Any pronouns, I'm still just learning English so I'm using a translator. Multifandom dump and more. I also have a blog where I write pieces.
Дата рождения - прошлое тысячелетие
date of birth - last millennium
20 years ago, I got in a (friendly) public spat with Chris Anderson, who was then the editor in chief of Wired. I'd publicly noted my disappointment with glowing Wired reviews of DRM-encumbered digital devices, prompting Anderson to call me unrealistic for expecting the magazine to condemn gadgets for their DRM:
I replied in public, telling him that he'd misunderstood. This wasn't an issue of ideological purity – it was about good reviewing practice. Wired was telling readers to buy a product because it had features x, y and z, but at any time in the future, without warning, without recourse, the vendor could switch off any of those features:
I proposed that all Wired endorsements for DRM-encumbered products should come with this disclaimer:
WARNING: THIS DEVICE’S FEATURES ARE SUBJECT TO REVOCATION WITHOUT NOTICE, ACCORDING TO TERMS SET OUT IN SECRET NEGOTIATIONS. YOUR INVESTMENT IS CONTINGENT ON THE GOODWILL OF THE WORLD’S MOST PARANOID, TECHNOPHOBIC ENTERTAINMENT EXECS. THIS DEVICE AND DEVICES LIKE IT ARE TYPICALLY USED TO CHARGE YOU FOR THINGS YOU USED TO GET FOR FREE — BE SURE TO FACTOR IN THE PRICE OF BUYING ALL YOUR MEDIA OVER AND OVER AGAIN. AT NO TIME IN HISTORY HAS ANY ENTERTAINMENT COMPANY GOTTEN A SWEET DEAL LIKE THIS FROM THE ELECTRONICS PEOPLE, BUT THIS TIME THEY’RE GETTING A TOTAL WALK. HERE, PUT THIS IN YOUR MOUTH, IT’LL MUFFLE YOUR WHIMPERS.
Wired didn't take me up on this suggestion.
But I was right. The ability to change features, prices, and availability of things you've already paid for is a powerful temptation to corporations. Inkjet printers were always a sleazy business, but once these printers got directly connected to the internet, companies like HP started pushing out "security updates" that modified your printer to make it reject the third-party ink you'd paid for:
Now, this scam wouldn't work if you could just put things back the way they were before the "update," which is where the DRM comes in. A thicket of IP laws make reverse-engineering DRM-encumbered products into a felony. Combine always-on network access with indiscriminate criminalization of user modification, and the enshittification will follow, as surely as night follows day.
This is the root of all the right to repair shenanigans. Sure, companies withhold access to diagnostic codes and parts, but codes can be extracted and parts can be cloned. The real teeth in blocking repair comes from the law, not the tech. The company that makes McDonald's wildly unreliable McFlurry machines makes a fortune charging franchisees to fix these eternally broken appliances. When a third party threatened this racket by reverse-engineering the DRM that blocked independent repair, they got buried in legal threats:
Everybody loves this racket. In Poland, a team of security researchers at the OhMyHack conference just presented their teardown of the anti-repair features in NEWAG Impuls locomotives. NEWAG boobytrapped their trains to try and detect if they've been independently serviced, and to respond to any unauthorized repairs by bricking themselves:
Poland is part of the EU, meaning that they are required to uphold the provisions of the 2001 EU Copyright Directive, including Article 6, which bans this kind of reverse-engineering. The researchers are planning to present their work again at the Chaos Communications Congress in Hamburg this month – Germany is also a party to the EUCD. The threat to researchers from presenting this work is real – but so is the threat to conferences that host them:
20 years ago, Chris Anderson told me that it was unrealistic to expect tech companies to refuse demands for DRM from the entertainment companies whose media they hoped to play. My argument – then and now – was that any tech company that sells you a gadget that can have its features revoked is defrauding you. You're paying for x, y and z – and if they are contractually required to remove x and y on demand, they are selling you something that you can't rely on, without making that clear to you.
But it's worse than that. When a tech company designs a device for remote, irreversible, nonconsensual downgrades, they invite both external and internal parties to demand those downgrades. Like Pavel Chekov says, a phaser on the bridge in Act I is going to go off by Act III. Selling a product that can be remotely, irreversibly, nonconsensually downgraded inevitably results in the worst person at the product-planning meeting proposing to do so. The fact that there are no penalties for doing so makes it impossible for the better people in that meeting to win the ensuing argument, leading to the moral injury of seeing a product you care about reduced to a pile of shit:
But even if everyone at that table is a swell egg who wouldn't dream of enshittifying the product, the existence of a remote, irreversible, nonconsensual downgrade feature makes the product vulnerable to external actors who will demand that it be used. Back in 2022, Adobe informed its customers that it had lost its deal to include Pantone colors in Photoshop, Illustrator and other "software as a service" packages. As a result, users would now have to start paying a monthly fee to see their own, completed images. Fail to pay the fee and all the Pantone-coded pixels in your artwork would just show up as black:
Adobe blamed this on Pantone, and there was lots of speculation about what had happened. Had Pantone jacked up its price to Adobe, so Adobe passed the price on to its users in the hopes of embarrassing Pantone? Who knows? Who can know? That's the point: you invested in Photoshop, you spent money and time creating images with it, but you have no way to know whether or how you'll be able to access those images in the future. Those terms can change at any time, and if you don't like it, you can go fuck yourself.
These companies are all run by CEOs who got their MBAs at Darth Vader University, where the first lesson is "I have altered the deal, pray I don't alter it further." Adobe chose to design its software so it would be vulnerable to this kind of demand, and then its customers paid for that choice. Sure, Pantone are dicks, but this is Adobe's fault. They stuck a KICK ME sign to your back, and Pantone obliged.
This keeps happening and it's gonna keep happening. Last week, Playstation owners who'd bought (or "bought") Warner TV shows got messages telling them that Warner had walked away from its deal to sell videos through the Playstation store, and so all the videos they'd paid for were going to be deleted forever. They wouldn't even get refunds (to be clear, refunds would also be bullshit – when I was a bookseller, I didn't get to break into your house and steal the books I'd sold you, not even if I left some cash on your kitchen table).
Sure, Warner is an unbelievably shitty company run by the single most guillotineable executive in all of Southern California, the loathsome David Zaslav, who oversaw the merger of Warner with Discovery. Zaslav is the creep who figured out that he could make more money cancelling completed movies and TV shows and taking a tax writeoff than he stood to make by releasing them:
Imagine putting years of your life into making a program – showing up on set at 5AM and leaving your kids to get their own breakfast, performing stunts that could maim or kill you, working 16-hour days during the acute phase of the covid pandemic and driving home in the night, only to have this absolute turd of a man delete the program before anyone could see it, forever, to get a minor tax advantage. Talk about moral injury!
But without Sony's complicity in designing a remote, irreversible, nonconsensual downgrade feature into the Playstation, Zaslav's war on art and creative workers would be limited to material that hadn't been released yet. Thanks to Sony's awful choices, David Zaslav can break into your house, steal your movies – and he doesn't even have to leave a twenty on your kitchen table.
The point here – the point I made 20 years ago to Chris Anderson – is that this is the foreseeable, inevitable result of designing devices for remote, irreversible, nonconsensual downgrades. Anyone who was paying attention should have figured that out in the GW Bush administration. Anyone who does this today? Absolute flaming garbage.
Sure, Zaslav deserves to be staked out over an anthill and slathered in high-fructose corn syrup. But save the next anthill for the Sony exec who shipped a product that would let Zaslav come into your home and rob you. That piece of shit knew what they were doing and they did it anyway. Fuck them. Sideways. With a brick.
Meanwhile, the studios keep making the case for stealing movies rather than paying for them. As Tyler James Hill wrote: "If buying isn't owning, piracy isn't stealing":
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:
The Murderbot Diaries are a power fantasy about being aromantic and still developing extremely important dedicated emotionally intimate partnerships where you are a top priority in a person's life, equal to their other family or romantic attachments despite your own emotional difficulties. And having guns in your arms
it's not that I don't think "do it scared" can ever be a positive phrase, like if it's something like. "Oh, I'm scared to go to this party" but the "scared" is. nervous about the uncertainty of something, like not knowing people and things like that. That can be good.
Like, you don't have to wait for the ideal time to start doing things that could make your life better
but "ignore the fear and just do it anyway" is such an unstoppable and inescapable message, but on a basic level it is not true that fear automatically goes away when you expose yourself to the feared thing. Fear goes away when you expose yourself to the feared thing by your own choice and free will (not forced, coerced, or out of resignation because it seems like the only option), and when the experience feels safe enough that it can be a positive or at least neutral experience and help heal the fear.
people are very attracted to the idea that others have problems because they are not strong enough or too weak-willed or sensitive. Many people seem to like to believe that everyone's problems come from unwillingness to "do the hard thing."
As someone who viciously hated herself from very early childhood for being not strong enough, too weak-willed, and too sensitive, I have found that the method of doing things in spite of their "hardness" through sheer stubbornness and pain tolerance only created minimal progress.
"Pushing through" is useful in some circumstances, but using it as a primary tool for facing challenges results in expending enormous energy and difficulty for very slow results.
Examining why the thing is hard, and coming up with ways to make it easier, will take you six steps forward for every single step you take by "pushing through" without self-understanding.
What do you think it is that allows people to make the jump from "doing this thing is good" to "forcing people to do this thing is good" so easily they don't even notice they're doing it?
it's like the modern utilitarian/rationalist thing of designing an outcome that looks best from the outside and then completely failing to consider the fundamental changes that trying to implement it from the inside wreaks upon the whole thing.
you are not god. you are part of the story. your place in the system affects the results of your actions.
Expanded on this with help from @pixelartpeach! Keep reading for AU plotting:
Prowl was forged during or shortly before the Great War. Unlike most Transformers, he lacked an innate power (read here for that headcanon) and so was treated as defective--stuck in a menial job and looked down on. Chromedome was the only bot he was close to. Their relationship wasn't great--Prowl was bitter about his lot in life and Chromedome had his own issues. Even so, when the draft came and Prowl decided to refuse it, he invited Chromedome to run away with him.
Chromedome said no. Prowl said "screw you" and left. Ex #1.
While drifting across the planet to avoid authorities, Prowl crossed paths with a scientist named Mesothulas. He wound up partnering with Meso, fetching supplies and running messages in exchange for fuel and a place to stay. Meso was also interested in Prowl's power-less spark--specifically, he wanted to see if he could give Prowl a special ability artificially. Prowl agreed and let himself be experimented on. Meso is the one who gave him his jump jets and hologram generator (both of them from failed experiments). But the experiments got more invasive and Meso got weirder about it and Prowl eventually decided it was time to cut ties. And by "cut ties," I mean he deleted all of Meso's research and then trashed the lab before skedaddling. Maybe stabbed Mesothulas on his way out. Young Prowl had a habit of burning bridges. Anyway, Ex #2!
After that, Prowl got caught and arrested and that's when Yoketron intervened. He spent decades in the dojo unlearning his worst behaviors and trying to make Yoketron proud. Then he got sent on his optics quest. Sometime during that quest, he clashed with a Combiner team and wowed them with his strategy and skill. They still think about him a lot... (can you call them Exes if it's one-sided pining?)
Anyway, he eventually gave up on his search for purpose and went back to the dojo--we know what happened there. Then he exiled himself to space for a million stellar cycles until Op's crew barged into his life. And the rest is history.
Now I'm gonna imagine a scenario where all these bots from his past show up on Earth and Prowl has to explain to the team how he knows them.
It’s so funny how like. Spock is queer bc of the subtext, the Otherness inextricable from his character, meanwhile William Shatner was handed the straightest man of all time on paper and fumbled the bag bc he couldn’t stop giving Leonard Nimoy fuck-me eyes and now he lives in a bi Kirk hell of his own devising, forever enduring the conshatquences of his shactions
Not enough stories with disabled protags who were once independent loners and abled struggling with their new reality of relying on others. Where is the anger? . Where is your rage? Lets scream abt it. Rage rage rage.
Theres too much tip-toeing around the writing of violatile emotions for my liking when its part of the grief for your own body/ability. Grief thats mistaken for ungratefulness. Whatever.
Im gonna be so real i think that people are scared to show anger from disabled people bc they are scared of seeing disabled people through a lense of the average person.
They think the most saintly thing you can do is care for someone disables but don't care about the emotions the disabled person themselves feel. Once you reach a certain threshold of disability, people stop seeing you as on the same level of humanity as everyone else. So the thought of a disabled person actually having negative emotion towards this help is shocking to them.
Sympathy is handed out to those exhausted and hurt from having to care for disabled people (which is fine), but not those whom may be in the process of mourning their own bodies/ability/mind. We can show a nurse/doctor having a breakdown, have entire genres of show and movie and book revolve around it, but if a disabled person lashes out thats seen as something much crueler in the eyes of the typical viewer. Its spoken about in the same vein of a dog who bites and thus "needs to be put down".
Why? Why? One day that could be you. You are not safe from one day becoming disabled. Nobody is.
grace, who has been alone for five minutes: oh my god. an alien! im not alone anymore! i hope he wants to be friends :)
rocky, coming up on 50 years of solitude, imprinting on grace in ways baby ducklings can only dream of: if you leave me to sleep where i can't watch your heart beat i am blowing up this tunnel with us both in it
Sometimes having an OC is like "this character is an outlet for my insecurity and trauma" and sometimes it's like "this character is an outlet for my love of vampires :)". Sometimes it's both
Sometimes you think it's "this character is an outlet for my love and nothing more :)" and then you look it over later like "shit. product of the deepest depths of my soul again"
Sometimes I feel like a failure of a human being for not having the urge to do my driver’s license despite already being in my 20s and everyone around me has a license and a car but then I remember that Jimmy Page didn’t have a driver’s license either and that makes me one step closer to being Jimmy Page which imho makes me one step closer to being pretty cool. Plus gas prices are insane so I might as well not…
My name was Mitya Ivanovich of Ryazan. I was nine winters old when I died. In 1353 winter came early. The boyars took our grain, the wolves took our goats, and hunger took our minds. One night, I was sent to fetch water from the well. I leaned too far and saw my reflection tremble. Then the rope snapped. The well was bottomless, or so they said. They found my boots days later, frozen solid and standing upright like a man still waiting for spring. If you read this far, it’s too late to pretend you didn’t. You have until the next cockcrow to send this message to 10 villagers or one tax collector. A boyar’s son once received this message carved on birch bark. He laughed, said peasants have no ghosts, and burned it in his hearth. That night, his estate flooded with boiling kvass. A widow in Novgorod copied this tale and sent it to 12 others. The next morning, her cow gave birth to triplets. All healthy. She named them Mitya, Mitya, and Mitya. I still look over their bloodline. Send this to 10 people if you don't want to end up like the boyar's son. Your time starts now
I see half the fandom characterizing Adrian as patient and selfless, and I see the other half characterizing them as bitter and unaccommodating, and I also see the joking and non joking 'what if Rocky were the trolley operator' fics and ideas, and I've come to the conclusion that you all are missing the beauty of the superior third option that is Adrian also being traumatized and feral over their mate.
Thank about it. Rocky's a spitfire and bounces off the walls at baseline and they looked at that little autistic, bossy ball of energy and went 'yes. that's them. the creature I want to spend the next 500+ years with'. They have to at LEAST match their energy somewhat. And if you think you wouldn't be a fucking ball of PTSD and bitterness at your culture and society after fifty plus years of not knowing they were alive or dead, you're fucking operating on moon logic. Honestly, Adrian and the other families were probably begging for a rescue mission that never happened for various political and logical reasons; and while it probably would have ended in mass fatalities as well, so thank goodness that figurative and literal ship never got off the ground, the fact that it didn't happen probably burns more than a little, reasonable or unreasonable.
So one day Adrian gets some Eridian diplomat on their doorstep, and they're expecting the formal condolences at long last, but instead they go into this whole spiel of ' so. So! Turns out twenty two of the original crew died, but your mate survived! When did they die? Oh, early on, so your mate was submerged in crippling and literal deafening loneliness for over four decades; and now he's back and acting weird, and he's become codependent with this weird fragile squishy human being that's the only reason he came back at all, and he's refusing to send down the cure unless we make the blob an aquarium. Could you come to the space elevator and tell him to stop being so unreasonable?'
If that were MY mate? I'd fucking lose it.
Just throwing things at this poor messenger and shrieking like " Oh! Oh!! So it's somehow Rocky's fault that you're refusing to take a few months out of the several hundred Eridian years we have left to ship the cure we already have to Threeworld before things actually become problematic to make sure one of the two saviors of our entire species doesn't die?! To give the sole survivor of the mission--my mate, who's been alone and in silence, with no one to watch him sleep, for hundreds of years--some sort of solace and peace?! And you're wondering why he's acting erratically?! Maybe you wouldn't be in this position at all if you'd sent the rescue mission for which we've pleaded for years at every single thrum! I don't care if this Grace thing is a literal giant space amoeba; get the fuck out of my house and tell the powers that be to give it literally everything it wants and needs!"
And they're all 'be reasonable' and Adrian's like " I've been reasonable for hundreds of Eridian years, and you would not be in this situation if you'd actually sent a rescue mission and not simply wrung your claws and hoped for the best, so fucking live in the nest you made. All I'm going to do if you get me on the radio with Rocky right now is tell him he's doing amazing and give him advice on how to properly parboil the Taumoeba so that you can't even recover even the slightest scrap of DNA if you don't give the flesh blob that saved his life and saved OUR lives PLURAL goddamn vitamins."
Like, they think it's bad that Rocky basically stands over Grace's sleeping body and hisses? Wait until they get the MUCH LARGER ERIDIAN doing that for Grace and Rocky. Wait until the much large Eridian leads the families of the dead twenty-two crewmates to the space elevator to riot because this sure sounds like a coverup to them!! This sure sounds like the deflection of blame on the sole survivor!! This sure sounds like the same paralysis that left them to die alone in space because you didn't want to admit failure!!
Yes, I know, I'm weaving some sort of political intrigue plot that probably doesn't exist in canon. All I'm saying is that you all are missing the delicious implications of a mission that went radio silent for fifty plus earth years with no word from the government and no obvious attempt at rescue, followed by your partner coming home with the only being that's been around to watch him sleep since the rest of the crew died forty-some years ago, and people are calling him weird and changed. You'd be horrified. You'd be sick.
You'd be pissed the fuck off at every body of power that let this happen.
I loved when “Drift Compatible” entered pop lexicon cause we were in DESPERATE need for a way to platonically express “one of us to the other is as a limb to a body; we are a left and right feet of a dancer; we do not need to speak because any one word inspires an exchange of unspoken words that conveys a full conversation in which a mutual conclusion is determined in an instant”. Huge win for the QPRs out here
I also really love that the movie explicitly shows that drift compatibility can be any form of relationship. Two brothers, three brothers, husband and wife, father and son, two friends who have lost everything to the same enemy. It isn’t about the way you connect, it’s about the connection itself. And of course, that connection lets you put boots to asses and kill alien monsters together. Because the power of human connection can change the world or something.
the eridians have this beautiful, transcendant concept called the thrum where they come together to form a hive mind in order to discuss scholarly pursuits and solve their peoples greatest issues which resulted in them building a space ship to save their planet
and the human race has eva stratt with her two cups of coffee
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