#the tas would explain it but i can not het there

[kairosthegoat]

Failing in uni as i physically can not get there and both the presentation and lecture are fucking worse than useless but i refuse to use ai

[numberonebidoofenjoyer]

‘Mon of The Day (Video #1)

[Begin Video. African-American male fidgets with camera, smiling. He’s wearing an orange school uniform, gray dress shirt and orange tie, in orange jeans. Instead of a jacket, however, he’s wearing a lab coat. He backs up, before waving at the camera.]

‘Ello and Yello, Rotumblr! I’m Lochland!

Bzzt! And I’m Rotom!

And we're your hosts for ‘Mon of the Day! Here on MOTD, we try to replicate the nostalgic feel of Professor Oak’s Pokemon Talk, by going over some of the Pokemon in Paldea for our very own treasure hunt! For our first episode ever, we’ll be taking a look at a Pokemon was recently given to me, and my first officially registered Pokemon!

[He emerged with a standard Poké Ball from his labcoat pocket.]

Quaxly, come on out!

[Het tosses it up, and in a flash of blue, a Quaxly appears. It’s a duckling-like Pokémon. It has a yellow beak and blue eyes. It has teal webbed feet and a large teal coif-like crest that covers its head.]

Quaxly! Quax, quax!

Hi baby! How’re you doing?

Quaxly! Quax, Xly, xly!

Awwww, who’s a cutie? You are, you are!

[Lochland briefly bends down to affectionately coddle the Duckling Pokémon. Rotom clears his throat impatiently.]

Lochland!

[The boy looks up and cringes, seemingly embarrassed.]

Ah, crap, right. Ahem! Recorded as the Duckling Pokemon, Quaxly is a Water-type, known for it’s keen coif, which is super smooth!

This is due to the rich, moist cream that the hair can hold, bzzt! If dry, not only does Quaxly get upset, but the coif can become extremely spiky and unkempt!

[Lochland picks up Quaxly, affectionately smoothing it’s hair. Quaxly leans into his touch.]

Quaxly is a tidy Pokemon, and hates getting dirty, explaining this behavior. In battles, it uses it’s swift speed to kick its foes repeatedly. It’s legs also allow it to swim through rough or even fast flowing currents, making it one of it’s most valuable assets!

Quaxly, like my trainer, however is prone to overthinking. To Quaxly trainers, even those with a brave or sassy ones, be sure to give them reassurance that you endlessly love and support them, bzzt! Pokemon have feelings too!

[Lochland flinches, a grimace on his face.His Quaxly nudges him in a comforting way.]

(...You could’ve. Just not mentioned me in that part…)

(Quaxly…)

[Lochland coughs, regaining his composure.]

Ahem! Fun fact: Quaxly aren’t native to Paldea! They’re, apparently, from a foreign lands a long time ago. And yet, they’ve been spotted and researched in Paldea the most…so…

Quax?

[The Duckling Pokémon tilts its head, vocalizing something. Roto sighs.]

Bzzt! Pave, that doesn’t count…that ranch was still in Paldea…

[Lochland clasps his hands together.]

Anyhow! Before we sign off, I wanna make a small note about Quaxly and Aqua Jet! Using Water Gun like a foundation and allowing Quaxly to twist into it using it’s flexibilty, you can techinally pull off a Aqua Jet! Observe!

Wait for it….

Quax….ly!

Ta-da! Your very own pre-Aqua Jet! Makes the process of learning it a bit easier!

[An excited gleam reaches Lochland’s face, his hands frequently twisting around. He seems to stumble over his words.]

The control W-Water-types have on their own water allows them to pressurize it, and con-contor-contort it! Th-The ability this would have on allowing a fountain-like Water Gun to, uh, to surround the spinning Pokémon to merge with the water, and then use that water and built up momentum to…ah!

[He winces, smiling apologetically. His hands stop twisting.]

Sorry, sorry, I’m rambling again! Regardless, I hope you all enjoyed this episode and tune into future ones! This is Lochland and Rotom, signing off!

[He waves to the camera, as it fades to black. End Video.]

[i-am-nickelbolt]

I shouldn't, but I'm gonna.

The low-hanging fruit here is that this question disingenuous at best and asinine at worst. "Why do you hate Magic so much? Why do you feel like you have to whine and complain about every little thing that you don't agree with constantly? You clearly don't care about the people who work on this game at all." This is the inverse statement. Please stop with this hyperbolic nonsense.

Okay, now that that's out of the way.

Fact: Magic is unreasonably expensive. As of writing this, Elesh Norn, Mother of Machines is $40 market price on TCGPlayer. This is unreasonable.

Fact: This is not new. In 1994, a pack of Revised was $2.49. The local shop sold Revised Shivan Dragon, arguably the chase rare of the set, for $20. This was unreasonable. Adjusted for inflation, this would be $5.09 for a pack today, and $40.72 for a Shivan Dragon today, which is approximately the price of packs and chase rares today. Everyone's favorite Standard, original Ravnica Standard in 2006, had $20 shock lands that everyone needed twelve of for their 3 color decks. This was unreasonable. We were in the middle of the goddamn Great Recession, and Jace, The Mindsculptor was pushing $100. This was unreasonable. That MH2 has how many mythic rare staples is unreasonable. But ultimately we're talking about cardboard with a picture of a dragon on it and rules text, if you tell any "normies" that this card is $20, or $10, or even $5, they're gonna look at you like you're nuts! It's absurd to explain the value of cards to people! This game is, always has, and always will be unreasonable.

So yes, there are special treatments. But go back to 1998, and look at what Urza's Destiny foils were selling for. The prices for foil Ring of Gix make everything that's not Neon Ink or Numbered look cheap in comparison. And Ring of Gix was unplayable. Again, *this is not new.*

Why is it *now* all of a sudden, that the game is *truly* unreasonable?

Insider baseball. People are paying way, way too much attention to stock prices, conference calls, earnings, profits, and other corporate boardroom nonsense. Magic made a billion dollars last year, *clearly* the price gouging has begun.

Look, I'm as damaged by late-stage capitalism as anyone. (Wait, that's totally not true, being that I'm a cis-het white male with a comfortable salary and a wife that makes way more than I do, basically everyone else has got it way worse than me. But the point is...) I hear the words "monetization" and I fly into a blinding, white-hot rage. Magic is already unreasonably expensive.

it's unreasonable to think that Hasbro… … we're talking about Hasbro, y'all… get real. Hasbro is not going to be altruistic with pricing, especially not with their crown jewel. Anyone who thinks that other companies, especially publicly-traded companies, are any friendlier are fooling themselves. But are we really talking about overthrowing capitalism here?? We're not gonna start a revolution on MaRo's Tumblr.

Supply, demand, and markets exist outside of capitalism. If the supply isn't commensurate with demand, then shortages are unavoidable as scalpers will swoop in and buy all the product. Socialism and Communism don't necessarily change market forces because Socialism and Communism are about workers controlling the means of production, not making everything free. Luxury goods and collectibles will continue to exist under Socialism, some people will be able to afford them and others will not.

Yes, WotC can set their prices. We tried this experiment in 1995 where cards were getting unreasonably expensive, so lets make a reprint set to get more cards out there. I was around at that time. And the player base revolted when their $50 Ehrnam Djinns value evaporated, we got the Reserve List because the game almost legit died, and not in the internet hyperbole "Hasbro is killing Magic," nonsense. If you want to print cheap cards, you have to account for the fact that everyone who already owns cards are going to take a bath. This is why Masters sets are expensive, it's a nod to the fact that these cards have value, they're going to go down in value, but hopefully not too much.

Magic is, if you insist on buying cards, ultimately a luxury game for people who, on a global scale, are wealthy. You can tweak the knobs a bit, but this fact will always be true.

So the real conversation should be: What is the price that is reasonable, how did you come about this price, and what does WotC need to do to hit this price and ensure that it doesn't ever change? Nobody is having that conversation, because it's largely about what I *personally* can afford. There's no absolute line of what is affordable. People will be priced out of this game regardless. These arguments aren't tethered to anything. People are mad that cards are expensive? What that signals to people is that it's okay to sink money into this thing and you can expect to keep your value, and that's okay. We shouldn't have to stress out every time that a set gets printed that we're going to take a bath on what we've collected.

Give me an argument, in concrete terms, what a pack should cost. What should a chase mythic be worth? What should WotC do to hit that number, and never deviate from that number? There is no answer! It's arbitrary! "Just make the game cheaper" doesn't mean anything! It's just a complaint being shouted into the Void. It's all relative to what *you* find affordable.

If your sense of what is fun about Magic is only about being able to own and play all the expensive cards, then you probably have unreasonable expectations. If you feel like you have to pay attention to every release and buy every release and own every card, you have unreasonable expectations. If you feel like you need the most tuned version of a deck to have fun, you have unreasonable expectations. Pauper is a thing, you can build cheap and fun decks, you can play Penny Dreadful on Magic Online, you can proxy things when you play with your friends. You can build a cube to play infinitely with your friends. You can build your own custom set and print your own cards. You don't have to buy anything to play Magic.

Magic is absurdly expensive. Magic should be cheaper. There's reasonably nothing that can be done to make it categorically affordable, and unless you're playing specifically tournament Magic where you need to own legitimate cards and can't borrow them from friends or whatever, none of this matters in the least.

That's it, don't @ me, I'm out.

Why does Wizards hate the players of their game? Why do they feel the need to constantly milk as much money as possible out of its playerbase while trying to offer as little as they can get away with, constantly?

If you don’t think a Magic product has enough value for you, don’t get it. Our goal is to make products that players actively want.

[copiosis]

Capitalism is fulfilling its glorious purpose

Capitalism is working. Not in the way you think though.

Capitalism, like all things, is changing. In its throes it is sparking humanity’s imagination. What’s coming from that is astounding.

We have capitalism to thank for that.

In its early years, capitalism offered incentives for the powerful to expand their grasp. Satisfy their greed. Those incentives – adventure, wealth, conquest...but also struggles and pain and bloodshed – worked extremely well. Today, as most proponents of capitalism will knee-jerkingly say, more people are better off (and prosperous) than ever before.

There is no doubt about capitalism’s role in all that.

But neither doubt cloud one’s awareness of capitalism's massive problems.

If it weren’t for those problems, though humanity wouldn’t be striving for something better today. In that way, capitalism has been – and is – exactly what its proponents claim: the best system we’ve devised.

· · ·

While attending class at an Apple store, Johnny, our instructor read the subtitles on a video project we were working on. The project was about Copiosis, our economic innovation and the algorithm we’re fine tuning.

^^The video project that started the conversation.

“What is it you’re working on?” Johnny asked.

“It’s a new economic system capitalism is evolving into,” we said.

The instructor paused...

“Tell me about it,” He said.

We gave him quite a bit.

“Hmm, sounds interesting. I’m a dyed in the wool capitalist, but I’d like to know more. Gotta website?"

We told him the URL. Then asked: “Dyed in the wool, eh?” That’s when he said something we’ve never heard from a capitalist:

“As far as I’m concerned, nothing so far has been as successful as capitalism in making people more prosperous. Even poor people are better off today thanks to capitalism."

Did you spot the remarkable part?

Usually, when someone defends or exalts capitalism, they will say something like this:

"Capitalism is better than anything else".

Or they’ll say, “there’s nothing better than capitalism”.

Or they’ll take liberty with Winston Churchill’s famous quote about Democracy:

^^Yeah, he didn’t really say this. But people take the actual quote and re-shape it in their adoration of capitalism.

Maybe you don’t see the hilarity of such statements. But we do.

When people talk about capitalism, their words have historical context, even though the speaker thinks they’re talking about the future. The unspoken conclusion of “there’s nothing better than capitalism” is, “so don’t even try to make it better because you can’t.”

Imagine! Here was a dyed-in-the-wool capitalist acknowledging what no other capitalist or capitalist sympathizer has acknowledged. His three words left room for possibility.

Those three words?

“...nothing so far...”

Something can be better. And you can bet something isbetter than capitalism. How do we know? Put aside the fact that we’ve created it. Just consider this. Here, we’ll express it in the form of a proclamation:

Whereas humanity throughout history can’t help but seek improvement in itself and its world

Whereas history has shown humanity’s propensity for tinkering with things to make them better, turning salad bowls to salad spinners and straight razors into freakish versions like this futuristic gizmo...

Whereas even when some aspects of humanity try to hold it back (the electric car), humanity still finds a way to move forward (Tesla) and...

Whereas the future is a long-ass time, far longer than human history and

Whereas humanity is constantly birthing more babies and among those babies are more and more challengers of the status quo as seen in the civil rights, gay and now the gender movements, etc., and...

Whereas a lot of what humanity has tinkered with has benefitted humanity

Whereas humanity is not likely to stop tinkering with things in order to make them better...

We hereby proclaim that the future contains something that performs far, far better than capitalism!

Ta-da!

It was refreshing to hear Johnny use those magical, mind-opening words. Words that left us smiling.

This should be so common sensical. Yet a lot of people enamored with capitalism can’t conceive of something that can outperform it.

^^It’s really inconceivable to some that humanity can do better than capitalism.

Looking at the world today, it’s a wonder people think capitalism is here to stay when there’s so much evidence showing it’s on its way out. Look closely enough at what’s happening and you can see the one thing that is causing this shift:

Capitalism itself!

Hell, even politicians are getting it. Often, politicians are the last to get anything.

The same is true with democracy. And traditional governments. We'll write about that in the future.

· · ·

Three questions for ya reader:

“When you were a child, what did you want to be when you grew up?”

"Are you doing that now?"

"If not, why not?"

Presuming you’re of adult age, with a career of at least five years let’s say, you’re likely not doing the thing you “wanted to be” when you were a child. Early on in Copiosis’ people's answers to these questions fascinated us. Usually, they would say something adventurous that they wanted to be. An astronaut, artist, musician, inventor...

^^What did you want to be when you grow up? (Photo: rawpixel)

Yet the thing they are doing now was comparatively lack luster. As they thought about their childhood dream juxtaposed with their adult reality, you could see and hear, the fire die in their eyes as they talked about reasons why they didn’t become what they wanted back then:

Too unrealistic

discouraged by my parents

Had to take care of my family

Had to grow up

Did have the time

Life got in the way

Have to earn a living

All of these answers (we’re resisting calling them excuses) point to a deeply inherent feature (not a bug, a feature) of capitalism. Some say it’s a flaw. But we believe it’s a brilliant design element: capitalism's ability to crush most people's dreams.

Now, some people will scoff at the idea that capitalism squashes dreams.

But it does.

Sure, there a few people out their living their dreams. But the majority are not. And some of the ones people think are living their dreams are actually living compromises at best, nightmares in the worst cases. And they're blaming people like racial minorities women, cis-het-white men and anyone else who doesn't look like them.

People who seem successful on the outside aren't living dream lives either.

Note the suicides of people like Heath Ledger and Philip Seymour Hoffman, or the struggles of Michael Jackson or Robin Williams. And it’s not reserved to Hollywood.

There are "successful” business people like Kenneth Lay and John Clifford "Cliff” Baxter both of ENRON infamy. And there’s Donald Trump.

It’s easy to think people are happy when you can’t see behind their wealth or success.

It can’t be overstressed that capitalism is notsynonymous with freedom. Or happiness. Or success. It is not designed for any of those outcomes. Copiosis is, but let’s stick with capitalism.

Even those who think they’re succeeding in capitalism are still suffering mightily. Nor are they free. Someone once said “Until we are all free, we are none of us free.”  It rings absolutely true for everyone in capitalism. You may be doing pretty well, but a lot of the well you’re enjoying is heavily dependent on the non-free status of others.

Paraphrasing Wikipedia:

“[non-freedom usually applies] to a situation where a person’s livelihood depends on wages or a salary, especially when the dependence is total and immediate....[and that dependence is limited to a] range of ...unfulfilling work that deprives humans of their “species character” not only under threat of starvation or poverty, but also of social stigma and status diminution.”

That’s what non-freedom looks like in capitalism. When someone says “Yeah but, if you give everyone the kind of freedom you’re talking about in Copiosis, then the things needing done no one will do”, they don't realize what they're saying.

Think about your needs in the context of modern, capitalist society and it’s really clear that our society is heavily dependent on non-freedom. The conveniences you enjoy – regular garbage pick up, food production (especially the shitty parts of that process), “waste” management (I’m referring to sewage here, separate from garbage “waste”) childcare, elderly care – all the things you’d rather not do or don’t want to do because you have other “better things to do with your time” are taken care of by others.

You explain away the fact that these people often are paid the lowest wages/salaries yet do really important work, by saying “well they’re being paid” or “That’s why I pay taxes” as if that is a good excuse for keeping people in those jobs. And mind you, most of those people in those jobs aren't there by freedom of choice.

When people counter Copiosis saying “who will do the jobs no one wants to do?”  what they are really saying is “those people doing the work that makes my life comfortable better keep doing it because I don’t want my life to change. And I’m not going to do that work. I don’t care how much better off my life may become. And I don’t care how shitty that job they’re doing is. They have to keep doing it.”

That’s non-freedom. For you andthe other guy.

A person may be paid for the work, sure. But that person is doing work he MUST do. Not work he would PREFER to do. And sometimes that work is shitty, or boring, or repetitive, or hazardous, or debilitating or dehumanizing.

^^Real freedom feels different. It looks different too.(Photo: Rawpixel)

Those three words are scary to people who have been immersed in non-freedom all their lives as both benefactors AND beneficiaries. Unfortunately very, very few have freed themselves from this paradigm.

So of course the first thing people think of, if people are afforded the freedom to choose is “how will shit get done if we have no slaves (laborers) to do them?” Put more nicely it’s “who will do the work we need done”?

Thankfully Copiosis answers that question by offering a framework where things get done AND people are free. Without the need of human slaves.

Someone responding to our innovation recently wrote: “those of us who believe in freedom use the term communist to refer to socialists and others who advocate the creation of an oppressive, authoritarian government.”

While his assessment of our innovation could not be farther off base, his presumption of his idea of freedom as some paragon of virtue is too. His idea of freedom is based on non-freedom.

In our experience, people who say they “believe in freedom” actually believe people shouldn’t be free. We explain this clearly here. Paradoxically, we believe those who say they “believe in freedom” actually advocate for an oppressive system that, is so sophisticated in its oppression, it causes its proponents and the oppressed alike to think they’re systemically free.

But they’re not.

For clarity:  a person who is free can do nothing if that’s what they want to do. A person who wants to spend all their time learning to paint, play video games all day, or fish or whatever, can. And they can do those things (or anything else) without going hungry, living on the street, or getting care for their body (or mind) if necessary. If they’re free that is. They can also get all the education they need or want to learn or improve any skill while doing whatever they want.

That’s real freedom.

And…the person exercising their freedom can do so without anyone else having to do anything they don’t want to do to support that person.

That. Is freedom. Not what we have today. The great thing is, that’s where we’re heading. Thanks capitalism!

What people who “believe in freedom”, especially in America, advocate for is not freedom. It’s non-freedom. It’s borne of capitalism and an associated epistemology that says "humans must earn a living or they’ll become lazy".

Proponents of such beliefs may not believe so consciously, or even intentionally, but that’s what they endorse. And there are some proponents who are intentional and vocal about it.

When a person has to “earn a living” they can’t possibly be free. When a person believes another should earn their living, that person is an oppressor.

All this ideological churn is an outcome of the deepest, most powerful feature of capitalism: one that reflects back to humanity its beliefs about itself. As you can see around you, people are getting the messages. And they’re starting to think different.

That would never have happened had capitalism not produced what it is producing.

For that, we (humanity) could be grateful for it.

Maybe in the future we will.