#where there's a lot of research and theoretical work going on

[cat-dragoness]

What kind of job do you have where you get to do math?!!!!!!!

I'm an engineer :D My degree is in mechanical engineering, but I'm mostly working in the aerospace field right now, which means lots of analytical stuff.

[bird-bureau]

I think my fav recent misinformation post that went around on here was that one post with almost 30k notes abt how “ADHD meds don’t work on your period” and they didn’t know this until recently because “the tests for every ADHD med were only done on AMAB people to control for hormonal difference,” where the post’s one source was a link to an Upworthy article that ADMITTED it couldn’t find sources for the anecdotal claim like. Lol. Lmao

[mantisgodsdomain]

The part that you haven't heard about in more detail here, for reference, is our miscellaneous research on typography, calliography, and type design, because we haven't done it in anywhere near as much detail and still arguably know nothing. In this case, you get to hear "oh yeah we're relearning cursive" as part of an unrelated ramble. This is because if we don't have at least one thing to chew on throughout the day, we wind up in a dull, grinding state of mind where we start losing chunks of important things, such as our ability to not be a huge asshole and/or hit people with sticks.

Sometimes, this means gnawing on plots, either ours or others'. Sometimes, this means learning new things. If we're operating on any subject in particular, we prefer to keep a level of basic competence high enough to let us feel like we have reasonable authority in saying something. If we are expressing an opinion, we want it to be one that is informed, because seeing people say things where they obviously don't know what a single word in that sentence actually means makes us want to chew through glass and people spreading blatant misinformation and unexamined, unbelievably blatant bias makes for our absolute least favorite dish. If we don't know something, and it's worth knowing, then we should bother to learn, because it is worth it to know at least enough to know when someone's bullshitting you, and be able to apply the knowledge you have acquired in one field to other ones over time. Many things work along the same basic lines - if you look at enough of them, then eventually, you'll learn the intersections, and the way one thing interacts with another.

In unrelated news, now that we are officially in formal education again and thus interacting with people who feel very confident in the idea that they are bringing an objectively correct perspective to the room, we are learning that apparently our "basic level of knowledge that we feel like we need to possess to feel even vaguely confident talking about the subject in any context" is most other people's "at least bachelor degree level knowledge". We are unclear on if this is a new discovery or not, as last time we were in an actual physical school it went badly enough that our memory of the year it occurred in is functionally irretrievable. This is not good for the superiority complex, probably.

is the fountain pen thing why your broskis been rbing the occasional fountain pen post or was that shared brainrot

It depends which broski you're talking about but probably. We have been exploring the ins and outs of the fountain pen since, like, the start of this month and we have already regaled our MOTW group with "hey did you know that you can buy a fountain pen that looks like a shark for three dollars" and similar such thoughts.

Though not all of our miscellaneous interests make it onto this blog, as we try not to post on things until we are reasonably informed on them, our close friends get to be regaled with the lovely story of whatever niche subject that we have dedicated our time and energy to learning things about every week or so, and we've been talking about pens for slightly longer as we learn more thoroughly how to work with them, and being told about things by an enthusiastic insect tends to get you looking at things (whether you like it or not)

[kedreeva]

#we spoke of this a LOT at work after that one tech was murdered and hidden in a wall

hi!👋 hello! kedreeva! i’m going to need to ask you to explain this!!!!

So back in 2009, a lab student named Annie Le was murdered at Yale university. Cameras saw her going on into a building, but not out again and it was like, the eve of her wedding (or close to? I don't remember) so clearly she had places to be and people waiting for her so they immediately started looking and the next day (or so? Anyway on the day of her wedding) they found her body in a recess in a wall, down in the areas where the research animals were kept. It turns out, a tech had killed her, but since there were cameras like EVERYWHERE, he just, I guess, left her there. Well, hid the body where it was. I don't remember how they caught him, but they did. It was a horrifying story. It still is.

And it was a huge news story among the folks at my workplace because, at the time, I was working at a different university, as an animal husbandry technician. As you can imagine this was a kind of intense time to be in that situation. They started offering, like, I'm not gonna say counseling but it was "if you need to talk we would prefer you talk to us about something wrong rather than kill anyone about it" and as techs (even if we were not even the same kind of tech, the killer was a lab tech and we were husbandry techs but I think a lot of people assumed it had been a husbandry tech since she was in an animal area), we were kind of getting the side eye from lab people for weeks afterwards. Like they thought we were gonna go "wow that's a fantastic idea, you're next!" or something, idk. And I mean like, people would freeze when you were alone in a hallway, or turn and walk the other way, or duck into the nearest room and watch you walk past, and they were all being super nice/civil to us when they did have to interact. It was very atypical behavior for lab people. Like not all of them, some of them had always been nice and weren't worried, but some of the people who had been unbelievable dicks previously were walking on eggshells. And the people who had friends in other universities reported this was happening at their jobs, too.

And instead of talking to The Man (because all the higher ups were garbage at the time), we just. talked among ourselves. It was a lot of "I may say I feel like strangling lab people sometimes when they do things that drive me up a wall but I don't MEAN it you know that right" and it also led to group discussions of what would be a theoretical *better* solution to hiding a body than what happened, with clear disdain for doing things like hiding bodies in walls, which is a terrible idea and one we would never do (looking at the people who think we might have decided this was a great idea actually).

Which consequently led to a lot of supervisors and/or managers that happened to overhear us bringing us donuts or arranging pizza for lunch in like, some kind of bid to help us feel appreciated, I guess, so that we wouldn't murder anyone, even though none of us were going to do that anyway. But also none of us were in a position to turn down free donuts or pizza or whatever.

And then after a few weeks, maybe a month or so, people just kind of forgot and moved on and things went back to normal like fifty people hadn't spent every lunch hour for weeks talking quietly among themselves about how human bodies would definitely fit into a carcass disposal barrel or that you'd have to crush hip bones and/or skulls before incineration. Hypothetically.

Like I said, it was a VERY weird time to be at my job, and every time I remember it happening feels like a fever dream. I can't even imagine what it was like at Yale.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

In defense of bureaucratic competence

Sure, sometimes it really does make sense to do your own research. There's times when you really do need to take personal responsibility for the way things are going. But there's limits. We live in a highly technical world, in which hundreds of esoteric, potentially lethal factors impinge on your life every day.

You can't "do your own research" to figure out whether all that stuff is safe and sound. Sure, you might be able to figure out whether a contractor's assurances about a new steel joist for your ceiling are credible, but after you do that, are you also going to independently audit the software in your car's antilock brakes?

How about the nutritional claims on your food and the sanitary conditions in the industrial kitchen it came out of? If those turn out to be inadequate, are you going to be able to validate the medical advice you get in the ER when you show up at 3AM with cholera? While you're trying to figure out the #HIPAAWaiver they stuck in your hand on the way in?

40 years ago, Ronald Reagan declared war on "the administrative state," and "government bureaucrats" have been the favored bogeyman of the American right ever since. Even if Steve Bannon hasn't managed to get you to froth about the "Deep State," there's a good chance that you've griped about red tape from time to time.

Not without reason, mind you. The fact that the government can make good rules doesn't mean it will. When we redid our kitchen this year, the city inspector added a bunch of arbitrary electrical outlets to the contractor's plans in places where neither we, nor any future owner, will every need them.

But the answer to bad regulation isn't no regulation. During the same kitchen reno, our contractor discovered that at some earlier time, someone had installed our kitchen windows without the accompanying vapor-barriers. In the decades since, the entire structure of our kitchen walls had rotted out. Not only was the entire front of our house one good earthquake away from collapsing – there were two half rotted verticals supporting the whole thing – but replacing the rotted walls added more than $10k to the project.

In other words, the problem isn't too much regulation, it's the wrong regulation. I want our city inspectors to make sure that contractors install vapor barriers, but to not demand superfluous electrical outlets.

Which raises the question: where do regulations come from? How do we get them right?

Regulation is, first and foremost, a truth-seeking exercise. There will never be one obvious answer to any sufficiently technical question. "Should this window have a vapor barrier?" is actually a complex question, needing to account for different window designs, different kinds of barriers, etc.

To make a regulation, regulators ask experts to weigh in. At the federal level, expert agencies like the DoT or the FCC or HHS will hold a "Notice of Inquiry," which is a way to say, "Hey, should we do something about this? If so, what should we do?"

Anyone can weigh in on these: independent technical experts, academics, large companies, lobbyists, industry associations, members of the public, hobbyist groups, and swivel-eyed loons. This produces a record from which the regulator crafts a draft regulation, which is published in something called a "Notice of Proposed Rulemaking."

The NPRM process looks a lot like the NOI process: the regulator publishes the rule, the public weighs in for a couple of rounds of comments, and the regulator then makes the rule (this is the federal process; state regulation and local ordinances vary, but they follow a similar template of collecting info, making a proposal, collecting feedback and finalizing the proposal).

These truth-seeking exercises need good input. Even very competent regulators won't know everything, and even the strongest theoretical foundation needs some evidence from the field. It's one thing to say, "Here's how your antilock braking software should work," but you also need to hear from mechanics who service cars, manufacturers, infosec specialists and drivers.

These people will disagree with each other, for good reasons and for bad ones. Some will be sincere but wrong. Some will want to make sure that their products or services are required – or that their competitors' products and services are prohibited.

It's the regulator's job to sort through these claims. But they don't have to go it alone: in an ideal world, the wrong people will be corrected by other parties in the docket, who will back up their claims with evidence.

So when the FCC proposes a Net Neutrality rule, the monopoly telcos and cable operators will pile in and insist that this is technically impossible, that there is no way to operate a functional ISP if the network management can't discriminate against traffic that is less profitable to the carrier. Now, this unity of perspective might reflect a bedrock truth ("Net Neutrality can't work") or a monopolists' convenient lie ("Net Neutrality is less profitable for us").

In a competitive market, there'd be lots of counterclaims with evidence from rivals: "Of course Net Neutrality is feasible, and here are our server logs to prove it!" But in a monopolized markets, those counterclaims come from micro-scale ISPs, or academics, or activists, or subscribers. These counterclaims are easy to dismiss ("what do you know about supporting 100 million users?"). That's doubly true when the regulator is motivated to give the monopolists what they want – either because they are hoping for a job in the industry after they quit government service, or because they came out of industry and plan to go back to it.

To make things worse, when an industry is heavily concentrated, it's easy for members of the ruling cartel – and their backers in government – to claim that the only people who truly understand the industry are its top insiders. Seen in that light, putting an industry veteran in charge of the industry's regulator isn't corrupt – it's sensible.

All of this leads to regulatory capture – when a regulator starts defending an industry from the public interest, instead of defending the public from the industry. The term "regulatory capture" has a checkered history. It comes out of a bizarre, far-right Chicago School ideology called "Public Choice Theory," whose goal is to eliminate regulation, not fix it.

In Public Choice Theory, the biggest companies in an industry have the strongest interest in capturing the regulator, and they will work harder – and have more resources – than anyone else, be they members of the public, workers, or smaller rivals. This inevitably leads to capture, where the state becomes an arm of the dominant companies, wielded by them to prevent competition:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/06/05/regulatory-capture/

This is regulatory nihilism. It supposes that the only reason you weren't killed by your dinner, or your antilock brakes, or your collapsing roof, is that you just got lucky – and not because we have actual, good, sound regulations that use evidence to protect us from the endless lethal risks we face. These nihilists suppose that making good regulation is either a myth – like ancient Egyptian sorcery – or a lost art – like the secret to embalming Pharaohs.

But it's clearly possible to make good regulations – especially if you don't allow companies to form monopolies or cartels. What's more, failing to make public regulations isn't the same as getting rid of regulation. In the absence of public regulation, we get private regulation, run by companies themselves.

Think of Amazon. For decades, the DoJ and FTC sat idly by while Amazon assembled and fortified its monopoly. Today, Amazon is the de facto e-commerce regulator. The company charges its independent sellers 45-51% in junk fees to sell on the platform, including $31b/year in "advertising" to determine who gets top billing in your searches. Vendors raise their Amazon prices in order to stay profitable in the face of these massive fees, and if they don't raise their prices at every other store and site, Amazon downranks them to oblivion, putting them out of business.

This is the crux of the FTC's case against Amazon: that they are picking winners and setting prices across the entire economy, including at every other retailer:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/25/greedflation/#commissar-bezos

The same is true for Google/Facebook, who decide which news and views you encounter; for Apple/Google, who decide which apps you can use, and so on. The choice is never "government regulation" or "no regulation" – it's always "government regulation" or "corporate regulation." You either live by rules made in public by democratically accountable bureaucrats, or rules made in private by shareholder-accountable executives.

You just can't solve this by "voting with your wallet." Think about the problem of robocalls. Nobody likes these spam calls, and worse, they're a vector for all kinds of fraud. Robocalls are mostly a problem with federation. The phone system is a network-of-networks, and your carrier is interconnected with carriers all over the world, sometimes through intermediaries that make it hard to know which network a call originates on.

Some of these carriers are spam-friendly. They make money by selling access to spammers and scammers. Others don't like spam, but they have lax or inadequate security measures to prevent robocalls. Others will simply be targets of opportunity: so large and well-resourced that they are irresistible to bad actors, who continuously probe their defenses and exploit overlooked flaws, which are quickly patched.

To stem the robocall tide, your phone company will have to block calls from bad actors, put sloppy or lazy carriers on notice to shape up or face blocks, and also tell the difference between good companies and bad ones.

There's no way you can figure this out on your own. How can you know whether your carrier is doing a good job at this? And even if your carrier wants to do this, only the largest, most powerful companies can manage it. Rogue carriers won't give a damn if some tiny micro-phone-company threatens them with a block if they don't shape up.

This is something that a large, powerful government agency is best suited to addressing. And thankfully, we have such an agency. Two years ago, the FCC demanded that phone companies submit plans for "robocall mitigation." Now, it's taking action:

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/10/telcos-filed-blank-robocall-plans-with-fcc-and-got-away-with-it-for-2-years/

Specifically, the FCC has identified carriers – in the US and abroad – with deficient plans. Some of these plans are very deficient. National Cloud Communications of Texas sent the FCC a Windows Printer Test Page. Evernex (Pakistan) sent the FCC its "taxpayer profile inquiry" from a Pakistani state website. Viettel (Vietnam) sent in a slide presentation entitled "Making Smart Cities Vision a Reality." Canada's Humbolt VoIP sent an "indiscernible object." DomainerSuite submitted a blank sheet of paper scrawled with the word "NOTHING."

The FCC has now notified these carriers – and others with less egregious but still deficient submissions – that they have 14 days to fix this or they'll be cut off from the US telephone network.

This is a problem you don't fix with your wallet, but with your ballot. Effective, public-interest-motivated FCC regulators are a political choice. Trump appointed the cartoonishly evil Ajit Pai to run the FCC, and he oversaw a program of neglect and malice. Pai – a former Verizon lawyer – dismantled Net Neutrality after receiving millions of obviously fraudulent comments from stolen identities, lying about it, and then obstructing the NY Attorney General's investigation into the matter:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/08/31/and-drown-it/#starve-the-beast

The Biden administration has a much better FCC – though not as good as it could be, thanks to Biden hanging Gigi Sohn out to dry in the face of a homophobic smear campaign that ultimately led one of the best qualified nominees for FCC commissioner to walk away from the process:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/12/15/useful-idiotsuseful-idiots/#unrequited-love

Notwithstanding the tragic loss of Sohn's leadership in this vital agency, Biden's FCC – and its action on robocalls – illustrates the value of elections won with ballots, not wallets.

Self-regulation without state regulation inevitably devolves into farce. We're a quarter of a century into the commercial internet and the US still doesn't have a modern federal privacy law. The closest we've come is a disclosure rule, where companies can make up any policy they want, provided they describe it to you.

It doesn't take a genius to figure out how to cheat on this regulation. It's so simple, even a Meta lawyer can figure it out – which is why the Meta Quest VR headset has a privacy policy isn't merely awful, but long.

It will take you five hours to read the whole document and discover how badly you're being screwed. Go ahead, "do your own research":

https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/privacynotincluded/articles/annual-creep-o-meter/

The answer to bad regulation is good regulation, and the answer to incompetent regulators is competent ones. As Michael Lewis's Fifth Risk (published after Trump filled the administrative agencies with bootlickers, sociopaths and crooks) documented, these jobs demand competence:

https://memex.craphound.com/2018/11/27/the-fifth-risk-michael-lewis-explains-how-the-deep-state-is-just-nerds-versus-grifters/

For example, Lewis describes how a Washington State nuclear waste facility created as part of the Manhattan Project endangers the Columbia River, the source of 8 million Americans' drinking water. The nuclear waste cleanup is projected to take 100 years and cost 100 billion dollars. With stakes that high, we need competent bureaucrats overseeing the job.

The hacky conservative jokes comparing every government agency to the DMV are not descriptive so much as prescriptive. By slashing funding, imposing miserable working conditions, and demonizing the people who show up for work anyway, neoliberals have chased away many good people, and hamstrung those who stayed.

One of the most inspiring parts of the Biden administration is the large number of extremely competent, extremely principled agency personnel he appointed, and the speed and competence they've brought to their roles, to the great benefit of the American public:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/10/18/administrative-competence/#i-know-stuff

But leaders can only do so much – they also need staff. 40 years of attacks on US state capacity has left the administrative state in tatters, stretched paper-thin. In an excellent article, Noah Smith describes how a starveling American bureaucracy costs the American public a fortune:

https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/america-needs-a-bigger-better-bureaucracy

Even stripped of people and expertise, the US government still needs to get stuff done, so it outsources to nonprofits and consultancies. These are the source of much of the expense and delay in public projects. Take NYC's Second Avenue subway, a notoriously overbudget and late subway extension – "the most expensive mile of subway ever built." Consultants amounted to 20% of its costs, double what France or Italy would have spent. The MTA used to employ 1,600 project managers. Now it has 124 of them, overseeing $20b worth of projects. They hand that money to consultants, and even if they have the expertise to oversee the consultants' spending, they are stretched too thin to do a good job of it:

https://slate.com/business/2023/02/subway-costs-us-europe-public-transit-funds.html

When a public agency lacks competence, it ends up costing the public more. States with highly expert Departments of Transport order better projects, which need fewer changes, which adds up to massive costs savings and superior roads:

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4522676

Other gaps in US regulation are plugged by nonprofits and citizen groups. Environmental rules like NEPA rely on the public to identify and object to environmental risks in public projects, from solar plants to new apartment complexes. NEPA and its state equivalents empower private actors to sue developers to block projects, even if they satisfy all environmental regulations, leading to years of expensive delay.

The answer to this isn't to dismantle environmental regulations – it's to create a robust expert bureaucracy that can enforce them instead of relying on NIMBYs. This is called "ministerial approval" – when skilled government workers oversee environmental compliance. Predictably, NIMBYs hate ministerial approval.

Which is not to say that there aren't problems with trusting public enforcers to ensure that big companies are following the law. Regulatory capture is real, and the more concentrated an industry is, the greater the risk of capture. We are living in a moment of shocking market concentration, thanks to 40 years of under-regulation:

https://www.openmarketsinstitute.org/learn/monopoly-by-the-numbers

Remember that five-hour privacy policy for a Meta VR headset? One answer to these eye-glazing garbage novellas presented as "privacy policies" is to simply ban certain privacy-invading activities. That way, you can skip the policy, knowing that clicking "I agree" won't expose you to undue risk.

This is the approach that Bennett Cyphers and I argue for in our EFF white-paper, "Privacy Without Monopoly":

https://www.eff.org/wp/interoperability-and-privacy

After all, even the companies that claim to be good for privacy aren't actually very good for privacy. Apple blocked Facebook from spying on iPhone owners, then sneakily turned on their own mass surveillance system, and lied about it:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/14/luxury-surveillance/#liar-liar

But as the European experiment with the GDPR has shown, public administrators can't be trusted to have the final word on privacy, because of regulatory capture. Big Tech companies like Google, Apple and Facebook pretend to be headquartered in corporate crime havens like Ireland and Luxembourg, where the regulators decline to enforce the law:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/05/15/finnegans-snooze/#dirty-old-town

It's only because of the GPDR has a private right of action – the right of individuals to sue to enforce their rights – that we're finally seeing the beginning of the end of commercial surveillance in Europe:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2022/07/americans-deserve-more-current-american-data-privacy-protection-act

It's true that NIMBYs can abuse private rights of action, bringing bad faith cases to slow or halt good projects. But just as the answer to bad regulations is good ones, so too is the answer to bad private rights of action good ones. SLAPP laws have shown us how to balance vexatious litigation with the public interest:

https://www.rcfp.org/resources/anti-slapp-laws/

We must get over our reflexive cynicism towards public administration. In my book The Internet Con, I lay out a set of public policy proposals for dismantling Big Tech and putting users back in charge of their digital lives:

https://www.versobooks.com/products/3035-the-internet-con

The most common objection I've heard since publishing the book is, "Sure, Big Tech has enshittified everything great about the internet, but how can we trust the government to fix it?"

We've been conditioned to think that lawmakers are too old, too calcified and too corrupt, to grasp the technical nuances required to regulate the internet. But just because Congress isn't made up of computer scientists, it doesn't mean that they can't pass good laws relating to computers. Congress isn't full of microbiologists, but we still manage to have safe drinking water (most of the time).

You can't just "do the research" or "vote with your wallet" to fix the internet. Bad laws – like the DMCA, which bans most kinds of reverse engineering – can land you in prison just for reconfiguring your own devices to serve you, rather than the shareholders of the companies that made them. You can't fix that yourself – you need a responsive, good, expert, capable government to fix it.

We can have that kind of government. It'll take some doing, because these questions are intrinsically hard to get right even without monopolies trying to capture their regulators. Even a president as flawed as Biden can be pushed into nominating good administrative personnel and taking decisive, progressive action:

https://doctorow.medium.com/joe-biden-is-headed-to-a-uaw-picket-line-in-detroit-f80bd0b372ab?sk=f3abdfd3f26d2f615ad9d2f1839bcc07

Biden may not be doing enough to suit your taste. I'm certainly furious with aspects of his presidency. The point isn't to lionize Biden – it's to point out that even very flawed leaders can be pushed into producing benefit for the American people. Think of how much more we can get if we don't give up on politics but instead demand even better leaders.

My next novel is The Lost Cause, coming out on November 14. It's about a generation of people who've grown up under good government – a historically unprecedented presidency that has passed the laws and made the policies we'll need to save our species and planet from the climate emergency:

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

The action opens after the pendulum has swung back, with a new far-right presidency and an insurgency led by white nationalist militias and their offshore backers – seagoing anarcho-capitalist billionaires.

In the book, these forces figure out how to turn good regulations against the people they were meant to help. They file hundreds of simultaneous environmental challenges to refugee housing projects across the country, blocking the infill building that is providing homes for the people whose homes have been burned up in wildfires, washed away in floods, or rendered uninhabitable by drought.

I don't want to spoil the book here, but it shows how the protagonists pursue a multipronged defense, mixing direct action, civil disobedience, mass protest, court challenges and political pressure to fight back. What they don't do is give up on state capacity. When the state is corrupted by wreckers, they claw back control, rather than giving up on the idea of a competent and benevolent public system.

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/2023/10/23/getting-stuff-done/#praxis

[asnarkyandironicusername]

Every person has a RomCom, just like a soulmate; I truly believe there is one out there for everyone. To prove this, let me share the recommendations I would give to our favorite profilers

My recommendation for Aaron Hotchner would be Beach Read by Emily Henry. Now, it may sound like a bit of a reach, but I think he would connect with Gus - he had a complicated relationship with his father (which arguably could have led to him pursuing his career to help others) and also has regrets from his younger years. I think he would appreciate the cheesiness of their competition, as he is a competitive person but, around the right people, has no problem laughing a little at himself.

David Rossi would be Love In the Time Of Serial Killers by Alicia Thompson because he could relate to her researching serial killers & how that work, along with personal trauma, shapes our social connections. Also, the love interest is mildly put off by serial killers & notices her self-sabotaging detachment but plans to stick it out with her anyway and he definitely needs the kind of partner who is willing to meet him where he is.

We were robbed of lesbian Emily Prentiss (personally always saw her Bi, but that’s neither here nor there), but I know she won’t even look at a rom-com if it isn’t Sapphic. I know One Last Stop by Casey McQuiston has a home on her bookshelves and would definitely recommend her Mistakes Were Made by Meryl Wilsner.

Derek Morgan is definitely a sports rom-com guy. However, my recommendation for him is actually The Rom-com Agenda by Jayne Denker. I will not be elaborating.

Now, JJ could go one of two ways - She definitely still has a competitive edge so I could see her digging some sports romance, but the real question in my mind is would JJ read a queer romance? I don’t think she would avoid them in a homophobic way, but I definitely could see her going through a phase where she questioned her sexuality, but it made her nervous so she just compartmentalized it and now only reads straight rom-coms OR she was totally comfortable with her sexuality and can actually enjoy a queer rom-com without it stirring up complicated feelings. In this scenario, I’m picking the latter and recommending (despite the cliche of it) Cleat Cute by Meryl Wilsner.

For Spencer Reid, I have three suggestions: Love, Theoretically by Ali Hazelwood and Love In the Time Of Serial Killers by Alicia Thompson and The Seven Year Slip by Ashley Poston. I think his physics inclinations could make Love, Theoretically a good pick, but IDK if there are any inaccuracies. Love In the Time Of Serial Killers is up his alley and deals with a protagonist who seeks academic validation instead of social. The Seven Year Slip only feels like a fit because he’s a Doctor Who fan & it involves time travel & wobbly wobbly stuff.

You know that Penelope Garcia is just gobbling up any and all rom-com with a fistful of popcorn and lots of giggling and feet kicking.

[bits-and-beasts]

I was thinking about Sonics phobia of water in my au, and how he started life as a lab experiment. it reminded me pretty heavily of the Movie plague dogs and that awful, awful, intro scene where Rowf is trying his best not to drown during a test... so I redrew it for sonic.

in the context of the AU at least. sonic was also made to be a biological weapon like shadow. but because they had lost Geralds research, (and shadow himself) they had to make things up from scratch. they bio-engineered a Mobian that theoretically would have infinite energy. but since they didn't have alien DNA to work from, or a functional understanding of chaos energy, They used radiation instead.

their goal was to make a soldier that could essentially become a weapon of mass destruction on command. but they realized they couldn't get sonic to go super without putting him in near-death situations. so a lot of his testing was just brutal... so uh, he doesn't like water anymore.

in the end it was his inability to go super, and the fact that he can't control himself when he does that lead to GUN letting him go free. but it sure doesn't undo the horrible shit he had to live through for all those years.

but yeah. GUN sucks in this story, don't be like GUN.

[dipperdesperado]

guerrilla gardening is very cool

I’m really stoked to talk about praxis and solarpunk today. Hopefully, you all know what solarpunk is. I imagine fewer of you know what praxis is. Essentially, praxis is a term, used a lot by leftists, to talk about doing stuff. It’s a practice or activity, informed by theoretical and experiential knowledge. In our goal to create an ecological society informed by appropriate technology, we should think not only about the massive upheavals but the things that we can do right now. That’s where guerrilla gardening comes in.

Gardening in general is activism, but guerrilla gardening is like, super solarpunk. The rundown is essentially when you and/or a group of homies take some love-starved land and turn it into a garden (or just plant stuff there) without permission from the owner of said land. That lack of permission is what makes it guerrilla. This can lead to a better community, and supports abolition (of private property), autonomy, and collective resiliency. Ideally, you can get public support behind ya, and be able to work with the municipality to not get in trouble. The classic asking for forgiveness than permission, until you’re the one that can decide.

Where to Start: X Marks the Spot

When you (and your small-but mighty collective/affinity group) decide that you want to set up a guerrilla garden, the first thing you want to do is find a good spot. It can be that little line of grass that split up two sides of the road, a sidewalk bed, or an empty lot. You want to make sure there’s good sunlight and decent soil. If the soil ain’t good, but you wanna do stuff there, I’d recommend researching how to rehabilitate it. Obviously, that’s more work, though.

Once you have your target spot, you’ll need your tools and plants. Some basic things will be gloves, a trowel, a water source (like a can or hose), and plants/seeds. Some nice-to-haves could be mulch, compost, or soil amendments. It depends on what you’re planting and what your conditions are to know what you’ll need to bring. If you’re in a high visibility area, it could be nice to have some clothing that makes sure you don’t look suspect. That’s probably a good general rule of thumb. Act like you deserve to be in the space because you do! If you look suspect, people will think as much.

Prepping the Garden

Once you have everything you need, you’ll need to get the garden site ready. If you need to clear it out, whether there’s vegetation you’re not interested in, trash, debris, etc., do that. Ideally, you can also improve the soil quality with stuff like compost and organic stuff if you need to.

Time for Plants!

Here’s where the real fun begins. Get some plants going! You want the ones you pick to be a good fit for the target climate and soil. Even better if some of them are edible. When you’re planting, be sure to space the plants out and water them pretty well. If you're planting seeds, be patient! It can take a few weeks for the plants to sprout.

Garden Tending

Now that you have a garden going, it’s time to keep it up. You want to water them regularly and watch out for any invasives or weeds that could crowd out your plants. You might also have to add additional amendments to the soil, to keep the plants happy. Try to make sure to think about and account for issues in the garden. Whether that’s nonhuman neighbors or mean vandals, you want to try to think of ways to uphold the values of the project while protecting its continued existence.

Permablitzing

I also want to touch on some more specific types of guerrilla gardening. Firstly, let’s talk about permablitzing.

Permablitizing is a portmanteau between permaculture and blitzing. Permaculture is a type of gardening and farming that aspires to copy natural ecosystems to create harmonious gardens that are self-sustaining. It generally will include a mix of native, edible, and wildlife-attracting plants. Permablitzing is taking that permaculture idea and rallying the community to create a permaculture garden in a single day.

It looks a little something like this: volunteers collectively design and install the garden. They put in garden beds, plant trees, and shrubs, and install irrigation. There might also be compost systems, raised beds, or accessible walkways through the garden. Permablitzing is great because it’s relatively quick, it’s tangible and immediately garners buy-in. It’s more about finding the space to do this and finding people who are willing to participate.

Seedbombing

If you’re not able to work with a group, or you just want to be able to very quickly deposit new plants in places, you can seedbomb!

Seedbombs are small packages of seeds wrapped in soil that can be thrown or dropped onto the ground. This kinda stuff is great for rewinding and restoring neglected or degraded areas. Just make sure you do research! You don’t wanna introduce invasive or incompatible plants.

The basic seedbomb recipe is:

Soil

Clay or compost

Seeds

You mix them together, roll them into small balls, then let them dry. You can just toss them into your target areas. Seedbombing is great because it’s fun and creative while being a great way to un-neglect neglected areas. You can also do it alone or with the homies. It’s a very flexible guerrilla option.

Final thoughts

One of the most important things to think about when trying to enact social change is aligning your ends (the liberatory future you envision) with your means (the things you do to get to that vision). Guerrilla gardening is great to this end as a form of praxis because it allows for this to be realized in the here and now. It helps us realize that we don’t have to wait until people let us do what we think is right. If you see an issue, you can respond to it. Also, gardening is fun, gets you outside, and allows you to be more connected with the earth, which is just so so so good for you. Be smart, keep each other safe, and good luck with your gardening!

[communistkenobi]

im an undergrad student who was thinking about specializing in studying fascist movements in North America for my masters and ive really enjoyed reading your book commentary - you connect things that I'm not always aware of in ways that are really comprehensive and appreciate

Do you know of any researchers who are moving things on the topic right now (most of the books ive read are around 20+ years old, unfortunately)?

(sorry if any of this is unclear/grammatically incorrect/weirdly worded - I'm super sick rn)

thank you! I'm really glad to hear that :)

For contemporary writing, I'm currently working through some of Alberto Toscano's work - he has a really interesting article from 2021 on fascism from a Black radical/Marxist perspective where he summarizes various historical analyses of fascism from Black (particularly US) thinkers and activists. One thing I especially appreciate is that he complicates Aime Cesaire's formulation of fascism (i.e., "european colonialism come home") as incomplete when applied to settler colonial contexts, especially the United States - one of Cesaire's articulations of fascism is that (to paraphrase) "one fine day, the prisons begin to fill up, the Gestapo gets busy" and so on, and Toscano, working through Angela Davis and George Jackson, responds with (again I'm paraphrasing) "the prisons are already full! The Gestapo is already here!" etc. Toscano also has a new book that just came out in 2023 called Late Fascism, which explicitly addresses the current moment. I only have a physical copy of that so I can't share a pdf unfortunately, and I still need to get around to reading it lol.

These are also a couple random articles I found insightful:

Carnut (2022). Marxist Critical Systematic Review on Neo-Fascism and International Capital: Diffuse Networks, Capitalist Decadence and Culture War - does what it says on the tin

Daggett (2018). Petro-masculinity: Fossil Fuels and Authoritarian Desire - talks about car culture as a site of modern reactionary political movements, links climate denialism with (proto-)fascist movements

Parmigiani (2021). Magic and politics: Conspirituality and COVID-19 - this one does not mention fascism explicitly, but imo the intersection between new age spirituality, anti-vaccine sentiment, and qanon/q-adjacent conspiracies are pretty important to understanding contemporary fascist social movements, so I'd still recommend reading this

Finally, this isn't an article but I found this recorded lecture about the history of Qanon pretty interesting. I don't think the author gives particularly insightful answers on how to solve the problem of far right conspiracies in the Q&A portion but I found it to be a helpful summary

Otherwise I've been focusing a lot on decolonial scholarship more so than fascist scholarship - this is again guided by Cesaire's argument that Europe/The West broadly is inherently fascist. These works aren't contemporary, but you can look at this post for some of the readings I linked on decolonial scholarship if you want to go that route. Those are serving me more for theoretical frameworks to guide contemporary analysis, not analysis of contemporary events directly

also idk if I need to put this disclaimer, but just in case this leaves my blog: this isn't a full throated defense of/apology for everything in these articles, I'm not claiming they're sufficient to understanding the present moment, these are just some of the things I've been reading recently and have found helpful in some way or another. a lot of contemporary work I have read (much of which isn't linked here because I don't think its very good/do not have it on hand) focuses on populism and authoritarianism as central analytical terminology, which i think does a lot of work to exceptionalize and mystify fascism as a historical and political process/project originating from European colonialism & Western imperialism, but these terms are endemic to the field so you have to contend with them no matter what

good luck with your studies!

[rjzimmerman]

I am rapidly turning into a person terrified by red blobs on weather maps heading in my direction, thinking tornadoes. WTF is going on?

Excerpt from this story from Vox:

Tornado season is here again, with twisters striking in Indiana, Pennsylvania, and Florida over the past few weeks. But while severe storms in spring are nothing new, there have been subtle changes in tornado patterns in recent years that portend a more dangerous future for communities across the country. 

According to a preliminary count from the National Centers for Environmental Information, there have been 547 tornadoes documented from January through April 2024. That figure is higher than the year-to-date average — 338 — the organization calculated between 1991 and 2020 but in line with the number observed in 2022 and 2023 in the same time frame. 

And even as the number of tornadoes has stayed relatively consistent in the last few years, experts say there have been key changes in their behavior over time that could have major consequences. 

More tornadoes are now concentrated in fewer days, meaning they are less spread out and there’s a higher number occurring on the same day, according to a 2019 study published in Theoretical and Applied Climatology. A growing number of tornadoes are also occurring in the southeastern part of the US in addition to the Great Plains, where they have been historically most common. 

There’s still a lot experts don’t know about why both these trends are occurring and it’s not clear if climate change is playing a role. What is more certain is that these shifts mean people will have to prepare for these natural disasters in new ways, with some communities enduring more severe storms in rapid succession and others being forced to build infrastructure for tornadoes they had rarely experienced before. 

Scientists have some information about why there are more concentrated tornadoes, or clustering, and why the locations of tornadoes have shifted slightly. With clustering, it’s tied to the presence of atmospheric and wind conditions that fuel dozens of tornadoes at once. And with changes in geography, it’s related to parts of the country drying out while other areas are seeing more rain. 

What’s still unknown is whether such shifts are related to climate change as the Earth has gotten warmer due to human-generated greenhouse gases. 

“It’s hard to pull out the different trends — maybe the natural variations are impacting tornadoes, maybe the broader climate change, maybe it’s a combination of both,” says Jase Bernhardt, a climatologist at Hofstra University. “We want more research done to understand why it’s happening.”

Experts similarly have some sense of why tornado geography has shifted, though they’re still working to untangle the factors involved.  

[emmebearpaw]

…. Oops I’m back with a whole second post/probably soon to be thread because the windglider one was getting very long and now I’m talking about Tengus and Gliders together. Putting in a read more for length.

This post is in response to reblog from @canonical-transformation and asks from @followfire and @beingatoaster

Chapter 1) How the hell does a Tengu Work?

ok that might seem like a strange place to start but I think it’s important to start off with the fact that Tengu wing anatomy is wack as hell. Typically I am the sort of person who likes to do research while thinking about my silly silly headcanons. I have learned a lot about old fabric skinned aircraft and have an appreciation for early heavier than air gliders now because of the (Wikipedia) research I’ve done to think about gliders in genshin. So I figured we’ll look up animals with 4 wings and figure out how they would fly and okay yup, early birds and flying insects. Do any of them have shorter front wings and larger back wings? No? No they are all either larger front or equal size? Excellent. Sounds great. It does seem to be a design feature used in certain types of military jets and missiles to uh… help with turning? I don’t 100% know. It’s called Canard configuration. It’s specifically for fixed wing aircraft and not… birds….

ok so I don’t actually know the motion a tengu’s wings would probably be making. It’s not like we ever get to see them fly in game. Hell, we barely get to see Sara’s wings because the game magically puts them away so they don’t have to animate them except in her idle. This is stupid and we are going to pretend she can’t put her wings away in her inventory and simply just keeps them folded a majority of the time. Anyways enough about Sara for now (don’t worry man. We’ll be back), it’s time for assumption #1: tengus fly in a mostly horizontal position and flap their wings in a rhythm similar to dragonflies (front and back set flap with off timing), but with more elbow in it like a bird. There is a flapping motion, the wings work independently of one another, and a tengu can not hover or fly backwards.

Assumption 2: the larger bottom set is likely responsible for most of the lift. The smaller top set is likely responsible for steering? Especially sharper turns and maneuvers? I don’t 100% know. I really feel like they should be reversed so I can take inspiration from proto-birds like micro raptor but instead we have that. So we are going to work with it.

assumption 3: the human form isn’t really meant to sustain flight? But we know they can fly, and it’s described as flight and not as gliding in lore, and thus they must be able to, for some amount of time, generate enough lift to gain elevation. In order to help reach that goal, a few other things I presume about tengus are that they have extra musculature in and around their wings to support them, they have bones that are more hollow than the average human, both to reduce weight and to store oxygen so that anaerobic metabolism is delayed and thus lactic acid production, allowing tengus to perform athletic feats for longer without exhaustion than an equivalent human, and that their builds tend towards lean and muscular without excessive weight. Sara is a decent example of a tengu build I think! Sort of lanky and isn’t muscular like Itto, where it’s very obvious, but she is muscular and very strong.

those assumptions are going to form the backbone of what a theoretical prosthetic glider may need to accomplish. It needs to be able to move independently from the other wing on the same side, and flap! Either to provide lift or to help steer. Now, let’s get onto

Chapter 2: Construction of a Second Wing.

I say as if there would be one construction. Because. You know. It’s a mobility aid. There would be varying levels of need and thus varying types made so let’s go through them in rough order of least involved to most involved. Anyways I’m still not an engineer so uh fuck.

but first we have to start with the common elements. While I tend to think normal gliders for people without wings are unframed devices, I firmly believe that tengu wing prosthetics (which I’m going to call second wings I guess. I made up that name for the chapter title but do like it) are articulated framed constructions. Realistically I think bamboo would grow in Inazuma despite it not being there in game because trees can’t appear in two regions if they don’t have fruit, but, I think bamboo frames are the most common material due to its lightness.

I was originally going to draw pictures depicting the framing but it’s too late and I’m comfy cozy in bed, because past midnight is the only time I write insanely long tumblr posts. Diagrams may be added later but please use your imagination for now.

ideally I think the frame would follow the leading edge of the wing, acting almost as a second skeleton in order to minimize motions the wing is incapable of, and to provide a way to attach these things to the body harness. Realistically a frame on just one side of the wing may be impractical, and if that is the case then the wing is probably fully surrounded by a light bamboo frame. This probably depends on the needs of the user.

My general thought on the design of these would be a wing by wing approach. The trailing edge of the wings are not sewn close all the way, allowing the user to slide their wing in from the bottom before closing it with snaps, buttons, knots, etc. The wing would then be connected at the… shoulder I guess? The back? By an attachment to a harness. This prevents the wing cover from loosening or moving mid flight and secures the wooden framing against the skeletal structure. The idea would then be that a user could flap their wing normally, but with a larger impact than their wing could usually provide. The wing by wing nature of this general design allows for users to only have 1/4 wings be a second wing, or as many as they need in whichever combo. A more permanent harness attachment would likely be used in those who need both wings in a pair or both pairs, though the single wing approach may also be more practical for those with mobility issues in their wings. Basically, if the problem is lift generation, you can retrofit a wing over top and have a new wing! User cases: those with problems to wing shape (caused by injury or congenital) that hampers flight potential. Tengu with any other problem that does not limit range of motion below what one would typically need to fly with. See chapter 3 for more detail, because I do have a reason why this is the version I have thought about the most.

But speaking of those with mobility problems. What about people who can’t move their wings to the extent needed to fly typically. This is a much harder problem to solve with a second wing obviously, but I have had a few thoughts. To begin, these ones are definitely probably closer in framing to a full frame, because the frame will likely have to act as a brace. This is also the time to tell you I’m not a physical therapist. Anyways I don’t know how to solve this problem but there are a few options

A) the glider acts more like a brace and solid wing. The tengu’s wing(s) is still inside but does not bend, and is likely supported by more internal straps to fasten their wings tighter to the bamboo framing . This likely limits the ability to fly as flapping would not be an option. Though in individuals with upper wing injuries that limit mobility, I really do thing external control with strings controlled by arms or other body parts may be an option for sharp steering that is hard to do by body position alone.

B) Single wing injuries may be able to have rigging of some sort to have the motion of the opposite wing move the injured wing. This would likely be better if the injured wing was tucked away somewhere else and a new wooden boned wing was created.

use cases: those with atrophied ring muscles (though they may be able to move to previous one over time. Those with injuries limiting range of motion.

The last category is for those missing parts of or entire wings. These prosthetics would be the most intense, and would involve not only rigging wings to be able to flap and move via strings or whatever but also a different attachment system custom made to the user’s body. This… I don’t have enough engineering knowledge to imagine this I’m gonna be honest.

Chapter 3: hey why have you even thought about this and how does it pertain to characters (you can stop I’m just oc rambling. But also Kujou Sara)

So I’m gonna be honest and say I have a genshin OC who is a tengu. She is learning to make second wings because her nephew (who is like her little brother!) is a half tengu, and thus his wings are too small and aren’t growing primary feathers at quite the rate to support flight. She thinks that flight is one of the essential qualities that makes a tengu a tengu and not just a human with wings. She thinks he should get to be a tengu, and is thus making prosthetics from scratch even though she is very much not educated to do so.

This would eventually also lead her to talking with Kujou Sara. Thinking about Kujou Sara is a large part of why I have the oc, and also why I basically made her to be a foil to Sara. I don’t think Sara can fly, due to combination atrophy from not using them since I doubt Takayuki would let her go flying really, and injury (from falling off a mountain and whatever else she may have accumulated). Now. I don’t think Sara would like the concept of a mobility aid but also, like, I think it would be good for her to get her feet off the ground and to not have anything bad happen. Kujou Sara should have nice things and maybe one of those things can be talking to someone more immersed in the culture you are disconnected from and discovering things about it. And getting a second opinion on the things that mark you as obviously non human despite your effort to be one.

Anyways make your ocs to explore all the things in a game the game won’t cover, such as: long term ramifications of that war they just had, Yokai culture and self identification of the label, Kujou Sara having screen time and development and even some good things happening to her, Tengu, and wind gliders.

anyways that’s it for tonight my brain is starting to melt. Maybe more if I can think of more later.

[goldenbloodytears]

Hey!! While waiting for the community to be reviewed... What are your thoughts on Danny's education? I wonder if this prick ever got an actual degree in journalism instead of finding a way to falsificate the whole thing somehow under the premise of being good enough for it anyway, tbh

Ooooh! Great question!

Well, honestly, I've been a bit back and forth about it--he's always given me major confidence trickster vibes, so the idea that he wouldn't....fluff up his credentials... seemed funny to me.

Prior to his tome release, I thought it would be interesting if he was more self-taught, especially since back in the day, it was a lot easier to get into journalism without strictly studying journalism. This isn't to say this is no longer the case, there ARE still situations where you can end up a journalist without going to journalism school... but generally the "best" way (if you have no network) is gonna be school. Anyways, his tome reveals he did take at least one anthropology related course in college, so I'm assuming he has at minimum a couple credits to his name. I like to think that he finished his degree, but the idea that he got wrapped up into the murdering and maybe didn't get to finish his degree is very fun too. Honestly picturing Danny at uni is such a trip because my general impression of colleges/universities is most of them tend to be very left/liberal-leaning and Danny's just a fucking centrist man... he's a bloody doomer getting into fights about how humanity is bad. He's literally the annoying guy in your seminars who takes the prof's entire attention and stalls the discussion just so he can have his own personal debate.

However, I like the idea that he didn't go to school strictly for journalism. I think part of the issue with his education is we don't know where it fell in relation to said patricide. It's not entirely unreasonable that his dad might have wanted Danny to get some university education and then enlist, it would look good in making him an officer, higher-ranking, stuff like that. If that's the case, Danny's credentials might be related to things that would be more useful to a theoretical future career in the military. For example, something like a BA in (military?) history with a minor in English. I'd honestly argue that his education is open season since his line of work as a journalist is one of those careers where as long as you can meet the technical skills required (writing, communication, research, etc.) it doesn't matter what you strictly studied since higher education at the university level generally already prepares you for that.

I have more thoughts so I might expand on this a bit later, but in the meantime I'd love to hear other people's thoughts on this topic as well.

[maggiemacabre]

SiIvaGunner SmashUp! Behind the scenes and post-mortem

Hello folks and welcome to my new Tumblr blog. I don't know how much I'm going to actually use this thing in the future but I figure if I need it, it's here. As you can probably tell by the title, today's subject will be none other than my most recent "work", the SiIvaGunner SmashUp!

The idea of a SiIvaGunner take on the concept of "Royal Rumble but full of stupid contestants" was in my head for a while, but the motivation to do it wasn't in place until I found Dead Meat's Horror Royal Rumble in August or September of 2023. The Jerma Rumbles and Vinewrestle were definitely also influences on the idea, but the Horror Royal Rumble was the impetus, and played a part in influencing some creative choices featured in the SmashUp (more on that later).

After running the idea by the team and the rest of backroom, I picked up WWE 2K23 (which fortuitously was on sale that weekend) and got to work. Going in, I had next to no idea of the ins and outs of pro wrestling, which meant that I had to do a lot of research into things like the wrestlers themselves, moves, terminology, different match types, general historical stuff, how shows are actually presented, etc. This put me in a very, very deep rabbit hole which I have still not crawled out of. I even went to two house shows!

Making the wrestlers was the first step and by far took the longest amount of time out of anything, since this was the first show of its kind on the channel and required the creation of 34 unique wrestlers. Some of them were easier than others (lookin' at you AMUNO), but others such as Ninomae Ina'nis took days to complete due to the amount of detail they required. This also isn't including wrestlers who were made that got cut; some of these exclusions include Bottom G, who was left out because Andrew Tate sucks, Elly from Touhou Project, who was replaced by Sumireko, and Wood Man, who was left out for lore reasons and replaced with 8-Bit Beast in a somewhat 11th hour decision. Maybe next year?

The decision to make Hot Cross Buns and Raft Ride into women also spawned from this period. Hot Cross Buns was made first and was originally meant to show up in the Grand Rumble, but after some time I ended up deciding to move her to her own match, which became a Women's World Champion match because lol. I had to use mods to make the men and women able to fight each other, so theoretically Raft Ride could have been a man, but women are awesome.

Being an egotistical maniac, I also included some references to things I'd worked on in the past. Totino's Stadium, the arena where the match takes place, was first mentioned in the FUMO JAM ad from the DJ Professor K Day stream, and Nu Grandiose City is the city where Woodyana is from in Woodyana Stones: Raider Made of Lost Bark. Also I guess this is why Elvira was included? LOL. Fun fact: The footage of "Totino's Stadium" is actually of Gazprom Arena in Russia.

Since I was involved with the channel's MAGFest panel in 2024, I was able to announce the show months in advance, although I'm not sure how many people actually paid attention at the time. Getting a logo ready between finishing CCC and MAG was a bit tight, but thankfully it was able to be done on time, and on top of that I was able to make the big card poster thing on my own. I actually designed it to be printed, and I proposed making it a sold item, although that idea was rejected. I also came up with the date during this period, choosing the day right before the WWE Hall of Fame show, and while things got a bit close to the wire, it was luckily able to make the date and time without a hitch in the end.

After all the wrestlers were made, it was time to record and edit. I was a bit worried about my laptop overheating while doing so, but I was able to get good quality 60 FPS 1080p footage recorded without any hitches other than some human error on my end. While the controversial ending of the Grand Rumble wasn't what I had in mind, I ended up leaving it as-is for time reasons and also because it felt like a funny troll ending. Which it was! Editing was not quite as smooth since I had to go through all the footage and edit it together into a cohesive product. WWE games don't allow you to cut to entrances during a Royal Rumble, which meant that I had to record and edit those in myself. The method I ended up using resembled the one from the Dead Meat rumble mentioned earlier with cuts to the audience as the buzzer rings, although I'd like to believe I did a better job than they did with their 2024 entrances where they awkwardly cut around shots of the ring. This is also where the fun facts come from, as they are actually covering up the nameplates that show up as an alternative to cutting to the entrances.

After editing was done I got some other team members to do commentary. Thankfully I was able to get someone with wrestling knowledge, which definitely added a dimension of realism and legitimacy to the project. I don't know if I can say who the announcers are because of leaks, but if you haven't figured it out, Randall Shields is a Smash Bros. reference. Also it was the first contribution to SiIvaGunner that had "Randall" made in about half a decade. What a return!

The premiere of the project was electric. Seeing over 1.3K people tune in and get hype over something I made was incredible and made my week, if not month. I did feel a little bad about the reaction when Dream came in (💀), but other than that it was awesome. And don't worry, he won't return.

In the end, I had a lot of fun with the project and it was awesome seeing everything pay off. I want to thank everyone who helped, including the artists who designed the logos and the people who did commentary. It couldn't have come together without help and assistance from everyone, and I hope that this becomes the first in a series of similar videos.

[genericpuff]

Does anyone else wish that more Hades x Persephone stories made use of Despoina, the daughter of Demeter and Poseidon? Some accounts have her as a goddess of winter and it would have been interesting to see how that would have played out.

So I actually have a lot of thoughts on this and it goes beyond Despoina a little bit, but bear with me here because I still think it's worth talking about. Note that I'm obviously not an authoritative figure on this topic, this is simply my two cents based on the research I've done on Despoina, the Eleusinian Mysteries, and the context of The Hymn to Demeter as a whole.

Frankly, I think the reason that the modern retellings of Hades and Persephone don't make more use of Despoina is because we still don't really know a lot about her. Even in my own research of her, from what I've gathered (i.e. I could totally be wrong on this so if I am please send me resources if you have them!!!) the claim that she was the 'goddess of winter' is pretty much on the same level as claiming there's source material about Persephone going down to the Underworld willingly - i.e. it seems like something someone said maybe 20-30 years ago and people just kind of went "yep, that's canon!" and claiming there were sources surrounding it while never actually being able to provide those sources... probably because they don't exist.

In reality we don't know much about Despoina - and thus she tends to not be depicted in these modern retellings - because she's affiliated with The Eleusinian Mysteries which are, well... a mystery! The Mysteries itself was an initiation process for a cult dedicated to Demeter and Persephone, the members within were sworn to secrecy so all of the writings we have about it are pretty minimal and theoretical aside from knowing for a fact they were associated with Demeter, Persephone, and Hecate (and in some versions, Aphrodite). So unless someone who was actually there is able to appear and tell us what the actual fuck was going on behind closed doors, all we have are the word of mouth stories and depictions told through Greek poets such as Callimachus.

By extension, we don't know all that much about Despoina who was strongly connected to the Mysteries. We know she was the offspring of Poseidon and Demeter, we sort of know she's an actual tangible goddess but there are also other works that claim "Despoine" was simply a title within the Mysteries (as it means "the mistress") used to describe certain goddesses such as Persephone, but when it comes to her as a goddess affiliated with winter specifically, really she seems to only be mentioned as a consequential footnote in Demeter's search for Kore (which led to the drought / winter season) and frankly from what I can glean, I think that's the only real 'connection' there is that people tend to conflate as "goddess of winter", because she was born the same time Demeter would have started winter.

But why would there be a goddess of winter, really? In the Mediterranean where it doesn't traditionally snow aside from on mountaintops and at higher altitudes? It does get colder, yes, but Mediterranean winters still tend to be mild and wet, you wouldn't find blistering cold "Canadian" winters in Athens as we imagine them to be when we think of Demeter and the creation of the seasons. Even the notion that Demeter used winter to kill the mortals is told in such a manner to describe the seasons but they don't necessarily mean snow literally, they mean drought, the lack of summer harvest, when Greece would go through periods of drought where harvests were minimal and mortals were at a higher risk of starvation. Remember that these myths still come from a specific regional context so what we call 'winter' isn't precisely the same as what Ancient Greek poets like Homer called 'winter'.

If there was a goddess of winter, it would technically be Demeter, but again, not exactly because it's more the absence of the Mediterranean heat and sun needed to grow the plants they traditionally consumed. The closest thing we know to be a "goddess of winter/snow/frost" with actual text and sources is Khione, a mountain nymph whose name literally translates to 'snow' due to snow being more common in, you guessed it, the mountains of Greece.

Anyways, I'm digressing now, but my point is that a lot of modern retellings frankly struggle to depict Despoina because there just isn't enough on her to know who she was like we have with Demeter and Persephone. She was an enigmatic figure spoken of within cults that kept their information behind closed doors. And a lot of the research that is out there is muddied with made-up headcanon stuff. None of this is to be argumentative, but I did want to talk about it because in all my readings of Despoina (which there are , again, not a lot of!) there just doesn't seem to be anything backing up the claims that she's the goddess of winter and frost, it seems to all just be "well I read it somewhere" only for that 'somewhere' to be a poorly-made Wiki page with no scholarly sources or references, Tumblr posts that also don't have scholarly sources (or are using sources from those aforementioned Wiki pages), or to just not exist, period.

But hey, I'm very aware I could be entirely off base on this; again, if there's actual writings about her being the goddess of winter that I've missed, please by all means send them my way. I'm just really struggling to pull up anything tangible that has her cited as such that isn't rooted in modern day hearsay or fanfiction.

[verosvault]

🚨SPOILERS FOR FANTASY HIGH JUNIOR YEAR EPISODE 8🚨

Dimension20 "Fantasy High Junior Year"

Episode 8 "Fracas at the Frostyfaire Folk Festival"

Timestamp: 39:40

Video Length: 4min. & 23sec.

Research into Cassandra and Ruvina + Learning about Oblivati Mori (Pt.1 | Pt.2 | ‣Pt.3)

Brennan: "But that would mean that if someone was able to write it, they would know it, but they would have to have a way of writing it without breaking Obliviati Mori. There's two pieces of information you guys can glean from that right away, the first of which is that belief and worship and the weird, tenuous alliances between gods where some of them are from the same region but have conflicting domains, and some gods have the same domain as other gods but are still ascendent in different areas or for different kinds of cultures or anything like that, all the gods have this agreement that is basically like, for lack of a better word, we're all playing the game, and if your fucking buddy or your pal or someone you love loses fair and square, you're not allowed to go to your mortal worshipers and say, "Hey, can we peel off a few followers to my buddy who's having a hard time right now?" It's basically like a law of, you are not allowed to root for each other. You are not allowed to pull for each other. You're not allowed to put a thumb on the scale in that way. If your flocks choose to have you work together, you can work together, but when a god dies, that's it. You're not allowed to cheat by reminding mortals that there was this other deity."

Siobhan: "But if we went and asked another deity about this god, would they then be able to tell us? Or would we have to specifically say their name?"

Brennan: "According to Obliviati Mori, they would not be able to tell you. But the law is a law, which immediately to you, Adaine, would tell you, well, any rule has ways of working around it."

Siobhan: "Ok, Great. So it's a law, but laws can be broken."

Brennan: "Yeah. And there might be enormous arcane penalties for so doing, but effectively, you know that there are dead gods. There are rules concerning how the other gods can refer to those dead gods to mortals, if they are even allowed to. And to a certain degree... But again, the second, biggest thing is, of course, this wouldn't be a thing unless gods could always remember dead gods."

Siobhan: "Mhmm."

Zac: "So do we have a sense of, when Lydia and her crew were on this mission, they never knew the name of this god, right? Or did they at one point know it?"

Brennan: "Lydia can confirm for you, she's like,"

Lydia: "We never knew the name of the god. We knew Bakur, the fiend, but-"

Fig: "Even though gods can't say the name, the name could still exist out there in texts."

Lydia: "Exactly, which is why a lot of, you know, if a god is trying to be crushed or scoured, you try to break their idols, erase their texts, burn the holy texts, all that kind of thing. But theoretically, if we had found the name written somewhere on text, that would have done it.

Fabian: "Then it makes sense why Cassandra said that thing about being like, I thought you were dead."

Fig: "I thought you were dead."

*multiple "yeah's" at the table* 😂🤣💀

Fabian: "Mm~."

Riz: "So if you had to get around it, maybe a way to do it would be to possess someone or something. Is it possible that Lucy..."

Fig: "Was possessed?"

Riz: "...was possessed?"

Fig: "All the Rat Grinders are suspiciously qui-. No one's grieving Lucy or anything like that."

Adaine: "Yeah, it's weird, right?"

Fig: "So the Rat Grinders are in on this, in some capacity. And I even think it's possible that, the way that Ivy reacted to me, either she saw through my disguise and so she was being cheeky, or Lucy's around somehow and they've just found another way to proselytize-"

Fabian: "Oh-! Maybe- Yes! 'Cause she did beckon to you, right? To be like-"

Fig: "Yeah, she was like, 'Oh- Okay, we're meeting up.'"

Fabian: "Ooo~ Yes, like a possession thing, where somebody's, the god is Lucy and- and-"

Murph: "What happened to that armor after Gilear had it?"

Emily: "What happened with the armor?"

Brennan: "He'd stolen it from Hell, and he just returned it to you when you guys got back from spring break."

Emily: "Where is it?"

Murph: "So, it just should be in Hell?"

Brennan: "Yeah, the Armor of Pride is back in the Hall of the Armors of Sin."

Murph: "Okay."

Brennan: "So the Armor of Pride is just down in Hell."

Emily: "And all the demons are archfey are fallen deities?"

Brennan: "Unclear. Some great celestials and fiends are created by gods in their status as celestials or fiends. Bakur was created by a god that he could no longer name, right, and so there's certain- But it looks like some divinities, some archfey or some celestials or some things like that, are gods who, their worship is waning and waning and waning or their divinity is waning and waning and waning, and they just make a decision to, rather than face death, become something that relies a little bit less on faith."

[aita-blorbos]

AITA for trying to play God? (OC)

I (who the fuck cares) was a scholar. a few centuries ago, me (24 at the time) and my.... ahem, colleagues (both male, both also 24 at the time) started a little project. it was SUPPOSED to be purely theoretical, as the original intent was to research the inner most fundamental workings of our world. the three of us were all naturally curious souls, and I'll admit that the three of us also connected with each other over having. not-fantastic childhoods. looking back on everything, I don't think the project was started out of curiosity, like the three of us originally thought. each of us had suffered horrible injustices, and I think we wanted to know if it was possible to right every wrong we had to go through

the project devolved as we all became obsessed over uncovering everything, and I mean EVERYTHING, about how the universe works. the three of us each ended up finding out our own individual ways of cheating death.

so this is where things get weird. in our world, our Souls are the source of our magic, and our Souls are stored in our Hearts (as in the literal organ that pumps blood around the body). I had a... thought, about the nature of the Heart. what if I ate one?

so I killed my father and ate his Heart. don't worry, he deserved it, he was the source of all the misery in my and my sister's lives. that's not the part where I feel like an asshole, though you are free to judge me for it. I don't care.

what I DO feel bad about, though, is everything that came after. after eating my Father's heart, I had a really strange experience where I like. absorbed all of him into my own Soul. and then I was in this void where I spoke with this weird Entity/God/Eldritch thing that offered me a deal: I can become a god myself and right every wrong there is in the world, if I can find and consume six pieces of my Soul that split off of me when I committed the ultimate sin of eating another's Heart.

so I started my search. along the way, I may have. cannibalized a few other people, and I reached the conclusion that eating another's Heart results in you assimilating everything in their Soul into your own, including their magic and abilities. I also found out that I stopped aging, and my body's regeneration is pretty much limitless. unfortunately, I didn't get that far before I and some bystanders were murdered.

IT TURNS OUT THE GOD THING I MADE A DEAL WITH GAVE ME THE POWER TO MAKE MY OWN DEALS WITH PEOPLE. so I asked another person, the one in the group most desperate to survive, to eat my Heart and continue my mission. they did, and it turns out that I don't get almagamated when I'm eaten. all the people I did eat were transferred over into my... host's (???) Soul though.

at present, I've inhabited multiple hosts at this point, and I managed to find 5 out of the six required pieces. we've collectively cannibalized too many people to count. my most recent host, Ine (18NB), is... the person I feel the worst about roping into this mess. they're the most recent piece of my Soul I've acquired. they accepted the deal I gave them out of sheer desperation and fear of death, and now they have to navigate resisting the fascist nightmare that is their country (WHICH ALSO HAPPENS TO BE A REGIME LED BY ONE OF MY FORMER COLLEAGUES. ONE OF THE COLLEAGUES I STARTED THE ORIGINAL PROJECT WITH.) in their last year of high school. they're not doing very well, especially since we discovered that the last piece we need is someone they care about. A Lot.

Ine spent that night having the worst breakdown I've ever seen. and thanks to absorbing so many people's experiences, I've seen a lot of bad breakdowns.

we can only stall for so long. sooner or later, things will come to a head. someone will die, and I will be complete.

I've had a long, long time to reflect. I still want to eradicate all injustice from this world, but after seeing the level my former colleague has sunk to in the name of the same goal... I don't know anymore. I want him dead by my hands so badly. I want to rewrite reality to rid this world of him, of everyone like him, I will do whatever it takes to get there. and honestly, I don't think that makes me any better than him.