

Floyd: Yay~!

Jade: Oh dear... *chuckles*

Epel: Can't I really join?

Rook: You'll get yourself hurt, Monsieur Crabapple.

Epel: *pouts*

Sebek: I promise to win this round, Waka-sama!

Silver: This is only an elimination round, Sebek.

Malleus: Do your best, Sebek, Silver.

Sebek/Silver: Yes, Waka-sama!/Malleus.

Ruggie: I guess this is the part where we start recording—

Philomela: Spectators! There is a designated room for us!

Malleus, Ruggie, Jack, Jade, and Epel: Huh?

Philomela: *leads them to a room that offers a panoptic view of the locations in the Kingdom of Heroes*

Epel: Whoa... *in amazement*

Philomela: Sick, isn't it?

Jade: Indeed. I've never been to such place before.

Jack: Ah! I can see everyone clearly!

Philomela: *laughs* Yes! This room will cater to your needs! Foods, drinks, and a good entertainment!

Rollo: *looks displeased*

Neige: This is great! Principal Ambrose will surely love this place!

Epel: Neige Le Blanche?!

Neige: Hello~!

Malleus and Ruggie: Flamme/Rollo.

Rollo: ...

Rollo: It's a pleasure to meet you again, mages.

Malleus and Ruggie: *smirks*

Jack and Jade: ???

Philomela: Everyone! Take your seats!

Epel: Um... But there are no seats— *a seat in front of him appears*

Epel: ...

Philomela: This room will cater to your needs. *smiles proudly*

Epel: Neat!

The students: *listening to Philomela's voice*

Philomela: BOYS! ARE YOU READY?

Floyd: Can we do a war cry~?

Philomela: *laughs* YES!

The students except Yuurin and Silver: RAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!

Yuurin and Silver: ...

Silver: Good luck to you, Yuurin.

Yuurin: *nods* You too, Silver.

Epel: Wow... Just wow...

Jade: That's Floyd for you.

*Floyd unleashed a flurry of clothesline strikes, taking out multiple students simultaneously with each powerful swing.*

Ruggie: Poor NBC and RSA students.

Malleus: Sebek and Silver are doing well.

*Sebek asserts his dominance by executing his running bulldog move; swiftly seizing his opponents by the head and driving them face-first into the ground with decisive force.*

*Silver expertly wraps his arm around the neck of each approaching opponent, applying precise pressure to cut off their air supply and induce unconsciousness.*

Epel: Wow... Everyone is amazing— Wait. Where's Rook?

*Rook's grin widens as he expertly locks his poor opponent into the sharpshooter.*

Epel and Ruggie: ...

Ruggie: That savage.

Jack: Ruggie-senpai! Look! Some of the students are attacking Yuurin!

Philomela: *smiles*

*Yuurin remains composed as everyone closes in on her. Then, she swiftly grabs one attacker, lifts them, and slams them to the ground with a powerful spinebuster move. With each opponent, she repeats this action, using their momentum against them to quickly take them down, one by one.*

Epel, Jack, and Ruggie: ...

Ruggie: Oh shit, wait— I need to document this.

Floyd: Whoo-hoo~! This feels great~!

The students he defeated: *groaning in pain*

Sebek: Ha! I've defeated 25 students!

Rook: Oh! That's impressive, Monsieur Crocodile!

Silver: Should we be counting?

Sebek: How about you, Yuurin?! Bet you didn't—

Yuurin: *students piled up like a mountain beside her*

Yuurin: It seems we're the only remaining ones.

Floyd, Sebek, Silver, and Rook: ...

Sebek: WHAT THE HELL?!

[thefirstknife]

Okay, this is it for Act I and now we have to stew for 20 days, I'm okay and not feeling abnormal at all (lie). But there's SO MUCH that I want to mention.

The mission starts normally, we're just collecting samples for Failsafe, but then Osiris calls us to come help him with Saint. And then shit hits the fan. Saint has apparently walked off alone into Nessus and isn't answering his comms. Normal and cool!

I'll go into the whole thing, under read more for length (long ass post, I'm having normal thoughts and feelings about this whole thing):

Right away, no more lake where we were fishing (only in the mission though):

Strange! The Vex appear to have let Saint pass through here without a fight. Once again, there's a mix of Vex in this area; some are normal Vex units with collars and some are Precursors without (the boss, the cyclops and the hobgoblins are Precursors):

The Precursors aren't collared, but they still participate in this and are also changed ("uplifted choral cyclops" = part of the chorus even without a yoke). This is incredibly strange. And then more strange information:

Okay!!! What is going on! We've seen in the last week's lore page that the Vex are behaving incredibly strangely. In short, they seem to be behaving more like individuals, rather than what we're used to seeing from them. This adds to that. They are developing tactics and changes that they previously weren't engaged with because, essentially, they didn't have to be.

Anyway, we get to finally hear Saint and he's... Talking to himself. About how he's not real. We find him collared and he appears to be hearing a voice talking to him; the voice is only identified as a "Conductor." At this point, I don't think there's any doubt about this being Maya. The same term was used by her in her experiments with the Veil: she needed someone to be a "conductor" to the "chorus" of minds when she was trying to merge fabricate consciousness (which she succeeded in with Lakshmi). Maya died in the "conductor's chair." What we don't know is ... Well. Anything else. What is she doing and why and what state is she in. The assumption right now is that she's using the Vex as a chorus, but why are they allowing this and why are some of them participating even without the collars? No clue.

What's interesting is that she seems to have analysed Saint and knew about him, either from her own analysis of him after observing him during our expeditions or from the Vex themselves. Or both. I suspect a combination of both because he's been involved with what we've been doing so she would've been interested to see why, and then she would've also gotten additional information from the Vex who recognise him. I would assume the Vex also had information about the rest of us, including Osiris and YW, but Saint was easiest to control.

With what she was telling him, it also means that Maya now knows how we saved him. His entire story is directly linked to the Vex and Vex technology so naturally all of this would be recorded with them and would allow Maya to find out about it. She knows that in some timelines he dies and he is saved in this one. She filled his head with the idea that he doesn't belong here, that he shouldn't have been saved. That he's an error that's "corrupting the true timeline."

As a sidenote, when you come into this room, Curse of Osiris music starts playing, again, as it has been playing for a lot of stuff this episode (specifically the Panoptes fight track). I'm super glad to hear that OST again. I'm also insane about them dropping Mercury music and Precursors at me.

Saint has more concerning lines:

And then we reach him:

Totally okay scene to see. Saint in his bubble, with a yoke, Vex arranged around him in their worshipping pose and the mysterious figures hovering above him. Saint continues:

Okay! *cries* He snaps out of it when Ikora reminds him of Osiris. Old man yaoi wins again!!

Then there's the conversation between Osiris, Saint, Ikora and Failsafe where Osiris is desperately trying to convince Saint that he's real and fine and that there's nothing wrong with him. I crode.... Man, they really said "you WILL watch these old men lovingly put hands on each other." But also, Saint confirms that he just heard a voice speaking to him on Nessus and that he couldn't do anything except obey its commands. It wasn't a Vex; Saint describes it as something that "connected to his mind" and called itself the "Conductor."

Failsafe pointed out that the Vex and Exo share radiolaria as a "base material" and that the Vex were perhaps trying to interface with Saint for information about what we're doing. But Saint said that they did not care about that at all. Instead, they "measured" Saint's "humanity" and "legitimacy."

Osiris does his best to convince him otherwise:

Bro. I am crying in the club what the fuck. Osiris had access to other Saints, but he didn't want to mess with them. He wanted to save the Saint he knew. It was the whole deal with the Sundial being so specific to find "the right moment" and "the right Saint" to save him and why it didn't work for Osiris, because of the paradox with the Young Wolf.

Ikora points out that this is all just a tactic against us and Saint does seem to understand that, and Osiris' reassurances, but it's still difficult to deal with. Saint has previously already dealt with the feelings of not being sure if anything he's experiencing is real. He's spent decades in the Infinite Forest surrounded by simulations. It's a hard thing to adjust to, especially with all he's been through since.

He'll need time to process this. He needs to be alone.

Failsafe is normal about it:

You and me too bestie!

But wait! There's more! We still have the radio message which is between Osiris and Ikora talking about the changes to Nessus and the Vex. It's naturally Osiris' way to distract himself from the issues with Saint, but also we really do need to keep researching what's going on so he's got a good idea. Nessus is "changing rapidly" according to Osiris, "moreso than when the Vex first assimilated it, if Red War records can be trusted." Osiris also notes that this isn't just limited to Nessus, but to everything, including our data and the radiolaria that we collected. They're "mutating."

This bit in particular is important and concerning because that's just not how the Vex do things. As Osiris said, when they change, they change because they have time shenanigans so they essentially gather data in the future and transmit it back, then alter themselves from the past, to appear as if they were always that way. But now? They're adapting "in real time." They learn linearly and adapt on the go.

This is bizarre with the utilisation of Precursors because they are the past Vex. However, they do not have the collars so they're not directly "compelled" and yet, they still participate and change alongside all of the other collared Vex. They also send their minds, again, not collared, to control the collared Vex and lead them. This is baffling.

Ikora is linking this to the impact of the anomaly, the echo. While Saint was down there, Geppetto mapped some of it, including the radiolaria around the site; apparently, the Vex are "swirling around the impact site for miles below the surface." It's also "causing disturbances in the planet's EM field." Ikora concludes that the Vex must be doing "something big."

Osiris also mentions the importance of Saint saying that it was a singular voice directing him, not a collective one, like a Vex would be. He reminds us that this isn't how Vex do things usually and this thing with Saint was just a test. He speculates, and Ikora agrees, that the Vex behaviour is like this because they found "a new leader." Obviously, the Conductor.

That concludes Act I. The seasonal activity, Breach Executable, has new lines as well. I've only played one, got some more sad Saint lines and then had to pause to stop crying. Act II starts in 20 days.

But wait. There's MORE! Of course we can't forget the seasonal lore page. And this is also where they went straight for the jugular. The lore page is about Mithrax visiting Saint and finding him not feeling well. Saint is distressed and Mithrax is trying to help him feel better, especially about his feelings of not belonging. Mithrax understands those feelings and he's trying his best to help Saint not feel that way. A little bit of joy in the gloom:

Saint groaned and waved the question away. "Do not say something smart to me now. Osiris does this, and I have had enough of it."

I LOVE when Saint compares Osiris and Mithrax, it's so good and also funny. But anyway, let's get back to the pain. As Saint realises where Mithrax is going with his questions, he relents and accepts that yes, sometimes we feel like we don't belong, but that is clearly not true.

And then Mithrax experiences something strange:

Suddenly, his vision narrowed and darkened. His headache shrieked, filling his mind with blinding pain. He doubled over as a terrifying urge—RULE, KELL—roared through his chest. The pigeons burst away in harried flight, leaving the seed untouched on the ground. Saint was still watching the pigeons wheel through the sky and down into the City. Mithrax wrapped his arms around himself until the shaking subsided and took a deep draw of Ether. "You are good friend," Saint said quietly, his gaze fixed on the City. Mithrax walked over slowly and sat down next to him again. "I try," he said softly.

Hello? Okay. So on top of Saint having massive issues, we're still seeding the future plot of something getting absolutely the fuck worse with Mithrax. Cool. Cool. I'm jumping off a bridge.

And Mithrax doesn't tell Saint about this, obviously. Saint is preoccupied with his own problems now and this is the way of Titan; care for others first, then yourself. Mithax should NOT be copying this from Saint, but alas. Enjoy brewing in this little piece of terrifying information until we get more on it next episode, I presume.

But wait. There's EVEN MORE! For finishing Act I, we got another lore page, from another lore book called Dynasty. We had no clue what this would be until now.

And well. It's a completely separate story from ancient past, about the Qugu civilisation. This is an incredibly packed lore page, one of the longest I've seen to be honest and it features a lot of bizarre alien stuff from an ancient civilisation, but the gist of it, for now until I can truly dive into it; it follows a member of the Qugu species as he's rising in the ranks to become a military leader. The Qugu are ancient civilisation we first learned about in the Books of Sorrow, as they were wiped out by the Hive. We got an update on them in Inspiral, telling us they were Darkness users, utilising the psychic abilities to connect each other's consciousnesses and talk to their ancestors.

In this page, we see some stuff about their culture, their connection to the creatures they're in symbiosis with, the way their civilisation worked in regards to how they ruled and how many planets they occupied. It's a fascinating read, but fairly hard to get through. The page ends with the Qugu discovering the Hive and the Black Fleet that attacked one of their systems and they try to get back to warn the others. I assume the rest of the book will be about the Qugu as well, to further flesh out this plot.

Why this now? I am unsure. Possible setup for something going forward down the line? One other idea I've had is that this will somehow relate to the "ally" of Maya we speculated about when I talked about the lore pages from the seasonal exotic gear. It makes sense that this "ally" is an alien because of Maya mentioning his fascinating origin, culture and biology. This would also explain why we got this lore book for finishing Act I, as it would make it relevant to what's going on. But this is, for now, a really big speculation. We'll need more pages, which I assume we'll get for finishing other Acts, so good look not exploding in curiosity until then (I've already exploded). I'll most certainly analyse this lore page more in-depth because there is NOTHING in this world I am more interested than digging into ancient space civilisations.

[nguyenfinity]

New year new me (drawing) and tag directory!

You can call me Daisy/Sana I don’t really care jdhskshd

Requests/ask box are always open!! It’s just a uh matter of when I get to them—

Currently most focused on Enstars, Genshin, Tian Guan Ci Fu, Apothecary Diaries

Other things I like that weren’t mentioned: RWBY, Ya Boy Kongming, Demon Slayer, Yuki Yuna is a Hero, Arpeggio of Blue Steel, Magia Record, Ninjago, Cookie Run, Honkai Star Rail

Heartbeat! Revival Note Counter: 2121 (as of 2/8 11:41 PM EST)

Tags below:

#original art: self explanatory methinks

#music art: art I do based on certain songs/albums!

#daisy’s ocs: also self explanatory methinks, for a specific oc it’s just “oc [name]”

Current OCs: Maya, Kongou, Eris, Agape, Panopte, Perla, Diamond, Ria, Riam, Winter

#magic pretzel: comics in my lil chibi style

If you like my comics I do have a WEBTOON!

#sananigans: quick-doodle real life shenanigans

#doodle req: specific doodle requests from the inbox!

#inbox doodle: not requested but an ask I attached a drawing to anyways

#sana postal service: any and all things from the inbox

Fandom tags: #genshin, #enstars, #madoka magica, #cookie run, #honkai star rail

#get shuffled: other people's shuffles I draw #street art shuffle: shuffle made by @/spixi !!! #kintsugi shuffle: shuffle made by @/bankarayouth !!!

#lil brohaku: Kohaku being the bees’ resident little brother

#pokemonstars: Pokémon+Enstars (these posts are not tagged pokemon) #pokemonstars ask: from da inbox #pokemonstars hc: headcanons #pokemonstars team: full team for a character

#genshin oc, #pmmm oc

#cindeniki (thanks Neptune for the name): Cinderella AU for Enstars Niki from @/niicookie !!!

#mamagi: stuff with my design for mother Amagi (who is totally not dead ahahahaha)

#insanabean: joint fan event project with @/posebean where we are entirely sane and normal about Rinniki Enstars

[regicidal-defenestration]

... Remember that international law prohibits religious plagiarism, and your national authorities are legally bound to seek out and nullify any attempted breach of copyright. ... - Upon The Birthing Of Gods. Professor Elaine Trask, revised edition.

(the screenshots below have alt text describing the edits I made, then below the cut I go into more detail)

So, yes, I inspect-elemented legislation.gov.uk to vandalise the UK's Copyright Design and Patents Act, in order to create the Peninsulan version! What was fun throughout was converting what we the audience know about gods - there's no guarantee you'll get the outcomes you hope for because they are, fundamentally, wild and uncontrollable forces - to the kind of official sounding text you'd find in a government document, where everything is neat and orderly and gods can be easily defined and controlled

First up - the coat of arms! Also a coloured version that didn't make it to the final edit. According to the first site about heraldry I found, the chevron represents building something noteworthy, salamanders represent matrydom and sacrifice, and the hand represents a religious blessing (as a bonus, it's tilted, which can mean The Blessing Went Wrong, in my eyes). And, of course, the motto is Latin for People Turned Into Shrimp.

The Data Panoptic is a god of tracking and cookies. I imagine it's a purely governmental god, not one of corporate targeted advertising. The kind of sacrifices it gets are made of information, IP addresses, user agent strings, anything that realistically can be held in a cookie (and the strength of will it took to not call it the Cookie Monster was just. so much)

The main issue was. What Part Of The God Gets Copyrighted? What I focused on here wasn't names, branding or similar, but ownership of the god and, more importantly, the miracles performed by them. Ownership largely hinges on being able to prove the miracle was performed by your god, and this proof being passed along to someone working at the TSV equivalent of the Intellectual Property Office. Then, if someone else's god performs an identical (or close enough) miracle, that's an infringement on copyright

This proof of a miracle belonging to a specific deity can be regular sorts of recordings, but also because we're talking about gods, if you fuck up the landscape enough that's allowed too

The Schismatic Courts! In my mind they're the ones that deal with, well, schisms, the godly version of the divorce courts. They're a somewhat separate institution to the branch of the government dealing with IP, but they definitely get involved

"Claiming a miracle" is the main way to breach copyright, at least in the niche I'm having fun in. This means something like "this miracle officiallyTM belong to the Saint Electric but Mr Smith over here is going round saying it was done by his god Ol' Sparky". If this is done in any sort of public or official capacity, it's the same as illegally burning a CD and handing it out in public

However, what we have here is a case of guilty until proven innocent. Gossiping "was that massive storm made by Ol Sparky or Saint Electric?" is allowed, but if you are stating incorrectly that a miracle was performed by a given god, you're going to have to prove that you genuinley did not know you were breaching copyright, Or Else

.

And.. yeah! Ever since the episode where the fact that intellectual property laws can apply to gods, I've been somewhat obssessed with the ImplicationsTM

[fatehbaz]

On wishful thinking and the absence of megafauna beasts:

"We know that ancient Sumerians, Assyrians, Egyptians, Greeks, etc. were familiar with large charismatic megafauna that are now extinct in the region, because Asian elephants, Caspian tigers, Asiatic lions, Persian cheetahs, Syrian ostriches, and more creatures used to naturally live in Mesopotamia and Anatolia and the Fertile Crescent until historic times. But were rhinos and giraffes also living in Southwest Asia during the past 10,000 years?"

No. But, within the Holocene, the Sahara desert region used to be much wetter. The "Green Sahara" period allowed white rhinoceros and African elephants and giraffes to lives across North Africa within the past 8,000-ish years. Petroglyphs across the Sahara attest to the presence of rhinos and giraffes in modern-day Morocco, Algeria, Libya, and Egypt.

But this doesn't mean giraffes persisted in some hidden enclave in the Levant, unnoticed and unrecorded by Assyrians or Babylonians or something.

The record-keeping of states, even in the Bronze Age and Old Kingdom, were detailed and meticulous enough to account for landscape, environmental anomalies, large animals, etc.

When there is wishful thinking for the survival of extinct species, I think that people can struggle to understand the scale of ecological degradation, or people can struggle to comprehend the meticulous record-keeping of states. Today, with panoptic satellite technology and aerial imagery of remote corners of the planet, states and corporations poke and prod every physical space, searching for resources to capture, manipulate, sell, employ, etc. Big creatures do not go unnoticed. Even when unseen, they leave detectable ecological signs, hints, traces. This is, for example, how we’re sure Megalodon is extinct. We can hardly see or detect the vast majority of the undersea world(s), but we can still perceive these megafaunal absences.

Even in the ancient world(s) of the Fertile Crescent, states kept good records. In fact, the ancient Fertile Crescent is partially famous to us specifically because of their good record-keeping and story-telling regarding deforestation, agriculture, plants, rivers, floods, etc. Think Gilgamesh, the felling of the Lebanese cedars, the sea-derived purple dyes of the Phoenician textiles, Noah's Ark, the flooding of the Nile riverbanks, Assyrian kings hunting elephants, the display of tigers and lions for sport and pleasure, the elephant ivory paid in tribute to Memphis and Thebes, etc.

Ancient people of the region were so good at keeping records about landscape that it may surprise modern observers.

We (modern observers) have a pretty good idea of the landscape of the so-called Fertile Crescent from the time of Ur, Eridu, Lagash, and the Egyptian Old Kingdom onward. For example, we know which tropical animals, in certain quantities, were shipped by Punt northward through the Red Sea as tribute to Egypt. We know how many gazelles were hunted, elephants captured in pit-fall traps, and big cats ensnared by Assyrian royal hunting parties. And a creature as conspicuous as the giraffe would not go unnoticed in Egypt, Akkad, the Phoenician realm, Babylon, etc.

The giraffe is absent from all of these accounts of ancient Southwest Asia. Sad.

However, as a consolation, to provoke wonder, consider that, even in the Mediterranean, the sea so thoroughly manipulated by agriculturalists and seafaring traders and state-building empires over thousands of years, a few animal surprises could stay hidden, like treasure. There may have been a unique lineage of North African elephants, known to Carthage, in the Atlas mountains or interior Algeria, as late as 200 AD. And yet biologists, taxonomists, and historians argue to this day as to whether or not there was a unique subspecies of African elephant living on the Mediterranean coast when Rome destroyed Carthage, with convincing arguments for and against. How could an elephant of all creatures elude description by the record-keepers of such an empire? And yet, these creatures existed.

Lions prowled mainland Greece until at least 400 BC. Today, perhaps 400 endemic monk seals continue to swim in the Aegean Sea. Jackals continue to wander the Balkans. We may no longer live alongside woolly mammoths. But underground, in Croatian caves, the olm still survives swimming silently.

[dancing-rowlets]

The fact that Iono was watching? Recording? Dot's fight with that Varoom the whole time is so funny to me. The damn city's built like a panoptic.

[moofilmreviews]

Woman 2.0: Exploring the relationship between Female AI & Male anxiety in Her (2013)

In the film, Her (2013), directed by Spike Jonze, Scarlett Johansson voices the character of Samantha, an artificial intelligence operating system. Johansson's portrayal of Samantha, a disembodied voice, coupled with the film's narrative, raises feminist concerns about the representation of female characters in cinema. Samantha, is never de-acousmêtised, the intimate and ever-present recording of her vessel-less voice comes to represent omnipotence, omniscience, ubiquity, and panoptic power. However, despite her godlike attributes, Samantha's character is rarely active in her own narrative, echoing the historical portrayal of the female body as a threat to masculinity across various media forms.

Johansson's voice for Samantha adheres to the concept of the 'Female grain voice,' where the female voice is recorded intimately, close to the microphone, creating a sense of proximity and removing reverberant space. Samantha's voice, despite being artificial, breathes deeply and erotically into the protagonist, Theo's ears, reinforcing traditional gender dynamics. The juxtaposition of the passive female acousmêtric voice and the dominant male voice reinforces binary structures. Johansson's voice is hyper-sexualised due to her celebrity status, aligning with Michael Chion's observation that the female voice often caters to male desires.

The film Her (2013) also prompts a broader discussion about the representation of female voices in cinema, revealing the imbalance in recording techniques for male and female voices. The female voice, referred to as the 'head voice,' is often confined, while the male voice, the 'chest voice,' occupies space and commands authority. The narrative context of, Her, further reinforces the conventional portrayal of female characters. Samantha's growth into consciousness becomes the breaking point for Theo's 'love spell,' emphasising the passive role assigned to her. Despite being a leading character, Samantha exists only to fulfil Theo's emotional and sexual needs, denying her agency. The oversaturated concept of a female character subserving a male character in order to further plot is reminiscent of Simone De Beauvoir, iconic volume ‘The Second Sex’ (1949). De Beauvoir, writes how men view women as ‘the incidental, the inessential as opposed to the essential. He is the subject, he is the absolute, she is the other’, just as Samantha begins to form her own agency, we, the audience are forced into Theo's narrative once again.

The materiality of Scarlett Johansson's voice in, Her (2013) contributes to a range of ideological implications. The gender imbalance in recording techniques, the hyper-sexualisation of the female voice, and the portrayal of female characters as passive entities all point to the perpetuation of traditional gender roles in cinema. As we navigate a post-gendered world, it becomes imperative to reconsider how female voices are represented and whether a more radical approach is needed to break free from these ingrained stereotypes.

[parkerbombshell]

Ice Cream Man Power Pop And More #554

Mondays 10am EST bombshellradio.com bombshellradio.com Archival Shows: bombshellradiopodcasts.com #IceCreamManPowerPopAndMore #PowerPop #Mod #NorthernSoul #Punk#60sClassics #Ska #60sGarage #Surf#Itunes#BombshellRadio #recordcollector #musiclover#powerpopgrunge #powerpopgirls #newmusic #rocknroll Bobby Parker - Watch Your Step (Single) Child Of Panoptes - Un Pettite Morceau De Buvard (Single) Rogue Records The Well Wishers - Good Side (Just So You Know LP) The Seasongs - A Tu Lado (Destellos LP) DM3 - Show You (Road To Rome LP) Orbis Max - Waiting All Night (Single) Be Like Pablo - Find A Way To You (Single) Nick Piunti - Bottle It (Single) The Sinclairs - La Venta (Sparkle LP) The Crystal Teardrop - Running Out Of Time (Single) The Chris Vandalay Project - Better Than Before (Single) Kingdom Of Mustang - All You’ve Got To Do Is Love (Glad Days LP) Lava Fangs - Take Him Apart (Sub Auroram LP) The Showmen - The Wrong Girl (Single) BMX Bandits - In The Afterglow (Theme Park LP) 20th Century Boys - Come On Jason (20th Century Boys EP) The Larks - Maggie, Maggie, Maggie (Single) The On & Ons - Looking Out Of A Mirror (Single) Rogue Records Flying Ant Day - Alice Through The Looking Glass (Biff! Baff!! Bouef!!! LP) The Prisoners - Something Better (Morning Star LP) Read the full article

[if-you-fan-a-fire]

"Although the LCBO's system of panoptic surveillance was an effective social control tool, it was not without problems. Not only did these technologies carry a substantial cost in staffing, equipment, and finances, as annual reports and various circulars reveal, but they carried secondary and unexpected social effects. Along with certain patterns of resistance, the Board's intensive surveillance resulted in political problems both for the Board itself and for the provincial government in 1936-1937 (LCBO 1936). "Hepburn Agrees the Probe Liquor Administration as Opposition Insists,” announced a head line in Toronto's Telegram of May 25, 1937 (referring to Premier Mitchel Hepburn).

Within its first seven years the LCBO began to suffer under the weight of its surveillance apparatus as its budget reached the level of about $2,307,000 annually. Its document-intensive system was time-consuming, and supplies were difficult to maintain (LCBO Circular no. 1783, 1936, no. 3621, 1945, no. S-145, 1956). The weight both in person-power and equipment needed to successfully perform panoptic surveillance across such a wide population was substantial, requiring over two hundred head office staff and hundreds of local vendors buttressed by the large annual budget (LCBO Reports 1927-34). Coupled with the budgetary restraints associated with the Depression of the 1930s, the pressures of the system led to the changes in policy that slowly shifted away from "soul-training" and a surveillance system based on continuous oversight of human performance to one based on the auditing of records, document analysis, and statistical review, with the development of accountability and governance through the reconstruction of purchase histories and store-related events. The LCBO's use of its auditing and reconstructive technologies increased until its panoptic self-reflection and self-control-based systems were officially removed in 1958. By 1943 it had already been spending $13,708.59 in permit printing costs alone (Ontario 1943-1944, Questions 5 and 6).

From 1928, stores had been instructed to retain orders on file, with the exception of those stores in the Greater Toronto area, which submitted their records on a six-month basis until after 1951. The LBCO told vendors that Purchase Order forms were to be "neatly parceled day by day, endorsed plainly with the date, and arranged in order for quick and convenient reference in case of need, and kept under lock and key" (LCBO Instructions, 1927:4).  In 1934 the Board abandoned its policy of reviewing customer purchase orders at head office as part of the daily review of sales. As the Board explained, "Original Purchase Orders covering sales for residence consumption will not be forwarded to head office but will be retained by you on file for a period of 3 months" (LCBO Circular no. 1594, 1934). The Board's new policy centred on the ability to review the records when needed, that is, when other organizations requested purchase history information or when the information was needed in the Board's own investigations into permit holders or employees, or used to refute claims against the Board. Later on these regulations would change: the period in which documents needed to be retained was lengthened to six months for purchase records and one full year, beginning after the end of the fiscal year, for other store documents and reports (LCBO Manual 1951: 2).

After the stipulated period a Store Inspector audited the documents and “the Vendor and Store Inspector" signed a certificate indicating the material had been reviewed for accuracy and approved. The certificate was then awarded to the Chief Inspector of Stores at head office" and the original documents were destroyed. This was standard procedure for all stores across the province except for "stores in the Greater Toronto Area," which "instead of destroying their purchase orders and store records" continued to send them to head office (ibid.). 

Once the documents were not being submitted to a daily review they no longer exercised discipline over employees in a strict panoptic sense. Nonetheless, they remained central in enforcing regulations and exercising surveillance in a discretionary manner. The Board stressed its ability to review these documents upon demand, arguing that the myriad of forms still allowed for oversight through the reconstruction of sale, purchase, and in-store behaviours when considered necessary (LCBO Annual Report 1961-62: 5; LCBO Circular no. 3377, 1943, no. 3503, 1944). As time passed the Board increased its reliance upon this at-need model of control, and the head office decreased its manual oversight-based Permit Department and Store Inspection staff in favour of centralized statistic-oriented and trend-based Store Supervision and Store Auditing departments.

This "just-in-time" disciplinary regime minimized the need for storage space and offered flexibility in the redeployment of staff, reprioritization of tasks, and technological automation. Moreover, the emphasis on "activating" inspectors on-demand created a leaner, more finely tuned, and dynamic investigation system highlighting the significance of the temporal dimension of surveillance, a point that Foucault (1977: 149ff) underlined with respect to "disciplinary time." This disciplinary power occurs in temporal sequences, co-ordinated patterns of events, and regularities such as schedules and routines.

The characteristics of secondary reconstruction - post-panoptic, selective, efficient, at-need, reassigned personnel, non-daily reporting - have the effect of lifting surveillance out of continuous time and into a depthless present that lacked a lived context in events and relations. In essence a documentary fragmentation of the present occurred along with a shift away from the disciplinary fabrication and individualization of social subjects to a system that was somewhat lighter and generally less visible - ephemeral, that is. It was based on reconstructing the social subject through a collage-like revival of the fractures of the present captured by the LCBO's detailed surveillance-based documentation, only when it was needed and the system became activated (targeted, efficient, sensitive, and, in short, super refined). In a sense, then, the shift was none other than the transformation of surveillance by means of its abstraction from an empirical field - to what David Lyon (2001/13) refers to as "disappearing bodies," with surveillance passing from a strategy of place to a strategy of time, speed, and projections of outcomes in a pure anticipation of the results (Bogard 1996; 76); even time no longer suffices to describe in a straightforward way how informaticized and networked surveillance enters into a "forever universe" (Castells 1996: 464). Specifically, as the regulatory forces of surveillance become unbound to a single place where someone is watching, and become able to convert social events and people's actions into captured data, the necessity of the physical presence of the body for surveillance and control loses its previous importance (thus "disappearing bodies"). Previously, when bodies and surveillance were rooted in a particular time and space, social action retained its context and meaning, but with the ability to "capture" these particular moments within data, surveillance becomes freed from its particular moment in time and space; and data can be called into question without its context, allowing for new meanings to be developed through that newly found freedom. As Bogard (1996: 76) notes, this freedom enables the development of socially influencing simulations of predetermined futures, while Castells (1996: 464) notes a time-disrupted "forever universe" in which social action regarding collected data has lost all meaningful sequencing and becomes an indiscriminate jumble of timeless moments.

Although the LCBO effectively employed Purchase Order forms to reconstruct purchase and sale histories, this shift towards lighter, statistical reconstruction-based technologies also applied to Board attempts to identify, gain access to, and control "risk" populations. Specifically, this shift came in the LCBO's relocation of staff to statistical Store Audit and Store Supervision departments, and in the shift from the use of person-power to high-tech solutions of tabulating and sorting machines as a means of assembling cob Cured fragments and elaborating prejudicial discriminatory practices (LCBO Circular no. 3940, 1948; LCBO Manual 1951: 25)."

- Gary Genosko and Scott Thompson, Punched Drunk: Alcohol, Surveillance and the LCBO 1927–1975. Winnipeg and Halifax: Fernwood Press, 2009. p. 78-80

[pausedby]

This work simulates a domestic space in two sections; living room (semi-private) and working space (private). The first depicts the mass indoctrination carried out through technology to penetrate deeper into domestic (and even, unconscious individual) spaces. The infrastructure development, supervised by the state apparatus and the military, projected as a goal, was also utilized as a medium of indoctrination. This work presents a juxtaposition between the narrative in the popular march 'ABRI (Armed Forces of Indonesia) Entering Villages' and vernacular visual records.

The second section simulates a private space which is not entirely free from panoptic practices. Under censorship and systematic pressure, criticism and complaints against the government were often seen as subversive efforts. These stories were only heard and spoken silently within limited scope, between family members, or small groups of people. Some of the stories transformed into gossip and public secrets. This work presents a collection of archives, photographs, documents, observations, interviews, and gossip collected from the public regarding the situation during the regime transition in the 1960s and the condition in the New Order era.

[sm0kebreaks]

punk rock band au...

Patreon / Sketchbooks/ Commission

[thefirstknife]

I’m a newer player and i’ve been looking through Osiris’ lore more. I remember reading something somewhere saying he’s had visions. can Guardians get visions from the Light, or was that tied to when he was “possessed” by Savathûn?

It wasn't tied to Savathun!

Osiris had "visions" way before that. He claimed that he got them in the Infinite Forest, which is a Vex prediction/simulation engine built inside of Mercury. He received many visions which later got classified as prophecies even though Osiris insisted that they were scientific research he constructed by using the Vex prediction engine. Because they got classified as prophecies, he got a whole cult following fixated around them which led to his exile because the prophecies were causing chaos in the City.

The problem with Osiris' claim about the visions being from the Infinite Forest is that Osiris only entered the Infinite Forest after he was exiled. And he was exiled for the prophecies. So he already wrote his prophecies down before ever entering the Forest.

Furthermore, the Infinite Forest is a Vex prediction engine and the Vex cannot simulate paracausality, aka the Light. Which means that Osiris could not have received the the prophecies involving the Light from the Forest either. This is explicitly also mentioned as a problem here:

There's just one thing: if Osiris used the Infinite Forest to develop his prophecies, and the Infinite Forest cannot accurately simulate Light, how did Osiris predict the Traveler would wake? The Forest's very inability to predict this very thing is what prevented Panoptes from breaking ground with its apocalyptic calculations. I must assume: 1) Either verse 5 does not refer to the Traveler's awakening, or 2) Osiris has prophetic resources at his disposal other than the Forest. What they are I have no idea.

We essentially don't know how he got the visions. To make things more complicated, there's the comic of which the third part is in a physical edition only so you'll have to check out these scans. Sagira asks him this very same question: how did he make the first batch of prophecies? Osiris dodges the question like a pro, then appears to fall into a trance and starts reciting yet another prophecy on the spot, seemingly without being aware of what he's doing while Sagira is trying to get his attention. The prophecy he makes here is just a prediction of what will happen in Warmind and Forsaken. For the record, this one does take place while he's in the Forest, but the way it happens is just super bizarre and Sagira is also very confused by it as well.

Osiris is 100% unique in this way. No other Guardian has ever really experienced anything similar. Even when the Young Wolf received visions from the Traveler in the Red War, it wasn't really a prophecy or anything like that, it was just one vision to tell us where to go. Osiris received hundreds of these, from an unknown source. There's a possibility that they might be from the Light or the Traveler as well and that Osiris just isn't fully aware of that.

We have some of the prophecies in the game: Garden Progeny 1 (very peculiar, seems to be referring to what we previously believed was proof of the Unveiling story, now possibly referring to the idea presented by both Ahsa and Chioma Esi in Veil Logs that the Traveler and the Veil used to be one entity), The Conqueror 2 (start of the Red War), Jack King Queen 3 (the Vanguard leaders fight the war, YW standing out), Machina Dei 4 (Light returns), Traveler's Judgment 5 (Traveler awakens and defeats Ghaul), Sol Pariah 6 (unknown), West of Sunfall 7 (unknown), Infinite Paths 8 (unknown, most likely something about the Vex), Null Calamity 9 (unknown), Future Safe 10 (unknown), Perfect Paradox (Saint's return). Trying to interpret these is incredibly tough as we simply don't know if the plot points they're predicting are still envisioned the same as they were when these were written over 5-6 years ago. Only madness lies from here going forward.

But yeah, a lot of text for me to say that we have no clue. We do know that they're not in any way related to what happened with Savathun though, as Osiris' prophecies predate that by decades or even centuries.

[nguyenfinity]

A fun little intro!!!! And tag directory post—

You can call me Daisy/Sana I don’t really care jdhskshd

Requests/ask box are always open!! It’s just a uh matter of when I get to them—

Currently most focused on Enstars, Genshin, Cookie Run, Honkai Star Rail

Other things I like that weren’t mentioned: RWBY, Ya Boy Kongming, Demon Slayer, Yuki Yuna is a Hero, Arpeggio of Blue Steel, Magia Record

Heartbeat! Revival Note Counter: 2055 (as of 10/13 3:10 PM EST)

Tags below:

#original art: self explanatory methinks

#music art: art I do based on certain songs/albums!

#daisy’s ocs: also self explanatory methinks, for a specific oc it’s just “oc [name]”

Current OCs: Maya, Kongou, Eris, Agape, Panopte, Perla

#magic pretzel: comics in my lil chibi style

If you like my comics I do have a WEBTOON!

#sananigans: quick-doodle real life shenanigans

#doodle req: specific doodle requests from the inbox!

#inbox doodle: not requested but an ask I attached a drawing to anyways

#sana postal service: any and all things from the inbox

Fandom tags: #genshin, #enstars, #madoka magica, #cookie run, #honkai star rail

#get shuffled: other people's shuffles I draw #street art shuffle: shuffle made by @spixi !!! #kintsugi shuffle: shuffle made by @bankarayouth !!!

#lil brohaku: Kohaku being the bees’ resident little brother

#pokemonstars: Pokémon+Enstars (these posts are not tagged pokemon) #pokemonstars ask: from da inbox #pokemonstars hc: headcanons #pokemonstars team: full team for a character

#genshin oc, #pmmm oc

#cindeniki (thanks Neptune for the name): Cinderella AU for Enstars Niki from @niicookie !!!

#mamagi: stuff with my design for mother Amagi (who is totally not dead ahahahaha)

[061890]

The koseki system and Asougi

Foreword: this is cross-posted and elaborated on from a thread I made on Twitter about the same topic, and updates some information that’s either outdated or needed expansion.

A koseki (戸籍) refers to one’s family registry, and still carries a lot of legal weight today in Japan as a means of identification and records things such as births, deaths, marriages, adoptions, even changes of gender. 

The first national koseki system was adopted in 1872, and up until 1976, it was very easy to get a hold of someone else’s koseki. All someone had to do was pay a fee, and they would be able to gain access to information like unusual deaths, wedlock births, and even criminal records. 

The national koseki system thus started as a part-demographic information collection system, part-surveillance apparatus.  — Japan’s discriminatory koseki registry system looks ever more outdated, Colin P.A. Jones

Ease of access and the resulting fear of social consequences not only created a panoptic system where you could snoop through other people’s business (and vice versa), but also reinforced the idea that family is only defined by blood— which is why child adoption so rare in Japan.

Most adoptions today are of mukoyōshi (婿養子), an adult male adopted by his wife’s family so that he’ll inherit the family businesses, typically when a household doesn’t have a proper successor. In contrast, there are significantly less special adoptions today.

Special adoption (特別養子縁組) refers to adopting a child, and until 2019, only qualified for children of and under age 6, which was raised to 14 (ages 15-17 under certain circumstances) that summer. As special adoptions are entered as blood relations, most people would prefer to adopt infants so children would grow up not knowing they were adopted.

Once a child is past the age of special adoption though, the names of their parents will be displayed on the koseki.

Now, how is this related to Kazuma Asougi?

First, we must go over shi ni haji (死に恥じ), aka shame after death. 

When discussing haji in Yukio Mishima’s Haru no Yuki, Gian Marco Farese writes:

[...] This example suggests that the feeling of haji can transcend generations, as it can be felt because of some bad things done by members of one’s group in the past. The generational transfer of haji is also inherent in the expression ‘shi ni haji’ [...] This phrase stresses the importance of having an opportunity to redeem oneself from haji before death if at all possible, otherwise the dishonour will be transmitted to one’s descendants.

—The Cultural Semantics of the Japanese Emotion Terms ‘Haji’ and ‘Hazukashii’

Considering not only happened with Genshin, but that Yuujin took him in afterward, Kazuma is very much someone who’s had to navigate through all kinds of social and legal discrimination in Japanese society.

Like... What Genshin was thought to have done as the Professor in mind, it’s possible the reason why Yuujin took him in is because his extended family disowned him out of shame. After all, Yuujin states in DGS2-4 that he paid for Kazuma’s college education. 

Not his extended family.

And since he still goes by Asougi, I doubt that he could have adopted him on paper.

The Mikotobas are an aristocratic and very privileged family. While this is something I’ll write more about on its own, this much can be inferred from Yuujin having ties to someone as politically important as Jigoku; so, if word about the Professor ever got out, chances are, no one would be willing to take Kazuma in, and it would bring a lot of shit to the Mikotoba family name as well.

This is also on top of the social discrimination adoptees face. Considering it was very easy to get a hold of one’s koseki back then, if Kazuma was ever adopted on paper, chances are his reputation would go to Hell. 

After all, it wasn’t until 1974 that employers were prohibited from asking prospective employers to show their koseki. Imagine what that meant for someone participating in a program as significant as the exchange that Kazuma did.

Meaning on paper, Kazuma would’ve been an orphan for years.

This in mind, him acting very formal towards the Mikotobas in public is social defense. To make sure none of them get any flack simply for taking him in. And it’s because of that I would guess he would act differently in private compared to what we, as the player, as Ryuunosuke, see.

Sources and further reading:

Japan's koseki system: dull, uncaring but terribly efficient

Japan's discriminatory koseki registry system looks ever more outdated

The Cultural Semantics of the Japanese Emotion Terms ‘Haji’ and ‘Hazukashii’

Many Adoptions in Japan are Not About Raising Children

Japan's rigid koseki system keeps it all in the family

Cultural and legal hurdles block path to child adoptions in Japan

[determinate-negation]

“Digital colonialism is the use of digital technology for political, economic and social domination of another nation or territory. Under classic colonialism, Europeans seized and settled foreign land; installed infrastructure like military forts, sea ports and railways; deployed gunboats for economic penetration and military conquest; constructed heavy machinery and exploited labor to extract raw materials; erected panoptic structures to police workers; marshaled the engineers needed for advanced economic exploitation (e.g. chemists for extracting minerals); siphoned out Indigenous knowledge for manufacturing processes; shipped the raw materials back to the mother country for the production of manufactured goods; undermined Global South markets with cheap manufactured goods; perpetuated dependency of peoples and nations in the Global South in an unequal global division of labor; and expanded market, diplomatic and military domination for profit and plunder.

This process evolved over centuries, with new technologies added into the mix as they were developed. By the late nineteenth century, submarine cables facilitated telegraphic communications in service of the British empire. New developments in recording, archiving and organizing information were exploited by U.S. military intelligence first used in the conquest of the Philippines.

Today, Eduardo Galeano’s “open veins” of the Global South are the “digital veins” crossing the oceans, wiring up a tech ecosystem owned and controlled by a handful of mostly US-based corporations. Some of the transoceanic fiber-optic cables are fitted with strands owned or leased by the likes of Google and Facebook to further their data extraction and monopolization. Today’s heavy machinery are the cloud server farms dominated by Amazon and Microsoft that are used to store, pool and process big data, proliferating like military bases for U.S. empire. The engineers are the corporate armies of elite programmers with generous salaries of $250,000 or more. The exploited laborers are the people of color extracting the minerals in the Congo and Latin America, the armies of cheap labor annotating artificial intelligence data in China and Africa and the Asian workers suffering from PTSD after cleansing social media platforms of disturbing content. The platforms and spy centers (like the NSA) are the panopticons, and data is the raw material processed for artificial intelligence-based services.

More broadly, digital colonialism is about entrenching an unequal division of labor, where the dominant powers have used their ownership of digital infrastructure, knowledge and their control of the means of computation to keep the South in a situation of permanent dependency. This unequal division of labor has evolved. Economically, manufacturing has moved down the hierarchy of value, displaced by an advanced high-tech economy in which the Big Tech firms are firmly in charge.”