#so it seems like a very viable platform

[ettawritesnstudies]

Assume you are interested in the book in question, and you could get which ever format you wanted in either situation. (Ebook, paperback, hardcover).

For the preorder: Everyone gets the same rewards regardless of what you order. There might be a larger giveaway that would be won by lottery.

For the kickstarter: You can pick your tier + rewards going up in value for larger items.

In general, the merch itself would be the same for both campaigns, for example, everyone in the preorder gets stickers, and everyone in the lowest tier on kickstarter gets stickers. The rewards would be exclusive to either the preorder or the kickstarter, so you wouldn't be able to get them afterwards, except at special events like book signings or something.

please boost!

[band--psycho]

Zayne x Reader - Umbrella

For my ongoing A-Z Challenge (Requests open)

Please be kind, reblogs are always welcome and greatly appreciated!

Thank you all for the continued support and I hope you all enjoy this! 💛

Requests are open so if you have any ideas/requests, you're more than welcome to send them over.

I do not give permission for any of my works to be copied or translated onto this site or other platforms

Main Masterlist / Zayne Masterlist / Join My Taglist

Today was just not your day. 

You’d already had a pretty shitty day at work; meaning that all you wanted to do was go home and forget that today had ever happened.

But now the last train home (that you’d already been waiting for for over forty five minutes) had just been canceled; meaning that you now had to walk home. 

As annoying as this was, it wasn’t the end of the world, it just meant that you’d get home slightly later than you’d been hoping. 

The problem was, it was raining.

Hard. 

And you had no coat, no hoodie and no umbrella. 

But why would you? 

This morning, the sun was shining in a beautiful, cloudless, blue sky; and you hadn’t heard of any rain forecasted for today…but that was your first mistake. 

You tried calling a taxi, but they were all booked up, you weren’t surprised, everyone else who’d been waiting for that train was doing exactly the same thing. 

You considered staying at the station until the rain stopped; though given by the heaviness of it, it looked like it was going to be going on for a long while. 

You toyed with the idea of staying there anyway, even if that meant waiting until the early hours of the morning and getting the earliest train home, sleeping for an hour and then getting the train back to work. 

But you knew that that idea wasn’t a viable option; you needed to sleep and if that meant that you had to get absolutely soaked beforehand, then so be it. 

You opened the door, watching as the deluge from the sky continued…there was so much rain falling the sound blurred into one long whirring noise.

‘This is going to be a long walk home,’ you thought to yourself, silently hoping that the downpour would just magically stop when you stepped outside; but as much as you hoped, you knew it wouldn’t happen. 

So you took a deep breath, preparing yourself, knowing that you were going to get soaked the second you stepped outside. 

But much to your surprise, you didn’t. 

‘Did you actually make the rain stop?’ you thought to yourself for a brief moment, that was until you looked up to see an umbrella over you. 

“Aren’t hunters meant to be prepared for all types of weather?” a familiar voice said from behind you. 

You turned around to see Zayne standing behind you, holding his umbrella over you, shielding you from the rain. 

“It’s not my fault the weather forecast was wrong,” you replied back, the irritation clear in your voice as you folded your arms across your chest. 

You watched as a small smirk tugged at Zaynes lips, making your eyes narrow in confusion. 

“Would that really have changed your current predicament?”

Quickly you realised what he was referring to. 

When you were both younger, you never used to have a waterproof coat, nor an umbrella, not because you didn’t own any, but because you just never had them on you when it rained.

Only on the very rare occasions you might’ve been seen wearing a hoodie, but for the most part, you were never prepared for weather like this. 

“Probably not,” you admitted with a sigh, shrugging your shoulders. 

It wasn’t that you enjoyed walking in the rain, you didn’t, it just seemed to be that whenever it rained you weren’t prepared for it. 

“I’ll walk you home,” Zayne spoke, taking a few steps closer towards you, making sure to keep the umbrella over your head as he did so. 

“I’ll be fi-” 

“You’ll be soaked from head to toe,” he interjected, ”and as your doctor, I have a duty of care for you,” 

“You sure it’s not just because you want to spend time with me?” You teased back playfully, as the both of you began walking away from the station; the umbrella being the only form of shelter you both had from the rain. 

“Maybe that’s also part of the reason,” he admitted softly with a warm smile.

It felt like it had been ages since you and Zayne had really spent any time together, both of you had been so busy lately with work that your social lives had pretty much become non-existent. 

You missed him. 

And he missed you. 

That’s why he ran from the platform he’d been standing on (patiently awaiting his train, which, unlike yours, hadn’t been canceled, to the platform that you were on. 

Yes it meant he was going to get home ridiculously late, but if it meant he got to spend time with you, then it was definitely worth it. . 

“Well maybe you could have dinner at mine tonight,” you offered, hoping that he didn’t sense the nervousness in your voice. 

It made perfect sense; and it killed one bird with two stones, you both got to spend time together and could eat, which you were pretty sure Zayne had done as little as you had today. 

“Alright,” he nodded, accepting your invitation gracefully. 

You two had had dinner at each other’s apartments loads of times before, it wasn’t an uncommon thing...but for some reason you couldn’t shake the feeling that this time was different.

Tagging:

@xacatalepsyx @book-dragon03 @fangirlsfandomsss @ollieneedsamilkshake @ladyparamount @cheesemachine44 @exactlynuttypatrol @thegalaxysedge22 @girasolcarichuu @popcorn-mochi01 @tasha-1994 @worm-in-a-bug

[centrally-unplanned]

I blogged before about this company, Orange, that is an AI-powered manga translation company. Essentially, their pitch is that most manga is still (officially) untranslated, a ton of manga gets made after all but few become mainstream enough to get ported overseas. They posit the barrier to that is the cost of translation; if they could automate that process, then they can make viable for release what previously was not. That concept rests on two questions - does the tech pan out, and does the economics add up?

Recently they went live, under the name Emaqi, so we can better explore those questions. What I notice on first glance is the pitch seems to have shifted a little bit in post:

You are not the translators of Vinland Saga, Witch Hat Atelier, or Magic Knight Rayearth, very obviously so. They have Sailor Moon in here lol. These are just the official translations being cross-listed into their "manga platform", where you buy it there and it lives, DRM-locked, in their app. Which is fair enough as a model, that is just Kindle, it works. Though Kindle and a dozen others already exist, so their value-add has to be the AI translation stuff right? That is why I would choose this over another app.

Which they do have, though it is kind of buried:

"Only on emaqi" - there is no mention of the translation approach, poor guys! Can't fault the branding decision I guess given the state of the discourse. When it comes to the products themselves, I went through ~6 or so of the sample chapters of different manga, did a few spot checks with the original Japanese, and read the reviews of some others who looked into it. They seem fine! I am cautiously impressed, I think there proofers did a good job smoothing out some edges, it has a "manga tone", and while small issues like the hyphenation the reviewer above mentioned do exist and are legit noticeable, they aren't common and not a huge deal. It has flow issues? Some dialogue should link together in how it is written, but doesn't. But it isn't crazy off or anything. You will not be wowed by these, but certainly if you are someone who reads bootleg scanlations you are gonna have no problems. A lot of manga uses pretty simple vocab and isn't breaking new ground on plot, I can see how a purpose-built tool could handle it well enough.

The economics though...here is where I don't think this case was ever going to pencil out and isn't now. Because I am pretty sure no one here has heard of any of the manga listed above as exclusives. (I saw 90's manga Geobreeders in there, but that was already partially translated in the 2000's, not sure if they did a new one? Setting it aside) Which, of course you haven't, if you had it probably would have been translated! Books are a 90:10 market, most books never get read and some books get read a ton. Anything big enough can justify a professional translation, and the other can't really sell to begin with.

On top of that, their model is mass translation; which means these obscure manga are presented to you with no context, no hype, no build-up. Wtf is The Blood Blooms In the Barrens?? See, if you were like a boutique publisher, selecting "the best of the best" in untranslated manga, you would promote your specific product. Interviews, social media, the value of the brand-itself as a quality seal. Publishing less is more, actually, your value as a publisher is as a quality selector. Or you could be say the porn market, where you max quantity so people can search "foot fetish breeding kink oshi no ko" and get results; they know what they want. But they aren't doing either! And to be blunt a lot of these are not gonna sell on their art alone:

I'm not mocking The Delayed Highschool Life of a Laborer here, that is better than I could do; but if you want to me spend money on a whim the bar is high and these don't reach it. Which of course they don't, they would be professionally translated if they did.

And finally, the price - $5 dollars, for volume 1's, like a 100-200 pages. The cross-listed manga typically sells for ~$10? That isn't much cheaper! If "translation" was this big cost barrier, and all you got is cutting the price of ebooks in half, I don't know if the analysis was so solid. This is a new product, I doubt they are overcharging to make a quick buck right now - this is the "sell at cost to scale" era.

In all of their lead up press they would say things like this:

Orange's process uses AI to read the manga through image analysis and character recognition, then to translate the words into English, Chinese and other languages. The technology is specialized for manga, meaning it is able to handle wordplay and other difficult-to-translate phrases. A human translator then makes corrections and adjustments. The process can deliver a manga translation in as little as two days. Orange will work with multiple Japanese publishers. The company looks initially to complete 500 translations monthly.

But this is missing a lot of context. For one, these manga are simple high school or battle manga that are ~200 pages long, many of those pages have only a few lines of dialogue, etc. Imagine you are a professional translator, and you are given that manga to translate, all the set-up done for you, all you gotta do is write. How long do you think that would take? Not that long! It could probably take like a week if it's actually all you did (calc'd from a 10k word count manga volume, 2k is a typical "good translator" per day count - many manga are shorter than that). And note how they said "as little as two days" - not median two days! Just, you know, aspirationally.

Translation is just not a big bottleneck. You gotta do layouts, lettering, proofs, etc, these can all take just as much time - and are being done by people, they still need wage workers doing all this. But that is small fry in comparison to publishing contracts, author approvals, distribution, all of that. And most importantly, product acquisition - you have to get authors to sign with you! That can be months of work. I am sure they are trying to get bulk agreements with publishers and such, but authors will push back on that, this is not an easy endeavor.

Which is why, in above, they say they hope to have "500 translations monthly". And after a year+ of work, on launch, they have...

...18. As best I can tell at least, their site deliberately obfuscates what they actually translated versus are just hosting for resale after all.

So yeah, as mentioned I don't think the economics pencil out. These aren't worth $5 dollars, they can't actually generate volume that makes "massive economies of scale" actually valuable, and their approach is currently antithetical to the idea of generating traction for any of their individual works. Niche publishing just doesn't work this way.

But it is early days, and hey I respect the experiment! I do think the tech is pretty good, and it is nice to see a company showcase it. It isn't quite good enough yet for prime time, but it could get there. I do want more manga to get exposure and audience; I will give a fair shake to any who try.

[copperbadge]

Well, Still Salty.

I was cranky yesterday and I thought a good night's sleep would provide some adjustment in perspective, but unfortunately "spending yesterday not on tumblr" also offered perspective and got there first.

Up front: feel free to comment or reblog on this post (replies may be heavily delayed) but if you feel the urge to Like, I'm going to ask you to take one more step and go to https://www.tumblr.com/support, select "feedback" as the category, and enter a line or two about the new dash. It can be as simple as "Your new dash design is difficult to use and is driving people off the site". I'm not asking everyone to do it, but if you're going to Like this post, that would be a helpful action in addition. You can delete any response they send; no reason to expose yourself to the unique combination of incompetence and condescension with which they handle feedback generally.

Also up front: yeah, if I find somewhere else to go and go there, I will certainly let you guys know beforehand, I'm not going to just evaporate. I'll be broadcasting about Tumblr's replacement on Tumblr very heavily. But I can't deny that it is now an active goal of mine to find a viable replacement for this site. (More on this in a moment.) You will always be able to find me on AO3 as copperbadge, or via copperbadge@gmail.com. (More on this in a moment also.)

This kind of thing is why I refuse to fuck with staff now or ever; I don't trust them and I never will. Watching @wip respond to almost every complaint or suggestion with "but that would be really hard" is telling. Whoever is pushing blocks around at Tumblr wants a lucrative site that's easy to code, but lucrative is hostile to community and code is difficult by nature, and when the architecture of the meeting hall is hostile and cheap, people don't stick around.

I've been watching the site as every change made it incrementally worse, from a buggy post window that doesn't allow ease of editing to the new dash (which is the reason I'm writing this in a text window off Tumblr). I genuinely do not think I can use desktop Tumblr like this unless I can install something that will put it back the way it was, and roughly 40% of the content you guys get HAS to come through desktop. It's impossible to do on a phone or so time-consuming it's not worth it. I cannot code Radio Free Monday on a phone; it's a struggle to code it on a single-monitor laptop (I usually write it on my work computer, where I have two monitors). Even writing image IDs on the phone is difficult and something I rarely do. Tumblr is becoming an actively difficult place for me to make content, introducing friction left and right.

But where does one go? I've tried other platforms and they're either worse to use or they don't have the constituency. The problem with a lot of discourse around internet addiction is that it often points out how glued people are to their phones without asking what it is they're doing on those phones. I'm not addicted to social media; I don't doomscroll, I don't care what celebrities have to say, I don't find 140 characters useful or interesting, I don’t find most “funny” videos very interesting. I create a lot of original content for public consumption, significantly more than many social media users, and if that becomes difficult, then the site suffers more than I do. But it's undeniable that social media, and this social media in specific, is where my people are, and yeah, I like seeing you all every day. It makes it difficult to leave even when Tumblr is the best of a bad set of options.

It seems like a lot of the internet, lately, is the best of a bad set of options.

All that said, Tumblr forced a sudden, unwanted, and unchangeable reskin on me a day after I listened to a two-hour podcast about addiction while working on building a newsletter system for my author site. I spent the evening before this happened in contemplation of my relationship to social media and to my readership and how I might alter it to my benefit regardless of whether that's also to Tumblr's detriment. Their poor timing, I suppose. A lot of the theories advanced on the podcast were, to put it kindly, bunk, but one of the suggestions for people questioning their relationship to an activity was a dopamine fast -- removing something in your life that gives you quick but unsustained dopamine hits, so that you can take some time to level out and examine your behaviors. On the one hand, that's not at all how dopamine works; from the jump it's a bad theory. But on the other, pulling back from something you think may be causing you difficulty is generally speaking a good tactic.

Removing myself from Tumblr yesterday was an active process: because I have ADHD and often will forget something exists if I don't systematize my engagement with it, Tumblr is normally pinned to my browser, with the app on my phone's top screen. Removing the app and closing the window meant that while I occasionally reached for Tumblr, it was less frequently than I expected, and the lack of access reminded me why I wasn't there. I missed you guys, but I didn't miss getting distracted from work by my dash, or the pressure to respond to the volume of communication I receive through the site daily. I don't think my use of tumblr as my sole social media has been unhealthy, per se, but certainly yesterday felt both quieter and calmer after I walked away.

But that's a temporary relief, because you are my community, and not only do I not want to leave my community, it's a resource for me. One of the reasons I do things like Radio Free Monday and the weekly Hug on Saturdays is that I try to make sure that resource is reciprocal. Leadership involves service. Leaving would be easy in the short term, but in the long term, leaving my community without having another place to meet it, or another community to go to, would be harmful to both of us. I'm already someone who isolates, and while I have a strong brickspace circle of friends, they fulfill sometimes different needs.

Though I do appreciate the wild vote of confidence from the comments to my last post telling me people would come with me where I went. That means a lot to me. I will attempt to make it either unnecessary or as painless as possible. Just know, I see your faith and friendship and I appreciate it.

Sometimes at my old job I'd be in very tumultuous meetings where a lot was discussed and not much agreed on, and the most useful thing to me was always to say, "What are our next steps? What would you like me to do because of this meeting?" So what are next steps, all this being the case?

First, I'm going to be off Tumblr, mostly, for another couple of days, because clearly I need the break and a few days won't matter too much. Again, I will be back either to continue on the site or to let you guys know, at length and volume, where I'm headed. The former is much more likely.

Second, I'm going to be actively looking for both a widget I can install to reset the dash (recommendations welcome, I currently don't even use xkit) and a wholly new platform that's a realistically viable alternative. Even if the dash gets reset, the shitty post editor is here for good. Attempts to source alternative platforms in the past have taught me that it needs to have a mobile-friendly site or an app, a similar structure to tumblr, and a reasonable chance of actually attracting users. That's a heavy venn diagram unlikely to be fulfilled anytime soon, but I'm now invested in finding it, instead of just passively waiting for it to happen to me (as Tumblr did when it pulled me off LJ).

Third, I do have an email newsletter in the works! I'm just wrestling currently with setting up how people sign up for it. This wasn't meant to be "my main broadcast platform"; it's meant to be a once-monthly email to share book news, targeted at people who aren't on socials or who just really love content from me, I guess. :D The plan was for me to assure Tumblr users that it was not extra content, just select content repackaged into a digest. But it will be one way to ensure that if I'm moving around outside of Tumblr, you'll know about it. I hope to have a link to a signup page soon. (I'm....dealing with some code issues.)

Fourth, I'm going to be combing through the last ten years I've spent here and pulling anything I think is of value into an archive. For now everything will remain here as well, and I'll let you guys know if I think that's going to change, but it's clear that this space is moving only one direction, towards a place I can't exist, and when/if it crumbles I want to have already evacuated what's important.

So there you go. I'll possibly be posting sporadically (the Saturday Hugs are queued six months in advance so that'll happen) but if nothing else and if not sooner, I'll be back full-time next week starting with Radio Free Monday. I appreciate your patience and your kindness in the meantime!

[glareraw]

Accelerationists are pathetic

Accelerationism is a range of revolutionary and reactionary ideas in left-wing and right-wing ideologies that call for the drastic intensification of capitalist growth, technological change, infrastructure sabotage and other processes of social change to destabilize existing systems and create radical social transformations, otherwise referred to as "acceleration". “Accelerationism.” Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, 9 Aug. 2024. Link

Let's be so fucking for real.

We are in a hopeful political landscape right now. Trump looks more and more like he will lose, and Kamala Harris alongside her VP pick Tim Walz are winning over the hearts of Americans, and increasingly beating Trump in the polls as he rambles on about how Kamala changed her race or something. And we are learning how to parse the alarmist claims of news media, and deny them ad revenue from scaring us.

But there is a thorn in side of the Democratic Party. A small group of very loud accelerationists who claim to be leftist online act like Kamala is the antichrist. Their two main claims are that she imprisoned over 1,500 people for smoking weed during her time as a prosecutor, and they still act like she fully supports the genocide in Palestine, despite the first claim being a lie told by Tulsi Gabbard in the 2020 presidential race, and the second claim a case of "I pretend I do not see it" in terms of the truth.* (see footnote) They seem to forget that a Trump presidency would be FAR worse for Palestinians.

But let's be real. The originators of this argument are cishet white people who live in major cities of coastal blue states and whose parents pay their rent. They have a feeling of emptiness in their life because they have everything given to them, so they argue with LGBTQ+ people and POC online instead of making an actual difference in the real world. They sit behind their screens and convince unsuspecting netizens of their delusions that we could have a viable 3rd party candidate come out of nowhere in less than 3 months, and completely ignore the fact that a candidate with their ideology would absolutely tank in an election. They don't care that the American people are not ready for the nation they want to make.

One of the talking main strategies these accelerationists are trying is to get people to abstain from voting --if they don't get their third party candidate. Their goal is to get less votes for Kamala to make Donald Trump win so the world will go to shit and they can remake society from the ashes how THEY want.

They think that their lives are sheltered from the blatant danger of the republican platform, to hell with the women and LGBTQ+ and POC of the red states! They are totally fine with sacrificing the safety of women and minorities in service of their unrealistic headcanon. They simply do not, or refuse to understand the severity of the situation we find ourselves in. If Trump wins 2024, there's a pretty strong chance there won't be an election --at least a real one-- in 2028 or ever again.

And if they think they will actually be able to start a revolution against the federal government? If they can get past the SWAT team arrests at their peaceful protests and CIA assassinations of their movement's leaders, they will have the honor of battle with the most powerful and overfunded military on Earth. Good luck with that! But these people would be lucky to even have leadership to begin with, because none of them actually have a viable plan or real knowledge of how to make their maladaptive daydreams real and govern their dream society.

If you read all of this and look at the facts and still believe Kamala Harris is a horrible person and you don't WANT to vote for her, then fine. I don't feel the need to argue with you further. But you NEED to vote. Change will have to be made gradually, it can't happen all at once this time. As I said, the country isn't ready for that. But if enough leftists don't vote, and Trump actually wins, it will set us back decades, if not a century or more. The government will not collapse, it will just become stronger under fascist rule. They will not get the chance to make the change they want.

I don't think the ideology of accelerationism poses a huge threat in this election. The overwhelming amount of support for the Harris Walz campaign, combined with the long-expected downward spiral of Donald Trump makes it more and more likely that we will see Kamala in the White House. And the media fear mongering about insubordination from the electorates --and Kamala's defeat in the Trump-appointed federal courts after the election-- is largely overblown. They forget how we won in 2020. AFTER Trump was ousted.

But as I said, overall, I don't think accelerationists will be successful in causing a Trump victory. They just really piss me off.

*She supports a ceasefire and the two-state solution, but can't make that happen just yet as she is just the VP but that's a whole can of worms and a conversation for another time. Just know I personally support a ceasefire and understand that what is happening in Palestine IS a genocide.

[talenlee]

Decemberween 2024 — Cohost (RIP)

In August 2023, I wrote about trying to make for a cozier internet. Now part of that is unavoidably built around the fact that I turned 40 that year and you know what it’s really really hard to avoid noticing how often I make the same typos from hand to hand, like it’s just possible I’m now at an age where one of my two hands is faster than the other and that’s how I’m going to notice my age rather than the normal model of like, my first gray pubic hair. But the point is, back then I talked about the idea of taking things slower and making more careful searches, treating the internet as a place to be connected to people, and one of the ways I mentioned – offhandedly – doing that, was Cohost.

Cohost was a website. It was like a website.

I wrote something about the end of Cohost back in the diary of the month when it passed – my September 2024 wrapup has some of the thoughts there, about what Cohost was in the broad, top-down sense of the form.

This article was always planned to happen, here in Decemberween, when I started the year — I sketched out the idea that I would use the Decemberween posts as a chance to show you a ‘best of Cohost’ set of posts, things that my friends or peers made and I wanted you to see or know about. It was, in my mind, a way to encourage you to use a social media platform I used, not just ‘because I was there,’ but because I could show to you its merits, and how it worked.

Except, y’know, it didn’t work.

Definitionally, Cohost did not work because it could not make enough money with its model of remuneration that could meet its costs. I don’t know much about those costs, though every person I’ve seen discussing those costs tends to be someone who I wouldn’t trust to manage their own bathroom supplies let alone managing a multi-national business that’s meant to pay people’s rents, so I don’t think it’s a good conversation for me to get involved in. Still, if you define the function of a website as ‘exist enough to keep existing,’ for whatever parameters you consider that to mean, then Cohost did not. In a few days, it will be deleted off the internet, and that is all for what Cohost is.

And then it will be what Cohost was.

Not only was Cohost not financially viable, though, it was also a place that was, undeniably, very white. It was too big for the people who made it to moderate it at the rate it grew, and it was biased towards people who were friends with the founders, and the kind of people who were friends with those people. All very real, very legitimate problems that were part of the character of cohost and I don’t want to pretend that actually, it being a place black people didn’t feel safe was somehow a quirky speech affect. I can think of four or five ‘big name’ posters (by their avatars, I actually don’t know their names) who would create and promote posts about this problem, which I remember seeing leading to some goodnatured comments from people going ‘hm hm hm,’ and then too many people piping up to say ‘can I argue with this post so effectively structural racism stops existing?’ and those seemed exhausting to produce.

It isn’t like knowing about these problems changes the impact the place had on me. I’m a byproduct of a lot of racist things. I like to make sure I hold onto, and keep present, the awareness of those racisms, especially those ones that aren’t ‘this person keeps saying a slur’ but rather, ‘there’s this structural problem and whatever neutral stance you took failed to fix it.’

Cohost was a place that taught me the phrase, ‘you don’t want an audience, you want a community.’ I talk to students about audience a lot, in a deliberately anodised way. When I say ‘your audience’ I mean ‘who is this for? who do you want to see it?’ and my students, brains rotted by a million platforms that have been teaching them to be pre-emptively burnt out Fiverr ‘social media experts,’ ‘audience’ means ‘the number under my name on my platform of choice, that can be turned into some kind of graph.’ This is one of those words that I’m genuinely coming to think need a new schisming, I need to use a term that doesn’t make these people assume I mean the thing they’re already predisposed to think of because of course, the way I’m using it, I mean something that can be intimate and dynamic and immediate, and if that’s not what people hear, then I can’t restructure their heads, I need to find some other way to get the idea into them.

Because what I mean, so often, is your community.

Not ‘who are the people you broadcast to’ but who are the people you share with?

I don’t know who reads this blog. I don’t know who watches my videos. I don’t know who listens to the podcasts. I know that I have a degree of microsuccess here, where things I make have ten to thirty people express some interest and engage with some effort. But I have spoken to some of those and you know what? the reason the cohost race discussion sticks out in my mind is because I know one of the people in my audience would expect me to not ignore it. I don’t want to let that person down.

Because I am in community with the audience, even if I don’t know you. I don’t know you, by name, reading this, right now. I don’t have that analytical tool and I’ve done things to turn those tools off, to take them away. The point of this system is not to try and steal information about what you think from the material you touch, but rather, to make you feel comfortable talking to me about what you think.

It’s not everything I learned from Cohost. But it is something Cohost taught me. Also that I gotta be the one to reach out on discord to check in on people, y’know?

Check it out on PRESS.exe to see it with images and links!

[xxpeppermintxx109]

I’m sorry but you’re lying. I have downloaded your fic from a long time when you started wiriting it. You did not tag it as a love triangle. For instance: I would have never started it if I had seen the love triangle tag. We are stupid like you keep insinuating. You are a liar. The only ship tagged was original female character/aemond. I have the proof of it. A lot people in the hotd fanfic community knows this and has seen the proof. That is why you are known in the fic community as an imposter. For almost a year you didn’t tag it as a love triangle. That is why you keep getting criticism: you used aemond/ewan’s fanbase to gain traction and attention for your fic, and then decided to blindside everyone with your own little fantasy of qoren.

Let me make it clear. It is your story and you can write whatever you want. But it doesn’t mean people have to like it. Most people don’t. And people have a right to give their opinion. But you keep crying about it and making yourself be a victim. Just accept it. You write for yourself and that is totally okay. Just accept the criticism that you cheated your readers and that is why ppl got upset and stopped reading your fics. It’s not because we only want aemond; it’s because that is how you advertised your fic and then switched it up. At least have the decency to be truthful.

You did not tag your fic as a love triangle. You added it months after starting it, after you hooked aemond fans in. That’s why people hate your fic now and don’t trust you.

so actually, no the only pairing tagged wasn’t just aemond and oc

From NOVEMBER OF 2022, what like two weeks after I posted the first chapter mind you, Qoren Martell/original female character was a pairing. And there were a TON of other pairings I shouldn’t have tagged cause they weren’t main pairings, as see this screenshot below :)

Betrayal, angst, and tragedy were tagged since the very beginning. Love triangle was tagged in chapter 5, it appears when looking back at all my screenshots of chapter summaries to upload, which yes is my bad it’s not the VERY beginning but jfc, still EARLY. And guess what, I think I had maybe 5k-8k hits on this fic at that point. That is not me sinking my claws into the Aemond fandom like you so accuse me of, and then just doing a bait and switch.

Qoren only became a viable option AFTER Aemond killed Luke, which if you look at all of my old edits over this last year and a fucking half, has always been the plan. Luke was always gonna die, Aemond was gonna get into shit with Shaera for it. Qoren was an emotional decision on her part. Even now she still considers Aemond a lot of the time. AND I HAVE STATED MULTIPLE TIMES THAT AEMOND AND SHAERA ARE ENDGAME, so unclench jfc.

I don’t paint myself as a victim, when I get shit like this all the time being rude. When I was getting Islamophobic comments comparing MY writing of Qoren to fucking 9/11. When I was getting harassed for the simple act of writing the story as it’s always been laid out by multiple anon accounts who spammed my asks and my ao3 comments. And it sure as hell doesn’t seem like this fandom “hates” me and my story as you so claim, cause I still have a ton of readers who enjoy this story and give it kudos on ao3 and read and interact with me on all platforms, so fuck off lol. Shit, it’s hitting 5k votes on wattpad. Doesn’t seem to me like people hate it or my writing decisions??

Get off anon and say this with your whole chest while you’re at it <3

[tokiro07]

Ichi the Witch ch.5 thoughts

[Look With Your Special Eyes]

(Topics: narrative progression - flavor text/worldbuilding, speculation - Uroro/Ichi)

Welcome to Mantinel

Looks like my prediction from last week that Nichi would likely use this chapter to continue establishing the core concepts of the story, namely either the goal or antagonists, has turned out to be incorrect

Instead, Nishi has opted to use this chapter not to introduce us to anything particularly new, but to introduce Ichi to the rest of the cast, with the entire Witches Association observing him in action and forming their own opinions of him

That said, because we get to see so many new characters and designs at once, that does mean that we're getting a solid preview of the big players we're liable to meet going forward, like how in Food Wars you got to see prototype designs for a lot of the cast in the crowd when Souma was giving the introductory speech for the incoming class. How many of them will be important, I obviously can't say, but I imagine Nishi at least has a few ideas for each of them just in case she has the time to visit all of them

I saw quite a few comments about the lady with the sunglasses and beard-like chin accessories, which makes sense since she takes up the most of the real estate on the page and has an established team, so she was likely meant to make a big impression. Me personally, though, I'm the most curious about the crying girl with the mouths in her hair. Is her hair alive? Is it a spell? A magic item? A curse? A Magik parasitizing her hair Skullgirls style?

For what little this chapter offers in lore, it's details like that that make this chapter rich in flavor

Flavor Text

The mirror-based magitech of the Witches Association, Desscaras' self-aggrandizing username, the fantastical fashion sense of the Witches...all of it really helps to build the vibe of this world

It all feels so alien, but not in a way that I can't tell what I'm looking at either. There's a level of clarity and familiarity that keeps me from feeling unwelcome, but just enough mysticism that I don't foresee myself getting too accustomed to be surprised by whatever's around the next corner, at least not anytime soon

I particularly love the energy that Shirabedonna brings to the table; rising up from a puddle in the floor feet first with her platform shoes filled with liquid and a pair of eyes staring out at Ichi is such a striking image, and one that I won't soon forget! Following that up with her rabid and insatiable desire for knowledge, that big smile, those funky pants, and her cat-clawed gloves as she plays with a sample of Ichi's hair...she's just so fun!

I won't declare her my favorite this early, but if she's big enough to keep making appearances and contribute to the actual plot, there's a very good chance that I'm going to fall in love with this woman

Plus, while I said this chapter was light on lore, I didn't say it was devoid of lore, as Shirabedonna gleefully provides

What's In a Name

Thus far we've met three Witches, each with their own title: Desscaras the Abyssal Witch, Monegold (or Monigold as this chapter spells it, not sure which is accurate) the Aureate Witch, and Shirabedonna the Analytical Witch. I assumed that these names came from either signature spells or behaviors they were known for. While Desscaras has given no indication thus far of what makes her "Abyssal," Monegold at least has gold in her name to match with "Aureate," so at the very least I was confident they weren't arbitrarily assigned

Shirabedonna's introduction immediately suggests that both factors are viable, but most likely the former is the important part, as Shirabedonna's signature spell seems to be to cast this world's equivalent of Scan or Tattle. That said, I'm guessing she specifically hunted down Sachikila for its analytical power since she's clearly obsessed with the pursuit of knowledge, so it's entirely likely she got that name before attaining the spell

Speaking of names, Nishi has opted to directly answer a question of mine from ch.3: the chants are the names of the Magiks, but not the names that we're told! Reminiscent of the Fae, the Magiks' associated chants are their true names. What this means for their societal structure is unclear; do they use those names within the context of Magik society and hide them from humans, or are they unknown to everyone? And what's the purpose in hiding them? Perhaps knowing their true name when they're released from their current Witch would allow one to capture them more easily?

Desscaras says that only the Witch who holds a magic stone can read its chant, but Ichi was able to use Desscaras' Lazud and Parthion when obviously he doesn't hold their stones. Is that a quirk of Uroro's Ultra Amplification, or can Witches share spells with each other? I'm inclined to believe the former, but all current evidence suggests it could be the latter

Now that we know that chants are secret names that may or may not be used for controlling a Magik against their will, I'm more confident than ever in another theory from ch.3: Uroro most certainly has a chant, and I'll bet he has very good reasons for keeping it a secret

I'd wager that Uroro's chant will be a major upgrade for Ichi either in a few arcs or possibly his final upgrade at the end of the series, and its attainment will likely be the mark either a milestone or the conclusion of their joint character arc. Whether that will be the two of them becoming true partners like Asta and Liebe in Black Clover OR if it will represent Ichi's mastery and surpassing of his internal antagonist a la Yuji gaining Sukuna's Shrine in JJK, I envision it being a defining moment for Ichi's character

Based on Uroro's sudden manifestation in this chapter, I anticipate next week's chapter will serve as a projection of that very arc

Shoulder Devil

While I can't imagine that Ichi will give in to Uroro's temptation, as the Witches have not violated Death for Death yet and deliberately antagonizing them would make it significantly harder to hunt the established Magik targets, Uroro's actions will certainly have consequences for Ichi in the immediate future

As Shirabedonna says, every member of the Witches Association is currently forming a unique opinion on Ichi and deciding whether or not he can be trusted. Ichi's ability to withstand and possibly fend off Uroro will likely garner some level of trust from them, but if Uroro firmly establishes himself here as the primary antagonist, then it will be a lot easier for Ichi to come into conflict with other Witches since they'll go through him to get to Uroro. This will make defeating Uroro more permanently a necessity, as otherwise he'll continue to use Ichi as the impetus to orchestrate conflicts within Mantinel

If Uroro can be even remotely assuaged, though, we'll still undoubtedly have some Witches who don't trust him, but more importantly we'll see the beginnings of Ichi and Uroro's friendship. In that scenario, those fights will be for the sake of strengthening Ichi's bond with Uroro and demonstrating to the Witches Association how peace between human and Magik is possible

Either way, I think for now this interaction will be a good way to benchmark Ichi's current abilities, as what we've seen so far has almost certainly provided a skewed understanding of Ichi's relative standing in this world

Level 1 Mage

As Shirabedonna points out, Ichi's magical power is on par with the average woman - which is to say, completely in line with what you would expect from someone with no formal training

What this means is that, despite being able to defeat the ostensible strongest Magik, Ichi's capacity for spellcasting is really nothing special outside of Uroro's Ultra Amplification. This was already telegraphed pretty well by the fact that using UA knocked him out for three days at a time, but it's good to get the understanding that this would happen to anyone other than well-trained Witches, and might actually be worse for people without Ichi's physiological advantages

It's also helpful to have the path to overcoming that weakness mapped out; if Ichi is only as good as the average woman, then his upcoming experiences and training will naturally make him more suited to using Uroro's magic. In the meantime, though, his unusual physical strength and technical prowess should help to make up the difference in magical power and experience when he's inevitably pitted against other Witches, at least the early-game ones

What we really need right now to get a proper understanding of how much those factors make up for his weaknesses though is a ceiling battle. The Strongest Witch vs. the King Magik looks like a ceiling battle on paper, but because of Uroro's feminine immunity, neither of them got to show off what they're really capable of and we're left without a clear picture of how strong Ichi needs to aim to become by the endgame

That could end up happening here, with a high-ranking Witch stepping in to stop Uroro from tempting Ichi against them, but it could just as easily be a low-ranking Witch to establish not the power ceiling, but the power floor that Ichi has only barely managed to step onto. I could go either way, so long as we understand just how far apart Ichi and the likes of Desscaras really are by the end of the fight, as making Ichi seem impossibly strong in turn makes Desscaras seem shockingly weak when that's definitely a misdirect

No matter how it shakes out, this is all clearly still just prologue, and the real adventure won't begin until all of the pieces are in place

Until next time, let's enjoy life!

[uselessheretic]

maybe a silly question, but what does the term “izzy canyon” mean? it conjures up a mental image of “the metaphorical place where izzy hands enjoyers hang out/got kicked into” but I dunno if it’s a hashtag or a group chat or a state of mind or why it’s a canyon specifically (I guess con sounds like can?) the mastodon con makes it seem pretty organized!

not a dumb question at all!

"metaphorical place where izzy hands enjoyers hang out/got kicked into" might actually be the most succinct and on the nose description i've heard of it lmao

it is really mostly just a way to refer to izzy hands fans who tend to interact in the same corner of fandom.

the idea started sometime last year when an izzy fan got doxxed after receiving hate mail for a few months. a burner account posted the person's city and possible locations for the chain they worked at, along with a list of other users they said they would target next (seemed to just loosely be people in the same circle as them? weirdly enough my handle was on there too despite not knowing each other)

nothing further developed from that situation and the person was okay, but understandably it kicked off a wave of izzy fans blocking anyone who had a habit of harassing izzy fans, along with running blockchains on the most vocal ones who'd start dogpiles. around the same time, someone made an "izzy haters" twitter and izzy haters group chat which just intensified "okay just block all of them because that is a huge red flag for incoming networked harassment"

tldr izzy fans grew a reputation for being very heavy blockers. it became an in joke within the community that izzy fans didn't ever know what was going on when the general fandom had new memes, or more likely, new discourse because of the huge block wall between the groups.

almost as if they were at the bottom of a canyon, doing their own thing, and not paying attention to whatever was going on outside. hence the izzy canyon. i think it's also at least 30% a joke about izzy's genitals as well.

so yeah, just generally people who like the same character and hang out in the same social circles. i think because it's the part of fandom most vocally anti harassment, it also has a funny habit of absorbing in fans who don't necessarily like izzy, but had been targeted as part of a harassment campaign or in general just tired from fandom in general.

it pretty much functions like its own mini fandom within fandom? and as a group is very enthusiastic and also freakishly well organized so they end up more likely to do things like make regular fanweeks, set up a blog for doing fandom research and polls, organize a boat tour for a convention, or laying out detail instructions for test running mastodon for week to see how viable it is as a platform.

[olderthannetfic]

Tumblr seems to be sliding in a downward spiral, and it feels like the start of the end of a fandoming era for me. I've been through it before; platforms are born then die, and life fandom finds a way. I'm just not looking forward to floundering for a bit, and dreading what the next hub will look like.

AO3 isn't really a place geared or meant for the same thing, and that's fine. My only fandom-related activity took place on AO3 only for a few years between my leaving LJ and joining Tumblr, and I lived ;-) But during that time, I was my own little island in fandom. Reading, leaving a few comments, not being super active. It's only when I found a community again that I was back to being really active in fandom once more.

And it's not that I actually use Tumblr to post about myself, but I do use it to read and reblog cool things - art, gifsets, science stuff, discovering new fandoms, and the like. I'm not sure where else I could find my people, with sameish purposes. The other sites I've tried didn't fill that niche in a way that suited me, in part because of how they look and work, in part because of who and what is(n't) there.

I have DW & PF accounts just to be safe, but I'm not very fond of group chats Discord-style - and without Tumblr, IDK how I'd even hear of new communities where I might pop in once in a while, loins girdled and everything. The micro-blogging platforms are not what I'm looking for either. Sure, I can follow a few DW comms and blogs; I already occasionally do and I will be more consistent about it if I must.

But one of my greatest fear is that the next platform will be phone-based, app-only, or some such BS - and that is something I just won't be able to deal with. Phones are tiny, it's uncomfortable to write anything, I don't like touch screen and much, much prefer a proper keyboard and a mouse (copy-pasting on a screen? (x_x) << it me), art/pics are too small to properly appreciate, a phone isn't comfy to hold for a long time for me, and the app system means you have no control over anything as a user… and that anything there must be Apple Approved, dick-free, blood-free, and tasteless. And I say this as someone who's pretty much uninterested in sex IRL or in my entertainment ;-) I still support and want the tits, the gore, the everything, and as long as I have the tools to curate - oh, wait. Curate things myself? That's not something that's popular these days, is it? It's not going to generate money, if I'm happy ;-)

So… I guess I'll play some more on Neocities, and see if anyone wants to have webrings again? (it would be fun and nostalgic, but not really viable on a large scale; people who haven't known those would just laugh and point and go on the InstaTok of the time).

So here is my little cane-waving rant of the day! I know things evolve and change and that in ten years I'll be rolling my eyes at my moping. It's only that I feel tired of moving from one shitty platform to another, of fearing I won't adapt (or more accurately won't want to adapt given the annoyance/benefit ratio) to whichever new place things will move in a few years. It's saying goodbye to a former home, moving, and hoping you'll make another home elsewhere kind of sniffles today!

--

We already know the next platform. It has been Discord for a few years now.

If you want the one after Discord, I think you're looking at waiting things out for quite a few years (or until Discord makes a major misstep as a company).

True, real time chat is not for everyone, but small discords with well-chosen channels can operate more asynchronously. Just like a lot of people who hated the look of Tumblr early on eventually capitulated, a lot of chat haters have jumped ship to Discord already.

Realistically, 90% of fandom always goes where the action is, no matter how much they claim the features make that space impossible, and 10% disappears.

We might get the 10% back on the next platform or they might leave fandom for good. There were LJ-haters who resurfaced post LJ era.

But as for where you'll find out where people are... probably AO3 author's notes.

[yukipri]

I joined Threads! Unfortunately my reach on Insta is still the most limited of all of my socials, and that’s the account Threads is directly attached to.

If you’re on either Insta or Threads, would love if you could stop by🙏

Direct linking to Threads doesn't seem to work...so here's

my Instagram

through which you can find my Threads account!

Edit: You actually can link to Threads, ironically through the icon at the top of individual Instagram account pages on desktop. Though Desktop viewing is currently limited to individual pages, and you can't necessarily scroll the feed. So here's my Threads page!

~~

Next, some initial thoughts on the platform for those who are kinda curious what this new thing is. Not at all an expert, just some info I've gathered myself, that I'd personally have liked to know before joining:

On Threads

・It launched July 5~6, 2023. Rollout varies by country.

・Twitter's already upset about it, apparently there's a lawsuit. So I guess it considers Threads a possible threat.

・It's run by Meta, same folks as Insta and Fb.

・The accounts are directly linked to Instagram, which has its pros and cons. You need an Insta account to make a Threads account, but if you already have an Insta account, it's very easy to make a connected Threads account. However, once linked, they're linked; you can't disable your Threads account without also disabling your Insta account. You can also automatically follow all the accounts you're already following on Insta, to be activated as they make Threads accounts. You can also share Threads posts to your Insta stories.

・Currently only on mobile app, hoping the'll make it desktop accessible soon

・The current audience mostly seems to be folks who have come direct from Instagram. This means yes, a lot of official/influencer accounts, but also a lot of artists/small creators too.

Functionality

・Right now, the "feed/dashboard" is a hot mess. It's just one massive algorithmic spew, no way to curate it, no way to see just the posts by the folks you're following, not even chronological. These are things that i personally require in a social media, so yeah it sucks rn. HOWEVER, they did state that they're working on a "followers only" feed, much like the one on Instagram. If they implement a Followers Only feed like Insta, it'll at least be much better than Twitter's current "Following" feed. There has been no timeline provided on when this may launch.

・It functions much the same as Twitter, with options to create new posts, and like, retweet, quote retweet, and reply to posts made by others. (There's still a lot of floundering about the exact terminology to use, since it's not twitter so you can't "retweet" etc)

・500 Character word limit per post, which is much more than Twitter, ey!

・Up to 10 images per post, doesn't seem to cause image quality reduction either. Rather than being able to arrange the images like on Tumblr though, they're all automatically in a carousel that you can see by swiping.

・Your bio can be the exact same as what's on your insta, but currently only shows followers. In order to see who you follow, you tap "followers" and then when the menu opens, swipe to "following." Then, you can tap on the individual accounts to view their pages. This is currently the only way to ensure you see the posts from certain accounts, because there's no guarantee they'll show up on your feed, and it's a huge pain. But again, they're hopefully working on a fix for this.

My understanding is that the app rushed to launch now, since Twitter is a dumpster fire and people are fleeing. (why is it a dumpster fire? Well, Musk implemented a randomly fluctuating tweet view limitation, which is dumb af, but means it's essentially become unusable to folks who use the platform a lot)

I'm hoping that there'll be improvements to Threads and it'll become a viable Twitter alternative, but until then...yeah we'll keep an eye on it.

Now that I've probably completely turned you off from downloading the app, if you do, a nudge that again I'd appreciate if you stopped by my account, YukiPri_Art on Instagram, and/or YukiPri_Art on Threads!

[mariacallous]

Would you like to do your bit to curb population decline in the west? Fancy a home full of babies with very high IQs and extremely blond hair? Well, let me introduce you to the Donald J Trump Insemination Institute. On a sprawling ranch in New Mexico, women can be impregnated, free of charge, with Trump’s sperm, ensuring that future generations, on Earth and Mars, are blessed with a steady supply of very stable geniuses.

Sorry if I turned your stomach there, but I’m afraid I’m only half-joking. It was actually Jeffrey Epstein – who used to party with Trump – who was besotted with the idea of a ranch where 20 women at a time would be impregnated, in order to seed the human race with his DNA. Elon Musk, who is obsessed with babies and Trump, may harbour similar fantasies. Earlier this year the New York Times reported that Musk has “volunteered his sperm” to help seed a colony on Mars. (Musk has denied these claims.)

While Trump hasn’t announced plans for a baby ranch of his own yet, he is suddenly a big fan of artificial insemination. Last week the former president announced that he would support free in vitro fertilisation (IVF) treatments if elected again. “We wanna produce babies in this country, right?” Trump said during a town hall campaign event in Wisconsin. He didn’t provide many details about how this would work other than saying that either the government or insurance companies would pay for everything.

Another fuzzy detail? How government-sponsored IVF would coexist with the Republican party’s 2024 platform, which supports states’ rights to pass foetal personhood laws. It is impossible to support widespread access to IVF while also supporting the idea of foetal personhood, which holds that an embryo is a person and destroying one is homicide. I am fairly sure that Trump has no idea how IVF actually works, so here is a little explainer: you typically fertilise multiple eggs because you have no idea how many of them will develop into viable embryos. You could fertilise 20 eggs and end up with no viable embryos or end up with 20. The only way to control how many embryos you create is to harvest a single egg at a time, which is hugely expensive, inefficient and emotionally exhausting. In short: Trump seems to be running on a platform where IVF would be free but also effectively illegal.

While it may be half-baked, Trump’s free IVF policy makes it clear that he is desperate to woo female voters. Women have registered and voted at higher rates than men in every US presidential election since 1980 and now – for obvious reasons – they are leaning heavily towards Kamala Harris. I’m not sure a last-minute IVF policy is going to cancel out the fact that abortion rights are a key issue in this election and Trump has boasted about being the guy who overturned Roe v Wade. Nor will it cancel out the fact that Trump is a legally defined sexual predator who can’t stop himself from saying every misogynistic thought that creeps into his little head. During a recent rally in Pennsylvania, for example, Trump praised his male supporters for “allowing” their wives to attend his campaign rallies without them.

While Trump is clearly trying to appeal to women with his IVF policy, you also have to wonder whether his buddy Musk – one of the most influential voices in the US’s growing pro-natalist movement – has a hand in this. If the billionaire did get a position in a Trump administration (a possibility that has been repeatedly floated) one imagines Musk would encourage the US to emulate Hungary’s pro-natalist policies, which stem from a racist desire to encourage births and repopulate the country with the “right” (AKA white) kind of children. “We want Hungarian children,” Viktor Orbán said in 2019. “Migration for us is surrender.”

Free IVF may sound like a progressive policy on the surface but, for many on the right, it is linked to a belief that women are nothing more than baby-making machines designed to pass on the legacy of men. A future Donald J Trump Insemination Institute may not be as far-fetched as it sounds.

[floatingcatacombs]

Tech So Bad It Sounds Like The Reviewers Are Just Plain Depressed

12 Days of Aniblogging 2024, Day 8

I really do try to stay away from armchair cultural criticism, especially when it's this far removed from my weaboo wheelhouse, but this one’s been eating away at me for the entire year. What are we doing here?

2024 has been full of downright bad consumer tech! The Apple Vision Pro, the Rabbit and Humane AI pins, the PS5 Pro… those are just the big ones, and that’s not even getting started on vaporware like Horizon Worlds and Microsoft’s Copilot+ PC initiative. Sure, there are Juiceros every year, but this recent batch of flops feels indicative of a larger trend, which is shipping products that are both overengineered and conceptually half-baked. Of course, there’s plenty of decent tech coming out too – Apple’s recent laptops and desktops have been strong and competitively priced, at least the base models. The Steam Deck created a whole new product category that seems to be thriving. And electric cars… exist, which is better than nothing. But it’s been much more fun to read about of the bad stuff, of course. These days it feels like most of the tech reviews I read these days have the journalists asking “what’s the point?” halfway through, or asserting in advance that it will fail, like this useless product with a bad value proposition is prompting an existential crisis for them. Maybe it is!

yeah yeah journalists don't write their own headlines. I can assure you that the article content carries the same tone for these though.

What did a negative tech review look like before the 2020s? Maybe there wasn’t one, really. The 2000s and the 2010s were drenched in techno-optimism. Even if skepticism towards social media emerged over time, hardware itself was generally received well, mixed at worst, because journalists were happy to extrapolate out what a product and its platform could do. Nowadays, everyone takes everything at face value! As they should –the things we buy rarely get meaningfully better over time, and the support window for flops is getting shorter and shorter with each passing year. On the games side of things, look how quickly Concord ended! With that out of the way, I’m going to start zeroing in on the hardware I saw a “why does this exist” type review for this year.

The Apple Vision Pro

People have been burnt time and time again by nearly every VR headset ecosystem to release (other than mayyybe Oculus, but Facebook’s tendrils sinking in don’t feel great either). The PSVR was a mild success at best and the PSVR2 was an expensive and unmitigated disaster that lost support in a matter of months. Meanwhile, the Valve Index couldn’t cut it with its price, and Microsoft actively blew up their own HoloLens infrastructure earlier this year. It’s at this point it's clear that VR is a niche, and one that’s expensive to develop for and profit off of.  Surely Apple will save us!

completely isolate yourself from your family for the low, low price of multiple paychecks

With most of the competition focusing on gaming, Apple attempted a blue ocean strategy with the Vision Pro by instead making their target audience… nobody! It’s hard to tell what anyone was ever supposed to do with these things, and reading long-form reviews, it became very clear that the reviewers were trying to come up with viable use-cases and largely failing, because it’s just not very practical tech. There’s no physical input devices, so you’re instead using mix of hand-tracking, eye-tracking, and voice commands to control the thing. That’s pretty cool, but it means that the one niche that VR has been proven in, gaming, is effectively impossible. Things like office software can also be hard to use without a keyboard and mouse, and even when there’s tailor-made headset applications for existing software, it’s still usually not better than just doing it on your desktop!

The tech is real, and that’s the saddest part. Looking at teardowns, I fully believe that the hardware had to cost multiple thousands of dollars to break even, and as someone who suffers from VR motion sickness, I’d be really curious to see if all the stabilization tech from their extra onboard chips helps with that as much as the press releases claim. It’s like a more drastic version of the iPad problem, where the hardware is amazing on paper, but interfacing limits with the form factor itself combined with a subpar operating system mean that you can’t actually do as much as you’d hope to with all that power.

Of course, the Vision Pro is also full of prototype hacks and hard design problems – that battery pack is a nightmare! If it’s a productivity device, how are you supposed to share content with other people when the headset has to be custom-fit every time and there’s only one profile? Apple still has no good answer. That leaves the only available niche for this device as white-collar productivity done in isolation, and most people fundamentally do not live in that world. It feels lonely and dystopic, even.

If I had to guess what happened, the VR division at Apple was working on this for the better part of a decade, and facing headwinds, Apple decided to cut their losses and force them to deliver a project, doomed as it may be. There’s a potent business fantasy of a bad version 1.0 leading to a successful 2.0 and beyond, but Apple has not pulled of that kind of situation in the twenty-first century. It’s either a success or it is a proven failure, and this is so, so, obviously the latter. I do hope that the stabilization tech makes it into other headsets eventually though, so that I can play Blade and Sorcery at my friend’s house without throwing up. Everyone else, please copy Apple’s homework or steal their patents, preferably to the tune of under $3500.

Rabbit R1 and Humane AI Pins

The current AI paradigm has been around for two years now, and since we've all heard way too many arguments already, I will try to keep my own takes brief. The LLM results we have right now are real (even if everyone is trying to dress them up as superintelligent snake oil when they’re just cool computer synthesis), but from everything I read, it seems like the era of drastic improvement is over. It would take exponentially more text and images and video than we already have to get more linear improvements, and a good chunk of the world has already been scraped, and the lawsuits are already pouring in, further slowing down data ingestion. The tech is slowing down, and the industry won’t be able to grow its way out of the hard social problems it’s invoked. If there are gains to be made, it's in more fine-tuned and curated LLMs, and that's far harder work than most of these companies want to get up to right now.

With that out of the way, are you interested in wearing an LLM on your shirt?

The video that notoriously tanked a company. Of course, now I'm also supposed to make fun of this guy for using b-roll of himself speeding in a school zone . Nobody wins.

Not one, but two separate startups pushed this idea to market this year. Humane’s AI pin launched for seven hundred dollars plus a twenty-five dollars per month subscription, all for the privilege of getting to ask a little square on your chest questions and getting GPT answers spoken back to you. But what about like… ChatGPT’s own phone app? Or hell, even Siri! Apple and Android’s voice assistants are both are over a decade old– do you really have that many ungoogleable queries? And specifically, ones that voice responses make the most sense for, and not text? To make things worse, this thing has serious overheating issues and a battery that can’t even last a day. The Rabbit R1 at least has a cute design, and actually has a screen, and is much cheaper, but it requires a data tether to your phone, so like…why not just use your phone. Reverse-engineering has confirmed that its app can just run on a normal Android phone, so there’s really nothing special other than the little orange square that it’s hosted in.

Why would you even try to roll out a product as doomed as these, instead of just going bankrupt and pocketing a year or two of salary like most startups? The AI boom, of course! After the NFT hype cycle, everyone really did convince themselves that you can just fail upwards with no real limit. Unfortunately, people have higher standards for hardware than PNG transaction platforms, as they get far more upset when they’re left physically holding the bag. I’ve been watching Deep Space 9 recently and have to ask, are these companies trying to capture the fantasy of Star Trek comms badges? Because if so, they should honestly lean more into it. It wouldn't be any more functional of a product, but if there’s one thing nerds always love, it’s themed garbage.

welp

The PS5 Pro

This one just launched a bit ago for the holiday season. It makes some sense on paper – most PS5 games offer a choice between a performance and a fidelity mode, so why not just make a version strong enough that it can get the benefits of both? Great! That’ll be seven hundred dollars.

Okay, $700 doesn’t sound as insane in the context of that Humane pin I was just talking about. But it’s $200 more than the PS5 at launch, and it doesn’t even come with a disc drive unless you want to fork over another $80. The past few generations of gaming have been defined by heavily subsidized console prices with the goal of roping gamers into more lucrative ecosystems, but Sony here seems to be testing the waters for an unsubsidized era.

I've heard the external disc drive install process is surprisingly user-friendly, but at this price point they should have included a little automaton who does it for you

If you can stomach PC gaming, at that price you’re halfway there to buying something that could trounce a PS5 Pro, plus a monitor close enough to your face that you might actually notice the 4K improvements. There are also only a couple of games per year being produced at high enough fidelity for there to be any noticeable quality improvements. The returns are diminishing and the AAA landscape is narrowing, and console upgrades like these only hasten the industry’s spiraling. Is all this sustainable from a development perspective? I don’t know. If Nintendo announced a Mario Odyssey sequel for the Switch 2, I’d buy it at launch regardless of the graphics, and my PS3 can play Demon's Souls and my anime blu-rays just fine. So I’m well aware that I’m not the target audience for stuff like the PS5 Pro, but I think it's going to become harder and harder to compel that audience going forward.

_

The end of the low interest rates in US has drastically changed the underpinnings of its tech industry, and I think every one of these bad product launches can be traced back here one way or another. The era of running flashy ventures at a loss for years in order to corner the market is profoundly over, unless you’ve got Thiel blood money or a GPT transformer, and even then. This, combined with the end of quarantine-era user habits, has left many companies to repeatedly go all in on hype cycles like blockchain and the metaverse and AI, pretending like the last one never happened every time. This trend-chasing means, that depending on each company’s circumstances, they need to either spin something up quick, reroute an existing prototype, or risk delivering laughably late. You need a product and you need it fast. And rushed tech is always going to have load-bearing and stupid problems, no matter how long the initial development time was. Everyone loses, especially the saps who actually believe in the sales pitches enough to buy these things. And those poor, poor tech journalists who have to review it all are being consumed with eldritch madness watching this all unfold. Hey, at least they’re not trying to simp for Microsoft Copilot!

Hopefully, this particular era of tech ends sooner rather than later, so that I don’t feel compelled to do another essay of this type. If I were more of an idealist or a doofus I’d be dreaming of a serious anticonsumerist movement and/or Xi Jinping liberating us all, but unfortunately I’m of the belief that we’re doomed to dumbass gizmos destined for the landfill until the end of the silicon era.

[copperbadge]

Have we found a tumblr replacement yet? Apparently the latest “live” shenanigans were the thing that it took to break me. I’m not trying to stir shit, I’m just mostly here for you and a couple other blogs, so I’m going wherever you go.

I wish, but unfortunately not so far. I mean, I've talked a little about how I'd like to find one but there aren't really any viable ones right now, and there may not be a fandom mass-migration for years still. I'm more likely to follow the crowd than blaze a trail in this case, so it may be some time. For now my only real tactic is to simply not engage with staff or support at Tumblr in any way, and accept the changes as gradual steps towards the site's demise with as much serenity as I can muster.

I've already accidentally opened Tumblr Live twice while trying to navigate the app, which I'm sure is intentional, given I've now suddenly opened Tumblr Live twice since its inception instead of Zero. Relatedly, I would love to see them redirect that passion into making the "Mute Notifications" button actually work, but mine is not to reason why.

Anyway. There are options available, like obviously there are other social media platforms, but none have quite the combination of "easy to use" and "has a lot of people on it" and "Offers the same functionality" (photo and video hosting, an app, etc) even with an "ease of use" and "functionality" that are as crap as Tumblr's.

For example, Dreamwidth is great, but it's a Livejournal code fork so it's a very different format from Tumblr, more labor-intensive to make and share posts (no reblog function, image embedding can get a bit complicated, etc). CoHost is new and very promising but a bit of a ghost town right now -- I'm there and I've had a bunch of people find me there but still exponentially less than are on Tumblr. Pillowfort I still need to re-investigate; I'm there as well but it's been a while since I looked in, and I was struggling with the functionality previously. I had a look at Mastodon, but as positive as decentralized servers could be for the future of social media, I actively dislike the idea, and it also seems difficult to set up and complex to maintain. Discord is....there, and a lot of fandom stuff has shifted there, but its structure is very different and it's also decentralized, and also I hate it passionately and refuse to use it, so that's a no-go for me, though I suspect it's where fandom might end up.

If you're struggling with accessing tumblr directly, you might consider feeding the blogs you follow to an RSS reader -- I know people who do that and find it pretty functional, because then if they want to comment they can just pop open the specific post and deal with it directly. I don't know how much you know about RSS and I don't have the energy to fully explain it right now, but NetVibes is a pretty decent free RSS reader and it's what I use for certain blogs outside of Tumblr.

In any case, if I do find a place, or if I see the migration beginning, I'll sound the alarm :) In the meantime I'm still reading through my tumblr, stashing away posts to save off when I leave, even if that'll be a while.

[tenaciouschronicler]

December 2 2024 2009

Time for timeline trickery!

Further left of the pink furniture is an arcade machine fitted with Appearifier tech. Its unclear which was created first but this one has the ability to see exactly what you would be appearifying. In this case its locked on to Jaspers. Im kinda surprised he was not put into the suit specifically for his funeral but that this seemed to be par for the course for him.

The timestamp shows 3140 days before 'today', April 13, 2009 making it September 7, 2000. Yes I did the math. It was actually very unecessary since I could have just googled it but Im always creating more work for myself.

On this day Jaspers and Rose were having a therapy session wherein Rose learned a Secret of Jaspers. How you could understand him is astonishing, Rose. Rose knows removing Jaspers from the timeline at this point would cause a parodox, the secret was not shared yet, but tries anyway in the name of Science. Much like when WV paradoxified a pumpkin, Jaspers is nothing but green sludge. Next to the Appearifier platform is another machine. This one processes the sludge to form a clone cat which would sadly not be viable outside of the containment unit.

Whoever was operating this machine in the past may have been making unsuccessful attempts to perfect the science of ECTOBIOLOGY.

I need this here for two reasons. First, the added emphasis on ectobiology by making the text color green. Second, which ties into the first a bit, who have we met so far that makes a reference to ectobiology?

Our main protagonist himself, John Egbert. Not only is it his chumhandle, his shirt has a green slime ghost. While we normally associate blue as his color, I feel like that plus this hints that somehow, someway, John WILL perform ectobiology. The only question is, given his track record, will he be successful?

Shortly after telling Rose his Secret, at 4:13:14, Jasper is appearified by an unknown person. Where/whenever he goes, Jaspers ends up visually untraceable for two weeks ending up back on the beach September 21st. Since the apperifier is still locked on Jaspers, Rose fast forwards to the present to find where he had gone after landing on that other platform. The music that plays genuinely unsettles me, probably because of the meowing.

For a very brief moment, in the lower right hand corner an upsidedown pink horseshoe flashes before fading away. I learned my lesson since that one Dave flash so Im constantly looking there to see if i miss any play buttons. Now, I thought you had to click when the horseshoe was visible, but no the hitbox remains active even after it fades away. Once you click on it a western version of Jaspers piano song, done by whistling, plays while Rose finally rides the pony as the scarf flutters in the wind. There are three cymbal crashes that flash a poorly drawn photo, one where Rose hugs the pony, one where she feeds the pony an apple, and one of John dressed in western wear infront of a saloon.

I genuinely dont get the purpose of this aside from an easter egg but its hilarious none the less.

Back to the story, since Rose was able to track Jaspers to his new location, she appearifies him back to her. With thirteen seconds on the clock she jumps on the Transportalizer, kitten in hand and hightails it out of there.

We switch to Jade who is out looking for Becquerel. A difficult task since for some reason he is immune to Jades precognitive powers. We get to see Bec appear in the background with a flash of lightning, which may be the source of the lightning PM dealt with earlier, as he looms behind Jade.

And just as quickly, disappears when Jade turns around. Jade being Jade, she pays no mind to the ominous aura her pet excudes and moseys on down to Johns package that 'arrived months late. And yet, right on time.'

Today we find John in his dads room. Prepared for Clowns and Secrets John finds...

Wait a minute. These are just boring business documents and spreadsheets.

In a hilarious upset, absolutely nothing!

'Kind of a boring room' is an understatement. Here the only flash of color comes from the cake mix in the left corner. While Dad is still into magic, there is no sign of harlequins anywhere amidst the polished shoes, black ties and fedora hats. The whole flash is just John having a breakdown as all his preconceived notions shatter under the ralization Dad is just a normal man. This begs the question, why all the harlequin decor? Did he think John was into it, even if Johns stated otherwise? Or is this his inheritance from Nanna, who I can 100% see being into clowns? Ive got a feeling that this moment for John will become the norm for us. Building up ideas for our characters and then 'shocking' us as what we thought we knew gets turned on it head.

[londonspirit]

When Our Flag Means Death first premiered, the pirate comedy series — a novel genre mashup in and of itself — didn't necessarily make a big splash in the streaming landscape. It didn't take long, however, for positive word of mouth and a slowly growing fanbase to lead to impressive viewing numbers, with the first season becoming the biggest new series in the U.S. across all platforms — and its popularity has only grown since. Now, on the precipice of the series' return, over a year after it was finally renewed for a second season, viewers are eagerly preparing to tune in to find out what will happen to Stede Bonnet (Rhys Darby), Edward Teach/Blackbeard (Taika Waititi), and the rest of the Revenge's crew now that everyone has been divided into two separated groups.

Ahead of the Season 2 premiere, Collider had the opportunity to speak to creator David Jenkins for a spoiler-free conversation (if you've checked out some of those trailers already, that is!) about what fans can expect. Over the course of the interview, which you can read below, Jenkins discusses when he found out the show would be renewed, the unprecedented response to Season 1, and why he enjoys engaging with the OFMD fandom online. He also digs into discussing why Season 2 takes a somewhat darker tone, the importance of adding more female characters to the cast, his envisioned story for the show's planned three seasons, and more.

COLLIDER: You made a whole season between now and the last time we spoke!

DAVID JENKINS: It was a long time ago. Here we are!

And I know it was a bit before we even knew that Season 2 was going to be a possibility. How long was that wait on your end?

JENKINS: Yeah, I blocked it out, if I'm honest. [Laughs] It was a minute. We're really lucky that they picked us up, and they've been really wonderful to us at Max. They're just very fun to make this show with. There was a minute where I would call it kind of a slow-burn fandom, and the show just seemed to grow and grow and grow. I think we became more and more viable as the weeks went by after the finale, and thank god we got to do it again.

With the response to Season 1, it felt like week after week, even once the whole season was out, there was just this exponential growth. What was your reaction to that? Has that ever happened to you before, in your experience?

JENKINS: Oh, it’s never happened to me. I don't know if it's happened to other shows. Somehow, I feel like the streaming of it makes this unusual, and then the fact that it is actually a romantic relationship between these two characters. Audiences didn't want to get burned again, and then saw that they weren't going to be, and celebrated it. It just really moved me, actually. I thought that they'd kiss, and people would be like, “Oh, cool, cool!” I kind of thought people would know a little bit more [about] where we were going, but then in hindsight, no, people have been hurt and burned on so many other shows and then made to feel silly. So it was very gratifying to see the show embraced — to see every element of the creative embraced, every element of the production design, every department get their due in attention, was just overwhelming. It's the honor of my professional life. I don't think this happens very often, so I'm just savoring it.

You don't always see creators who are willing to engage with the fandom online, or they try to keep a distance, but it feels like you're getting in there occasionally and interacting with fans. How do you feel about that particular response, the fandom and their passion?

JENKINS: It's an honor. If it were a different circumstance or a different property or something else that maybe had a different tone that brought in a more dyspeptic, less gracious [fandom]... Everyone's been lovely. When people are being nice and normal, easy to be around, yeah, I wanna be at that party. Are you kidding me? And then you're gonna celebrate all the work that we did when we didn't know if the show would be good? Because when you're making these things, you're like, “Well, I know this is just my weird thing. Maybe people like it, maybe they won't.” When people are this gracious and effusive and not weird about it, it's like, “Yeah, let's talk. This is great. You're a fan of the stuff that we were a fan of. We're not different.” So that's really rare.

In terms of the overall tone of Season 2, there's definitely a darkness that it starts with. Was it more of a conscious decision to embrace that side, or did it really inherently come from picking up with these characters after where we left off with them in Season 1?

JENKINS: It's picking up with where the arc is in the story. We're post-breakup, and they're trying to fix it. One of these characters is very, very damaged and has never made himself vulnerable in this way before, and I don't think [he] would react very well to having his heart broken in this way. I don't think it would be cute, and I don't think it would be funny. I think it would be scary as hell to watch a very damaged guy that we've established in Ed, who killed his dad and thinks he's not capable of being loved, deal with rejection and see that Stede really hurt him. It's important to do that, to give him stakes because Rhys [Darby] is adorable, and Taika [Waititi] can be adorable, and sometimes when they're being adorable, they become invulnerable. I want to see a love story between two people who are very vulnerable, for better and for worse. So you have to pick up in a place where there's been damage done and there's a price to pay, and then it's like, “Can they come back from it?”

That's not to say that there aren't moments of levity and comedy. Stede, from his perspective, is this more pining figure writing letters, but he's definitely not in the same mental or emotional space as Ed is at this point because he doesn't realize how hurt Ed is.

JENKINS: The lovely thing about Rhys and about Stede is Stede’s cluelessness. He eventually does the right thing, but he doesn't know his own strength, and that's his problem. Then he does damage, and then he has to repair that damage, and that's the growth of that character. Ed is a guy where you're like, “Wait a minute, you're invulnerable. You’re Blackbeard,” but then you see he's hurt, he's not getting up. To me, those are the natural journeys for those two characters. Then you see Ed come back, and he has to wear a bell around his neck, and he's gonna fix a lock on this door, and he's gonna learn to fish and just be a three-dimensional human as opposed to just a scary drawing. Those are the tensions of those guys, and that's why Rhys has dog energy, and Taika has cat, and that seems to go along with both of those arcs.

I wanted to ask you about one of the things that feels like a really nice addition to Season 2, which is just the number of female characters that we get for the crew to bounce off of.

JENKINS: Good, I’m glad you feel that way.

Leslie [Jones] is back, we get Minnie Driver, and there's a new female pirate captain who shifts the power dynamic, among others. Did that feel like a natural way to expand the cast, or was that a change that you really wanted to make after Season 1?

JENKINS: It felt like both. Watching Season 1 is like, “Oof, there’s a lot of dudes.” We do go into Jim's experience as a non-binary crew member and Jim's relationship with their mentor and mother figure. In Season 2, it felt important and also the most logical way to build the world out. So it was fun to add these characters, even one-offs like Hell-Cat Maggie, and be like, “There are so many different perspectives to bring into this show.” It just felt natural to do that.

What's your favorite needle drop that the show has used so far in Season 1, and which one are you excited for fans to get to in Season 2?

JENKINS: Season 2 is built around [Kate Bush's] “This Woman's Work,” and that was very early on. That was a little bit like [Fleetwood Mac's] “The Chain.” I knew I wanted to use that, clear it, script where it should go in the season. There's a couple of those where it takes a minute to get that song, and there's a lot of back and forth, and if you don't get it, there's not a real good replacement for it. In that first season, “The Chain” really worked. We could have found a different song, but “The Chain,” that really works there. Also, [Cat Stevens'] “Miles from Nowhere” at the end of the first season felt like the Stede Bonnet song with that version of “Miles from Nowhere.”

Season 2, Nina Simone makes a couple of appearances, and I just love the size and grandeur of what she's doing. She seems to fit with a really large fantasy show — obviously, she's Nina Simone — and what she's talking about and how she's expressing it up against this world is really exciting to me. I don't know why it works for me as much as it does, but it really moves me. She comes back at the end of the season with a different track, and I just love having her music up against these pictures.

I've seen quotes from you recently where you talked about how—fingers crossed—if there's a renewal, Season 3 would be the planned final ending for this show. Was that something that you always envisioned, that it would be three-and-done?

JENKINS: I think so. When Taika expressed interest in doing it, I was surprised. “Are you sure?” He was like, “Yeah, man. Yeah, I wanna do it.” I was like, “Okay, but it’s not limited. Can you do it for three seasons?” “Yeah.” “Really? Really, you'll do it for three seasons?” “Yeah, man. Yeah.” So my expectation was we're only gonna get Taika for three seasons. But beyond that, three is good for this show. The first season is about two emotionally underdeveloped men who are at about 14, 15, 16, emotionally. Season 2 is about them getting older and maybe, in terms of the relationship, being around 25 to maybe 30 by the end of the season. And then I think there's one more story to tell, and it's how does a relationship evolve? Where do we find them again in the third season? What are they dealing with? That's very interesting to me, and there is a big story that I'd like to tell there.

Our Flag Means Death Season 2 premieres with its first three episodes October 5 on Max, with two episodes dropping weekly thereafter leading up to the season finale on October 26.