#trufan

[felassan]

Details of a giveaway that BioWare are doing.

Dragon Age on YouTube: "​​Giveaway Time! Enter for the chance to win a custom Dragon Age-themed console or $200 BioWare Gear Store gift card! Sponsor: Trufan Inc. NO PURCHASE NEC. 18+ Ends June 17, 2024." [here is the link with the info] [source, two]

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Naomi Kritzer's "Liberty's Daughter"

Tomorrow (November 22), I'll be joined by Vass Bednar at the Toronto Metro Reference Library for a talk about my new novel, The Lost Cause, a preapocalyptic tale of hope in the climate emergency.

There's so much sf about "competent men" running their families with entrepreneurial zeal, clarity of vision and a firm confident hand. But there's precious little fiction about how much being raised by a Heinlein dad would suuuck. But it would, and in Naomi Kritzer's Liberty's Daughter, we get a peek inside the nightmare:

https://fairwoodpress.com/store/p148/LIBERTY%27S_DAUGHTER.html

Beck Garrison is a seasteader, living on a floating platform built by libertarian cranks to get away from big government, taxes, and the idea that people owe each other care and consideration. Various kinds of market trufans have built their own fiefdoms: there's a sin city, a biotech free-for-all, a lawless Mad Max zone, and so on.

Beck's father, Paul, is some kind of local functionary. He's wealthy and respected, both a power-broker and a power in his own right. He pays for Beck to get private tutoring (no public schools – no public anything) and if she needs bailing out from some kind of sticky situation, he's got her on his account with Alpha Dogs, the toughest mercenaries on the sea (no police, either). An armed society is a polite society, after all.

Beck has a job, naturally (there ain't no such thing as a free lunch). She's a finder: for all that the steaders worship commerce as a sacrament consecrated to the holy Invisible Hand, there's not a lot of retail at sea. California – the nearest onshore neighbor – has lots of pesky taxes, and besides, it's a long ways off. Besides, space is at a premium on the stead, so people don't have attics and basements to fill with excess consumer junk.

Instead, when a steader needs something – a shoelace, a fashion accessory, or any other creature comfort – they hire a finder like Beck to clamber around between the decks of the aircraft carriers, scows, yachts and other vessels comprising the stead. It's a good way for Beck to earn spending money, and she's a natural at it. After all, she's been a steader since she was four, when her mother died in a drunk driving accident and her father took her to sea.

The story opens with a finding job. Beck wants a pair of sparkly shoes for her client, and the woman who owns them is an indentured servant whose sister has gone missing. Find the sister, get the shoes.

Indentured servant? Yeah, of course. Freedom of contract is the one freedom from which all the others flow, so you can sell yourself into bond labor. Hell, maybe you can earn enough to buy a share in the stead and become a co-owner/citizen.

This is the setup for Beck's adventure, which sees her liberating bond slaves tricked into fatal work details, getting involved in reality TV production, meeting illegal IWW organizers, and becoming embroiled in a pandemic that threatens the lives of all the steaders. It's a coming of age novel, told with the same straightforward, spunky zeal of Heinlein's juvies, but from the perspective of the daughter, not the dad.

Kritzer makes it clear that growing up under the thumb of a TANSTAAFL-worshipping, self-regarding, wealthy autocrat who worships selfishness as the necessary precondition for market clearing would be a goddamned nightmare. She also thinks through some of the important implications of life in one of these offshore libertarian archipelagos, like the fact that the wealthy residents would be overwhelming drawn from the ranks of corporate criminals and tax-cheats, and the underclass would be bail-skipping proles ensnared in the War on Drugs.

But Liberty's Daughter isn't a hymn to big government. Most of the steaders are escaping the US government, a state whose authoritarian and cruel proclivities are well-documented. Kritzer uses the labor dispute at the core of the novel to reveal market authoritarianism – the coercive power that hunger and poverty transfers from the have-nots to the haves. Think of Anatole France's wry observation that "the law, in its majestic equality, equally forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread."

If you're familiar with Kritzer's work, you won't be surprised to learn that she tells a zippy, fast moving tale that smuggles in sharp observations about the cleavage lines between solidarity and selfishness. Her story "So Much Cooking" – published years before the pandemic – captured life under lockdown with eerie prescience:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/04/17/pack-of-knaves/#so-much-cooking

More recently, her "Better Living Through Algorithms" is a dazzling display of knifework that'll cut you a dozen times before you even notice that you're bleeding:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/05/02/wunderkammer/#jubillee

If you habitually read Kritzer's short fiction, Liberty's Daughter might be familiar to you, as it is adapted from a series of stories that originally ran in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. Kritzer's YA debut, Catfishing on the CatNet, was also adapted from a short story, "Cat Pictures Please," which won the Hugo Award in 2016:

https://boingboing.net/2019/11/19/setec-astronomy-kitteh.html

"Libertarian exit" – buying a country, or an archipelago, or just a luxury bunker – has been in the air lately. It's a major element of my new novel, The Lost Cause, which came out this month – anarchocapitalist wreckers try to sabotage the Green New Deal from the seastead they've moored to the tallest point in the drowned Grand Caymans and declared to be a sovereign nation:

https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865939/the-lost-cause

Kritzer is great at catching that zeitgeist. Seasteading is part of a long, bitter dream of a certain kind of selfish person to escape society, a tale told in lurid and fascinating detail in Raymond Craib's 2022 history Adventure Capitalism:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/06/14/this-way-to-the-egress/#terra-nullius

There's a longstanding joke to the effect that you can shut down any discussion of the merits of a libertarian exit by asking three questions about the brave new world:

Whether you can sell your organs;

Whether you can sell yourself into slavery; and

Whether there is any age of consent.

Kritzer tackles the first two, but tacks around the third. Instead, by giving us a young adult protagonist who has been raised in a rusting libertopia, she finds a decidedly less incendiary way to think about the role of autonomy in adolescents, and thus generates far more light than heat.

The result is a cracking read with a sting in its tail.

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/2023/11/21/podkaynes-dad-was-a-dick/#age-of-consent

[incarnateirony]

“ only goob and hellers could scream about Jared being "stuck on the cw" in one breath and then turn around and call it the castiel winchester (*throws up in my mouth a little even typing that one*) network like its some badge of pride. They do realize they are actually insulting MC here right? So its so bad Jared is *stuck* there but its 100% good for MC? That sounds like they know Jared could be on bigger networks and they know MC can't. That's basically what they are implying here.”

HEY LOOK MORE IDIOTS THAT PRETEND THEY DONT UNDERSTAND CONTEXT!!!! SURELY THIS TAKE WILL SAVE YOU FROM THE ENDING!!! THAT'LL CHANGE EVERYTHING!!! GO OFF, NONNIE!!! I'm sure screaming nonsense into the void as a coward in a mask with no real identity of your own beyond your projections and delusions about a tv show, and pretending you can't understand the universe will definitely help your situations.

This is DEFINITELY the anon box stab that's going to change the universe to perform the way you want to imagine it does. Bet!!!! This is definitely going to save All The Things for you. Big Accomplishment.

Please see a therapist.

seriously yall paid 5K to try to argue with me last time and be wrong, you guys wanna go again? Get off anon, nonnie. Put it down. Bet me or fuck off to the void or accept reality. These are the only choices and really, the first is optional, the choice between the last two are mandatory, and the plot.

Did the 5K scorching your asses last time or embarrassing yourselves about the pilot not teach you? You're REALLY going to do this again pretending you can't remember the past.

The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result. Market testing. Berens' intent. Confession, written first, at the start of the season, when I started saying it for the first time. Roadhouse. Omissions. Pilot script. Denial, denial, denial. Refusal to look at the common thread of context here... maybe even... figure out how I discovered this thread, by listening instead of arguing then burying it. Cuz the answer is in there. The whole answer is in there and I haven't been subtle. For the last *five years* I haven't really been subtle, to anyone bothering to listen first and argue and deny it second.

For all the years of screaming Delusional at people, what it really was, was wincels themselves living in delusion, projecting and screaming over the buried truth, being enemies to creatives working in limited conditions, and due to personal ship dislike or homophobia acting like you couldn't read--and still trying, to this day, but that's fine. Robbie designed The Winchesters to handhold you through it. And Jensen made sure to give helpful narrations on the point just to make sure you had no excuse to fuck it up.

Your delusions are over. And you're going to realize. The entire time you've been screaming people were delusional, you were just looking at your own Reflections.

You were never fans of the show, you were fans of your own opinions. Your own projections. Your own delusions. Your own refusal to listen to what the authors were intending to illustrate, fighting for even, while you fought against them. You fought against and attacked the writers of a show and called them idiots and pretended you were entitled to being the Trufans of the show that knew better than the people making it. And now they get their revenge.

You did this to yourselves.

[paulgadzikowski]

I've just realized I have no clue what continent you're actually on, but... do you go to any conventions these days?

(Marcon 2023 is fixin' to be an ASTONISHING ribbons-saying-you-survived-it-will-be-handed-out-at-other-cons level of disaster, or so I've been hearing....)

I'm close to the geometric center of the USA in Omaha, Nebraska.

I haven't been a regular congoer since about 2000 (when we lived in Louisville) and I haven't traveled to cons (instead of attending only local ones) since about 1990. I entertain the notion sometimes but I'd probably start out with one of the two big Doctor Who annuals, Chicago TARDIS, because I have family there to visit incidentally. I don't remember from my "trufan" days in the 80s that I ever went to a Marcon but it was always on my group's radar.

[laf-outloud]

Sometimes I get tired of how people in fandom try to police others, telling them what they have to do to be a TruFan or how they have to see a certain Take only one way. I'm just chilling here watching my little shows and waiting on what I hope to be good renewal news. No fan is bigger or better than any others--unless you make RL people feel bad. (Then you're a toxic human. That's all.)

The people who do that are incredibly insecure and easily led. They need constant validation that what they believe is real so they turn their fandom experience into a crusade, complete with enemies they can "win" against. They're afraid that if they lose, they'd have to admit that they were wrong, which would be another blow to their already fragile egos.

Being able to enjoy the fandom experience without feeling threatened by opposing opinions is indicative of a healthy ego and makes for a very enjoyable fandom experience.

(I don't condone going after people directly for their opinions, but I will advocate polite correction if there are 'fans' spreading harmful lies about real people that reach beyond their own sphere.)

[thewholetruthpodcastblog]

ONE OF MY DAILY LISTENS SHE POUR OUT EMOTIONS IN THIS SONG. IT'S CRAZY EVERYTIME I HEAR IT I THINK TO MYSELF WHO MADE THIS YOUNG LADY FEEL SO DEEP MY GOD THIS HEAR HAD TO COME FROM THE UNIVERSE INTO HER SOUL...

#TRUFAN

[mitchipedia]

Small Government: The ref has to be more powerful than the players (Cory Doctorow)

Companies should never be allowed to grow too big to fail, because they also become too big to regulate. Mega-corporations become more powerful than the governments that regulate them. Government becomes too weak to even enforce contracts, the one function that even extreme libertarians agree that government needs to do.

… even if governments do nothing but enforce contracts, they still have to be bigger and more powerful than the largest companies and cartels. This should be an area where good faith leftists and capitalist trufans can come together: making small government possible by banning big business.

[sweeptakeskeys]

Jedi Survivor Giveaway 2022 (Secret Code Word)

Jedi Survivor Giveaway 2022 (Secret Code Word)

Enter to Jedi Survivor Giveaway sponsored by Trufan Inc. in which you have a chance to Win PlayStation 5 Console, Xbox Series X Console, AMD Ryzen™ and AMD Radeon Powered Desktop PC and much more. The interested participate wants to play needs to visit https://giveaways.joinsurf.com/giveaway/QCd1c56 to complete and submit your entry form with valid details. Joinsurf.com – Jedi Survivor Giveaway…

[that-pissed-off-tolkien-blogger]

If I could draw, I would draw Gothmog as an Uruk in his pink pwaid sweatew.

P2: Not Uruk, BALROG. I'll just turn in my Tolkien trufan card and slink away now.

Awww either would be so cute!! Just imagine an uruk or a balrog in a pink plaid sweater! ADORABLE!!!!!

[sweeptakeskeys]

Amazon Prime Gaming Lol RP Giveaway 2022 Secret Code (League of Legends)

Amazon Prime Gaming Lol RP Giveaway 2022 Secret Code (League of Legends)

Enter to Prime Gaming RP Giveaway aka LoL League of Legends RP Giveaway sponsored by Trufan Inc. in which you have a chance to Win a dream vacation at The Kahala Hotel & Resort in Honolulu. The interested participate wants to play Surf Giveaways needs to enter a prime gaming secret code at Giveaways.joinsurf.com to complete and submit your entry form with valid details. Prime Gaming RP Giveaways…