#pay structure

[storgicdealer]

thinking about how chosens and darks existence and crimes were perceived in the internet and outernet. did they become a regular occurence there or something. JUST WHAT did other sticks think about them

if the timeline of golds death combined with darks supposed destruction of the internet this is probably how king would react

[marzipanandminutiae]

I brought the skirt I'm working on to the museum yesterday, to get some hand-sewing done at the desk between tours (a lot of my projects end up being done half-hand and half-machine, because I love working on the train or during downtime at my various jobs). you know, the one made of the God-Tier WoolTM

when I invited my coworker, a 19-year-old student, to feel the fabric- in that "OH MY GOD FEEL THIS!!!" tone -her jaw dropped

she had never felt soft, light- or even medium-weight wool in her life. she previously thought, it turns out, that all wool was coarse, heavy, and itchy. she couldn't stop stroking it with that awestruck look on her face

truly, fuck fast fashion and the modern garment industry. for depriving us of sensory richness in our clothing so thoroughly that most of us don't even know what we've lost

[tododeku-or-bust]

My fandom inclinations be damned, I've been saying forever that Greek Mythology is one of White Western people's favorite mythologies for a reason, and their biased translations and performances of it have long reflected that projection of that white-centric ideology and power fantasy. So to hear people say "we didn't learn about The Odyssey" no buddy you didn't hear about a lot of peoples' mythologies in school but I ASSURE you, you at least heard about The God Damned Odyssey.

[rawliverandgoronspice]

weird and only stp post but "the blade is your implement" fucks so hard as a sentence, the quasi-alliteration makes it both memorable and very pleasing to the ear and it's really good

[qiu-yan]

actually i think jiang cheng would be one of those people who doesn't care about the whole student loan problem at all....because jin ling is rich enough to pay his own way through college and jiang cheng dgaf about anyone else lmao

[housecow]

the urge to identify TX grass species around me grows

[polysyndetonaddictsupportgroup]

hello hello!! your fic pez dispenser debris brings me immense joy. and i wanna know if the other nejire and tamaki will be showing up. id love to see their reactions to fucking #leku. and i’d love to hear your thoughts on them in general if you have any to spare. the big three have such a fun dynamic to me.

Tamaki will appear. I’m not fully settled on Nejire. In my mind, she moved to Kyoto not long after she graduated but keeps in very close touch (if you read the battle of Yokohama posts, she was there during that fight because she was visiting Her Boys and insisted on a Big Three Sleep Over, which is why the three of them were together when Izuku called to begin with). They have a group chat that she started blowing up when the Leku news hit. All of them are painfully, violently aware of the fact Mirio is absolutely not dating Izuku and also of the fact that Mirio’s probably close to drowning himself at the mere thought.

I do really like the idea of the Big Three having been sort of outcasts before they were the big three, and I think canon supports this reading. They were all sort of the weird kids. They were each other’s only friends. After they started rising in the ranks, they became more popular, but they all consider the others their main people.

I also like the idea that they became the Big Three because of each other.

They were friends before they were the big three. And it’s not a coincidence that the big three were all already friends. They pushed each other to grow in their skills and surpass everyone else.

The reason why they haven’t been more present in pez is actually the same reason why I didn’t have them open a hero agency together: they all need to grow separately from the others for a bit.

Like. Here’s Mirio, with two very skilled and experienced heroes at his side, waiting for Izuku to graduate so he can start his agency. Why not go into business with the friends he’s already been fighting with for years?

I see the Big Three as people who all, for one reason or another, decided that they needed to learn how to be strong on their own at the start of their career.

Take Tamaki. He’s childhood friends with Mirio. He was briefly referenced in one of the tumblr posts as one of Mirio’s staunchest advocates after he lost his Quirk. So why isn’t he heroes with Mirio?

Well, he sort of is. He’s got a mutual support agreement with him.

Time to derail into my favorite topic: the economic models underpinning fictional societies. As you can probably guess I’m great at parties.

Mutual support agreements are contractual devices that I came up with in response to the convoluted economic structure of heroics compensation I discussed a few posts ago. In that post, I discussed independent/underground v. agency models with respect to public compensation and how I think that there’s an impossibly complicated matrix that grants heroes portions of the local budget based on their statistics. Briefly, I discussed how that calculation would cause conflict with big name heroes taking credit for their sidekicks’ work because agencies would necessarily need to be counted as one entity for the purposes of public funding.

What happens when multiple agencies are involved in the same incident?

As a reminder, the reason why they need to assign credit for a bust to one individual is because agencies are funded as a whole. This is a grant system that’s meant to be more than just about paying a salary—the government is providing funds meant to go towards an office space, supplies, everything. You could not give everyone in an agency public funding separate checks under that model. Public funding is made out to the agency as a whole and it’s up to the agency as to how to use it. But if you have six people from the same agency who all register the exact same take down because they all participated—well now you’ve got the one job reported six times over for the same filing entity. That’s going to horrifically skew the funding calculation. The government’s paying for the same bust six times over and you just incentivized hero agencies to send their people all to do the same job because it pays the same to have six guys stop one criminal as it does to have six guys stop six different criminals separately.

But hey—sometimes it’s a six guy job. That would more appropriately be considered an enhancement to a job’s relative difficulty than it would be to giving credit for a takedown. After all, the same job could require “six guys” or “one All Might.” If you focus on the number of heroes an agency uses in a job than you do on how difficult that job actually is, then you’re inadvertently penalizing better heroes because Mid Tier Agency needed six guys to handle what you did on your own, but since they needed six whole guys they get paid more for the same thing that you could do solo.

But the reason for this one man credit structure is because you’re getting one check for the government per agency. But what about when heroes from different agencies team up? Big Hero is not sharing a government funding check with Even Bigger Hero, and there’s absolutely no way that every single team up is just fucking pro bono for everyone but one guy. That’d make it impossible. So the same job would have to get counted multiple times when it involved different heroic entities.

The fact that you were teamed up instead of solo would go into the relative value calculation of each independent job. You get the full pot if you’re solo, but if you’re sharing the load, you’re sharing the credit. But at the same time, how much credit you get would also have to be determined on a case by case basis. Like. A hero that evacuated three civilians contributed to a fight, but they in no way should get equal credit and compensation to All Might, who fought the entire villain team solo.

So say Big Hero Agency and Bigger Hero Agency are doing a team up for the good of Japan. Big Hero Agency initiated the investigation, did most of the legwork, and invited Bigger Hero Agency onto the job. However, when it came to actually fighting, Bigger Hero Agency absolutely carried the day. Big Hero Agency would have been dust if Bigger Hero Agency hadn’t been there.

Who deserves more credit and compensation?

There is probably some kind of governmental dispute/appeal board to settle disputes about compensation, but like. As someone who does government work. The government’s absolute favorite thing to say is “we are not babysitting you, fucking figure it out like big boys.” They’ll have a way to resolve disputes, but they will also heavily incentivize voluntary agreement amongst the parties.

Planned team ups probably have legal working shit out ahead of time. Spontaneous team ups or heroes stealing each other’s fights a la Mount Lady and Kamui Woods in the pilot are probably the biggest headaches.

But what about heroes that are always teaming up? They’re your go to. Your homeboy. The daredevil to your Spider-Man. You don’t file your paperwork together, but you’re still always fighting side by side. Are you renegotiating who gets credit for what in every single little fight?

Fuck no. That’s a huge pain in the ass. Enter the mutual support agreement. It’s a contract that has a bunch of clauses meant to help streamline deciding who gets credit for what and resolve disputes before they happen.

You wouldn’t just want this for compensation purposes. Say Big Hero commits the hero equivalent of police brutality. Now he’s being sued. He’s apparently not that big of a hero as the name implies, because he’s got no fucking money. You want more money for your client, so you need a deeper pocket to pull from. At the time of the incident, he was working with Bigger Hero Agency. They’re not the same agency, but it was Bigger Heroes bust, and they work together all the time. Big Hero is basically one of Bigger Heroes employees hidden behind a different corporate structure. Should Bigger Hero be liable for Big Hero?

That’s a big fucking court case that can be headed off at the pass by the fact that Bigger Hero put indemnification and liability clauses in its mutual support agreement. There’s a lot of issues that would arise from the practice of heroics that you’d want to govern ahead of time with a contract. So you sign a mutual support agreement.

But the silly little fake tumblr post also said they weren’t popular and mostly agencies like Idaten used them. So why is that?

Frankly, because it’s not very worth agencies while to team up with other agencies on the regular. The system doesn’t incentivize it.

If you have all of your own sidekicks on a job, you can steal credit from them. The same is not true for heroes from other agencies. You get more public funding if you staff a job with all people from your agency instead of having part of the credit go to other agencies. And you get to stand in front of the cameras and say “Big Hero Has Saved The City Again” instead of having to say “Thank You To Our Dear Friends From Bigger Hero Agency Who Carried This Team.”

Idaten is the exception because, well. It doesn’t care. Idaten’s priority is cultivating the necessary talent and teamwork needed to get the job done. It doesn’t care if it has to go outside of the agency for that. Fuck, Tensei’s canonically willing to reach out to vigilantes. Its genuine focus is saving people, so it goes against the grain of what the system incentivizes.

Mirio and Tamaki have a mutual support agreement. They’re out working together so much that Fat Gum’s agency approved an overall disliked mechanism to facilitate their team ups. They are heroes together—so why aren’t they in an agency together?

I think Tamaki wanted to spend his first year in heroics forcing himself out of his comfort zone so he’d improve. Fat Gum will force him in front of the cameras. He’s focusing on learning how to communicate effectively with the public and with the media, and Fat Gum has the sort of resources and infrastructure where Tamaki can devote the time to learning that and improving. If he was in an agency with Mirio, he’d use Mirio as a crutch to hide from something he genuinely wants to improve in. Fat Gum forces him to grow.

Mirio himself sort of had to go independent. For one, he and Izuku decided to start their agency not too long after Mirio got his license. It was before Mirio debuted. Izuku had just finished his first year. No one knew who either of them were, and they had no clue just how famous they’d both become before Izuku graduated.

They both figured they’d be a couple of nobody heroes with a dinky little agency right out the gate of Izuku’s graduation and were sort of genuinely excited at the prospect. They’d just be heroes together, which is all they wanted. They’d figured no one would give a shit about them until well after they started their agency and started working and that Izuku would have 0 offers to work elsewhere because he wasn’t even going to apply to agencies. So Mirio decided he’d stay independent until Izuku graduated so he wouldn’t be tied up in an agency contracts and they could just start fresh.

The other reason is that most agencies wouldn’t touch Mirio with a ten foot pole because he was Quirkless, and even with the ones that would, he suspected they’d sideline or coddle him because he was Quirkless. Being independent meant he could do whatever the hell he pleased. So he bought the Mirio Mom Van and, for a brief, glorious moment, convinced All Might to supervise their bullshit so he could start going on jobs with Izuku (students have to be supervised by heroes with a teaching license, which he wouldn’t be eligible for for the first three years of his career, except in exigent circumstances. He couldn’t have Izuku as an intern himself but All Might sure could). For a few beautiful weeks it was just Mirio, Izuku, and fucking All Might in the Mirio Mom Van going on stakeouts, all wearing the world’s stupidest mustaches. The UA internship program revoked permission for this arrangement not long after it started formally out of concerns for the legality of this arrangement since All Might was no longer an active duty hero, informally because All Might, Izuku, and Mirio is the stupidest and most reckless combination fucking imaginable and they are killing Aizawa from the stress they are killing him. So now Mirio works alone while he waits for Izuku to be fully licensed.

Nejire I kind of see as someone who moved away from her hometown right out of the gate of graduation but visited home very frequently, which is why she moved to Kyoto after graduation but was having a fucking sleepover at Mirio’s place when Yokohama happened. She takes the bullet train back at least once a month and spends the weekend bumming on Mirio or Tamaki’s couch. I think she wanted to see who she was away from home and there’d never be a better time to do it. I also think she’ll move back so that way she can work more fully with Her Boys one day, but wanted to push herself out of the familiar first.

All of the trio’s reasons for not working together quite yet are mutable, to be clear. Tamaki just wanted the experience early in his career or he knew he’d never learn the public relation skills he wanted to get. Nejire also just wanted the experience somewhere else before she put down real roots somewhere and is liable to move back to be with her friends and family. And Mirio’s on the verge of opening his own agency, so he doesn’t have to worry about getting sidelined by his boss anymore or getting tied up in a bad contract.

[tiresiasbuttlicker72]

watching blood of zeus from the hospital bed and everyone is hot

[ganondoodle]

(been rewatching some of those totk critique vids i liked in the past and now seeing the cutscenes again, espeically when compared to botws, ......... the way the characters move and everything is so stiff?? like i didnt rly notice it when i played the game bc i watched each scene once and never looked back bc i was so bored but now i see just ... like sometimes it feels like all thats missing is the mouse someones using to slightly move the model on its rig in real time- or the way the characters talk feeling alot more like the classical mouth open mouth closed bwabwabwa- especially on rauru and mineru

i dont wanna sound like im literally trying to find something wrong with everything of that game but ... it looks so static- like the way the champions in botw moved while talking already gave you a bit of extra character but in totk they all just kinda .. do the basic movement and move their jaw enough to imply talking?? am i crazy?? like its not that extreme in every single moment but for most of them ... right?)

-not really the point in itself but also bc i just saw the first cutscene you get after zelda gets to da paaaast again ... how the hell do sonia and rauru even find zelda.. like, its possible she was lying on the ground for a while but even then, hyrule is so BIG what are the chances that the king and queen just where there exactly, its not like she was carried by a giant bird and dropped into a tree (ww), she just kind materializes and gently plops into long grass. like its not even a cosntruct that finds her, or some hylian, no its them specifically (couldnt you have used the lil heehoo look how rich in personality da king is actually bc he sneaks out to hunt sometime info for that? .. he was out on a hunt and found her or sth? no? another case of plot shortcuts or whatever you want to call it?)-

[reality-detective]

I’m pretty sure you will appreciate "Laminin"🤔

[darlingofdots]

I usually read historical romances, but I've been branching into contemporaries more recently especially because I want to read more f/f and the offerings in the Regency/Victorian section are kind of grim. But I did pick up The Duke's Sister and I, a Regency-era f/f romance published by Harlequin (!) and while I am having a perfectly good time with it, something stood out to me about this particular book's target audience and who books are for in general.

First of all, I have gotten into the habit of coding romances while I read them because that's what I do for my academic work, and it's interesting to me that the protagonist dynamic in The Duke's Sister and I is clearly still rooted in the more traditional "he's a playboy and she's a virgin" setup that has gotten a bit less popular generally but was part of the submission guidelines for Harlequin/Mills & Boon until fairly recently: Charlotte has had lots of female lovers while Loretta doesn't even know that that's an option, and Charlotte is the one who will have to overcome her #issues to accept that love and happiness are even an option.

Secondly, this adds a bit of a twist to the usual arc of sexual awakening for the "heroine" but still echoes that exact dynamic: one character being the other's first ever sexual relationship, which means they are also the one to teach the "virgin" how sex and pleasure work. I am personally not a huge fan of this simply because I don't find that first unsure and often insecure exploration very interesting, and I much prefer to read about characters who know their own bodies and what they want from a partner. But with The Duke's Sister and I, we have a specifically gay awakening, which I am much more receptive to in the context of a historical setting.

This book also discusses how the patriarchy controls what women know and even how we see ourselves, through the lens of Charlotte as a painter specifically of "realistic" portraits that depict female bodies as they are. There's a lot of messaging about how women don't see representations of normal faces and bodies in art and how it affects their self-image. I am not knocking this book, to be clear, this is a perfectly good theme for a romance novel and I think it pairs with the gay awakening really well! For our baby gay protagonist Loretta, a whole new world is opening up that she didn't even know could exist before, and for the first time she is able to see herself and her life without the filter of what the patriarchy wants her to think, do, and see.

But here is the question of target audience: of course there are romance readers who are just discovering that they're queer and books like this can support the process of re-understanding themselves. HOWEVER for a reader who is not currently having that specific experience, this messaging is unnecessary. I do not need to be reassured that women can be in love with women! I know! So who is this book for? The playboy hero/virgin heroine dynamic this riffs on is deeply rooted in patriarchal conceptions of female sexuality even as it attempts to liberate from them, but the socially-motivated mechanisms behind the trope kind of don't work when you remove the gendered power differential. It's so interesting to me how The Duke's Sister and I is in many ways a really conventional and straighforward historical romance that sets up the protagonists in the well-established roles of heterosexual hero/heroine romances, but also is fundamentally about breaking out of the constraints of heterosexuality.

Queer romance novels constantly have to grapple with wanting to play in the romance novel sandbox, which sits in a firmly cisheteronormative playground, and using similar tropes and telling similar stories because it's fun, while also confronting how much of the genre runs on cisheterosexuality. How do we tell queer stories in this environment? How far can we bend the rules to our purposes until we realise we have either broken the sandbox or left it behind? And some novels very deliberately and thoughtfully engage with these questions and try to queer the romance as much as possible, but others just want to tell familiar stories with queer characters, and both of these are perfectly fine and fun! But that tension is always there and, in my opinion, really draws attention to how the genre is constructed and all the ways it relies on intensely gendered assumptions about love, sex, and happiness.

[peresephoknee]

Stephen is terrified that a midlife crisis brought on by the demands of taking command is going to destroy Jack’s joie de vivre.

[totally-not-an-awkward-okapi]

Had a weird dream about Free Willy but trying to break an Angel(?) out of a government facility and honestly now I’m attached to this big anxious bird. Learning to fly is hard when you’re a gangly preteen.

[realtapiocafan]

Ok, i know everyone is getting extensions (except for us 🫠) but even if we just. ignore how the DK and Myles deals will likely cost the Bengals millions -I'm concerned about how they're structuring Mike G's deal.

Jake does a wonderful job detailing Mike G's contract and why his cap hit of 89% for the first year is so bad.

Let me try my hand at explaining this contract stuff:

The Bengals structured Mike G's contract to have most of the cap hit on one year. Obviously, that limits the amount of cap they can spend on other players for that year. And since the cap hit is mostly focused on Year 1 of Mike G's deal, that's next year. So why did the Bengals structure the deal like this? IF they cut Mike G in Year 3 of this deal, the dead cap will be minimized bc all of the cap hit was on Year 1.

The problem ofc is that they could've had more space for free agents next year if they spread the cap hit around. You're paying the same amount no matter what! But structuring it this way is limiting the amount of money that the Bengals can spend this year, basically just handicapping themselves out of a fear of risk in future years. IMO, this is prioritizing saving future money instead of caring about what happens next year.

Now, Mike G's deal isn't bank-breaking so the cap hit isn't egregious, but if the cap hit for Ja'Marr/Tee/Trey's first year is as high as Mike G's, well. Say goodbye to whatever free agents you're eyeing, bc we simply will not have the cap space.

And we could have Ja'Marr/Tee/Trey AND have a fair few of free agents (look at some of Jake's tweets), but the FO is too busy trying to save money in 2027.