#workshop colony

[t00nyah]

meebkin!!!

[t00nyah]

AHHHH IT THE THEYS.....THEM!!!! THANKS THUNDER

@t00nyah ur guys

[scarletiswailing347]

i cant find it anymore but this one post i read about zam caring about lifesteal for lifesteals sake while nobody else really does that inspired an au for me lol

[titanomancy]

Okay, but what if we weren't pretending not to rip off StarCraft?

[asianamsmakingmusic]

You do not need to be an expert on the histories and politics of the occupation of Palestine to join us and contribute. We're definitely not experts, and none of our membership has lived experience as a Palestinian person. But what we do know is that RAW comes from resistance to systems of oppression and the on-going impacts of settler colonialism and imperialism. What we do know is we must take a clear stance against genocide and deepen our practices of support for decolonization resistance movements everywhere, from Turtle Island to Palestine. What we do know is that solidarity is a commitment to paying attention, to learning, to collectivity, and to action in the struggle for justice, safety, sovereignty, and freedom. [x]

[colonyworkshop]

Happy 3rd Anniversary, Colony Workshop! Wow, it's hard to believe it's already been another year! I've been looking back at everything I've accomplished and all the new bugs we've met. It's given me a lot to feel inspired by and I'm looking forward to another fun-filled year of Colony! 🐝 In the last few months I've made a lot of progress with Colony: Rise of the Monarch and we've seen the release of episodes 2 and 3 to WebToons Canvas! 🦋 If you haven't had a chance to catch those yet, check it out on WebToons at- https://www.webtoons.com/en/challenge/colony/list?title_no=430865 (You can also see my first short WebToon- Colony: Legacy there!) Making this webseries by myself is an enormous task but I'm so happy to have the opportunity to write this story and share it with you all. It's been such a learning curve figuring out how to make this and I have already picked up so many new skills and techniques. I really hope that you'll keep an eye on Colony and follow this heartwarming journey as it develops! ❤️ I'm going to be away from my PC this weekend for some much needed rest. It's going to make June a short month for drawing but I'm hoping to get a few small bug drawings out and have the next episode of Rise of the Monarch ready to post in July. Have fun, everyone! Wear sunscreen! I'll catch you all again soon! 🐝

[harriefarrow]

Great opportunity to get motivated by learning how to be a more inspired writer. 

[beastofburgeon]

how much of roman'ce is getting sentimental and awkward about land contracts instead of doing /7+ kinds of love words about it?

[southeastasianarchaeology]

Modern Southeast Asia: Colonial Legacies, Lasting Diversities

Join the 2024 Summer Institute on "Modern Southeast Asia: Colonial Legacies, Lasting Diversities" at East-West Center, Honolulu (July 29-Aug 9). Open to college/university teachers. Apply by Mar 12.

The “Modern Southeast Asia: Colonial Legacies, Lasting Diversities” program, scheduled for July 29-August 9, 2024 at the East-West Center in Honolulu, is a two-week residential institute for college and university teachers. It aims to explore Southeast Asia’s historical and cultural diversity influenced by colonialism. The application, open until March 12, 2024, prioritizes humanities and social…

[padawan-historian]

Moments from Palestine across generations and communities

(1) A Bedouin woman smiles in Jerusalem (1898-1914)

(2) Asma Aranki Holding a Child from Her Family at Their House, Birzeit (1948)

(3) Bedouin girls in Jericho (1918)

(4) An extended Palestinian family gathers in front of their house in the village of Beit Sahur, near Bethlehem (1918–35)

(5) From the Mount of Olives, a young woman looks out over eastern Jerusalem (1929)

(6) Ruth Raad, daughter of photographer Khalil Raad, in the traditional costume of Ramallah (1939)

(7) Standing in his neatly ironed shirt and shorts, George Sawabin poses for a studio photo (1942)

(8) Katingo Hanania Deeb, prepares to demonstrate in the 1936-1939 Arab Revolt -- which was a nationalist uprising by Palestinian Arabs against British colonial rule in relation to Palestinian independence and the land acquisition and pushout as a result of the mass Jewish immigration (1936)

(9) Young children walking home from school Beit Deqqo Village, the Occupied Palestinian West Bank, 1987

(10) Four young girls decorating vases in a ceramic workshop in Nablus (1920)

(11) A young Palestinian girl squints and smiles as she holds a jar on her head (1920-1950)

(12) The ancient craft of a Palestinian potter (1918-35)

(13) The mothers of Palestinian detainees' protest in Jerusalem (1987)

Source(s): The British Mandate Jerusalemites (BMJ) Photo Library, Palestinian Museum Digital Archives, The Jerusalem Story + Khalil Raad

Please support, share, cite, and (if financially able) fund these organizations and public storytellers for their rebellious histories and community work!

[dungeonmalcontent]

Im remembering where I left off on my long term d&d campaign before we all realized our holiday seasonal schedules would make it incredibly difficult to play.

My players had made it to the dwarven city of my homebrew setting. And I had added on a detail from dwarf fortress to help enhance some of the weird culture they have. These are weird dwarves, after all. They have been grafting uranium into the skin for generations.

I added strange moods.

For those unfamiliar with dwarf fortress, you manage a colony of dwarves. You tell the dwarves what to do and they try to do it. You can micromanage just about everything. But every now and then a dwarf gets a "strange mood" or a "fey mood" (there's a few names for it in game). You can't stop this. When it happens the dwarf stops what they're doing, enters a trance like state, hijacks a workshop in the fortress, steals a bunch of materials, and crafts what is usually an incredibly valuable artifact.

So I described this to my players, as part of the city was being cordoned off due to a particularly troublesome strange mood. And a player responded with "so. Crafting heat. Got it."

And it killed a me a little. In a good way, of course. I had to stop and think about it for a minute before I could laugh but I did laugh.

Anyway, this is now the canonical way I think about it. The dwarves have a heat cycle, and it is not sexual in nature. It is for making cool and useless things. Like hats made of bone and rocks.

[t00nyah]

did some doodling in my notebook, ended up making the whole thing about sizzle (@thunder-opossum)

sizzle meets grenade! (my interpretation of green pup)

sizzle, blast (my blue pup interpretation. you'll see why later)

AND SHADY LONG LEGS!!!!!! copying auglur !

and so i ended up drawing a mini-story where sizzle meets the explosive brothers in last resort explosive au .

blast: Grenade?! sizzle: ? blast: … Oh. Sorry. You're not Grenade. Just…similar. sizzle: Who…are you? (And why do you…huh.)

b: I'm Blast! Sorry for stumbling and falling on you…Uh… s: Sizzling Waters. b: Sizzling Waters! What a nice name! b: I was out gathering food for my sibling. Do you wanna join? I wouldn't mind company! s: Uh… s: Okay. b: Yay!

s: Uh, Blast? b: Mhm? s: Can I ask you something? b: Yeah!

s: Where…is your sibling? Why aren't they…here? b: Oh. Well… They're in our current shelter stop. Waiting for me. s: Waiting? b: Well, yeah. They just can't do anything on their own. s: Oh— b: I should probably check up on them anyways. b: You can come too! They could use some friends! s: Uhh— b: Come on!

b: Hi, Grenade! Are you trying to sleep again? I brought food! And a friend! b: Woah, no wonder I thought you were Grenade. You're both so green! s: Yeah… We are, I guess. g: … b: Is it okay if Sizzling Waters hibernates here? I feel like the cycle is almost complete. s: Huh? Oh! Yeah, it is, isn't it? I— I didn't notice… b: So? g: … g: It's okay, I suppose. b: Yay!

this story has a continuation in my head, but only there, lol.

[suchananewsblog]

Mumbai | Govandi Arts Festival: the young step up

It began with a simple statement: “My identity is my right.” It was February 2021, right after the lockdown had lifted. The youth of Natwar Parekh Compound, a slum relocation and rehabilitation colony in Mumbai’s Govandi neighbourhood, had convened at the community library for a workshop about reclaiming public space. One of the most neglected suburbs of Mumbai, Govandi is home to a number of…

[mostlysignssomeportents]

FTC vs surveillance pricing

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

In the mystical cosmology of economics, "prices" are of transcendental significance, the means by which the living market knows and adapts itself, giving rise to "efficient" production and consumption.

At its most basic level, the metaphysics of pricing goes like this: if there is less of something for sale than people want to buy, the seller will raise the price until enough buyers drop out and demand equals supply. If the disappointed would-be buyers are sufficiently vocal about their plight, other sellers will enter the market (bankrolled by investors who sense an opportunity), causing supplies to increase and prices to fall until the system is in "equilibrium" – producing things as cheaply as possible in precisely the right quantities to meet demand. In the parlance of neoclassical economists, prices aren't "set": they are discovered.

In antitrust law, there are many sins, but they often boil down to "price setting." That is, if a company has enough "market power" that they can dictate prices to their customers, they are committing a crime and should be punished. This is such a bedrock of neoclassical economics that it's a tautology "market power" exists where companies can "set prices"; and to "set prices," you need "market power."

Prices are the blood cells of the market, shuttling nutrients (in the form of "information") around the sprawling colony organism composed of all the buyers, sellers, producers, consumers, intermediaries and other actors. Together, the components of this colony organism all act on the information contained in the "price signals" to pursue their own self-interest. Each self-interested action puts more information into the system, triggering more action. Together, price signals and the actions they evince eventually "discover" the price, an abstraction that is yanked out of the immaterial plane of pure ideas and into our grubby, physical world, causing mines to re-open, shipping containers and pipelines to spark to life, factories to retool, trucks to fan out across the nation, retailers to place ads and hoist SALE banners over their premises, and consumers to race to those displays and open their wallets.

When prices are "distorted," all of this comes to naught. During the notorious "socialist calculation debate" of 1920s Austria, right-wing archdukes of religious market fundamentalism, like Von Hayek and Von Mises, trounced their leftist opponents, arguing that the market was the only computational system capable of calculating how much of each thing should be made, where it should be sent, and how much it should be sold for.

Attempts to "plan" the economy – say, by subsidizing industries or limiting prices – may be well-intentioned, but they broke the market's computations and produced haywire swings of both over- and underproduction. Later, the USSR's planned economy did encounter these swings. These were sometimes very grave (famines that killed millions) and sometimes silly (periods when the only goods available in regional shops were forks, say, creating local bubbles in folk art made from forks).

Unplanned markets do this too. Most notoriously, capitalism has produced a vast oversupply of carbon-intensive goods and processes, and a huge undersupply of low-carbon alternatives, bringing the human civilization to the brink of collapse. Not only have capitalism's price signals failed to address this existential crisis to humans, it has also sown the seeds of its own ruin – the market computer's not going to be getting any "price signals" from people as they drown in floods or roast to death on sidewalks that deliver second-degree burns to anyone who touches them:

https://www.fastcompany.com/91151209/extreme-heat-southwest-phoenix-surface-burns-scorching-pavement-sidewalks-pets

For market true believers, these failures are just evidence that regulation is distorting markets, and that the answer is more unregulated markets to infuse the computer with more price signals. When it comes to carbon, the problem is that producers are "producing negative externalities" (that is, polluting and sticking us with the bill). If we can just get them to "internalize" those costs, they will become "economically rational" and switch to low-carbon alternatives.

That's the theory behind the creation and sale of carbon credits. Rather than ordering companies to stop risking civilizational collapse and mass extinction, we can incentivize them to do so by creating markets that reward clean tech and punish dirty practices. The buying and selling of carbon credits is supposed to create price signals reflecting the existential risk to the human race and the only habitable planet known to our species, which the market will then "bring into equilibrium."

Unfortunately, reality has a distinct and unfair leftist bias. Carbon credits are a market for lemons. The carbon credits you buy to "offset" your car or flight are apt to come from a forest that has already burned down, or that had already been put in a perpetual trust as a wildlife preserve and could never be logged:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/03/18/greshams-carbon-law/#papal-indulgences

Carbon credits produce the most perverse outcomes imaginable. For example, much of Tesla's profitability has been derived from the sale of carbon credits to the manufacturers of the dirtiest, most polluting SUVs on Earth; without those Tesla credits, those SUVs would have been too expensive to sell, and would not have existed:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/11/24/no-puedo-pagar-no-pagara/#Rat

What's more, carbon credits aren't part of an "all of the above" strategy that incorporates direct action to prevent our species downfall. These market solutions are incompatible with muscular direct action, and if we do credits, we can't do other stuff that would actually work:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/31/carbon-upsets/#big-tradeoff

Even though price signals have repeatedly proven themselves to be an insufficient mechanism for producing "efficient" or even "survivable," they remain the uppermost spiritual value in the capitalist pantheon. Even through the last 40 years of unrelenting assaults on antitrust and competition law, the one form of corporate power that has remained both formally and practically prohibited is "pricing power."

That's why the DoJ was able to block tech companies and major movie studios from secretly colluding to suppress their employees' wages, and why those employees were able to get huge sums out of their employers:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_Litigation

It's also why the Big Six (now Big Five) publishers and Apple got into so much trouble for colluding to set a floor on the price of ebooks:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Apple_(2012)

When it comes to monopoly, even the most Bork-pilled, Manne-poisoned federal judges and agencies have taken a hard line on price-fixing, because "distortions" of prices make the market computer crash.

But despite this horror of price distortions, America's monopolists have found so many ways to manipulate prices. Last month, The American Prospect devoted an entire issue to the many ways that monopolies and cartels have rigged the prices we pay, pushing them higher and higher, even as our wages stagnated and credit became more expensive:

https://prospect.org/pricing

For example, there's the plague of junk fees (AKA "drip pricing," or, if you're competing to be first up against the wall come the revolution, "ancillary revenue"), everything from baggage fees from airlines to resort fees at hotels to the fee your landlord charges if you pay your rent by check, or by card, or in cash:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/06/07/drip-drip-drip/#drip-off

There's the fake transparency gambit, so beloved of America's hospitals:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/06/13/a-punch-in-the-guts/#hayek-pilled

The "greedflation" that saw grocery prices skyrocketing, which billionaire grocery plutes blamed on covid stimulus checks, even as they boasted to their shareholders about their pricing power:

https://prospect.org/economy/2024-06-12-war-in-the-aisles/

There's the the tens of billions the banks rake in with usurious interest rates, far in excess of the hikes to the central banks' prime rates (which are, in turn, justified in light of the supposed excesses of covid relief checks):

https://prospect.org/economy/2024-06-11-what-we-owe/

There are the scams that companies like Amazon pull with their user interfaces, tricking you into signing up for subscriptions or upsells, which they grandiosely term "dark patterns," but which are really just open fraud:

https://prospect.org/economy/2024-06-10-one-click-economy/

There are "surge fees," which are supposed to tempt more producers (e.g. Uber drivers) into the market when demand is high, but which are really just an excuse to gouge you – like when Wendy's threatens to surge-price its hamburgers:

https://prospect.org/economy/2024-06-07-urge-to-surge/

And then there's surveillance pricing, the most insidious and profitable way to jack up prices. At its core, surveillance pricing uses nonconsensually harvested private information to inform an algorithm that reprices the things you buy – from lattes to rent – in real-time:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/06/05/your-price-named/#privacy-first-again

Companies like Plexure – partially owned by McDonald's – boasts that it can use surveillance data to figure out what your payday is and then hike the price of the breakfast sandwich or after-work soda you buy every day.

Like every bad pricing practice, surveillance pricing has its origins in the aviation industry, which invested early on and heavily in spying on fliers to figure out how much they could each afford for their plane tickets and jacking up prices accordingly. Architects of these systems then went on to found companies like Realpage, a data-brokerage that helps landlords illegally collude to rig rent prices.

Algorithmic middlemen like Realpage and ATPCO – which coordinates price-fixing among the airlines – are what Dan Davies calls "accountability sinks." A cartel sends all its data to a separate third party, which then compares those prices and tells everyone how much to jack them up in order to screw us all:

https://profilebooks.com/work/the-unaccountability-machine/

These price-fixing middlemen are everywhere, and they predate the boom in commercial surveillance. For example, Agri-Stats has been helping meatpackers rig the price of meat for 40 years:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/04/dont-let-your-meat-loaf/#meaty-beaty-big-and-bouncy

But when you add commercial surveillance to algorithmic pricing, you get a hybrid more terrifying than any cocaine-sharks (or, indeed, meth-gators):

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/tennessee-police-warn-locals-not-flush-drugs-fear-meth-gators-n1030291

Apologists for these meth-gators insist that surveillance pricing's true purpose is to let companies offer discounts. A streaming service can't afford to offer $0.99 subscriptions to the poor because then all the rich people would stop paying $19.99. But with surveillance pricing, every customer gets a different price, titrated to their capacity to pay, and everyone wins.

But that's not how it cashes out in the real world. In the real world, rich people who get ripped off have the wherewithal to shop around, complain effectively to a state AG, or punish companies by taking their business elsewhere. Meanwhile, poor people aren't just cash-poor, they're also time-poor and political influence-poor.

When the dollar store duopoly forces all the mom-and-pop grocers in your town out of business with predatory pricing, and creating food deserts that only they serve, no one cares, because state AGs and politicians don't care about people who shop at dollar stores. Then, the dollar stores can collude with manufacturers to get shrunken "cheater sized" products that sell for a dollar, but cost double or triple the grocery store price by weight or quantity:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/03/27/walmarts-jackals/#cheater-sizes

Yes, fliers who seem to be flying on business (last-minute purchasers who don't have a Saturday stay) get charged more than people whose purchase makes them seem to be someone flying away for a vacation. But that's only because aviation prices haven't yet fully transitioned to surveillance pricing. If an airline can correctly calculate that you are taking a trip because you're a grad student who must attend a conference in order to secure a job, and if they know precisely how much room you have left on your credit card, they can charge you everything you can afford, to the cent.

Your ability to resist pricing power isn't merely a function of a company's market power – it's also a function of your political power. Poor people may have less to steal, but no one cares when they get robbed:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/07/19/martha-wright-reed/#capitalists-hate-capitalism

So surveillance pricing, supercharged by algorithms, represent a serious threat to "prices," which is the one thing that the econo-religious fundamentalists of the capitalist class value above all else. That makes surveillance pricing low-hanging fruit for regulatory enforcement: a bipartisan crime that has few champions on either side of the aisle.

Cannily, the FTC has just declared war on surveillance pricing, ordering eight key players in the industry (including capitalism's arch-villains, McKinsey and Jpmorgan Chase) to turn over data that can be used to prosecute them for price-fixing within 45 days:

https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2024/07/ftc-issues-orders-eight-companies-seeking-information-surveillance-pricing

As American Prospect editor-in-chief David Dayen notes in his article on the order, the FTC is doing what he and his journalistic partners couldn't: forcing these companies to cough up internal data:

https://prospect.org/economy/2024-07-24-ftc-opens-surveillance-pricing-inquiry/

This is important, and not just because of the wriggly critters the FTC will reveal as they use their powers to turn over this rock. Administrative agencies can't just do whatever they want. Long before the agencies were neutered by the Supreme Court, they had strict rules requiring them to gather evidence, solicit comment and counter-comment, and so on, before enacting any rules:

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

Doubtless, the Supreme Court's Loper decision (which overturned "Chevron deference" and cut off the agencies' power to take actions that they don't have detailed, specific authorization to take) will embolden the surveillance pricing industry to take the FTC to court on this. It's hard to say whether the courts will find in the FTC's favor. Section 6(b) of the FTC Act clearly lets the FTC compel these disclosures as part of an enforcement action, but they can't start an enforcement action until they have evidence, and through the whole history of the FTC, these kinds of orders have been a common prelude to enforcement.

One thing this has going for it is that it is bipartisan: all five FTC commissioners, including both Republicans (including the Republican who votes against everything) voted in favor of it. Price gouging is the kind of easy-to-grasp corporate crime that everyone hates, irrespective of political tendency.

In the Prospect piece on Ticketmaster's pricing scam, Dayen and Groundwork's Lindsay Owens called this the "Age of Recoupment":

https://pluralistic.net/2024/06/03/aoi-aoi-oh/#concentrated-gains-vast-diffused-losses

For 40 years, neoclassical economics' focus on "consumer welfare" meant that companies could cheat and squeeze their workers and suppliers as hard as they wanted, so long as prices didn't go up. But after 40 years, there's nothing more to squeeze out of workers or suppliers, so it's time for the cartels to recoup by turning on us, their customers.

They believe – perhaps correctly – that they have amassed so much market power through mergers and lobbying that they can cross the single bright line in neoliberal economics' theory of antitrust: price-gouging. No matter how sincere the economics profession's worship of prices might be, it still might not trump companies that are too big to fail and thus too big to jail.

The FTC just took an important step in defense of all of our economic wellbeing, and it's a step that even the most right-wing economist should applaud. They're calling the question: "Do you really think that price-distortion is a cardinal sin? If so, you must back our play." Support me this summer on the Clarion Write-A-Thon and help raise money for the Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers' Workshop!

https://clarionwriteathon.com/members/profile.php?writerid=293388

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

https://pluralistic.net/2024/07/24/gouging-the-all-seeing-eye/#i-spy

[max1461]

Once again I am pissed that most of the Maya manuscripts are gone. So tantalizingly close to getting a look at a culture that developed genuinely in the absence of influence from Old World civilization. A fully independent data point on the development of literary culture—the kind that we know wrote philosophy, history, mathematics! And yet we barely have any of it. Can you imagine how much we might learn about humanity, about cultural universals and cultural particularities, about the history of Mesoamerica, from being able to read that work and compare it to what we know?

But it's gone. It's gone because the Spanish burned it and made learning the Maya script illegal. And it's gone because codices rot in the tropical heat and humidity, so unless you've got a continuous scribal tradition it's all going to disappear. We can't even read Maya cursive; we know there was Maya cursive, and it's likely what most codices were composed in, but it's almost all gone!

And of course this is worst for the remaining Maya themselves, who in addition to being deprived economically and legally by Spain and its colonial legacy, have been deprived of the dignity and respect that comes (for better or worse) from being part of a cultural tradition that produced great and widely respected works.

I just, you know, I just wish it wasn't gone!

But as I always say on this topic, a point of optimism: the jungles of southern Mexico and Guatemala are barely explored, they're dense and they almost certainly hide many things yet. Maybe, one day, some hidden cache will be discovered, a scribal workshop collapsed perfectly to protect the codices within from the damp. We can only hope.

[colonyworkshop]

It's WebToon day! 🦋 In this episode June shows up to cause trouble in the kitchen, while Lady Archwell and Mr Hawthorn discuss business in the dining room. You can view this episode in its seamless glory on WebToons Canvas at- https://www.webtoons.com/en/challenge/colony/list?title_no=430865