Game of Thrones Daily
AnasAbdin
Kaledo Art
Kiana Khansmith
Claire Keane
occasionally subtle
todays bird
taylor price
Andulka
dirt enthusiast
tannertan36
#extradirty
Sweet Seals For You, Always
sheepfilms
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Today's Document
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TVSTRANGERTHINGS
shark vs the universe
Xuebing Du
seen from Germany
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seen from United States
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seen from Sweden
seen from Serbia
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@demonsarisingmetal
Item: The Time Machine Rarity: ⏶ Common
What game do you associate most strongly with a specific time in your life?
Feed your dashboard by answering my question, blogger.
Halo Reach and sophomore year of college
Borderlands 2 and senior year of college
Firefall and Junior/senior year of college
Grid and looking for work for a YEAR after college
I played a lot of video games in college. Less after I got a job.
Item: The Wishlist Rarity: ⏶ Common
How many video games are in your backlog right now?
Feed your dashboard by answering my question, blogger.
Quite a few I’d love to try, but haven’t had the chance with raising a little:
Cyberpunk 2077
The latest Armored Core
Lorelei and the Laser Eyes
Borderlands 4
And I know EM-8ER is being developed by chuds but Firefall was so good and I need to know if they recaptured the spirit.
spin this list of all the pokemon. you have to eat whichever one you get
can you do it
without question
i might not like it, but i'll do it
maaaaaaaaaaaybe?
i'm not happy about it
fuck no
how would that even be physically possible
Companies are no longer grounded in reality.
My roommate recently came home pale-faced, like he’d seen a ghost. More like witnessed a massacre. Mass-firings were just done at his company. His job, he’d been assured, was safe. All of his coworkers weren’t so safe, and he had to get texts and phone calls from his work-friends, people he’d worked alongside for years, people he‘d gone out to have drinks with, learn they were no longer employed. To say he had survivor’s guilt would not be hyperbole.
Was this because the company had fallen on hard times? The pandemic has been rough for a lot of industries. No, actually, the company had turned a very nice profit both last year and previous, even in such a troublesome market.
The problem was, you see, the company’s stock price hadn’t risen quite as high as had been projected. They’d made money, sure. Quite a lot of money, in fact. But too many people had projected, i.e., bet the company would do better.
How did the company offset this “loss”? Easy: fire people. Quickest and easiest way to pad the numbers.
No but you don’t understand stock had fallen a percentage point! There was no other way!
We see it all the time. Hugely successful companies reporting ‘record-breaking’ profits then fire huge segments of their workforce - the very people responsible for those record-breaking profits. Why? The money “saved” on personnel costs can boost the stocks even higher!
If your company is struggling, not turning a profit, losing money, people expect layoffs. But to work hard, be successful, your company churning along strong and healthy, and you still lose your job? For what? Because half a percentage point that was dictated by speculation, guessing, by gambling that things would go up or down a certain amount on a graph of rich-people feelings?
I wonder how next year’s speculations will be affected with the information that the company laid off a lot of the people responsible for last year’s profits? Probably not much because the workers are just the components at the company; it’s the leadership that drives the ship, that makes the successes.Those leaders whose bonuses are coincidentally decided by, among other things, the stock price.
Companies are no longer grounded in reality.
“Don’t learn about money, kids. Don’t learn about economics. I know cosmic horror usually focuses on how the biological or astronomical sciences will expose you to the terrible true face of god and you’ll go mad, clawing out your eyes as things that Cannot Exist destroy your life and kill you, but that’s stupid. Biology and Astronomy follow rules.”
“Economics is the tongue of devils and madness and it turns mortal men of moral character into alien monsters incapable of comprehending even the most basic of human connections.”
It’s important to recognize that this isn’t horror, it isn’t insanity, and it isn’t really about companies no longer being grounded in reality.
Sure, it might be comforting to look at business decisions as making little to no sense or being the domain of nightmares, but that doesn’t actually arm you with any useful knowledge in this fight. It just teaches you to treat these things like incomprehensible boogeymen.
You *should* be studying economics. And politics. And the labor theory of value. Because…
Capitalism is highly rational, highly biased, and completely amoral.
Human beings love to find optimal solutions to any problem. The problem capitalism is trying to solve is how to accumulate and centralize the most wealth and power. The kind of behavior described above is completely rational if you understand that capitalism is about meeting that requirement for profit and growth.
It doesn’t care about me, it doesn’t care about you; it doesn’t care about anyone. You can’t make a capitalistic system moral because it does not consider moral concerns when trying to optimize for profit. Literally anything you can do that increases profit is encouraged, regardless of what harm it might do.
These things aren’t alien horror, they’re completely understandable and predictable. And we need to understand them if we’re going to dismantle this kind of system and replace it with something that doesn’t harm people.
There’s a quote that came out of the Ford Pinto Memo:
“If a corporation can make $99 by killing no one, and $100 by killing a thousand people, then a thousand people are going to die.”
The most true and disgusting quote that ever came out of Leverage was the pharmaceutical CEO who said that 10% of the profits on a drug that killed people would go towards a class action lawsuit. That’s like tipping your waiter. EUGH
The root cause of what OP was talking about is a concept called Shareholder Primacy. Shareholder Primacy is the idea that everything a company does is in the name of generating returns or value for the Shareholders of the company. This is a relatively new concept, developed in the mid-20th century by Nobel Economics Laureate Milton Friedman. The argument (simplified) goes as such: Shareholders give their money to a company, therefore they own a piece of the company and are entitled to push the company to return their investment and increase the value of their investment.
This has resulted in a tectonic shift in companies. Instead of there being typewriter companies, or computer companies, or lightbulb companies, or airplane companies. People (really just the investor class) invested in those companies based on their perceived ability to do a good job at what they set out to do. However, under Shareholder Primacy, ALL companies are actually shareholder value creating companies, and the only distinction is the product(s) they make in order to create value for shareholders. Shareholders can invest in any company and form enough of a vocal bloc to bully the CEO into making decisions that benefit the shareholders over all else. Hang onto that thought for a moment.
There are a lot of problems with Shareholder Primacy as a way to operate a corporation. Here are few of them:
Which shareholders get primacy? There are the short-sighted 'make my investment fiscally worth it' investors, but there are also investors who are trying to make companies reduce carbon footprints, or improve labor relations, activist shareholders. "Shareholder" is a simplistic definition and the Shareholders of a company are not a monolith.
Companies that buy most fervently into Shareholder Primacy don't last long. This is, from an economic standpoint, the most damning evidence against the case for Shareholder Primacy. Typically, companies that put the Shareholders first and foremost go out of business sooner than companies that are less extreme in this measure. Take OP's example: the stock didn't perform as well as possible, so lay off a bunch of staff to make the shareholders happier. Now that company has destroyed institutional knowledge and capabilities to return the same kinds of profits and increase the value of the company in the same way next year because they lost a lot of staff. Other companies may put more of their profit into shareholder dividends (a payout based on profit to the shareholders). More profit going to the shareholders means less profit to feed into research and development, or replacing old equipment, or raising pay to workers to retain institutional knowledge and generate a happier more productive workforce. Failing to do those things with profits will make the company less competitive in the future and underperform and then be bought out or just die away.
Growth-focused mindset. The only way to keep providing increasing value to shareholders year over year is to keep growing. However, every company eventually hits a point that it makes no sense to keep growing, but the shareholders clammer for more. That's why there are so few corporations owning every goddamn thing. They needed to keep growing bigger and bigger in order to keep their value growing for shareholders, so they acquired more companies to make that happen.
The focus comes off of anything but profits. This one I have gone over in other posts that would take me too much time to find, but generally, shareholders like corporate leadership that likes to appease shareholders. Shareholders get a voice in electing CEOs and board members, and so they tend to like to install finance guys at the top who will make the company more profitable. Boeing used to be an engineering company that made airplanes. Now they are a shareholder value-creating company that makes airplanes. When Airbus announced that they had a new generation of the A-320 that was considerably more fuel efficient than the Boeing 737, Boeing rushed the 737 MAX. The leadership of the company were no longer engineers that understood planes and could grasp complex issues facing the design team. The leadership were MBA finance and supply chain wonks that demanded that the 737 MAX be brought to market as quickly as possible without a pilot recertification requirement, which led to the MCAS system which went out on the market buggy and crashed two flights into the ground killing everybody on board. Shareholder primacy did that.
sorry guys, the plinko is blocked
I was talking about Goosebumps with a friend tonight and found the greatest tagline for any work of horror ever
I'm OBSESSED with how quickly this gets to the point. Welcome to Dead House. It will just kill you.
Is a wood louse the same thing as a roly-poly?
GOOGLE SAYS YES but I've never heard it called a roly-poly before... guess it's time to update my vernacular!!!
The spicy discourse that this post has catalysed is really improving my day immeasurably
Are you KIDDING, of course I d-
Oh.
@teashoesandhair hiding cute welsh stuff in the tags
In West Wales they call them pennysawls.
Here, I made a simplified phylogeny (evolutionary family tree) for explaining some of the names like “isopod” and “crustacean”
Also Wikipedia has a delightful and extensive list of their various common names:
Tag yourself, I’m a cheesy papa
Helicopter tail
(via)
When the author deletes your favorite fanfic:
Gather around, children. I’m about to tell you a story of ye olde fandom. (Real life fandom friends, I’m sorry. You’ve heard this story a thousand times, I know.)
Long before Disney bought Star Wars, long before the new trilogy, before even the prequels, and themselves predating the “remastered” versions of the original trilogy, Star Wars experienced it’s second renaissance in novel form. And comic book form. Skim the pages of the dozens upon dozens of Expanded Universe (”EU”) novels and you’ll find lots of foundations for the things you see on screen these days. Ben Solo, for sure, has his origins there.
But it was also a different era for the fandom. The 90′s saw the transition from fanzine culture to online fan fiction archives. The programming ability and computing power you needed to make a fan fiction archive that the authors could edit themselves did not yet exist in an accessible way. Series based archives popped up, mostly hand curated by webmasters posting .txt files of chapters and stories that they’d received from authors via email. Or usenet. Or mailinglists. I spent many of my teen years on Gossamer, the X-Files archive, and Fanfix.com, my favorite Star Wars archive. I remember haunting a Babylon 5 archive at the time, too, but it’s lost to history.
I read everything. Everything. But, by far my favorite fan fiction of all time was, and I will always remember this, “As Simple and as Complicated as All That” by Xia Sang Li. It was epic. Four novels. NOVELS. Dozens of chapters. Hundreds and hundreds of pages. It follows Luke Skywalker’s decision to finally throw caution to the wind and fall into bed, and in love, with Mara Jade. Written in the sweet spot after her character was introduced and explored, but before permission was given to the licensed authors to marry Luke off, it was an amazing indulgence. And, it was epic in scale and scope. The great plot twist in book one was that, spoiler alert, when Gaeriel Captison died, leaving Luke to look after her orphaned daughter, she didn’t tell the whole story. You see, Luke and Mara had indulged each other before, had a secret love child, and this brief period of time was erased or minimized in their memories. Slowly, the two come to realize, through their haze of lust and passion, that something is conspiring to keep them apart, and that this little girl isn’t who she seemed. Themes of family, and duty, and passion, and trauma. Force visions, original characters, and sex sex sex. It was amazing.
Epic right??? Right?? Wanna read it??
It’s impossible. The Fanfix.com archive zipped the textfiles, so the Wayback Machine hasn’t archived them. The Geocities page went down before the Geocities archive was published after its closure. And, the original author’s blog, not updated in a decade, features only a few chapters of a rewrite, an AU of her original epic.
But it’s not dead.
Starting in 1998, my teenage self printed the whole fucking epic. I did one chapter at a time. It took more than a year. I had it all saved, too, on a 3 ½ inch floppy that got destroyed. Beyond the author’s own hard drive somewhere on this green earth, I think this might be the only copy.
Every few years, when nostalgia overtakes me, I reread it, from front to back. The gender politics are very different. The interpretation of Luke, too, vastly different from modern fandom’s take. Sometimes I wish I could find the author, buy her dinner, and tell her how important her work was to me. But, that’s probably impossible. Sometimes I think about re-digitizing it and, like a different kind of pirate, putting it back into circulation. But, that’s just a wish. A whimsical dream. The notebook is at least 3 inches thick, with front to back printed pages of text. It would take… years. Certainly it took years to write. But, it was part of the floating world of fandom. And, it faded away. Stuff like this should never fade away.
Fan fic authors… I implore you. Never delete your work.
You can’t know the impact you make. You might think it not good, embarrassing, or irrelevant. It’s not. Not to someone. Not to me.
Seriously. You have no idea how many fanfics I had wanted to print and bind just so that I can keep it in my personal library to read. Some fics are so damn GOOD that they deserve to exist binded as a physical copy. Save them please!!! All fics matter to someone
PUT THAT BOOK IN A SAFE BOX OR A MUSEUM (is there a fandom museum? we should make one)
It’s not quite a museum, but there is the Fan Culture Preservation Project, which is a join venture between the OTW and the Special Collections department at the University of Iowa Libraries. It’s a place to preserve hard copies of fanworks and fandom memorabilia.
(Though it seems likely that @mizunocaitlin would like to keep a beloved fanfic.)
Dear fic readers: Save it before you lose it! authors have pleanty of reason to delete their shit, sad as it is, but you can still have it!! do what that person did, use https://www.lulu.com/ like i did for my faves stuff (tho already archived on gdrive by someone else), but find a way to PRINT IT OUT if you love it so much. dont just rely on digital copies because shit happens.
This is my current printed library of fanfics. This way works best for fanfics up to 20000 words, but I’m learning basic bookbinding for the longer ones (an experiment of that can be seen in the right side of the picture - “This, You Protect” by Owlet), because I LOVE HOLDING THEM WHEN I READ THEM and also, what will I read if the power goes down? Exactly.
@jambonsama thought you would like that
Thanks, I do !
If someone could tag that person who did the gorgeous binding of @senlinyu‘s magnificent Manacled… I mean the book is awesome, and the book binding ? Gives it justice. Also I think that the person who did the binding has made / is making other bindings? Maybe? I can’t quite remember?
@armoredsuperheavy might be an interesting read for you
I feel so vindicated in seeing this post, and knowing I’m not the only one who has “probably-the-only-extant-copy” fanfics from the late 90s in binders.
I took probably the most ridiculous and difficult route, hand bookbinding. Here’s an example of an earlier-era fic I’ve bound for archival purposes.
And some Bookbinding resources if anyone wants to join in the efforts! Rock on, fanfic hamsters!
as an archivist (a real one!) and a fanfic author, this post speaks so hard to me. SAVE YOUR STUFF, AUTHORS
In high school my best friend and I were known as the book printers. At the time neither of us had access to the internet beyond school so we did the only thing that made sense, printed everything. We would spend as much time as we could after school, usually on fridays, huddled around the library computers printing fics we wanted to read. The librarians didn’t mind, one of them actually thought it was charming and christened us her book printers.
I owe so much to authors, the early ones who showed me that it was ok to think up grand worlds and fill them with my favorite characters as well as characters of my own creation, and especially the new authors who quickly became my found family and have taught me that finding yourself through your writing is perfectly acceptable, and losing yourself to an indulgent plot line is fine too.
If I’ve learned anything in the decades since I offered to pay the school for the gross amount of paper we used, it’s that you should never forget your roots, and always remember you might just be the one creating fertile grounds for others to put down roots of their own.
If you ever have the chance, do it, print the pages and bind them. The story already holds a special place in your heart, isn’t it only fair that you hold it close as well?
THIS IS THE ONLY TIME I'VE EVER BEEN CHAOTIC ANYTHING!
For as long as you code
this is a wilbur and orville fan account. love those fat flightless fucks
i would like to clarify that this is in regards to the dodos who run the airport in animal crossing and im not trying to discredit or disparage the wright brothers
when the two smartest kids in the class get different answers
bird_looking_at_its_own_reflection.jpg
covenant_plasma_rifle.jpg
hey duck
youre no good duck
youre never gonna be shit
ya just like ya fatha
OH MY GOD 🙊. YOU SHOULDN’T SKIP THIS WITHOUT WATCHING. YOU WILL NOT REGRET IT. THIS IS A MASTERPIECE 😻💕
|• Cr: @voordeel from Youtube •|
Holy shit this was so good
Here’s a better quality version
