The thing about Ian Rider is that he could go either way. Did Ian groom Alex Rider into a dangerous life of spying for MI6 from a young age, or was he encouraging Alex's natural talents and trying to give him the skills to survive in a world where very dangerous people were always going to have a grudge against him simply for who his father was? Who knows! Either is entirely plausible!!! MI6 executed an immediate and terrifying level of manipulation and coercion upon Ian's death to get Alex to put his life on the line for them. Is this something Ian could have expected? Did he want it? Was it planned with his input? Did he actually leave Alex's custody to MI6, or was that a lie? Who on earth has the answers now besides Alan Blunt? And we know we can't trust a word he says.
Alex is very motivated in the series by information on his parents, something both MI6 and Scorpia use against him. Did Ian set him up for this by withholding that information in his childhood, or was he struggling with his own grief over his brother and trying to keep Alex safe by staying quiet, since so much of John's story was classified? Who don't know. We can't know.
Ian is a ghost over the entire series. Helen and John Rider are too, each in different ways, but Ian is interesting in that you think you have more of him than you really do. Alex does not seek information on his uncle. Is it because he thinks he knows everything already? Or because he can't face the admission that he doesn't?
We don't even know Ian's real relationship with MI6. Did they blackmail him like they did Alex? Or was that treatment only for Alex, since hiring him is so shady to begin with? Did Ian Rider ever sit in a room with Alan Blunt and give a report on his nephew? Or is he spinning in his grave over everything that his employers did to his nephew once he was no longer there to stand in the way? We don't know! We can't! I'm going insane!!
This is an interesting thing I'm noticing as I'm reading but it kinda seems to me like a lot of the Tolkien characters all seem to have elemental symbolism that seems to follow their characterization.
Like Gandalf and Bilbo both seem to have a lot of fire symbolism that follows them around. Gandalf uses light and fire as kind of his two go to weapons and he's the keeper of the ring of Narya which is the fire one. And of course Gandalf the White is forged out of flame. And then Bilbo's introduced in the middle of smoking, and he spends a lot of time hanging around campfires and hearths, like the campfire storyteller he is. He seems to like hanging out in the Hall of Fire at Rivendell, and his conflict with Smaug obviously also involves a lot of fire. He's also arguably the character who is closest to Gandalf.
Frodo on the other hand is like all water imagery. One of the first things we learn about Frodo is his parents were weirdos who hung out in boats and then drowned, and he's introduced filling drinks at Bilbo's party. He makes his stand against the Nazgul at the river. He himself nearly drowns like three times in the story, and spends a lot of time in boats, being haunted by dark waters, and the sound of the ocean (and of course ends the story going over the sea). Like the water symbolism with Frodo is nonstop and he shares that in common with Gollum, who specifically is characterized by pools, rivers, and lakes, as well as fish, worms, mud and roots and caves—very wet and slimy compared to Frodo's more mariner/wayfinder imagery. But they're still kind of two sides of the same coin.
Pippin and Merry get a lot of plant and tree symbolism. Besides hanging out with ents and drinking tree wine and that time they both got eaten by a tree, it's clear Merry grew up wandering forests and knows a lot about wild plants (and writes a book on it later) and Pippin gets a ton of association with Gondor, y'know, that place that is represented by a big ol' tree. Their tobacco leaves too actually kinda play a pivotal role, and are again, very plant focused.
You'd think Sam would also be more earth oriented, being he's a gardener, but not really? Unlike Merry who's out here spitting plant facts 24/7 and working on his plant book, Sam's interest in plants seems like to only be around when he's on the clock. His symbolism is all very celestial. He's the guy who ends up using the Star of Earendil. He sees Earendil while he and Frodo are walking through Mordor. He evokes Elbereth, the Star Goddess like multiple times. He names his daughter after the star-sun shaped flower Elanor which literally means "Sun and Stars." And if you think about it, Gardener is actually kind of a perfect role for a star-guy when you remember how dependent plants are on the sun. He also seems to share some kind of connection with Galadriel who is also caked in a lot of star imagery. It also tracks he'd be paired with Frodo thematically as he serves as a guiding light to a mariner, in contrast to how Gollum represents the depths.
as requested! this is a super super detailed tutorial for the a-z of gifmaking basics, starting from getting photoshop & downloading hq movies/videos alll the way to tagging & scheduling your gifsets on tumblr for max interaction. if you’ve wanted to get into gifmaking but feel intimidated or you don’t know where to start, this is the tutorial for you!!! making gifs might seem overwhelming at first, but with practice, it’s quite easy to get the basics down. for reference, this post is up to date as of nov. 2020. please rb if this helps!
I'm on a 20+ city book tour for my new novel PICKS AND SHOVELS. Catch me in SAN DIEGO at MYSTERIOUS GALAXY on Mar 24, and in CHICAGO with PETER SAGAL on Apr 2. More tour dates here.
Even by Amazon standards, this is extraordinarily sleazy: starting March 28, each Amazon Echo device will cease processing audio on-device and instead upload all the audio it captures to Amazon's cloud for processing, even if you have previously opted out of cloud-based processing:
It's easy to flap your hands at this bit of thievery and say, "surveillance capitalists gonna surveillance capitalism," which would confine this fuckery to the realm of ideology (that is, "Amazon is ripping you off because they have bad ideas"). But that would be wrong. What's going on here is a material phenomenon, grounded in specific policy choices and by unpacking the material basis for this absolutely unforgivable move, we can understand how we got here – and where we should go next.
Start with Amazon's excuse for destroying your privacy: they want to do AI processing on the audio Alexa captures, and that is too computationally intensive for on-device processing. But that only raises another question: why does Amazon want to do this AI processing, even for customers who are happy with their Echo as-is, at the risk of infuriating and alienating millions of customers?
For Big Tech companies, AI is part of a "growth story" – a narrative about how these companies that have already saturated their markets will still continue to grow. It's hard to overstate how dominant Amazon is: they are the leading cloud provider, the most important retailer, and the majority of US households already subscribe to Prime. This may sound like a good place to be, but for Amazon, it's actually very dangerous.
Amazon has a sky-high price/earnings ratio – about triple the ratio of other retailers, like Target. That scorching P/E ratio reflects a belief by investors that Amazon will continue growing. Companies with very high p/e ratios have an unbeatable advantage relative to mature competitors – they can buy things with their stock, rather than paying cash for them. If Amazon wants to hire a key person, or acquire a key company, it can pad its offer with its extremely high-value, growing stock. Being able to buy things with stock instead of money is a powerful advantage, because money is scarce and exogenous (Amazon must acquire money from someone else, like a customer), while new Amazon stock can be conjured into existence by typing zeroes into a spreadsheet:
But the downside here is that every growth stock eventually stops growing. For Amazon to double its US Prime subscriber base, it will have to establish a breeding program to produce tens of millions of new Americans, raising them to maturity, getting them gainful employment, and then getting them to sign up for Prime. Almost by definition, a dominant firm ceases to be a growing firm, and lives with the constant threat of a stock revaluation as investors belief in future growth crumbles and they punch the "sell" button, hoping to liquidate their now-overvalued stock ahead of everyone else.
For Big Tech companies, a growth story isn't an ideological commitment to cancer-like continuous expansion. It's a practical, material phenomenon, driven by the need to maintain investor confidence that there are still worlds for the company to conquer.
That's where "AI" comes in. The hype around AI serves an important material need for tech companies. By lumping an incoherent set of poorly understood technologies together into a hot buzzword, tech companies can bamboozle investors into thinking that there's plenty of growth in their future.
OK, so that's the material need that this asshole tactic satisfies. Next, let's look at the technical dimension of this rug-pull.
How is it possible for Amazon to modify your Echo after you bought it? After all, you own your Echo. It is your property. Every first year law student learns this 18th century definition of property, from Sir William Blackstone:
That sole and despotic dominion which one man claims and exercises over the external things of the world, in total exclusion of the right of any other individual in the universe.
If the Echo is your property, how come Amazon gets to break it? Because we passed a law that lets them. Section 1201 of 1998's Digital Millennium Copyright Act makes it a felony to "bypass an access control" for a copyrighted work:
That means that once Amazon reaches over the air to stir up the guts of your Echo, no one is allowed to give you a tool that will let you get inside your Echo and change the software back. Sure, it's your property, but exercising sole and despotic dominion over it requires breaking the digital lock that controls access to the firmware, and that's a felony punishable by a five-year prison sentence and a $500,000 fine for a first offense.
The Echo is an internet-connected device that treats its owner as an adversary and is designed to facilitate over-the-air updates by the manufacturer that are adverse to the interests of the owner. Giving a manufacturer the power to downgrade a device after you've bought it, in a way you can't roll back or defend against is an invitation to run the playbook of the Darth Vader MBA, in which the manufacturer replies to your outraged squawks with "I am altering the deal. Pray I don't alter it any further":
The ability to remotely, unilaterally alter how a device or service works is called "twiddling" and it is a key factor in enshittification. By "twiddling" the knobs and dials that control the prices, costs, search rankings, recommendations, and core features of products and services, tech firms can play a high-speed shell-game that shifts value away from customers and suppliers and toward the firm and its executives:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/19/twiddler/
But how can this be legal? You bought an Echo and explicitly went into its settings to disable remote monitoring of the sounds in your home, and now Amazon – without your permission, against your express wishes – is going to start sending recordings from inside your house to its offices. Isn't that against the law?
Well, you'd think so, but US consumer privacy law is unbelievably backwards. Congress hasn't passed a consumer privacy law since 1988, when the Video Privacy Protection Act banned video store clerks from disclosing which VHS cassettes you brought home. That is the last technological privacy threat that Congress has given any consideration to:
This privacy vacuum has been filled up with surveillance on an unimaginable scale. Scumbag data-brokers you've never heard of openly boast about having dossiers on 91% of adult internet users, detailing who we are, what we watch, what we read, who we live with, who we follow on social media, what we buy online and offline, where we buy, when we buy, and why we buy:
To a first approximation, every kind of privacy violation is legal, because the concentrated commercial surveillance industry spends millions lobbying against privacy laws, and those millions are a bargain, because they make billions off the data they harvest with impunity.
Regulatory capture is a function of monopoly. Highly concentrated sectors don't need to engage in "wasteful competition," which leaves them with gigantic profits to spend on lobbying, which is extraordinarily effective, because a sector that is dominated by a handful of firms can easily arrive at a common negotiating position and speak with one voice to the government:
Starting with the Carter administration, and accelerating through every subsequent administration except Biden's, America has adopted an explicitly pro-monopoly policy, called the "consumer welfare" antitrust theory. 40 years later, our economy is riddled with monopolies:
Every part of this Echo privacy massacre is downstream of that policy choice: "growth stock" narratives about AI, twiddling, DMCA 1201, the Darth Vader MBA, the end of legal privacy protections. These are material things, not ideological ones. They exist to make a very, very small number of people very, very rich.
Your Echo is your property, you paid for it. You paid for the product and you are still the product:
Now, Amazon says that the recordings your Echo will send to its data-centers will be deleted as soon as it's been processed by the AI servers. Amazon's made these claims before, and they were lies. Amazon eventually had to admit that its employees and a menagerie of overseas contractors were secretly given millions of recordings to listen to and make notes on:
https://archive.is/TD90k
And sometimes, Amazon just sent these recordings to random people on the internet:
Fool me once, etc. I will bet you a testicle* that Amazon will eventually have to admit that the recordings it harvests to feed its AI are also being retained and listened to by employees, contractors, and, possibly, randos on the internet.
*Not one of mine
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 thing that I think is most important about Klinger as a character is that he's deeply kind. He couldn't get a section eight because he wasn't willing to commit to making himself a danger to others. His dramatic wardrobe and escape acts never impacted anybody else (other than giving Henry and Potter some extra paperwork on occasion), and he's still a first rate soldier when they need him. He's always in the thick of things carrying litters or donating blood or delivering x-rays. The example I always remember is when he pretended to think he was in Toledo. He wore civilian clothes and talked to Potter as if he were a traffic cop, but he was still doing his job correctly and efficiently. His behavior is a protest more than anything else. It's a statement that he may be acting like a soldier to save lives, but they'll never make him think like a solider; he will do his part to lessen the suffering but he cannot support the war itself.
There's an episode with a guy who actually gets a section eight, and he's so clearly contrasted with Klinger because the other guy isn't just talking to his socks, he's firing into the minefield. Klinger tells Sidney that he hates the war so much because of the death, that he can't stand being a part of all that killing. If he just wanted to go home then he could do it, but that wouldn't actually help anybody. He's a lot like Hawkeye in that way. Sticking around and making it clear how much they hate it while working every day to save lives is the best way to fight "the war against the war" as Hawkeye calls it.
On a less serious note, Klinger is also just a really nice guy. He's even friendly to Frank, who only ever has awful things to say to him. He's surrounded by hate and violence, he's constantly overworked; and yet he shows up, goes above and beyond in his duties as a corpsman and clerk, is genuinely kind to everybody he meets, then spends his free time sewing elaborate outfits and constructing getaway schemes. That's just plain incredible. He never lets his hatred for the war turn him hateful, and instead he makes an effort to brighten up the 4077th with his wackiness.
you dont get how refreshing anne of green gables is like yes sometimes you really must imagine there are dryads combing their hair in the woods and little girls in the cupboard who love you and places called the lake of shining waters and lovers lane and be glad you live in a world where there are october’s and be full of love and wonder and whimsy and imagination
the transition from people needing each other to wanting each other is literally one of my greatest weaknesses that shit makes me want to walk into the sea and sit on the ocean floor for a thousand years
like. characters whose entire self worth is based on how useful they can be to others, who think that they're going to be abandoned as soon as they're no longer necessary, being told by someone that they want them to stay and realizing that they have value to people in and of themselves and not just for what they can do for them will never fail to completely unmake me. like on a molecular level.
titsay
andulkaphoto
annaxmalina
prguitarman
turnnoffyourmind
janainaart
izzy806
