#that’s just a marketing failure right there

[toiletcthulhu]

I really dislike our cultural need to format every mission statement or problem as concisely and simply as possible. I feel like this issue permeates across most aspects of society, as we can see marketing, academia, and politics all value short, simple, concise answers. This has left nuance by the wayside in many areas of pur society, as well as mass mobilization by propoganda-educated or uneducated masses (see the rise of the far right across the world right now). I do think the rise of the far right is partially based in the oppression, lies, and failures of liberal democratic empires, which I think should also fall, just not to Nazis. Regardless, I don't get why we can't say that, based on what we know about large scale radfem movements and some of their opinions about men who also experience oppression, it seems logical to say that some radical feminists hold harmful rhetoric in that it both damages a healthy worldview as well as displacing pain onto those undeserving of it, causing people who see that to become less likely to participate in those movments. We can also simultaneously hold accountable power structures that target those exact people who become disillusioned with socially progressive movements and give them a foothold into reactionary far right politics, as well as the people who get taken in by those reactionary politics for allowing selfishness, hate, etc. to mobilize them into harming others. I think all of these factors are varyingly responsible for the situation we're in, but leaving out or downplaying any of their parts in getting us here does nothing but reduce intersectionality and giving more examples of the left not holding people accountable or holding others exclusively accountable for the right to exploit. Also, I understand the kneejerk reaction to parasitism being used as an insult, but as with the case of Palestinians calling out the bloodthristy actions of Israel, there are some words that are just accurate to describe the oppression of a people. I still think we should be catious of throwing around the word "parasite" or "bloodthirsty" in our common vernacular; ableism and anti-semitism are still very prevalent and dangerous, but if someone is taking a majority of another's means of living and giving them nothing but the right to live, transactionally, for no other reason but greed, that is a parasite. If a nation seeks every opportunity to cause as much death as possible, that is bloodthirsty. If you can't differentiate someone needing assistance to live from housing exploitation, then perhaps you have negative internalized views that disabled people seek to gain power over those they rely upon for help or some other bullshit, but it does not paint a particularly favorable image of disabled people however you spin it. So overall, I agree large swathes of the left are fucked up and need to change (all genders), but disagree that parasitism can't be used to describe people exploiting others and giving nothing back for no reason other than unnecessary self-interest. That's all.

the whole "I got pushed into the far right, because radical feminists are so mean to men, and no one in the left criticizes them for it," routine would be more credible if not for the fact that at the exact same time radical feminists are saying "I'm getting pushed into aligning with the right, because the misogynistic left is bullying and silencing me for criticizing men,"

[dreamofbecoming]

happy pride to the sign i made for trans pride seattle many years ago that, due to my inability to plan how to correctly format posters, accidentally read “the first pride riot was a #marshapjohnson” and became my best friends’ favorite pride month rallying cry <3 🌈

[mortalityplays]

This is a dangerous sentiment for me to express, as an editor who spends most of my working life telling writers to knock it off with the 45-word sentences and the adverbs and tortured metaphors, but I do think we're living through a period of weird pragmatic puritanism in mainstream literary taste.

e.g. I keep seeing people talk about 'purple prose' when they actually mean 'the writer uses vivid and/or metaphorical descriptive language'. I've seen people who present themselves as educators offer some of the best genre writing in western canon as examples of 'purple prose' because it engages strategically in prose-poetry to evoke mood and I guess that's sheer decadence when you could instead say "it was dark and scary outside". But that's not what purple prose means. Purple means the construction of the prose itself gets in the way of conveying meaning. mid-00s horse RPers know what I'm talking about. Cerulean orbs flash'd fire as they turn'd 'pon rollforth land, yonder horizonways. <= if I had to read this when I was 12, you don't get to call Ray Bradbury's prose 'purple'.

I griped on here recently about the prepossession with fictional characters in fictional narratives behaving 'rationally' and 'realistically' as if the sole purpose of a made-up story is to convince you it could have happened. No wonder the epistolary form is having a tumblr renaissance. One million billion arguments and thought experiments about The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas that almost all evade the point of the story: that you can't wriggle out of it. The narrator is telling you how it was, is and will be, and you must confront the dissonances it evokes and digest your discomfort. 'Realistic' begins on the author's terms, that's what gives them the power to reach into your brain and fiddle about until sparks happen. You kind of have to trust the process a little bit.

This ultra-orthodox attitude to writing shares a lot of common ground with the tight, tight commodification of art in online spaces. And I mean commodification in the truest sense - the reconstruction of the thing to maximise its capacity to interface with markets. Form and function are overwhelmingly privileged over cloudy ideas like meaning, intent and possibility, because you can apply a sliding value scale to the material aspects of a work. But you can't charge extra for 'more challenging conceptual response to the milieu' in a commission drive. So that shit becomes vestigial. It isn't valued, it isn't taught, so eventually it isn't sought out. At best it's mystified as part of a given writer/artist's 'talent', but either way it grows incumbent on the individual to care enough about that kind of skill to cultivate it.

And it's risky, because unmeasurables come with the possibility of rejection or failure. Drop in too many allegorical descriptions of the rose garden and someone will decide your prose is 'purple' and unserious. A lot of online audiences seem to be terrified of being considered pretentious in their tastes. That creates a real unwillingness to step out into discursive spaces where you 🫵 are expected to develop and explore a personal relationship with each element of a work. No guard rails, no right answers. Word of god is shit to us out here. But fear of getting that kind of analysis wrong makes people hove to work that slavishly explains itself on every page. And I'm left wondering, what's the point of art that leads every single participant to the same conclusion? See Spot run. Run, Spot, run. Down the rollforth land, yonder horizonways. I just want to read more weird stuff.

[lurkiestvoid]

yeahhhhh pretty much, except the only thing is it's less individual investors and more Hedge Funds.

Hedge funds use algorithms to maximize profits by any means necessary, up to and including certain tactics that will deliberately tank a stock. If it's not performing well or if they just don't want it to, they can bet against it and whip out a variety of bullshit of varying legality to push the share price down, which causes other HFs to sell to stay ahead of the market, which leads portfolio managers and accountants and regular folks to sell, and then when the selloffs are done the original HFs make fucking bank off strangling the stock. (This also works in reverse: betting a stock will rise, baiting others to buy in, profit, then bet against it again)

So a "strong" company is one with lots of gains and very few/short losses (harder to break/less room to manipulate, generally Big Name stocks like Disney/Apple/etc) whereas a "weak" company with more losses than gains or lots of volatility is a prime target for the piranhas. The people running companies are terrified of stagnation, let alone losses, because it can very, very easily be taken advantage of and even outright kill the company in just a few weeks or months. Perpetual growth is virtually required to survive the market as it is today.

Individual, casual/hobbyist investors with at most a couple dozen shares in a handful of companies don't have the numbers/margins to seriously affect a stock price. Even hobbyist/semipro "traders" who obsess/hoard and attempt to imitate The Big Guys are comparitively few in number and just don't have the weight to affect much more than their own account balance. But hedge funds do have MASSIVE weight in the market, throwing around thousands of shares at a time, several times a day, for dozens of different tickers, in multiple markets and across multiple industries.

And then there are "market makers." These are giant companies whose SOLE purpose is to manipulate the market ensure "market liquidity," or, "a buy for every sell, a sell for every buy." What this means is that if demand is high but there aren't enough shares available to sell, they make more by "borrowing" them, potentially infinitely. If these market makers feel a stock is too "overvalued," they can dump loads of those borrowed shares to saturate the market and drive the price back down. There is extremely little regulation on this, which leads to situations where the same one share can have dozens or hundreds of "owners."

This can happen because regular everyday investors don't actually "own" stock at all. Like, very literally, their "shares" are 1) not real and 2) can be liquidated by their brokers at any time, because, as the go-between third party, their brokers own the shares "on their behalf," and brokers essentially just "deliver" digital IOUs. All Actual Real Shares are held in the DTCC by a company called Cede & Co, and everything else is traded on credit.

If you buy a "share" in a company through a broker, it's not your name on the company shareholder list, it's your broker's. If you're submitting paperwork to your broker for voting for that company's policies at their annual meeting, your broker is pooling aaaaall the votes and "proportionally" voting "on your behalf." And your broker can decide to lend out your shares without telling you (to their own profit) and you may or may not ever get them back -- this is called "failure to delivers" or FTDs and there is a massive backlog of them that just ... never get addressed.

this is hella over-summarized and sloppy but the tl;dr is that supply and demand economics are beyond broken, the entire stock market is more fake than you ever imagined, it's propped up entirely by computer programs trading IOUs-of-IOUs-of-IOUs, and is easily manipulated at the literal whim of bank-and-billionaire proxies.

companies really have got to be okay with stagnant profits. what is wrong with earning the same amount every year? why does it always have to be more? it's not sustainable. there are only so many people on the planet you can profit from 😭

[penginlord]

A Bridge too Far is one of the best and most underrated war movies for so many reasons, some of which I'll cover here just because it's a very good movie you should see. It both shows you the sheer scale of WW2, with massive paratrooper drops, artillery bombardments and tanks, while also showing the human side of the war with many small stories that relate too the whole, like the American corporal who threatens a surgeon to save the life of someone who earlier in the film he'd promised would survive the war. It cover so many perspectives, from that of high command preparing the whole thing, too intelligence officers, Frontline commanders and soldiers, to the Dutch resistance. It shows primarily the British side of the war too, which is unusual, but still shows the American side, as well as including a view from the polish brigade (and how poorly the British treat them) and even the Germans on the other side of the assault.

But what is it about? A Bridge too Far is about operation Market-Garden, a plan devised by British Field Marshall Montgomery involving the largest paratrooper drop in the entire war and around 60 miles of road and bridges in occupied Holland. The idea was too drop airborne units in occupied Holland to capture all of the required bridges on this route. Then an armored column would punch a hole through the German front line and make their way up the road, securing the captured bridges all the way to Arnhem, the final bridge across the river Rhine where they can then capture Germany's industrial heart, all within 2 (maybe 3) days.

A plan flawed at conception, and execution, as well as just being struck with some of the worst luck imaginable. (2 whole panzer divisions had recently been stationed in Arnhem to "rest from the front lines to prepare for Patton's assault", as well as the radios issued to the British paratroopers landing in Arnhem not working at all).

It's just a masterful film that just shows. . .war. You can feel the emotions of everyone as they experience everything in here.

You can feel the emotion of the Polish general when he says "when two people say 'I know what were going to do today let's play the war game', people die".

The final shot of the film is the most impactful to me, I've realized. It ties everything together. It's a simple shot of a Dutch family leaving Arnhem after it was destroyed in battle. There's no music, no commentary. Just one shot showing them walking away with nowhere left to go.

[northgazaupdates]

Single mother of 6 in URGENT NEED of GROCERIES in north Gaza🥖🥦🍉

Ibtisam Al-Habil needs mutual aid for groceries in north Gaza!

Ibtisam has been raising her children on her own since her husband was martyred by the occupation in 2014. Then in 2023, they did the same to her eldest son. She cannot work due to the invasion, and her financial needs are compounded by the cost of treatment for three of her children, a minor and two young adults, who are both temporarily and permanently disabled.

The blockade of north Gaza continues to drive famine among residents. Food is extremely scarce, and what little is available in the markets comes at highly inflated prices. The latest reports I have received on grocery prices from people in north Gaza are as follows:

1kg of Garlic - $80

1kg of Onions - $65

1kg of Potatoes - $40

1kg of Tomatoes - $56

1kg of Lemons - $23

1kg of Zucchini/Courgette - $24

1kg of Molokhia (similar to spinach)- $10

1kg of Green Peppers - $219

1kg of Eggplant/Aubergine - $16

1kg of Okra - $45

1kg of Cucumbers - $32

1kg of Apples - $47

1kg of Guava - $39

1kg of Avocado - $74

1kg of Sugar - $44.50

1 litre of frying/cooking oil/sirj - $23

1kg of rice - $19

1 plate of eggs - $224

loz of coffee - $27

It is extremely difficult, often impossible, for people in north Gaza to afford these prices. Failure to do so results in their starvation.

You can help a Ibtisam’s family by donating funds to their campaign. Ibtisam is struggling to find food for her children, and they often go entire days without eating. Any funds you give right now will go directly toward purchasing food so the family can survive! You can help feed a family right now with just a few clicks!

Please do not delay, Ibtisam and her family are currently starving!!! They are in urgent need of food RIGHT NOW!!!

[catullansparrowlet]

It's a great moment when you realise that no one sees any value in you in abscence of a degree. Especially when that realisation is coupled with the realisation that maybe a university degree is unattainable.

I'm doing great, why do you ask?

[seat-safety-switch]

"Aren't you worried about your brand?" asks Josh, the prototypical hominid who was formed in a vat this very morning. Even though scientists have conclusively proven they don't have souls, it is still not okay to commit violence upon their unpersons.

Back on my first cycle, society actually used real humans as internet marketing experts. It was cruel, for sure, but we had no other options. Initial experiments in training dogs to do it had raised the ire of every animal-rights group from here to Baltimore (inclusive,) but you can always find someone desperate enough to work a dirty, demeaning job. A job like search-engine optimization.

"Can you hop on a call to discuss your content strategy?" begs Josh, possibly out of fear. Judging from the look of his skin, he is probably at most six hours old, and nobody has told him what is going on. Sure, maybe he heard from a couple of the older clones in the back of the U-Haul® on their way to my neighbourhood. Just rumour and innuendo, like a schoolyard gossip mill. If I agreed, he wouldn't know how to hop on a call, or even what one was.

Believe me, I've tried talking to them before. Although annoying, I genuinely am confident that the protos are a lifeform that deserves respect. Same reason I try to help earthworms back onto the lawn after a rainstorm. All life is valuable, and unlike previous generations, none of these synthetic non-people asked to go into such a horrific industry.

Josh can tell that he is losing me. He has never experienced failure before, not since he came out of the basic education creche in the factory. He begins to weep, which is honestly pretty brave of him because I hadn't thought they worked out the bugs with that whole system yet. I am nothing if not sympathetic, so I offer him a way out.

"Do you want to go to the junkyard with me? You can hold the flashlight," I ask. He responds with a tearful look of pure glee. It's always easy getting these suckers to do what you want. Tonight, I'll let Josh sleep in the backyard, but not out in the open. Don't want the neighbours thinking that I'm starting up some kind of e-commerce scam.

[drchucktingle]

space raptor butt experiment

when conservative ideas are put to the test they basically always fail. specifically ruminating on how very early in my career conservative goofs tried to force me into an award for ONE specific reason: irony. in their mind, as a queer artist, i OBVIOUSLY didnt belong there

that is premise RABID PUPPIES had at hugo awards, that CHUCK TINGLE was least likely person to be taken seriously and therefore would delegitimize something serious. to them it was unfathomable that i could be making REAL art because i was too strange, queer, and UNTRADITIONAL

conservatives in literary space believe TRADITIONAL is RIGHT and everything else is distraction. now we have a literal TEST OF THIS THEORY. they GOT TO PICK THEIR FIGHTER in the arena, to see my art and whisper amongst themselves 'this is epitome of progressive artistic failure'

this test has been running for nearly ten years now, not in a lab but ON THIS TIMELINE OF REALITY. and look at the results, look how much tinglers resonate, how many buckaroos have gathered to support my art. CAMP DAMASCUS was a best seller. BURY YOUR GAYS COMIN IN HOT

this is not a moment to just sit around and pat myself on the back, but i think it is worth recognizing something. RABID PUPPIES and all of those conservative literary goofs were unequivocally WRONG about me and my art. because they are philosophically wrong about EVERYTHING

they have joined a long line of lonesome whining goofs who will say ‘let the market decide’ and when the market decides that their work is slop they will CONVENIENTLY forget what they initially stood for. more sad lonely devils moaning in their basements while we trot in the sun

i will end this observation with this: THANK YOU for being a part of this experiment with me, for seeing my unique expression and trotting along beside me. for as much as i have proven love to you on this path, YOU HAVE PROVEN LOVE TO ME. HERES TO TROTTING INTO THE FUTURE

[evansbby]

an update from me :)

hey everyone, i know i haven’t been very active on here lately. and the reason is because a lot of things in my life have changed. i’ve been debating even sharing this but i feel like i’m in a good enough position to be okay with sharing it.

so these past two years, i had been super active on here (late 2022- early 24) and that was because, well, I didn’t really have anything else. that’s because I had graduated in 2022 and then i just couldn’t find a job in my field. like so many other recent graduates, it was just so hard and tough and it really made me lose all faith in myself.

i found myself to be in the worst mental state i had ever been. I cut myself off from my friends, felt like a burden towards my family, was having meltdowns and panic attacks almost daily, even started eating unhealthily and was just overall in a very bad place.

HOWEVER, i always felt like I could come on tumblr and that’s why i was so active and writing all these stories because honestly, they were almost like a crutch to me. like the ONE thing i had to look forward to in life during those times was the feedback I’d get when i posted a fic, and honestly it’s what kept me going. like i swear to god, on some days this blog and community was the only thing that i had to look forward to and keep me going, and writing felt like such a huge escape.

because i felt so USELESS. like i was wasting my life and not making any money or being able to kickstart my career after uni, and that it would be like this forever, so when I was writing it actually felt like I was doing something with a purpose. honestly on some days I would literally wake up early and go sit in Starbucks all day just writing my fics like i was cosplaying working or something just so I’d have a purpose. (I don’t go to Starbucks anymore lol boycott)

anyways, i never shared this on tumblr these past few years bc you guys don’t understand what a failure i felt like. i would sometimes get asks on here asking what i did for a job and I’d feel so embarrassed of my current state of being unable to find a job when it felt like everyone else who had graduated with me had one and obtained one so easily. like i felt ASHAMED.

i remember once i got an ask asking what my job was and I just said “fashion marketing” bc that was one of the things i wanted to do and id done an internship in that field so i just put that but it was a LIE i was unemployed and the most depressed ive been in my whole life but I thought maybe i could manifest it.

ANYWAYS, and you’ve probably already guessed it, but the reason I’m not so active anymore is because I did eventually find a job. a really good one that I’m enjoying so much and I’m so happy at. Finally, I’m feeling like myself again, like I’m living that life in London as a twenty something that I’d see everyone on tiktok living!! Like I’m finally just having fun, going out with friends, being active, having money to spend on fun things etc.

and it feels so surreal and crazy because when i was depressed and jobless, it made me doubt myself so much. Like the constant rejections and failed interviews made me doubt myself and lowered my self esteem so much and I thought I’d NEVER achieve this life that i have now! And I don’t want to jinx it but I literally thank God every day for finally granting me this because I really feel like I would’ve gotten worse and worse and IDEK.

But back to the main point, and so because of my new job I just don’t have that much time for tumblr anymore. But this isn’t a goodbye post… not at all! I find that when I’m super busy in life is also when I get the most motivated to write! Like for example in summer 2022 I was on here so much and that was the summer I had the most fun, was the most busy. I think when I’m busy in life, I get motivated to write.

Which I believe is the case right now, because I’m SO motivated to complete all my stories, I keep thinking about them and writing them slowly, so please don’t think anything is abandoned! I just wanted to make this post to be more transparent about what’s been going on in my life and what had been going on these past two years. That maybe someone else going through something similar can see that eventually, everything does work out.

Anddd I don’t really know how to end this. I just want to say, yall don’t understand just how thankful I am for having this blog, this platform, to write my stories. For having you guys. Because who knows how much worse my mental state would’ve been these past two years when I didn’t have ANYTHING else going for me, if I hadn’t had this blog it would’ve been so much worse.

Thank you so much for believing in me and enjoying my stories and always always letting me know how much you enjoy them. And I’ll say the truth; I know everyone says that engagement on tumblr has been bad lately but I can say that bc of you guys I have literally never EVER had this issue. And that’s not me being big headed, that’s just the truth and it makes me so happy and grateful. Yall always came through for me and still do now! Every time I think my fic is going to flop, you guys come through for me. I appreciate it so much. You guys have no idea how much you helped me when I was at my lowest. And continue to.

Many thanks

Me 🩷🩷🫶🏼🫶🏼

[machineheraldbabe]

arcane, populism, and why viktor is the odd one out (yet again)

as a piltover-anti, a silco criticizer, and a pacifist, i am very very interested in how arcane presents not just the political undertones of both topside and the undercity, but the characters/dialogue through which they communicate those undertones. allow me to use some political science bro lingo to air out some thoughts.

long, long post incoming.

there are 2 ideological struggles at war throughout s1 (and i can predict that the struggle will carry over into s2): neoliberalism and populism - in their broadest terms since we're talking ofc about a fictional show dealing with surface level political machinations. by neoliberalism, i mean a focus on the social, political, and cultural structures of a polity (piltover, for our purposes) refocused into a strictly economic vacuum. and by populism i mean a unifying belief that the existing political systems of a polity fail to adequately represent their constituents, so the masses choose to rally around a specific gripe or issue, i.e., class discrimination, xenophobia toward immigrants, etc. this, in turn, forms a populist party or movement. an applicable example i can think of would be Nasser's Egypt in the 1950s.

*i know these are weighty topics with very real world implications! i just want to separate the theory to apply to our favorite fictional world.

the political struggle in question is put forward immediately by piltover, who, though presented as a technocratic state, embodies crucial neoliberal ideals emphasized especially by up-and-coming counilor mel medarda, much like how fresh-eyed american economists blew up the economic scene in the 1980s with a revival of capitalist, free market enterprise. take how she seizes the advent of hextech, for example:

she quickly sees hextech's potential yet not from the solely intellectual standpoint that jayce and viktor do - for her, it is profitable, literally and in terms of international relations. her goal is for piltover to prosper, but she has no rose-colored glasses on; prosperity means capital gain, and she's willing to override piltover's political and social systems to achieve her goal. an important caveat is that she draws the line at ambessa medarda's progression into militant authoritarianism, which deserves a whole post of its own!

piltover's populism moment will come later. first, let's unpack silco, who is probably arcane's most blatantly political figure, and a masterclass in the merits and failures of left wing, class-based populism.

silco, having been spurned by the classism and xenophobia that piltover's elite proliferate, and assisted by his rampant shimmer operation, fills the vacuum that vander's pacifism opened up. though silco's methods are unilaterally cruel (argue with the wall), the undercity clearly invested faith in him at some point, especially as vander's credibility as a guiding figure wavered over the years. he was fighting alongside vander for zaun's right to exist as their own independent body. in other words, he was uniting the undercity toward a common cause because the existing political system failed their constituents. to quote councilor shoola: "they may not be our preferred constituents, but they're still our people."

the track record of populism in our real world frequently ends in the ruin that silco himself brought upon the undercity. the kingpin is too dedicated to self-preservation, sees himself as too central to the movement, which prevents both compromise and/or a necessary armed revolt (insert your own politics about self-determination here). see italy's right wing populism party, Lega Nord, as a real-time example of this phenomenon.

but arcane makes an interesting plot decision with jayce, a very unexpected and "unwilling" contributor to piltover's abrupt dip into right wing populism. the showrunners love foils!

in arcane lore, i think it's safe to say that jayce's moniker "the man of progress" is pretty tongue-in-cheek. both he and viktor have a bemused tone about it in the run-up to his speech, and jayce is taken aback by heimerdinger's insistence that he deliver said speech. but the glowing, savior-esque imagery can't be ignored, nor can jayce's quick switch into his councilor role, no matter how reluctantly he makes it.

jayce is confronted by 2 forces that he seeks to combat in his quick tenure as councilor: internal corruption and an ineffective governing body. the latter goal is inspired almost solely by viktor, playing into jayce's naivety as a fresh-faced political figure, but this will be especially important to note later on. the innocence he offers up to mel is quickly erased, transformed instead into an uncomfortable - and inexperienced - militancy:

important in the bridge scene to my analysis is the populist "out group," or the designation populists give to those whom they actively oppose, and this opposition serves as their basis for organization. in this case, it's the undercity (keep this in mind for viktor's role!!).

jayce's combined frustrations at the unrest in the undercity and the council's (namely heimerdinger's) refusal to act, to both save viktor and to deal with the undercity's looming violence, motivates him to act like silco for a short time. unsatisfied with the status quo, he unites a likeminded individual, vi, along with the enforcers, to undercut the political system he feels is unable to represent its constituents or act in an effective manner. however, UNLIKE silco, jayce's realizes the inevitable cost the method of violence has and refrains in the end. he returns to the council and capitulates to some of silco's demands in the name of a peace piltover and zaun always thought impossible.

jinx's complete undoing of this underscores the failures of populism, especially as an extended movement over time. she wasn't accounted for. it's common sentiment at this point that she didn't attack the council for political gain. she was not invested in zaun's independence. she did it out of her and silco's twisted parental bond, and thus undid piltover's brief instance of compromise and compassion.

so...where does viktor fit into all this? and what are his implications for neoliberalism vs. populism in season 2?

viktor is neither wholly within nor wholly outside the populist outgroup - though jayce unintentionally shoves him back there in the pivotal bridge scene. furthermore, viktor also makes use of piltover's technocracy. he seems to have had a "raise yourself up by your bootstraps" history in arcane, contrary to left wing populist insistence that neoliberal ideals make this impossible.

this compounds as a double alienation for viktor, who also is straddled with the complications of his disability. a lot of his story is searching for a fellow in arms, if you ask me, and he had that with jayce until the pendulum swung, hence his return to singed.

if we stop there, viktor represents the failing of these 2 very flawed political ideologies. he fits nowhere and arcane uses him adeptly as a symbol of the failings of binaristic ideologues and systems. but let's speculate some more!

i'm convinced that viktor, due to his ambiguous 3rd party role in the story so far, will be one of the central villains (if not THE villain, if you allow me to be admittedly hopeful/biased) in season 2. consult the innumerable very well written theory/meta posts about the subject for more details, but one piece of evidence i want to focus on is this inherent physical, cultural, and ideological separateness that is innate to his character.

can we see him allying ever again with piltover, knowing that there's a split incoming? even without outside knowledge of league lore, singed's damning prediction ("if you take this path, they will despise you") cannot go unheeded. alternatively, then, can we see viktor allying with the supposed jinx-as-revolutionary side? no. personally, i see him as becoming increasingly unwillingly to compromise his a) immediate survival; and b) his ideals, especially after being endlessly sidelined in his attempts to express them in acts 2 and 3. he's also just a loner, guys.

there's some controversy on this point, but i'm convinced that the finger-printed cultists/followers we saw in the s2 trailer are devoted to viktor. starting with the shimmer addict he touched in the teaser, he is accruing a following all his own. and since noxus is here, touting their authoritarian militancy to replace piltover's outdated liberal ideals, nothing that jinx's revolution OR viktor's following does can be apolitical. to organize and to fight is survival under s2's raised stakes.

there aren't any binary spectrums when it comes to political theory in my opinion, so i am prepared to witness viktor introduce an entirely separate totalitarian narrative into arcane. where it will surely lack in militancy, it will make up for in its domination of the arcane. my biggest speculation is that, as they always do, piltover will fold and compromise at the last minute, perhaps yield to noxus, and invest wholeheartedly in taking down viktor's BBEG cultist regime. and by isolating his narrative repeatedly in s1, the writers planned this out expertly.

even if i'm wrong about viktor as third party, i like to think my observations still stand about the specific and qualifiable political divisions between piltover and zaun. the biggest hole this leaves for me is the question: will arcane ever take a stand? they seem very averse to making a blatant political statement, but i think their pervasive anti-police thread makes it clear that we're not meant to sympathize with piltover yuppies or their seasoned, jaded councilmen. let me know your thoughts!

also, as a jayce fan and a fan of arcane's overall story, none of this is meant as a CRITIQUE of him, mel, or silco. as silco said, "we all have our parts to play." i believe arcane's very greatest strength is their archetypal storytelling, and these distinct character roles are crucial to the success and vibrancy of the story.

if you read all the way to this point - ily <3

[ellieluvr420]

wife Abby headcanons xoxo

-You met at a bar when your friend cancelled on you last minute, she offered to buy you a drink and you chatted at the bar until she invited you back to hers, this was back when you were 22 and she was 25 so her flat was more modest but still well decorated and clean. You both shared a bottle of wine and sat and spoke more for hours until you were both so drunk you started doing karaoke together by watching youtube videos on her TV, she invited you out to an actual karaoke bar as your second date and she only fell even more in love with you the more she saw you.

-I think she would work in corporate like a lawyer or investment banker or something so I think she would try and work from home as much as they would let her.

-She looks so funny when she works from home too because she wears work clothes on her top half for her zoom calls but then she would be wearing pj bottoms and her slippers on her bottom half.

-Such a victim of Apple's marketing, always insists she needs the newest phone or whatever they had brought out, she has the watch, the phone, an ipad, an imac, macbook pro, airpod pros and airpod max's. Literally everything they sell because she's actually a tech geek at heart.

"I totally need it."

"Give me one reason you need an iPad Abigail."

"...I don't know, it's just cool."

You roll your eyes at her but chuckle at her insistence as you press a small kiss to her pouty lips. She smiles at you and looks like a child on Christmas day as she orders her new toy.

-She would so wear the airpod max's while working out and i think she'd always have one of those gallon water bottles that she'd take everywhere with her.

"Babe please just let me buy you one, trust me it will make you drink so much more water."

"No it won't, do not waste your money seriously." She'd huff at your stubbornness and go and buy you one anyway.

-I think she would workout at night or during the day if she can fit it in which rarely happens because she enjoys her mornings with you where you guys cuddle and chat and have breakfast together before she goes to work or gets started in the home office

-Does majority of the cooking because she really enjoys it and is also a chef, like she whips up three course meals so regularly like its nothing.

-You try and make dinner together on the weekends which equates to her micromanaging you until she gets too stressed watching you mess up and does it herself while you sit on the counter entertaining her.

-She always goes to sleep as big spoon and always wakes up as little spoon, every night, without failure. Also loves to lay on your stomach with her arms around your waist, one of her fav cuddling positions.

-She's the kind of person to ignore and persevere through a cold until she literally passes out and will get mad at you when you have to force her to rest but once she's comfy and has accepted she's ill she's such a baby.

-She would be so good with kids and they would all love her too like when you would go to family gatherings together all the kids would always be glued to her pulling her every which way

-loves dogs and cats and wants two of each

-loves home date nights where you cook together and watch films or play games whether its board, video or card games. Once you bought a fake police file and tried to figure out who the murderer was, it ended in a huge argument because you couldn't agree on who it was, you were so annoyed you made her sleep on the sofa but in the middle of night she sauntered back into your room and climbs into bed cuddling into you.

"Sorry babe, you were right." She kisses your forehead and you smile as you both go to sleep happily, Abby had managed to find the answer online but she didn't tell you that you were in fact wrong, she would rather be in bed cuddling you than prove she was right.

-I think she would want 3 kids, preferably boy, girl, boy or vice versa but she would be happy with any kids.

-If/when kids come along she starts working from home primarily and you watch them grow together.

-She would eventually want to move away from the city where she lived for an easy commute to work to a beautiful house in the country with large fields behind a huge back garden where the dogs and cats, and ducks all play with the kids.

-She would love reading crime thriller books but she also has a guilty pleasure for romance and sometimes she'll sit in bed with you and read you parts of the books. Can imagine older Abby refusing to get reading glasses because that makes her officially old but she’s literally holding the book as far as it will go and squinting so hard and she still can’t read it, you eventually give in and read it to her which only motivates her to not get glasses more because this was a way better option.

-Loves Family Guy, American Dad, South Park, all those kind of shows but if you put on a drama she'll grumble and then be hooked.

"Oh my god, oh my god, are you fucking kidding me? Noooooooo." Abby yells at the screen as she watches the season 1 finale of vampire diaries with you, you had started rewatching it as it was nostalgic and she made fun of you so much until you forced her to watch the episode you were watching.

Like I could so see her watching greys anatomy and sobbing when there's a major character death

-Goes to get mani pedis with you and she'll always get her nails painted to match the colour of yours even when you'd pick super bright to mess with her she'd get it without batting an eye.

-Of course she gets along super well with all your friends and family, sometimes you think they love her more than you 😀

okay that's all I got for now but I will probs do way more once the series is finished :))

[ironunderstands]

Sunday’s worldview sucks, his outlook and perception of himself and others sucks… and that’s why he’s so interesting

In honor of his drip marketing releasing tonight (or maybe yesterday for you depending on when I get this out), I’d like to talk about why I think Sunday’s beliefs and perspective is very, very flawed and how his own biases rather than the actions of those who oppose him are what led to his downfall.

Sunday is entirely responsible for his own failure, and that’s exactly why he’s incredible.

This contains mentions of leaks and spoilers for the Penacony quest line… you have been warned

To start with, oh my lord do Sunday’s preconceived notions kick him in the ass. 

I think the best example of this is his conversation with Dr. Ratio in which Ratio pretends to betray Aventurine, selling out his plan to Sunday. Now, what’s incredibly interesting about this exchange is that Ratio doesn’t fully lie to Sunday once in this exchange, rather he says half truths and makes vague statements which Sunday himself interprets as being in support of him. 

Take what Ratio said the whole, “A scholar knows their position and wouldn’t forsake it for the sake of petty pride.” In retrospect, we know this line is actually referring to Aventurine- aka Ratio is saying he’s not just going to sell him out to Sunday for the sake of information about the Stellaron (which he would get anyways if the IPC attained Penacony, plus Mr. Incredibly Dedicated Knowledge Spreader probably has other means of gaining it then through The Family). 

However, since Ratio answered the invitation Sunday gave him, Sunday assumes that Ratio is on his side, believes his cause is righteous, and that he won Ratio over with offering him information about the Stellaron, therefore making that previous statement of Ratio’s null, because Sunday interpreted it as, “convince me this is worth my time + prove to me you’re correct,” when it really meant, “there is no way in hell I’m about to sacrifice my friend to you, and there is nothing you could offer me to make me do so you crazed lunatic.”

But why did Sunday not weigh the options? Why did he unquestioningly believe his perception of the situation was the correct one?

Well- partly it’s because Ratio and Aventurine were doing their damndest to make it seem like they hate each other and that their plan was going off the rails.

But the more important part is that even without Ratio saying a word or even accepting the invitation, Sunday already believes he’d be on his side. 

Let me demonstrate this through Sunday's perspective:

I am a righteous person, I am doing the correct things, my worldview is the correct one. Dr. Ratio is also a righteous person who seems to be doing the correct things. Therefore, since we are both on the side of good, and Aventurine is clearly not on that side considering his status as Stoneheart and his negative relationship to Ratio, then Ratio will naturally want to be on my side. After all, the good guys work together, do they not?- and together will vanquish this evil villain.

This perspective is a simple one, but Sunday’s unshaking belief (up until the end of 2.2) that he is 100% in correct and in the right, that any and everyone who he also perceives to be in the right (like Ratio) would believe/side with him without truly needing to be convinced. Sunday doesn’t come out the gate offering the Stellaron information- he only keeps it as a backup just in case. 

However, this is complicated because Sunday is also not an idiot, and he’s extremely paranoid, so he’s going to make sure that the way he views the world is 100% correct on the off chance he’s wrong which could foil his plans- which is why he invited Ratio in the first place. Nevertheless, this isn’t him hunting for new perspectives, but rather him desiring to prove himself right again, which is a bad thing because Sunday is very much not right. 

A perfect world is a perfect pris- *gets shot*

Reference that approximately 2 ½ people will get beside, Sunday’s ideology that he is fully confident in.. sucks. It sucks ass, it’s terrible, and let me explain.

I’m not going to try going over all the little intricacies to how the dreamscape works because I a) don’t know and b) don’t particularly care because they aren’t relevant to the argument I will be making- which is that Sunday’s ideology is inherently flawed and immediately falls apart under scrutiny.

Essentially, he desires to create the perfect fake reality, enveloping the whole galaxy in Ena’s dream and fulfilling their every desire and whim within it, with himself as the sacrifice to allow it to exist. The seven rest days, no illness, no pain, no challenge, you get the idea. 

And, this perfect world paradoxically sucks ass because of its perfectness.

Improving society is great, eliminating hardship is great, increasing quality of life is great.

But declawing reality itself- absolutely not.

I’m going to try to explain this through my favorite strangely specific anecdote- the process of obtaining diamonds in Minecraft.

Stay with me now.

You essentially have two options- go out and mine them yourselves the hard way, which takes hours, gives you less diamonds per the amount of time spent on it, and likely with you exhausting some of your resources like food, torches, and tools which you will need to replenish.

Or.

You can just.. get them from creative mode or commands, and you can get as many as your heart desires.

However, despite the fact that option one is harder, gives you less diamonds and takes significantly more time, I, as well as hopefully you, would pick it every time (at least in a survival world, although honestly idk why you would even need pure diamonds in creative).

And that’s because the first option is rewarding. 

You did not earn the diamonds you easily and magically summoned into your inventory, there is no struggle, no journey, no challenge to it, therefore it feels entirely unremarkable, as compared to the feeling you (hopefully) get from mining diamonds, which makes you happy because you earned it. Yeah, it was harder, but the process itself is fun- the anticipation of not knowing when you’re going to find them, if at all, the danger, the fighting and digging and mauvering you will have to do in the process.

And with this unconventional example, the fatal flaw with Sunday’s ideology is revealed- it’s boring. 

It’s boring as shit.

Yeah, for the first few months or even years it might be enjoyable- having everything you could ever want served on a silver platter. However, humans are a) inherently a bit greedy and b) desire challenge, and this scenario fulfilles neither of those things. Naturally having everything means your desire for more can never be fulfilled, leaving the wanter forever unsatisfied, whereas in the real world, things are truly out of your reach, meaning that even if you never end up getting them, they are still a tangible thing just out of reach… as strange at it sounds, we like being tantalilus-ed more than you think. After all, if what you want is so easy to get, you will never run out of things to want, and eventually that gets draining. 

Continually, if everything is easy, if everything is just right there whenever you want it- existence itself no longer has stakes. 

And that’s the problem, because much like how a story with no stakes is extremely hard to find compelling, a life with no stakes feels boring at best and downright pointless and meaningless at worst.

I’m just saying, there is a reason why the Nihility was such a strong presence and problem in Penacony.

Anyways, like with the diamond problem, a lack of stakes means that nothing you do feels rewarding, because you didn’t truly earn it. 

Which is where the Sunday’s idea of a “perfect” reality falls apart, because the most enjoyable reality for humans to live in is not one literally devoid of any possible flaw.

So why does he believe in it? When it’s so clearly flawed?

Well, it’s because Sunday doesn’t think a better alternative exists.

The world made you this way.. and you chose to continue what it started.

I’m sure I don’t need to repeat the story of the Charmony Dove all over again because trust me, we’ve all heard it before. Nonetheless, it reveals something important both about Sunday’s personality and his ideology- he’s fundamentally a defeatist.

He doesn’t believe that there is any alternative for the dove, that it could ever be able to fly again with its deformed nature, so instead of being “cruel” and letting it “inevitably fall to its death,” he’d rather keep it in a cage all its life where it has no freedom, but at least it would he alive and “happy”.

And this is where his defeatism reveals itself- Sunday doesn’t believe reality itself can get better because improving it when there are so many factors and things out of your control is hard at best and impossible at worst. Therefore, he resorts to creating an escapist, false version of it- a perfect golden cage, because constructing that is far, far easier than trying to help the dove fly again. 

The universe has endless possibilities, if Robin and Sunday had tried hard enough, they probably could have found a solution. Sure, they were both children, so the capabilities necessary to even attempt that were likely far out of their reach. However, it was still possible, but Sunday doesn’t believe in possibilities- he believes he’s right above all else, which is where that stubbornness and arrogance comes into play again.

Sunday doesn’t think better solutions than his exists, and he believes everyone would could possibly stand in his noble way are either villains, or horribly misguided; so it’s his job to show them the light.

This is why he lets the Express Crew + Firefly try to change his mind- Sunday wasn’t actually interesting in shifting his perspective, or really what they wanted to say. Rather, he just wanted to let them say there peace, because well, Sunday’s a good, righteous person (at least from his perspective), and good, righteous people listen to others. Good, righteous people will let these poor, ignorant souls offer their foolish words before exposing them to the harsh truth- or at least that’s how Sunday sees it. 

Moreover, this also explains his arrogance. If he believes his worldview is the sole correct one, then why listen to anyone else? He’s this world's savior, or at least he’s been raised to believe that- so why not relish in it? He enjoys punishing Aventurine, enjoys the bastard who stood in the way of Sunday’s plans, shrinks away in “defeat” and get what he “deserves.” Despite how miserable it sounds, Sunday also takes pride in having to be a martyr to bring about his beautiful dream. The belief that he is a selfless, good person is a selfish desire of his, even if a genuine one, and it’s what leads to his downfall.

Sunday could have actually listened. He could have reevaluated his loss to Aventurine and realized it was not through the others clever deception, but through his own biases. He could have actually taken the Express’s and Firefly’s advice. He could have looked for other avenues to help the people he truly does care about. 

Despite Gopher Wood’s manipulation- Sunday’s decision to go forward with the pain is entirely his own, because he truly believes- even with all the evidence for the contrary- that he is correct.

And that’s why he fails. Not because of the Express. Not because of Ratio. Not because of Aventurine. Not because of Gopher, or even the rest of The Family.

No, Sunday fails because he is flawed, and he is wrong, and he is the arrogant, selfish and biased one, and his worldview is wrong.

So what now?

This might have seemed like I think Sunday is pure evil and irredeemable, but I think it’s quite the opposite.

He has very good intentions, and he does genuinely care about it the well being of other people around him. He gives Aventurine a chance to prove his innocence, even if he never intended on changing, he does listen to what the Express + Firefly have to say. He pauses when Robin shows up, as she’s the one person (until the very end) he’s actually willing to accept the perspective of. The whole reason he ended up here in the first place is because Gopher Wood twisted Sunday’s good intentions into a fatal arrogance and utmost belief in a flawed worldview. 

However, what really sells me on Sunday’s goodness is when eyes widen at that final moment, the light draining from him as he realizes he is wrong. 

And once Sunday realizes he is wrong, those flaws that bind him can finally be examined and improved upon, as they all stem from that worldview he no longer believes in. 

His whole life, Sunday has been enacting out someone else’s plan for him, even if he’s come to internalize it over time, at the end of the day- it was never his, and without it, he’s empty.

Which is exactly why the only place he can go now is the Express, and the only thing left for him is redemption and growth.

Dan Heng is right- Sunday has a noble soul, and now that he has stopped believing in himself, he’s no longer shackled by the past either. Improvement or utter demise (in a likely nihility-flavored manner) are his only options remaining.

I understand a lot of people want to see him become a Stellaron Hunter, but imo, that just does nothing for him. He’d still be following someone else’s path/script, and Mr. I Will Sacrifice My Whole Existence To Become The Sun To Illuminate These Wandering Souls probably wouldn’t be so on board with the whole.. terrorism part of being a SH. Like yeah, they are our friends (kinda), but they absolutely kill innocent people and cause millions of dollars in property damage to people who don’t deserve it. 

Also, being on the Express Just Makes Sense. This is a game about choices, a game about accepting the mistakes of your past, but not letting them define you in order to move on and forge a better future for yourself and others- with the Astral Express + Trailblaze as a concept being the literal embodiment of it. There’s a reason when you switch to the Trailblazer’s POV in stories, it includes Kafka’s most important words to us- “When you have the chance to make a choice, make one you won’t regret.”

Therefore, I hope the choices Sunday will make in 2.7 are ones he’s proud of, and I can’t wait to see how exactly they get him on board with the crew, because there still is a LOT of development he needs to do before then. 

Anyways, thank you so much for reading, and if you have any thoughts I’d love to hear them. This was a stream of consciousness mess, but I hope it was still valuable nonetheless! Also if you are reading this on the day it was written, I hope we don’t get disappointed by his drip marketing!

[after-witch]

Peaches [Yandere Mahito x Reader]

Title: Peaches [Yandere Mahito x Reader]

Synopsis: You smell like Peaches. Mahito thinks about it.

Word Count: 860

notes: yandere, discussions of dead bodies in a bit of detail, threats of harm, just a lil mahito something something in honor of tomorrow <3

You smell like peaches. 

He knows this now. But he didn’t always know what the scent that clung to your skin was actually called. It was knowledge duly gained by following his nose one day, having caught a scent on the wind that reminded him of you, although he knew it wasn’t actually you. 

Because the real you--the soul surrounded by flesh and blood--were currently holed up in the office building where you worked, stupid thing that you were, wasting your hours and energy on something entirely useless. 

But that windy breeze smelled like you, and that’s why he followed it on two feet, humming, until he wandered into some kind of open air market where baskets were bursting with all sorts of fruits and vegetables. He smelled them all, licking a few, taking bites when he felt like it, until he found the right one. 

It had yellowish-orange flesh, and it was soft, fuzzy. He took a bite and the juice ran down his chin, but the smell was stronger and that was particularly nice. The sign in front of the basket read: Peaches.

Ah, then.

A peach. 

That’s what you smelled like. 

Your scent was a bit different, though, if he got technical about it. You didn’t smell exactly like this real peach, all fresh fuzz and sticky bright juice. The way you smell is more… rich, low, consistent. Overripe. A peach amplified and concentrated.

Artificial.

That was how humans described such notions, wasn’t it? It must be perfume, or shampoo, or something else that humans rub on themselves to smell different. 

You, evidently, wanted to smell like peaches.

He couldn’t blame you. It was a nice smell, without considering personal taste. Pleasant and fresh. He supposed a lot of humans liked to smell that way. He didn’t mind dampness or decay, the low sweet rot of it was quite pleasant to him. Humans, on the other hand, tried to cover up any stench they could. Sprays for their bathroom, sprays for their skin, sprays for their hair, hastily emptying corpses of everything that made them bloat deliciously and spew out secretions and replacing it with sterile chemicals. 

Not that you were trying to cover up any such odor, corpse-like or not. He’s watched you in the bathroom on most mornings, scrubbing every bit of the human body that liked to produce a smell if left untouched. Your armpits, your back, that awfully special area between your legs. So that there was no trace of your natural scent about you by the time you were done, no chance that someone might walk by you and turn up their nose.

No matter what you smell like, though, your soul remains the same.

Souls have no particular smell, unless they are corrupt enough. Humans are truly pathetic for not knowing this fact. A corrupt soul is a bit like a dead body, he supposes, if he had to compare their scent to something else. Thrumming with rot, like decaying flesh moving with maggots. 

Your soul is not so corrupt. He would’ve gotten a whiff of it, if it was. Oh, but make no mistake: it’s not pure either. He’s seen the way it wavers, the darkened shimmers when you’re standing at a traffic light (sometimes he thinks about shoving someone into traffic, to see what will happen, what you’ll do) or when your boss is berating you for some nonsensical human failures (what might you do, if he snapped your boss’s neck here and now, in front of you?)--the curses that slither their way out of you are dark and low, stodgy little things borne out of feelings you try to stamp down.

That was the beautiful thing about curses. They were humanity, untethered. Just one reason why they were superior. 

That doesn’t mean he can’t want to play with humans, though. He’s never had a toy he wanted to keep around for so long, but there’s something about you. Something that keeps him just far enough away to avoid detection, on the off chance that you could see him. Sometimes he wonders, with the way your eyes dart around on the street, with the way you pause over something he’s moved in your apartment. Do you spot him in a crowd, and see that he’s different? Can you feel his presence, when he’s on the other side of the door, listening to you sing off-key while you shower?

Your soul shimmers then, too. 

He longs to touch it, to root around and see exactly what makes you angry, what makes you hate, what spots of mold might be hiding underneath that peach perfume. 

How long would you smell like peaches, if he dragged you to the damp tunnel where he lives? Would it linger on your skin like a memory? Or would it fade and fade and fade until there was nothing left but the sour, damp water of his sewer? 

Maybe he’ll talk to you tomorrow. Sprawl out on your couch when you come home, and find out if you can see him. 

After all, he can do whatever he wants. That’s what life is all about, isn’t it?

[letters-to-lgbt-kids]

My dear lgbt+ kids, 

I’ll tell you the ultimate brain health hack now. You want to improve your mood, your mental health, your ability to focus, your ability to relax, and you look for the one simple change in your life that’ll help you with all that? Well, there is one single thing you can do right now! And it is… to not trust any brain health hacks. 

Don’t get me wrong, there are things you can do for a healthy brain. Most of them are not really that surprising: regular exercise, quality time with loved ones, meditation, safe exposure to sunlight, engaging in creative hobbies or doing things that make you laugh are all examples for things that can potentially increase the feel-good hormones in your brain. In general, all of the classic healthy habits (a diet rich in vegetables and fruits, proper hydration, enough sleep and exercise) are good for your brain. 

But if I single out just one specific thing and market that to you as the ultimate fix-all, I’m still spreading misinformation. Even if that one thing is perfectly harmless by itself and even if it helps me - I just don’t know you well enough to make any such promises. Chances are, I don’t even know myself enough. Maybe I hacked my brain by eating a banana every morning, or maybe I eat breakfast regularly because I’m feeling happier and I’m mixing up cause and effect.

Of course the banana is just an example but let’s stick with it. Unless you are allergic to bananas, it’s unlikely this advice would harm you. It can in fact be a nice little routine to get more fruit into your diet, and that’s healthy! But if I sold you this as the “one small change for your mental health”, I’d set you up for failure. Healthy habits don’t work that way. Maybe your brain isn’t lacking in any vitamins a banana could provide but mine was. Maybe there is another lifestyle change you’d benefit from much more that I don’t consider because we live wildly different lives. Maybe you suffer from depression and a banana ain’t gonna do anything about that. Maybe your mental health is perfectly fine but by promising you some big improvement, I make you hyperanalyze your daily mood and convince yourself something is wrong when you don’t notice any changes. Or maybe… yeah, you get my point. Health is way too individual for “one small change” to work for everyone. 

With all my love, 

Your Tumblr Dad 

[mostlysignssomeportents]

The reason you can’t buy a car is the same reason that your health insurer let hackers dox you

On July 14, I'm giving the closing keynote for the fifteenth HACKERS ON PLANET EARTH, in QUEENS, NY. Happy Bastille Day! On July 20, I'm appearing in CHICAGO at Exile in Bookville.

In 2017, Equifax suffered the worst data-breach in world history, leaking the deep, nonconsensual dossiers it had compiled on 148m Americans and 15m Britons, (and 19k Canadians) into the world, to form an immortal, undeletable reservoir of kompromat and premade identity-theft kits:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2017_Equifax_data_breach

Equifax knew the breach was coming. It wasn't just that their top execs liquidated their stock in Equifax before the announcement of the breach – it was also that they ignored years of increasingly urgent warnings from IT staff about the problems with their server security.

Things didn't improve after the breach. Indeed, the 2017 Equifax breach was the starting gun for a string of more breaches, because Equifax's servers didn't just have one fubared system – it was composed of pure, refined fubar. After one group of hackers breached the main Equifax system, other groups breached other Equifax systems, over and over, and over:

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/equifax-password-username-admin-lawsuit-201118316.html

Doesn't this remind you of Boeing? It reminds me of Boeing. The spectacular 737 Max failures in 2018 weren't the end of the scandal. They weren't even the scandal's start – they were the tipping point, the moment in which a long history of lethally defective planes "breached" from the world of aviation wonks and into the wider public consciousness:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_accidents_and_incidents_involving_the_Boeing_737

Just like with Equifax, the 737 Max disasters tipped Boeing into a string of increasingly grim catastrophes. Each fresh disaster landed with the grim inevitability of your general contractor texting you that he's just opened up your ceiling and discovered that all your joists had rotted out – and that he won't be able to deal with that until he deals with the termites he found last week, and that they'll have to wait until he gets to the cracks in the foundation slab from the week before, and that those will have to wait until he gets to the asbestos he just discovered in the walls.

Drip, drip, drip, as you realize that the most expensive thing you own – which is also the thing you had hoped to shelter for the rest of your life – isn't even a teardown, it's just a pure liability. Even if you razed the structure, you couldn't start over, because the soil is full of PCBs. It's not a toxic asset, because it's not an asset. It's just toxic.

Equifax isn't just a company: it's infrastructure. It started out as an engine for racial, political and sexual discrimination, paying snoops to collect gossip from nosy neighbors, which was assembled into vast warehouses full of binders that told bank officers which loan applicants should be denied for being queer, or leftists, or, you know, Black:

https://jacobin.com/2017/09/equifax-retail-credit-company-discrimination-loans

This witch-hunts-as-a-service morphed into an official part of the economy, the backbone of the credit industry, with a license to secretly destroy your life with haphazardly assembled "facts" about your life that you had the most minimal, grudging right to appeal (or even see). Turns out there are a lot of customers for this kind of service, and the capital markets showered Equifax with the cash needed to buy almost all of its rivals, in mergers that were waved through by a generation of Reaganomics-sedated antitrust regulators.

There's a direct line from that acquisition spree to the Equifax breach(es). First of all, companies like Equifax were early adopters of technology. They're a database company, so they were the crash-test dummies for ever generation of database. These bug-riddled, heavily patched systems were overlaid with subsequent layers of new tech, with new defects to be patched and then overlaid with the next generation.

These systems are intrinsically fragile, because things fall apart at the seams, and these systems are all seams. They are tech-debt personified. Now, every kind of enterprise will eventually reach this state if it keeps going long enough, but the early digitizers are the bow-wave of that coming infopocalypse, both because they got there first and because the bottom tiers of their systems are composed of layers of punchcards and COBOL, crumbling under the geological stresses of seventy years of subsequent technology.

The single best account of this phenomenon is the British Library's postmortem of their ransomware attack, which is also in the running for "best hard-eyed assessment of how fucked things are":

https://www.bl.uk/home/british-library-cyber-incident-review-8-march-2024.pdf

There's a reason libraries, cities, insurance companies, and other giant institutions keep getting breached: they started accumulating tech debt before anyone else, so they've got more asbestos in the walls, more sagging joists, more foundation cracks and more termites.

That was the starting point for Equifax – a company with a massive tech debt that it would struggle to pay down under the most ideal circumstances.

Then, Equifax deliberately made this situation infinitely worse through a series of mergers in which it bought dozens of other companies that all had their own version of this problem, and duct-taped their failing, fucked up IT systems to its own. The more seams an IT system has, the more brittle and insecure it is. Equifax deliberately added so many seams that you need to be able to visualized additional spatial dimensions to grasp them – they had fractal seams.

But wait, there's more! The reason to merge with your competitors is to create a monopoly position, and the value of a monopoly position is that it makes a company too big to fail, which makes it too big to jail, which makes it too big to care. Each Equifax acquisition took a piece off the game board, making it that much harder to replace Equifax if it fucked up. That, in turn, made it harder to punish Equifax if it fucked up. And that meant that Equifax didn't have to care if it fucked up.

Which is why the increasingly desperate pleas for more resources to shore up Equifax's crumbling IT and security infrastructure went unheeded. Top management could see that they were steaming directly into an iceberg, but they also knew that they had a guaranteed spot on the lifeboats, and that someone else would be responsible for fishing the dead passengers out of the sea. Why turn the wheel?

That's what happened to Boeing, too: the company acquired new layers of technical complexity by merging with rivals (principally McDonnell-Douglas), and then starved the departments that would have to deal with that complexity because it was being managed by execs whose driving passion was to run a company that was too big to care. Those execs then added more complexity by chasing lower costs by firing unionized, competent, senior staff and replacing them with untrained scabs in jurisdictions chosen for their lax labor and environmental enforcement regimes.

(The biggest difference was that Boeing once had a useful, high-quality product, whereas Equifax started off as an irredeemably terrible, if efficient, discrimination machine, and grew to become an equally terrible, but also ferociously incompetent, enterprise.)

This is the American story of the past four decades: accumulate tech debt, merge to monopoly, exponentially compound your tech debt by combining barely functional IT systems. Every corporate behemoth is locked in a race between the eventual discovery of its irreparable structural defects and its ability to become so enmeshed in our lives that we have to assume the costs of fixing those defects. It's a contest between "too rotten to stand" and "too big to care."

Remember last February, when we all discovered that there was a company called Change Healthcare, and that they were key to processing virtually every prescription filled in America? Remember how we discovered this? Change was hacked, went down, ransomed, and no one could fill a scrip in America for more than a week, until they paid the hackers $22m in Bitcoin?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024_Change_Healthcare_ransomware_attack

How did we end up with Change Healthcare as the linchpin of the entire American prescription system? Well, first Unitedhealthcare became the largest health insurer in America by buying all its competitors in a series of mergers that comatose antitrust regulators failed to block. Then it combined all those other companies' IT systems into a cosmic-scale dog's breakfast that barely ran. Then it bought Change and used its monopoly power to ensure that every Rx ran through Change's servers, which were part of that asbestos-filled, termite-infested, crack-foundationed, sag-joisted teardown. Then, it got hacked.

United's execs are the kind of execs on a relentless quest to be too big to care, and so they don't care. Which is why their they had to subsequently announce that they had suffered a breach that turned the complete medical histories of one third of Americans into immortal Darknet kompromat that is – even now – being combined with breach data from Equifax and force-fed to the slaves in Cambodia and Laos's pig-butchering factories:

https://www.cnn.com/2024/05/01/politics/data-stolen-healthcare-hack/index.html

Those slaves are beaten, tortured, and punitively raped in compounds to force them to drain the life's savings of everyone in Canada, Australia, Singapore, the UK and Europe. Remember that they are downstream of the forseeable, inevitable IT failures of companies that set out to be too big to care that this was going to happen.

Failures like Ticketmaster's, which flushed 500 million users' personal information into the identity-theft mills just last month. Ticketmaster, you'll recall, grew to its current scale through (you guessed it), a series of mergers en route to "too big to care" status, that resulted in its IT systems being combined with those of Ticketron, Live Nation, and dozens of others:

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/31/business/ticketmaster-hack-data-breach.html

But enough about that. Let's go car-shopping!

Good luck with that. There's a company you've never heard. It's called CDK Global. They provide "dealer management software." They are a monopolist. They got that way after being bought by a private equity fund called Brookfield. You can't complete a car purchase without their systems, and their systems have been hacked. No one can buy a car:

https://www.cnn.com/2024/06/27/business/cdk-global-cyber-attack-update/index.html

Writing for his BIG newsletter, Matt Stoller tells the all-too-familiar story of how CDK Global filled the walls of the nation's auto-dealers with the IT equivalent of termites and asbestos, and lays the blame where it belongs: with a legal and economics establishment that wanted it this way:

https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/a-supreme-court-justice-is-why-you

The CDK story follows the Equifax/Boeing/Change Healthcare/Ticketmaster pattern, but with an important difference. As CDK was amassing its monopoly power, one of its execs, Dan McCray, told a competitor, Authenticom founder Steve Cottrell that if he didn't sell to CDK that he would "fucking destroy" Authenticom by illegally colluding with the number two dealer management company Reynolds.

Rather than selling out, Cottrell blew the whistle, using Cottrell's own words to convince a district court that CDK had violated antitrust law. The court agreed, and ordered CDK and Reynolds – who controlled 90% of the market – to continue to allow Authenticom to participate in the DMS market.

Dealers cheered this on: CDK/Reynolds had been steadily hiking prices, while ingesting dealer data and using it to gouge the dealers on additional services, while denying dealers access to their own data. The services that Authenticom provided for $35/month cost $735/month from CDK/Reynolds (they justified this price hike by saying they needed the additional funds to cover the costs of increased information security!).

CDK/Reynolds appealed the judgment to the 7th Circuit, where a panel of economists weighed in. As Stoller writes, this panel included monopoly's most notorious (and well-compensated) cheerleader, Frank Easterbrook, and the "legendary" Democrat Diane Wood. They argued for CDK/Reynolds, demanding that the court release them from their obligations to share the market with Authenticom:

https://caselaw.findlaw.com/court/us-7th-circuit/1879150.html

The 7th Circuit bought the argument, overturning the lower court and paving the way for the CDK/Reynolds monopoly, which is how we ended up with one company's objectively shitty IT systems interwoven into the sale of every car, which meant that when Russian hackers looked at that crosseyed, it split wide open, allowing them to halt auto sales nationwide. What happens next is a near-certainty: CDK will pay a multimillion dollar ransom, and the hackers will reward them by breaching the personal details of everyone who's ever bought a car, and the slaves in Cambodian pig-butchering compounds will get a fresh supply of kompromat.

But on the plus side, the need to pay these huge ransoms is key to ensuring liquidity in the cryptocurrency markets, because ransoms are now the only nondiscretionary liability that can only be settled in crypto:

https://locusmag.com/2022/09/cory-doctorow-moneylike/

When the 7th Circuit set up every American car owner to be pig-butchered, they cited one of the most important cases in antitrust history: the 2004 unanimous Supreme Court decision in Verizon v Trinko:

https://www.oyez.org/cases/2003/02-682

Trinko was a case about whether antitrust law could force Verizon, a telcoms monopolist, to share its lines with competitors, something it had been ordered to do and then cheated on. The decision was written by Antonin Scalia, and without it, Big Tech would never have been able to form. Scalia and Trinko gave us the modern, too-big-to-care versions of Google, Meta, Apple, Microsoft and the other tech baronies.

In his Trinko opinion, Scalia said that "possessing monopoly power" and "charging monopoly prices" was "not unlawful" – rather, it was "an important element of the free-market system." Scalia – writing on behalf of a unanimous court! – said that fighting monopolists "may lessen the incentive for the monopolist…to invest in those economically beneficial facilities."

In other words, in order to prevent monopolists from being too big to care, we have to let them have monopolies. No wonder Trinko is the Zelig of shitty antitrust rulings, from the decision to dismiss the antitrust case against Facebook and Apple's defense in its own ongoing case:

https://www.ftc.gov/system/files/documents/cases/073_2021.06.28_mtd_order_memo.pdf

Trinko is the origin node of too big to care. It's the reason that our whole economy is now composed of "infrastructure" that is made of splitting seams, asbestos, termites and dry rot. It's the reason that the entire automotive sector became dependent on companies like Reynolds, whose billionaire owner intentionally and illegally destroyed evidence of his company's crimes, before going on to commit the largest tax fraud in American history:

https://www.wsj.com/articles/billionaire-robert-brockman-accused-of-biggest-tax-fraud-in-u-s-history-dies-at-81-11660226505

Trinko begs companies to become too big to care. It ensures that they will exponentially increase their IT debt while becoming structurally important to whole swathes of the US economy. It guarantees that they will underinvest in IT security. It is the soil in which pig butchering grew.

It's why you can't buy a car.

Now, I am fond of quoting Stein's Law at moments like this: "anything that can't go on forever will eventually stop." As Stoller writes, after two decades of unchallenged rule, Trinko is looking awfully shaky. It was substantially narrowed in 2023 by the 10th Circuit, which had been briefed by Biden's antitrust division:

https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/appellate-courts/ca10/22-1164/22-1164-2023-08-21.html

And the cases of 2024 have something going for them that Trinko lacked in 2004: evidence of what a fucking disaster Trinko is. The wrongness of Trinko is so increasingly undeniable that there's a chance it will be overturned.

But it won't go down easy. As Stoller writes, Trinko didn't emerge from a vacuum: the economic theories that underpinned it come from some of the heroes of orthodox economics, like Joseph Schumpeter, who is positively worshipped. Schumpeter was antitrust's OG hater, who wrote extensively that antitrust law didn't need to exist because any harmful monopoly would be overturned by an inevitable market process dictated by iron laws of economics.

Schumpeter wrote that monopolies could only be sustained by "alertness and energy" – that there would never be a monopoly so secure that its owner became too big to care. But he went further, insisting that the promise of attaining a monopoly was key to investment in great new things, because monopolists had the economic power that let them plan and execute great feats of innovation.

The idea that monopolies are benevolent dictators has pervaded our economic tale for decades. Even today, critics who deplore Facebook and Google do so on the basis that they do not wield their power wisely (say, to stamp out harassment or disinformation). When confronted with the possibility of breaking up these companies or replacing them with smaller platforms, those critics recoil, insisting that without Big Tech's scale, no one will ever have the power to accomplish their goals:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/18/urban-wildlife-interface/#combustible-walled-gardens

But they misunderstand the relationship between corporate power and corporate conduct. The reason corporations accumulate power is so that they can be insulated from the consequences of the harms they wreak upon the rest of us. They don't inflict those harms out of sadism: rather, they do so in order to externalize the costs of running a good system, reaping the profits of scale while we pay its costs.

The only reason to accumulate corporate power is to grow too big to care. Any corporation that amasses enough power that it need not care about us will not care about it. You can't fix Facebook by replacing Zuck with a good unelected social media czar with total power over billions of peoples' lives. We need to abolish Zuck, not fix Zuck.

Zuck is not exceptional: there were a million sociopaths whom investors would have funded to monopolistic dominance if he had balked. A monopoly like Facebook has a Zuck-shaped hole at the top of its org chart, and only someone Zuck-shaped will ever fit through that hole.

Our whole economy is now composed of companies with sociopath-shaped holes at the tops of their org chart. The reason these companies can only be run by sociopaths is the same reason that they have become infrastructure that is crumbling due to sociopathic neglect. The reckless disregard for the risk of combining companies is the source of the market power these companies accumulated, and the market power let them neglect their systems to the point of collapse.

This is the system that Schumpeter, and Easterbrook, and Wood, and Scalia – and the entire Supreme Court of 2004 – set out to make. The fact that you can't buy a car is a feature, not a bug. The pig-butcherers, wallowing in an ocean of breach data, are a feature, not a bug. The point of the system was what it did: create unimaginable wealth for a tiny cohort of the worst people on Earth without regard to the collapse this would provoke, or the plight of those of us trapped and suffocating in the rubble.

Support me this summer on the Clarion Write-A-Thon and help raise money for the Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers' Workshop!

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/06/28/dealer-management-software/#antonin-scalia-stole-your-car

Image: Cryteria (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HAL9000.svg

CC BY 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en