Tie Tens

[tietensgo]

note: more spoilers

@blackjinhwan replied to your post “note: spoilers”

i completely disagree with your “people coming back made no sense” take. idk if youve been dirt poor before but these people are desperate. some spent their lives in fear of loan sharks heckling them for money or getting beat up by gang members. when youre going through that everyday and your life is miserable, your life isnt much better than a deadly game. and idk how you think ali could afford to leave the country if he couldnt even get a bus ride home?

Thanks for your thoughts!

I agree the people depicted in the show are desperate; my argument is that the game is not the best way to handle that desperate situation, and I think the show actually makes this point.

When I said Ali could leave the country, I didn’t mean he could’ve done so easily, or simply, or that it wouldn’t have been a struggle. But I think leaving directly, or getting himself to the nearest authority, were both better options than being dead in the game.

I conceded above that I don’t have a thorough understanding of the criminal world. But in the show they depicted the character who embodied having gang issues (or loan shark issues, or issues with the law in general) as being savvy enough to get cash from his underworld friends and escape a beating when it was EIGHT VERSUS ONE and then they say this person chooses not to turn himself in to the police or go to another city/town/country but chooses to play the game. This choice. Is what I found odd. Particularly… not that he would choose the game the first time (he knew nothing about it then) but that he would go back the second time.

Because. The game is deceitful. It is not a fair game. It is designed to kill as many as possible randomly, unfairly, and the players KNOW this. So I didn’t understand why they’d come back.

In the first episode, when they all play red light green light, there is some time that passes between when the first person is killed and when the group gets over the shock and starts to really play the game again. During this time, a lot of players turned and ran for the door. Every. One. of the people whose bodies piled up at the exit door made a calculation in their head: Is my life out there better? (Even though I’m desperate? And poor? And in debt?) Or is my life in here better, playing this game?

And the fact that they were at the door when they died means they chose outside. The show is saying that when presented with the actual choice of life in misery vs. death, people choose life in misery. (And imo, it’s not even that they choose misery. It’s that they realized that there are better ways to get out of misery and get some cash than playing this rigged game).

Then there’s the conversation they have after the first game. 255 people dead. The guards come in, and the remaining players literally PLEAD FOR THEIR LIVES.

These are actual quotes from the second episode, after everyone finishes red light green light:

“We may be in debt. But that doesn’t mean we deserve to die.”

“Sir, please spare my life. I will find a way to pay off the debts.” (emphasis mine, in support of my earlier point: there are better ways to earn cash than this game).

“A chance? You kill us while playing a child’s game. You call that a chance?” (emphasis mine, more on this later)

“You killed all those people. Yet you call this a game?”

“I don’t need that stupid prize money. Please just let me out.” (emphasis mine, in support of the point: life in misery is better than life in the game.)

“Please spare my life.”

“Please let me go home.”

“I want to stop here.”

These people thought about it, and they came to the conclusion that they wanted out. And the show expects us to accept that they just… forgot???? All of the horrors of the first game? All the words they said after? How they pleaded for their lives? And instead they chose to come back?

Now…. I agree, they did take a vote. And some people did decide to go on with the game. But I argue that those people either fall into the two categories I mentioned earlier (really really sick or so emotional they’re not thinking straight) or they were not… appropriately assessing just. how. rigged and pointless the game is.

Firstly. Players are recruited through false advertising. The guy in the subway (essentially) says “I’ll slap you if you lose, I’ll give you money if you win.” A lot of people would play that game, it only (relatively speaking) has an upside! In the real game, you DIE if you lose, and get the CHANCE to DIE AGAIN in another game if you win. But subway guy doesn’t tell them this. It doesn’t make sense to me that a player then agrees to come back knowing the game runners are deceitful. (How do you even know they’ll give you the cash at the end if they lied about the rules?! It’s a lie by omission. But a lie nonetheless.)

Second. The game is not. Fair. The players, after red light green light, see the disparity between how the game gives you its rules (you’ll be eliminated) and how the game plays out in reality (you will be killed). So it makes no sense for me that they come back KNOWING the game is RIGGED against them. For example: the sugar game is not a fair game- disproportionately, if you choose the umbrella, you die. The tug of war game is not fair if you are physically smaller; even with the old man’s strategy, Gi-Hun and the team almost lost. The lights out game ISN’T EVEN A GAME, it’s just Murder Time In the Dark! The marble game is closer to fair but the old man blows that one by not dying when it’s his turn, and finally, the ‘walk across glass’ game is BANANAS unfair- obviously those in the back win more often, and the moment one of the players looks like he’s getting the hang of it, the Leader goes out of his way to get rid of the player’s advantage by turning down the lights (so he can’t tell the tempered glass apart).

This is the crux of it: it’s NOT A GAME! the players are in a death squad type execution field where instead of guns they have silly rules and fake teams that are designed to make players feel like they have a shot when THEY DON’T. It is not IF you die, it’s WHEN AND IN WHAT ORDER. Which brings me back to the earlier quote:

“A chance? You kill us while playing a child’s game. You call that a chance?”

It’s not a chance. Not a real one. It’s just death. And my argument is that people realize this after the first game (that quote comes from episode TWO) and yet they come back? I repeat the math from the other post: 1 in 2 is chance. 1 in 456 is zero. I don’t have any idea why they took those odds.

The first time, it’s fine because they didn’t know. The second time, it’s as if someone came up to them and said “okay. let’s play a game. I’m going to give you 20 million bucks if you can win this arm wrestling contest with Arnold Schwarzenegger when he was 20 years old, right after he won Mr. Universe and was basically the strongest man on earth. Except you also have to do it while only standing on your left foot. Oh, and if you lose, you die.” And they took the bet.

Lastly, I think the show makes my point.

Gi-Hun, the winner, comes home to a dead mom (who he could’ve saved if he just accepted the cash the ex-wife’s-husband gave him). And he is so beside himself with grief and shame of what he did in the game and what it cost and who he lost that he can’t even spend the money.

The MONEY, the reason he played the game in the first place! is now useless. Because he can’t spend it.

So what was the point of coming back? What was the point in playing the game?

We know Gi-Hun has learned his lesson because he rips the card out of the hand of the new player being recruited in the subway. He doesn’t ask the new player, “Are you ill? Is a gang after you? Is your mom in North Korea? Are you in the country with all documentation handled? How big is the debt?” Nothing. He just takes the card. and goes, “No! Never!” when he’s asked to give it back because now he understands.

The old man created a situation where no one wins (except the VIPs), not even the winner.

TLDR; squid game is not a game. it is an execution system designed to leave one (1) person alive* and I didn’t understand why anyone would come back to the game and take a bet on being that one, especially after they know the game runners are dishonest, the game is rigged against them, and there are other ways to tackle poverty outside the game.

*when the police officer looks through the list of winners, I didn’t see any year where more than one person won, but i could’ve missed something, and the rules don’t seem to expressly forbid it.

[tietensgo]

@themoonofblueside replied to your post “note: more spoilers”

That. That is literally the point. The game is rigged, everyone knows they’re being played and used as a toy, everyone knows it’s not actually “fair”. But people are desperate enough to come back: that’s the whole point. These people haven’t been in poverty for a month, you think they didn’t try everything in their power to pay their debts? You think Ali didn’t try to leave the country after his surgery? People came back because they saw no way out and they were sick of being poor and living every second of their lives thinking about surviving for one more day to pay their debts. As Miyeon said-the inside and outside are no different, they’re both hell. People coming back and actively putting their lives on the line is The Point: the World has put them in such a position that they’ll do anything to pay their debts off. 

Thanks for your thoughts!

I… think we’re seeing two sides of the same coin here, two different conclusions from the same… coin. I think it is not believable to say that people in desperate situations choose almost certain death (knowing the game is 1/456) over possible death (life outside the game), regardless of the cash prize (in part because if they win, they are possibly too traumatized to spend it, and if they lose, they’re dead anyway, what does money matter?). I think your conclusion is that people in desperate situations would choose almost certain death (knowing the game is 1/456) over possible death (life outside the game) given enough financial incentive to try to overcome the odds.

I think we’ll have to agree to disagree :) If you haven’t already, see also this post where I elaborate, in the second main point, on why each of the (main characters at least) would have been better off not playing the game, despite their desperation.

To address your points above:

“You think they didn’t try everything in their power to repay their debts?” I point again to the quotes from episode two: “Sir, please spare my life. I will find a way to pay off the debts.” and “I don’t need that stupid prize money. Please just let me out.” The game is not the most logical way to pay off debts.

“You think Ali didn’t try to leave the country after his surgery?” Generally speaking, I would say that for Ali and his family, for a long time, staying in South Korea was the option they found more appealing than leaving South Korea. I say this because staying was what he/his family did despite all the perils of non-documented status (like being underpaid, being assaulted and not being able to go to the hospital for fear of being arrested, etc). But my point is. That when Ali’s choices were between staying (perilous), leaving (difficult), or playing this game (deadly), I don’t get why he chose the game.

“As Miyeon said-the inside and outside are no different, they’re both hell.” I understand that the dialogue suggests that life inside and outside the game are no different. They even dedicated an entire episode to trying to argue that life outside the game is truly awful and enough to make people play the game. My argument, for all the reasons stated, is that the two ARE DIFFERENT. The key difference is death. And that this difference makes no amount of money, despite truly awful life circumstances, worth the risk.

“People came back because they saw no way out and they were sick of being poor and living every second of their lives thinking about surviving for one more day to pay their debts.” There is a hypothetical scenario where the game doesn’t exist. Maybe the old man learned to be a normal rich person so the games were never invented, or the subway recruiter guy took a day off so no players were invited, idk. In this scenario, where nobody recruits them for the squid game, would Gi-Hun’s mom be dead? Would Sae-Byeok be dead? (Yes, her mom would be still be in North Korea, but isn’t she there anyway and Sae-Byeok dead by the end of squid game?) Would Ali be dead? (Yes he’d probably be in police custody. But dead?) Would Sang-woo be dead? (Yes he’d be in prison. But dead?) Would the gang guy be dead? (Yes, he’d be on the run. But dead?) Would the girl who gave up her life for Sae-Byeok be dead? (She’d conceivably be in bad shape. But dead?)

Tldr; If you agree that the players would not be dead inside of a week, or however long it takes to play all six games, then I think you can see where I’m coming from about why playing the game, why coming back, is meaningless. Playing the game is signing up for no money AND no life inside of a week. Not playing the game is signing up for (little to) no money and a difficult life, but a life nonetheless, and a chance to change the difficulty over time.

People coming back and actively putting their lives on the line is The Point: the World has put them in such a position that they’ll do anything to pay their debts off. Agency is definitely a theme in the show. But for all the reasons above, let’s agree to disagree :)

[tietensgo]

Posting the reply to this thread to continue the train of thought

@themoonofblueside​ replied to your post “note: spoilers”

I think you're looking at Sangwoo's position a little too um.positive? Yes if he was a character attached to living your point would be true but it's already established that he's extremely suicidal. And he has a pride. It's not him being jailed, it's his mom practically losing her job and home. So since sangwoo is suicidal here's his thought process: I can die right now, in this bathtub. Or i'll get in the game again, either die while playing or win. There's also the whole point with people not actively believing they'll die(esp. in deoksu's case). Deoksu fully went in the game thinking he'll live. And about gihun: his ex-wife's didn't give him the money. He offered the money in exchange of gihun never seeing his daughter again. Gihun did not accept the money. While entering the games, he thought if he won, he could support his mom and daughter and if he lost, her mom would have enough money to get treatment(let's not forget the condolences money)

Thanks for your thoughts!

I agree that Sang-woo is. Well, he’s the Mysterious One TM in the show, whose motives are... interesting... And I agree, at the start of the show, he’s in a depressive state, very much coded to be at the end of his rope (the bathtub scene). However, I place Sang-woo in the category of people who seemed smart enough to not play the game because of his agency, which I alluded to a bit in the earlier post.

Essentially, to your earlier point regarding agency (does the circumstance of their world and poverty etc compel them to make this choice or do they still have free will), I said we’ll have to agree to disagree because I can’t... /prove/ or demonstrate necessarily that (a lack of) agency swings a person in a certain direction... but I still think Sang-woo had enough agency that he wouldn’t have played the Squid Game.

The first reason is the amount of money he stole. Please scroll to the bottom of this post for a more thorough breakdown, but the crux of it is he stole ~$550,000 US dollars. And according to google, people who stole much more, $180 BILLION USD, got 25 years in jail. Sang-woo is 46 in the show. He’d’ve gotten out at 71 if he got all 25 years (which is /way/ too much for what he stole). A closer comparison might be this guy Nick Leeson, a rogue trader who used futures and options (same as Sang-woo) to rack up a $1.4 BILLION USD loss and bankrupted an entire bank. He got 6 and a half years, served 4 years 4 months and then was out for good behavior. My question to Sang-woo is: why does a deadly game make more sense than four and a half, maybe 6 years in prison?

You mention his mother, which definitely is seen to be a motivation for him. But. I don’t agree that the desire to do right by his mom is enough to drive him to play this game. Firstly, it seems like he shouldn’t have been able to put up other people’s stuff as collateral without their consent in the first place. But if he had her consent, if his mom volunteered her stuff, it could be repossessed and sold to cover the debts, definitely, but only up to a certain point, usually bankruptcy (and even then, some of her property would be protected). Somebody who knows the law about it should prolly weigh in, but I’d think if the bank is really interested in recouping losses, wouldn’t they put a lien on the mom’s assets? This would let her keep (use of) her property, keep the stand open but make her turn over a percentage of profits until the debt is paid off (Like a mortgage). She wouldn’t lose everything.

But let’s pretend the mom did lose everything. No bankruptcy, no lien. Everything is just gone and she’s homeless. She still strikes me as the kind of person who would want her son alive anyway. Yes, the current situation is bad. But six years down the line, when her son is out of jail, she can open another stand. If he chooses to play the game, she can’t get another Sang-woo. I think if he wanted to do right by his mom, he would take the consequences of his actions and go to jail, not die in the game.

Also. um. In the middle of him being in the bathtub. The doorbell rings. And Sang-woo got up. This is agency to me. (That is, he could’ve decided to stay in the tub and die, but he didn’t. He chose to get up.) Is he seeking to /die/? Or is he seeking a way out of debt? It’s hard. But something about his actions, and the way he is calculating about letting Gi-Hun choose the umbrella option and the way he manipulates Ali... just put him in a different category, and I don’t think he had a reason to play the game. But I agree he was in a bad space.

It’s... possible... Deok-su may not have expected to die, but. It doesn’t make it a reasonable expectation. People died left and right in the game, and strong people at that. I think I would say he didn’t have a good reason to come back, and he wasn’t thinking through the repercussions... By episode 6, Gganbu, we see Deok-su shaking, trembling as he loses during the marble game. So he knows the fear of death. And he makes the same face of fear when Han Mi-Nyeo grabs him, even pleading, “Don’t do this. I’ll go first, okay? Please let go of me. Let go.” It’s the same plea of everyone who tried to leave red light green light - when it’s their turn, they all realize that there’s no point in playing the game.

I agree that the Ex Wife’s Husband gave Gi-Hun the money with strings attached. But firstly, imagine being Gi-Hun’s mom; would she be happy to get a surgery? And then go and beg for the permission to see the girl again? Or would she prefer to die for her son’s pride? Would the ex-wife allow her new husband to keep the weird arrangement even if he made it? Would she want her daughter to grow up without ever seeing her dad again? If Gi-Hun agreed to leave the daughter alone, took the money, saved his mom, and then went to the police to demand to see his daughter, what would the ex wife’s husband do about it? There was no contract, no signed agreement: that was free money. Gi-Hun should’ve taken the win and taken the cash, saved his mom’s life, and figured out the details on visitation with the daughter later. It’s like. Really wrong that he didn’t imo. That’s a /life/ he played with. We also know that at the end of the film he’s on his way to see his daughter. So. Whatever the ex-wife’s husband wanted by keeping Gi-Hun away, he didn’t get it.

As for saving his mom by dying in the game, i’m pretty sure they only send condolences money if everyone agrees to quit the game and no one takes the prize money. if a player wins, no condolences money is sent, the winner (Gi-Hun) gets everything.

TLDR; I understand that Sang-woo was in a bad way... but i still don’t think he, Deok-su, or Gi-Hun had a good reason to come back to the game.

[tietensgo]

[alpaca-clouds]

Why the media CEOs will always learn the wrong lessons

Yesterday a friend and I talked about how the entire (AAA) game industrie looked at BG3 being as popular as it is and going: "Oh, we need to produce 100+ hour games, I guess! Those sell!" Which... obviously is not why it is popular. The game is not popular because it has 100+ hours of gameplay, but because it has engaging characters, that are well-acted and that work as good hooks for the players. Like, let's face it: The reason why I so far have sunken 160 hours into this game is, because I wanna spend time with these characters - and because I wanna give them their happy endings.

But the same has happened too, just a bit earlier this year, right? When Barbie broke the 1 billion and every Hollywood CEO went: "Oh, so the people want movies based on toy franchises! Got it!" To which the internet at large replied: "... How is that the lesson you learned from this?"

Well, let me explain to you, why this is the lesson they learn: It is because the CEOs and the boards of directors at large are not artists or even engaged with the medium they produce. They mostly are economists. And their dry little hearts do not understand stuff more complex than numbers and spread sheets.

That sounds evil, I know, but... It is sadly the truth. When they look at a successful movie/series/game/book/comic, they look at it as a product, not a piece of art or narrative. It is just a product that has very clear metrics.

To them Barbie is not a movie with interesting stylistic choices that stand out from the majority of high budget action blockbusters. It is a toy movie with mildly feminist themes.

Or Oppenheimer is not a movie to them with a strong visual language and good acting direction. No, it is a historical blockbuster.

And this is true for basically every form of media. I mean, books are actually a fairly good example. In my life I do remember the big book fads that happened. When Harry Potter was a success, there was at least a dozen other "magical school" book series being released. When Twilight was a big success there was suddenly an endless number of "teen girl falls in love with bad boy, who is [magical creature]" YA. When the Hunger Games was a success, there were hundreds of "YA dystopia" books. Meanwhile in adult reading, we had the big "next Game of Throne" fad.

Of course, the irony is, that within each of those fads there might have been one or two somewhat successful series - but never even one that came even close to whatever started the fad.

Or with movies, we have seen it, too. When Avengers broke the 1 billion (which up to this point only few movies did) the studios went: "Ooooooh, so we need shared universe film series" - and then all went to try and fail to create their own cinematic universe.

Because the people, who call the shots, are just immensely desinterested in the thing they are selling. They do not really care about the content. All they care about is having a supposedly easy avenue of selling it. Just as they do not care about the consumer. All they care about is that the consumer buys it. Why he buys it... Well, they do not care. They could not care less, in fact.

So, yeah, get ready for a 20 overproduced games with a bloated 100+ hours of empty gameplay, but without the engaging characters. And for like at least 15 more moves based on some toy franchise, that nobody actually cares about.

And then get ready for all the CEOs to do the surprised Pikachu face, when all of that ends up not financially successful.

Really, I read some interviews yesterday from some AAA-studio CEOs and their blatant shock and missing understanding on why BG3 works for so many people.

Because, yeah... capitalism does not appreciate art. Capitalism does not understand art. It only understands spread sheets.

[tietensgo]

Yeah, interesting point. Also wanted to add it's just easier to copy something than to take the time to make an original.

I think not appreciating successful works as art can contribute to 'learning strange lessons' from success if you will, but even if the studios appreciated the works as bespoke and unique art, i think they'd still fall into the trap of strange lessons because they don't want to take the financial risk that making an original work might fail.

You see this everywhere, even with really artistic or creative (traditionally anti-spreadsheet) people - instagram accounts are all the time told to "niche down". In other words, get a style and copy stick to it. Twitch streamers, even nice ones, react because filling HOURS of airtime with original thought would be almost impossible to do daily/every other day. Youtubers will milk the shit out of a successful series/type of video before trying anything new (I made 500 of... i spent 5000 hours in... i gave away 500,000 of...) because copying success and tweaking it slightly is a whoooole lot less work than developing another original hit.

So i generally agree, and wanted to add to the statement: even when "capitalism" understands and appreciates art (let's say by making it a hit), it can sometimes work counterproductively to the continued production of good art because copying elements of success is usually easier than making something original and good.

[starlightomatic]

i think its gross and bad and inexcusable that the cdc says you can end quarantine after day 5 of covid. omicron infections last 8-10 days on average. day 4-5 is the peak. it’s just fully not okay for covid-positive people to be wandering around and working and infecting others. im not blaming the people who don’t have a choice but to follow it. i don’t want you to get fired. this one is on your employers and on the cdc for giving shitty ass guidance that is not based in science but rather based on the fact that last winter’s covid wave was so severe that they were worried that if we let people quarantine until they tested negative that we wouldn’t have enough of a workforce to run society. regardless of the validity of that we are not at that point right now.

otherwise reasonable people are following this guidance and it’s really upsetting to see. people close to me have gone to coffee with their friends or voluntarily back to work while actively covid-positive because they diligently looked up the cdc guidance and that’s what it said.

im just so fucking tired.

[tietensgo]

six days after Delta airlines informed the cdc about an employee shortage and wanting their employees back, the cdc quickly came to an unrelated consensus that the number of days of quarantine should be shortened to 5 days

[anyroads]

From the CDC website linked above:

“People with COVID-19 should isolate for 5 days and if they are asymptomatic or their symptoms are resolving (without fever for 24 hours), follow that by 5 days of wearing a mask when around others to minimize the risk of infecting people they encounter. The change is motivated by science demonstrating that the majority of SARS-CoV-2 transmission occurs early in the course of illness, generally in the 1-2 days prior to onset of symptoms and the 2-3 days after.”

The CDC is NOT saying people can go back to normal after 5 days. They are saying they can end quarantine if, and only if, they meet a specific set of criteria. They’re saying that IF people are asymptomatic or haven’t had a fever for 24 hours, very much IF, then they can return to work as long as they wear a mask for 5 more days.

This is based on the science that has shown that symptomatic infections will have patients shedding virus at dangerous levels when those symptoms are at their peak. Once symptoms have lessened significantly, wearing a mask should be effective protection from transmitting the virus, because the amount of virus shed is now low enough that a mask should be enough to prevent it being a danger to most others.

This is basically the CDC trying to limit transmission as best they can in a country where sick leave and sick pay are in such abysmal shape that people can’t afford to take a week and a half off to stay home. The CDC has no control over labor laws and their enforcement.

This is absolutely not the CDC not giving a shit about people, and frankly this post has done more damage in spreading the misinformation that the only requirement for covid patients is 5-day isolation, and completely leaving out the SUPER IMPORTANT part where people still have to wear a mask for 5 days if they resume going out in public. Not to mention that even that is contingent on symptoms diminishing and their no longer having a fever, so it’s not like there’s some blanket rule that after 5 days you can do what you want.

I completely get the anger and frustration, especially as someone who falls into the vulnerable category and has been struggling with long covid for two years in a country where we’ve had zero covid rules or support for many months now. But please please please I am begging y'all to look at sources and read through them because this info is literally in the first paragraph of the CDC page as linked in the reblog above.

By choosing to rage-post about the actual information that you skimmed at best, if you read it from the source at all, you’re contributing to spreading misinformation. And that makes going outside all the more dangerous for people like me, who are more protected by the actual CDC guidance than by your well-intended activism.

Not to mention, this misinformation does nothing to support people who are told to go back to work after five days even though they’re symptomatic, by giving them information they could use to meet their needs and challenge their employers’ demands.

[tietensgo]

There is no misinformation in the above posts.

Just saw this, wanted to respond.

In case you haven't seen it, linking my in-depth analysis of the CDC decision here for context. This analysis was written before the reblog above (this is only noted to demonstrate that contrary to the above claim, research had been amply conducted prior to posting), and I have put together a response below.

But first, some context to the timing of the reply. In all honesty I considered not replying, because I just saw this and it's been a while since the reblog was posted, but I feel that the claim of misinformation made is quite important to address, if only for casual readers who might think it's true.

So in summary, a reply:

The CDC maintains that they came to a science-based decision of how best to approach the issue of quarantine. That's not what the post challenges, though some do debate it. The point of the post is that they chose to do so in the middle of an outbreak of a novel, though less severe, version of the covid virus (omicron) just after they were notified by a corporation that said the outbreak plus restrictions on working were responsible for a reduction in available staff.

This is TRUE - that happened.

There is no misinformation there, and the point of the post is that people might want to think strongly about why that occurred. Why the CDC, despite being a public health institution, was taking into account economic data at all, let alone staffing shortages. It says WAS taking, and not APPEARED to be taking, due to a direct quote from NBC (top) and Dr. Anthony Fauci (bottom):

NBC: "Dr. Anthony Fauci, President Joe Biden's chief medical adviser, told NBC Nightly News that the new guidance takes into account both public health data and worker shortages."

Dr. Fauci: "On balance, if you look at the safety of the public and the need to not have society be disrupted, this was a good choice."

That's the CDC. No misinformation, just their words.

To your point about 5 days of quarantine and 5 days of masking (which I addressed in great detail in my linked analysis post), I summarize my view as follows, first addressing directly the assertion regarding misinformation:

"This post has done more damage in spreading the misinformation that the only requirement for covid patients is 5-day isolation". The post never said this. What was said was that the CDC shortened the number of quarantine days [from 10] to 5.

This is TRUE.

The CDC has always been in support of masking when in indoor spaces where you could be in close contact to other people while Covid is around (with some asterisks about vaccinated families at Christmas dinner), sick or not, vaccinated or not. Masking is absolutely a requirement in the updated guidelines, but the major shift in the guidance was to shorten the quarantine - that is, the difference between the guidance before and after the update was that from days 6-10, now you can work.

To be clear: the guidance was not about testing negative for Covid (that is, being Covid-free). It was about the ability to work while having Covid, using "symptom-free" as a proxy for "not infectious" (even though they are not the same). It was about the ability to work while sick.

To quote Dr. Fauci again:

"[people should]... wear a mask for the rest of the time [sic, 5 days], so you can keep people safe from getting infected from you if you still are infected (emphasis mine), but at the same time, getting you back to what might be an essential function in society."

Call me crazy but I think people should be able to stay home the entire time they are sick with anything, and Covid in particular, not just the first half.

Further, and pardon the reliance on anecdotes here, if you've ever been sick, you know that just because you're not sniffling anymore or your fever has broken doesn't mean you feel well enough to work. Nevertheless, with the CDC guidance, employers now had the means to require workers to return to in-person operation before they felt safe to do so. In addition, no negative test was required to return - you could be covid positive, symptom free, AND (by their own admission) INFECTIOUS and back to work as long as you were masked, pushing the onus for public safety onto people's good will to mask up effectively (tight mask, nose and mouth covered, etc) - in a political climate where anti-mask sentiment was not only present but high.

You only have to go through the replies and tags on this post to see that the foreseeable, obvious result of the guidance - regardless of the intent, science, or wording - is what occurred: people were forced to go back to work sick. Period.

The posts are not about hypotheticals - they are discussing LIVED experiences of that time when the CDC gave corporations - intentionally or not - the ammunition to coerce their employees at a time when we needed the government to stand firm in doing the exact opposite.

The reason we need to think about this is not because anyone is trying to sow distrust in the CDC; rather it is to hold them accountable, to give scrutiny to their actions, or, in the absence of that, inform anyone who is interested about the CDC's (in this case economic) influences (biases?) so they can make fully informed decisions for themselves.

What would've happened if society took a second to learn lessons from Covid and how many people can be taken out by illness at once? What if we tried to facilitate remote work or improve distance learning or lighten the load on emergency systems in times of need? We don't know- because we've been shown that ostensibly, corporate interests can muddy the waters of decision making and force people to operate so that we never have to find out.

THAT's what the post was about. Hope it's clearer now.

TLDR; I didn't "skim at best", and a well-cited, succinct response is not a "rage-post". In fact, I read the CDC posting in its entirety plus external analysis from Dr. Jha and others knowledgeable about the CDC's decision making process, and did a two-part analysis on what I read (which I understand, you might not have known about before you posted). There is no misinformation in the above post, and at any point, I retain my right to post about these matters and voice researched, thoughtful dissent on decisions that affect my life, angry or not.

[tietensgo]

note: spoilers

As I did for Squid Games and Alice in Borderland, I am going to jot down my thoughts about One Piece Live Action, which turned out to be an overall good watch, even though I was /genuinely/ afraid it would suck.

OPLA had big shoes to fill, as the One Piece IP is quite well known and beloved. In my view, the Netflix show understood where it could bring a unique perspective, which helped the execution greatly. For example, the speed, superhuman movements, and over-the-top expressions of the anime would be a stretch to represent accurately in live action; even with cgi, I struggled to feel the epic nature of the devil fruits or fighting abilities being used to their full effect (the initial fight against Captain Alvida, for example). Instead, I enjoyed when the show leaned into amplifying the setting of the world and emotions of the characters, which was amazing! The grime of Alvida's ship, Luffy's backstory on Dawn island (the young!Luffy casting was spot. on.), watching Usopp try to load a cannon for the first time, the exploration of what Zoro and Nami talk about when they're not keeping the captain out of trouble - in my opinion, these were the moments that shined brightest for the show.

Pacing. If you've sat through 1000+ episodes of the anime as many have and felt the buildup of tension over /years/, the treatment that the show gives some plot points can feel frustratingly brief. Sanji's goodbye at the Baratie was not half as emotional as it was in the anime, and the moments when the crew was supposed to band together (e.g. feet on barrel on the Going Merry) felt less impactful because we hadn't had as much time to be endeared to the Straw Hat Pirates and root for them as a group. (For example, if the show had included Morgan's backstory of cruelty from the anime, his defeat would have felt farrrrrr more satisfying). However, I have to acknowledge that rapid pacing is expected in the live action, because the anime is decades old and OPLA has to condense a lot of material into a reasonable run time; for an eight-plus hour series, it managed to rarely feel slow (though it did happen), and that's a feat.

Characters. Koby was perfect. The right amount of nervous, the right amount of ambitious. Buggy was a revelation. His character is kind of a running joke in the anime, so I was ready to wish him off screen as soon as he appeared, but I loved Ward as Deke in Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. and the genuineness he added to Buggy's CLAP FOR ME OR DIE behavior made the performance not just intense but somehow nuanced. Nami asking (after Sanji's wink) if there was something wrong with his eye. Luffy drinking milk while others ordered beer. The adaptations of Hawkeye and Garp. You can just imagine the work that went into the fishmen makeup- the list goes on. As I mentioned, I think this attention to detail in adapting the appearance and interactions of the characters was probably what the series did best. Of course there were... interesting takes (bright neon hair in a world of muted color, Nami turning from dollar-sign-eyes loving money in the anime to eat-the-rich in the show, Nami keeping the secret of her involvement with Arlong from Nojiko) but these differences I think make OPLA its own production - a TV show with its own lore - and leave room for people to go back and watch the anime and fall even more in love with the characters and their deeper stories there.

Helmeppo. Helmeppo is so much. I love the 'let's all shit on Helmeppo' jokes. More. Moarrrrr of this.

Extras. I appreciated all the extra touches like the title screen of each episode being modeled after the focus character of the episode and the wanted posters being half anime half live action; it made the production feel like it was made by people who cared that the adaptation was done right. I loved hearing hints of We Are in the soundtrack, and the den den mushis were toooo cute. Altogether, good stuff for my one piece brain. It helped me get through the scenes of Go with Garp.

TLDR; The interpretations of the characters and the realistic settings were highlights of OPLA. The Going Merry, Kaya's mansion, Morgan's naval base, the Baratie and Arlong Park were all stunning to see in live action. However, while the fight scenes were well made, they didn't quite compete with the heights set by the anime, and the story is really condensed, leaving some heartfelt moments coming off as shallow or leaving them out of the plot altogether. This can be a struggle if you're looking for the intricate, mysterious, multi-layered world from the anime. But those still traumatized from memories of live action atla (2010) or dbz (2009) can breathe a sigh of relief as we hold out for sustained quality for this adaptation in future seasons: overall, OPLA is worth watching. A great introduction for newcomers to this amazing series and a pretty good adaptation for long time fans as well.

[discoursedrome]

Since I've been doing some discourse around "the disabled" today, I suppose it's a good time to note that I don't think "the disabled" or "people with disabilities" is really a coherent group from a political standpoint. From a legal standpoint, there's a coherent definition of "disability" in countries with laws protecting the disabled, and these legal definitions do tend to capture some of the brass-tacks essence of what "a disability" is, materially speaking. But that definition doesn't get you very far in activism or politics.

The thing is, by the strict definition, most people ate disabled, if by that we mean "have a disability, as formally defined." Like, you can pretty much assume everyone over 60 and most people over 50 are disabled; everyone who needs glasses or contact lenses is disabled. I would expect it's a significant majority of the population, though I have very much not done the math.

But of course, most of these people don't consider themselves disabled, and wouldn't be considered "really" disabled by others, and crucially, in many cases they're better off being considered "not really disabled." It's not that they have a false consciousness so much as that "disability" is such an expansive category, so varied in both its severity and character, that it doesn't really lend itself to solidarity. Disabled people mostly have one specific problem or a set of closely related ones, and not only do they rarely benefit from help provided to others, but because it's impossible to give everyone adequate accommodations, and people can even have conflicting needs, accommodations to one disability group can be threatening to another. You can get deaf people, paraplegics, and autistic people into a coalition together, but it won't last very long, especially not if it wins enough to start thinking about how to divide the spoils. Sucks for people who are deaf, paraplegic, and autistic, because they sure do exist, and within disability culture they have the same kind of complex status that "intersectionality" was coined to describe.

And so the upshot of this is that I'm skeptical of people who attempt to speak for "the disabled," or cite that status in a standpoint-epistemology way without being specific, or talk about policies that help the disabled as a broad group, because it feels obfuscatory; the formal group is too expansive and diverse to be discussed in those terms, so it tends to read as an appeal to an archetype, an identity, whose relationship to the formal/material concept is ill-defined.

[loki-zen]

People who need glasses and contact lenses aren’t disabled because the adaptations are really good and not hard to get. There are lots of other conditions that could be the same amount of disabling if there was a really good adaptation that was easy to get but there isn’t currently. This is part of what it means for disability to be socially mediated; part of what constitutes a disability is determined by what tech we have and what we choose to support.

Yes, almost everyone who gets old is eventually disabled. It would benefit these people, and the rest of us, if this were recognised, because people would be less able to pretend disabled people are a small minority who don’t matter and thus it’s fine if we don’t make provisions for them to access [name a thing].

The extent to which older people are able to go out and be independent has been much improved by laws which have mandated the provision of ramps, disabled parking, accessible bathrooms, etc.

[discoursedrome]

This is a workable definition so long as you don't mind disability being a spectrum, but it's an odd definition. You define disability by the lack of special accommodations? Like there's the social model of disability, but "society has a mechanism for you to get an assistive device" is a far cry from a society that's defined in such a way that your disability doesn't exist. If people had the same level of access to wheelchairs as they do to glasses, they would have better lives, but they would not be non-disabled. Even if you can fix the social standing by moving in that direction, you have to move a hell of a lot farther than that. To say otherwise would be to suggest that a sufficiently good disability accommodation laws could legislate disability out of existence.

Like, I think that insofar as we can define "disability", it has to be one or both of the followig:

A physical or medical issue or trait that makes it more difficult to participate in society on equal footing

A social stigma or deep disregard attending to people in this situation

And, like, people with glasses do in fact hit both those points? Like the only reasonable standard I can see for excluding them is that they don't have "enough", that it's a difference of degree rather than kind and they fall below some bar that's serious enough to matter, and my point is that this is the distinction people are generally making subonsciously, but it's rarely made overtly, because it can't be done in a principled way; there's no natural cutoff and many competing interests. But, like, on the social-model front, I will draw your attention to the fact that contact lenses are preferred to glasses despite being more dangerous and less convenient, mainly because they allow people to disguise their use of an assistive device.

I want to specifically talk about this point, because it's very much the kind of thing I mean to critique above:

people would be less able to pretend disabled people are a small minority who don’t matter and thus it’s fine if we don’t make provisions for them to access

What I'm saying is that this is not a useful way to think or talk about the issue, specifically because it's implying a level of specificity and unity to "disabled people", and particularly in how they're viewed socially, that is simply not present in reality. "Provisions for disabled people," in the general sense, do not exist. There are provisions for specific disabilties, but "disabled people" themselves pose significant barriers to them, because every disabled person relates to the majority of disability provisions the way non-disabled people do, not the way their beneficiaries do. These problems don't go away even if you only take into account the opinions of disabled people themselves, because this idea of "disabled people" as a political class is only an idea; it's not practicable.

[chromalogue]

I’m not a Disability Studies person, so I mean I’m probably gonna get some of this stuff wrong and I hope others can correct me, but I am a disabled person with a lot of friends in Disability Studies and I’ve benefited from their knowledge, and the way of thinking through this stuff that I’ve found useful is this:

All disabled people share the quality of having to navigate a world that is not designed with our bodies and/or minds and/or abilities in mind, to a degree that significantly affects our ability to participate in the world as we have it. 

I’ve seen some folks draw a distinction between disability - the systematic structuring of the built and social environment in ways that cater to a very narrow range of body types, neurotypes, and ability levels - and impairment, which I understand to be the specific thing that one does not do according to cultural expectations, that may or may not lead to being disabled.  It’s possible to have impairments that are not disabling.  It’s also possible to have impairments, such as chronic fatigue or chronic pain, that are disabling but cannot be accommodated by changes to the built and social environment to the degree that a person can participate fully.  And I might be going out on a limb here, but I think it’s possible to be disabled without any impairments, i.e. the barriers to your full participation are very there, but not based on a failure to accommodate your body form or neurotype.  I’ve found poverty more disabling than my circadian rhythm disorder. 

It’s true that what each person needs to be able to participate fully varies, and that sometimes people will need conflicting things.  It’s also true that no one disabled person will be able to speak for all disabled people.  But one of the benefits of sharing a disabled identity and forming a community is that we can work from our individual experiences to general principles.  Some of these, as I understand it, are as follows:

1) Disability is an axis of oppression like other axes of oppression.  Ableism is a systemic problem that isn’t going to be solved quickly or easily, or independently of other forms of oppression for that matter.  As far as wrapping your head about the variety under the disability umbrella, it’s helpful to think of it this way: the problem isn’t that people have so many different bodily and neural configurations, any more than the problem is that people have different sexualities, different genders, or different ethnicities.  The problem, in all cases, is the narrowness of the range that a person can inhabit without penalty.

2) “Nothing about us without us.”  The disability community should have input on decision-making bodies at all levels.  Ideally, this should be through direct participation by members of that community.  (I specify members of the disability community instead of disabled people, because I’ve worked on governing bodies where nearly everyone else around me is disabled to some degree but considers themselves to be the flawed exception to some sort of platonic ideal of a client.  Members of the disability community, on the other hand, I expect will at least be aware of the issues, and know what questions to ask.)  In organizations that are supposed to provide services to disabled people, representation on the board is absolutely necessary.  In other cases, failing direct representation, organizations should make a point of consulting with disabled people about policies and projects. 

3) People generally have a pretty good idea of what they need, and accommodating them is often a matter of asking them, and believing them.  If it’s impossible to give them exactly what they’re asking for, talk about it.  It’s usually possible to work out a solution together. 

4) As you said, there are all kinds of different access needs and comfort levels, including conflicting access needs; and there are disabled people who don’t conceive of themselves as part of the community; and in addition I think a lot of us have internalized ableism, different experiences and understandings, and sometimes trauma.  One person’s ableist dumpster fire can be another person’s touchstone and rallying cry.  So, like, a certain amount of grace is really helpful too, and flexibility, and willingness to hold conflicting ideas in tension, and openness to the possibilities of different understandings and interpretations.

So yeah, that’s what I know.  I know it’s incomplete, and other people in my sphere have a much better understanding than I do, and I hope that they feel free to add things or correct things. 

[capricorn-0mnikorn]

I'm hopping in here to second @chromalogue's points.

The Disability Community coalesced into a political identity alongside the civil rights movements for racial and women's justice, during the 1960s and 70s. I was too young to take part at the start. But I'm old enough to have still felt the impact of the Way Things Were Done Before -- when each different kind of disability had its own, separate, advocacy organizations.

And I've just got to say: It was not better. We came together with all our differences, and different needs, for a reason. The ratification of Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973, and the signing into law of the Americans with Disabilities Act that followed, only happened when Disabled people came together in solidarity, rather than focusing separately on their individual access needs..

Here's the thing: As different (and yes, often conflicting) as our different needs may be, the social, bureaucratic, and economic systems that marginalize us are the same.

Solidarity forever.

[whetstonefires]

i'm actually really mad about the take that the normalization of glasses stops bad vision from being disabling.

i still have to deal with the discomforts and inconveniences of wearing an imperfect prosthetic device to get by in the world? i still have to pay hundreds of dollars a pop to access it? if i lose it, i'm still helpless?

there's no way for the world to rearrange itself so 'inability to see more than six inches' becomes not an impairment. but a world that was more accessible to the blind-in-general would be a much less frightening one to be dependent on prosthetic corneas in!

[grison-in-space]

Yeah, like ... so okay, the idea that needing glasses is not disabling comes in part from the social construct model of disability, which stands in opposition to the biomedical model: the social model says, the problem is not me or my body, the problem is that my society is not built in a way I can access.

The social model is, like many models, a valuable simplification we can use to better understand the world! But it's also, you know, a simplification. It's actually one of those ideas that has a strong inflection from a subgroup within a broader coalition of disabled people: the social model has particularly strong support from, and I think may have originated within, the Deaf community specifically. Deaf people in particular have a very strong community culture ethos within their condition-specific community, and for historical and cultural reasons, the biggest marginalizations and struggles that Deaf people have often suffered from involve being isolated from society, denied means of communication, and treated as not worth the effort of educating. These really are very socially mediated!

What's more, the Deaf community--formed through networks of state boarding schools that created a tight knit group of people who formed found families, often after parental abandonment or at least parental disinterest in learning a language you can use--has often faced external groups saying that the community itself should be replaced with technological interventions. Instead of ASL, we should invest in better hearing aids, cochlear implants, or even signing gloves--interventions that are designed to make Deaf people less of an inconvenience to hearing people than an ASL interpreter, and often which carry big cognitive loads that hearing people don't notice or account for. Hearing aids are also even more expensive than glasses, even less likely to be covered by medical insurance, and don't work perfectly. So you get a certain frustrated defensiveness: I'm fine the way I am. The problem isn't me, it's you, and more specifically the problem is that you won't fucking listen to the solutions that actually work for me because you're too hung up on the ones that cause the least work for you. So: the social model appears.

And social models do have a lot of value when you consider what accommodations are, how to make spaces inclusive, and how to build organizations that are as accessible as possible. It takes the "blame" for access conflicts off disabled people and off their bodies and reframes the situation so that the "blame" for inaccessible situations is on the institution or society, which has more resources. It encourages us to shift our thinking. If you assume that we've fixed all the access issues for people with mild to moderate vision issues, then you might say that people who use glasses aren't disabled because society has lots of understanding and acceptance built in about glasses, people who need them, and what the strengths and weaknesses of glasses are.

But the social model doesn't work as perfectly for all disabilities. My memory is hazy, but I believe the biggest critiques of a purely social model of disability came out of the chronic pain community. Folks with chronic pain are understandably more likely to go "uh, yes I would like a cure, please and THANK YOU," and they are also much more likely to say "yeah, my body IS the problem, and I AM frustrated by the whole thing where it's constantly in pain." So you get this pushback against the social model where people with disabilities that are less socially mediated and more intrinsic say, "hang the fuck on: my body (or brain) is also throwing specific shit in my path that not everyone has to deal with, and I am absolutely fucking not going to pretend that this is entirely socially mediated."

So these days almost everyone is using a more complex biosocial model that incorporates both intrinsic and extrinsic struggles to disability. As someone with moderate myopia and fairly rough astigmatism, I have relatively few social impairments from my glasses (although the cost of the glasses and the need to take time for eye exams, plus the cost of those, certainly count), but there are other intrinsic impairments that are harder to fix, like fogging up in the cold or being reliant on a small nearly invisible set of frames to see with.

Anyway, I am in full agreement with @chromalogue . Disability as a coherent group is kind of like being queer. I don't face most of the same marginalizations that, say, my gay male friends struggle with. The point of allying with them, and of learning the issues that compress other queer people besides just me, is to make us all stronger as a unit by agreeing to learn about one another and having one another's backs. That makes our own activism better, and it helps us to clarify our own thinking, too.

[capricorn-0mnikorn]

All models -- whether something physical, like a roadmap, or conceptual, like the different models of disability -- are simplifications. They are also tools, and their simplifications serve a purpose.

Having a variety of tools, and knowing their capabilities and limitations, lets you do more things.

We wouldn't have all these different models of disability without the diversity of the Disability Community.

[tietensgo]

Thoughts on the Karl Jacobs thread

Market share may be good for the company, but it’s not necessarily good for you, the customer. I think Karl could do better in being aware of these types of nuances in the future.

On Apr 4 Karl replied to the Twitch Support Twitter account with some thoughts about their announcement that they were going to implement sponsored streams on Twitch.

Karl, in a four-tweet reply thread, stressed that he was “wildly unimpressed” and called the implementation a “malicious and manipulative bandaid solution”,  arguing that Twitch should not implement sponsored streams, and should instead focus on growth and market share over profitability. This seemed odd to me, that Karl would suggest that a company as large as Twitch was misstepping by trying to do something so egregious as turn a profit. But it appeared I was in the minority, going by the overwhelmingly favorable replies and quote tweets.

So I made this post. Just to present another way of thinking about this issue :)

Is growth and market share a good thing for a company to hold? Sure, for the company. In fact, increasingly the attitude of startup companies is to ignore profits for longer and longer time periods so they can get exactly that- the lion’s share of a market/user base (think Amazon, Uber). However, we have to remember two things:

There is a real cost (money, and people) to doing business this way

The monetary debt that is racked up has to come due at /some/ point, and users often pay the price

1: The cost of growth - regular companies without large pockets are unable to compete with growth companies, going out of business and leaving all the power in the hands of a few giant corporations

Amazon notoriously operated at razor thin (to nonexistent) profit margins for years. They /purposefully/ sold their merchandise for less than it was worth, operating at a loss specifically so they could put competitors out of business. Diapers.com, Zappos, nearly Barnes & Noble, likely several others that were too small to be mentioned - competitors gone, absorbed, or maimed. Uber purposefully used introductory pricing, lowering their fees to make their inroads into the market, cannibalizing Yellow Cab. All for the sake of growth. Amazon kept its edge by copying real products from real hard working people and making rip-off versions so that they don’t have to do any development work and instead can capitalize on the success of anyone that comes along.

THIS is how growth works - get big, and get big fast, and eff the poor guy who is in the way, even if their product is /better/. (Even if their product is priced the way it is so they can afford to pay their employees!!)

And if this seems too abstract (companies compete all the time, so what?), it’s real to you - the more growth tactics put competitors out of business, the more power the few companies left will hold. And they don’t always use it well.

Have you ever tried to get a hold of Instagram or YouTube if someone falsely flags your post/video? The recommended method (known by large creators as well, even though they have representatives to help them get around it) is not to go through the company’s appeal process, it’s to go to Twitter and AT the company! Ticketmaster, which holds 70% of the ticket market, implements service fees on top of the ticket price (some which go to the venue, some which they take as profit) - and these can be pricey, but if you want to see major acts, you’re stuck!

Market share may be good for the company, but it’s not necessarily good for you. The more power a single corporation has, the less they have to pay attention to any individual customer’s needs, so you’re sol if you have issues with how they treat you - they have a million more users waiting to replace you.

2: Growth companies rack up costs that have to be paid back, and these costs are often passed on to the customer

Growth companies lose money on their products through introductory pricing, (and paying employees and buying server space and and and) but they can’t stay making no profits forever for (at least) two reasons:

a - unfavorable business conditions and

b - competitors with bigger pockets.

A - Not too long ago, a virus no one saw coming impacted the entire world, closing 700,000 businesses in the US alone. These businesses went under because they had no money. It might be ‘annoying’ that Twitch is introducing sponsored streams, but these streams bring in money to help keep the doors open in case any unforeseen events happen in the future. It’s good for Twitch to be profitable, it’s like having a savings account of funds to dip into in bad weather times.

B - Growth companies have to fight /other/ growth companies. Netflix was happy putting Blockbuster out of business... until it met Disney+ and Amazon Prime and HBO Max and and and. Twitch was happy without sponsored streams... until Kick and YouTube decided to push for streaming. These growth companies are fine making no money as long as they’re the biggest fish - they can always milk their users for money later. But the moment they find a competitor who can steal their users and put them out of business, suddenly the scramble is on for cash.

Where does the cash to keep the doors open come from? In some way, shape or form, the user generally has to pay for it. Either they do what Uber did and bring prices back up once they want to turn a profit or they do what Netflix is doing and introduce an ad-based tier/no password sharing, or they do what YouTube did and introduce ads or what Twitch is doing and kill the 70/30 split for their favorites and introduce sponsored streams - eventually all of these companies have to stop eating loses and make a plan for profitability, and that price hike or decline in the user experience will always come after (sometimes years after) they have lured in enough users with introductory rates that no one can meaningfully complain.

So what do we do? And what does this mean for what Karl tweeted?

I think we need to slow the roll with the growth tactic stuff. Profitability is not a bad word (see: Apple). It (generally) means you have a good product/service/idea and it’s selling well. What is ‘malicious and manipulative’ might actually be the way growth companies do business, putting competitors out of commission through unfair pricing. Having to turn a profit might actually force them to /compete/ in the marketplace instead of undermine it.

I think Karl is coming from a good place in trying to speak up for the users and creators of the site, who might get annoyed at having to sit through a sponsored stream or annoyed at having to do them. And that’s fair! We need that kind of advocacy, goodness knows Twitch has issues (low discoverability on the platform, for example). He talks about wanting to keep Twitch from ‘exploiting its creators’ and stop ‘massive layoffs’. That’s great! (You know what might stop massive layoffs? Profits)  But the way to do it is not, in my opinion, to subscribe to flawed business methodologies that result in the consolidation of power in the hands of a few corporations at the expense of users.

Instead.

I think what Karl could focus on is advocating that the creators and those who work at Twitch should see a larger percentage of the profits that the company makes. It might be easier to do a sponsored stream or sit through one when you know Twitch is handing over 70% of the revenue to the creator, or that Twitch is using the revenue to support well paid employees and not lay them off in hard times! I think Twitch could consider including creators in the decision making process of the platform whose influence they help to build. Honestly, I actually think Twitch should even look into whether its business model fundamentally is sound when it can be so easily replicated or poached (*ahem* Kick/YouTube *ahem* Ludwig). These are all tough questions that need to be asked.

But it’ll take time to figure them out. And I think it would be nice if Twitch gets a little bit of our support and patience in addition to our skepticism as they try to figure it out.

[tietensgo]

note: spoilers

Commentary YouTuber Pinely (notable for, for example, The MrBeast-ification of Youtube), made a new video called Logan Paul's Consumerist Dystopia which I felt kinda :/ ... about, so I wanted to talk about it here.

The video is essentially about PRIME, the energy sports drink released by Logan Paul and KSI in Jan 2022. In it, Pinely discusses a number of points that criticize Prime, including how the taste is not as good as one might be led to believe, the fact that there has been a frenzy of purchasing of the drink (like lineups and increased resale value), and the fact that the ads for the drink can be quite embedded. But I watched it and don’t think the video lived up to its claims of identifying a consumerist dystopia, and certainly not one that Logan Paul created.

I say this firstly because, dystopia is a strong word for what is happening with Prime, and secondly because, the idea that Logan Paul created a consumerist dystopia (as opposed to him merely participating in an advertising campaign) makes little sense.

Let’s take each points one by one:

The title. Logan Paul’s consumerist dystopia. He didn’t say “Logan Paul and KSI’s consumerist dystopia”, or more generally, “YouTube’s consumerist dystopia.” He alleged, in the title, that Logan Paul specifically had done something to create a dystopia (with Prime) - that’s a high bar of proof to clear. And imo, the video doesn’t clear it. Instead of giving evidence of Logan Paul masterminding a concerted plan to benefit from consumerism, as the thumbnail might suggest, the video only shows clips of Logan... advertising Prime. We see him walking around some backstage area presenting the launch of the drink, walking through a grocery store where they stock Prime, and doing his job as a promoter of a product he has launched, bigging it up to the camera. Nothing new, nothing not seen in regular commercials on TV. Hardly evidence of him creating a consumerist dystopia. But with commentary and some really brutal editing (Pinely cuts video of Logan advertising Prime with a black-and-white tv commercial), Pinely tries to equate Logan’s quite average pandering of a sports drink to the camera as evidence of his crafting of a consumerist horrorscape (this term is used here because I can’t keep saying dystopia) akin to the Truman Show. In my opinion it’s exaggeration. The worst Pinely can say about Logan’s promotion of Prime is that possibly the love and friendship that is used by Logan and KSI to promote Prime is not genuine. (Maybe they’re not actually good friends). But then Pinely himself admits he doesn’t know whether they’re friends at all, and that it doesn’t matter- they’re business partners, and they’re promoting a drink. So if it doesn’t matter, and Logan Paul did simply promoted his product, why title it Logan Paul’s consumerist dystopia? It’s clickbait at best, and at worst, it’s selectively biased - it purposefully leaves KSI out of the title because KSI, at the moment of writing, is seen in a more favorable light than Logan Paul (and people might be quicker to realize that advertising Prime is not the same as creating a dystopia because KSI is seen as quite ‘hardworking’ broadly speaking, and deserving of his success).

The public reaction. Perhaps the most memorable clips of the video are of the public, where shots are shown of people rushing stores to buy Prime or buying so much at once the drinks in total retail for ~$1000. One couple appeared to pay $300 for (or at least spend that much to get) three bottles of Prime, a value of ~$90, a practice KSI has discouraged. However, instead of the public’s reaction being evidence of consumerism (defined in this context as “The situation in which too much attention is given to buying and owning things”.), all Pinely has managed to show, in my opinion, is evidence that Prime is a trending product. In 1996, it was Tickle Me Elmo, in 2007 it was the Wii, sometimes it’s concert tickets of a popular musician, this time it’s Prime. The crowds were not driven by materialism, the love of having lots of stuff, they were driven by a simple desire to try Prime or support Logan Paul/KSI through Prime combined with a response to scarcity. In other words, desire for a product, even a strong desire, (or strong sales), does not immediately equal consumerism (more akin to the love of buying and having a lot of stuff, for its own sake). What the video shows is regular people showing their support for YouTubers in their latest merch drop or jumping on the bandwagon of trying to get a taste of an item made rare by the number of people who want it. Nothing more.

(****I discussed this with someone, who pushed back strongly on this point that a large group of people wanting something purported to be overvalued /is/ evidence of consumerism, and I want to stress here that just because /some people/ wouldn’t have paid as much for Prime doesn’t mean that it is not right for /other people/ to strongly desire the product and even be willing to pay scalped prices for it- the fact that they are being scalped is not their fault, it’s the fault of those who recognize the demand and upsell the product****)

The advertisement. Pinely argues that Prime gets outsized amounts of free advertising compared to its taste (as distinguished from the quality of the product with respect to its ability to hydrate). Prime is an energy drink that doesn’t taste particularly good, if Pinely and Gordon Ramsey are to be believed. Not bad, but... not good either, or at least not as good as the claims made in the advertising done by other YouTubers. This advertising is often unpaid and can be over-the-top, designed to grab the viewer’s attention to the point where, instead of discussion about Prime having a spot in the middle of the video somewhere as a sponsor, the drink can be the entire point of the video, amounting to something like a 9-minute ad, in the case of (Mr. Beast adjacent) Matthew Beem, complete with stunts like jumping into the Thames river (quite unsafe, as Pinely points out). However, the reason for this behavior is explained within the video, again by Pinely himself: it is not evidence of a consumerist dystopia, they are simply YouTube creators trying to pay the bills, (or, more generously, individuals trying to make money) and they know that jumping on trends accomplishes this by getting views. If the trend was giving money away, they would do it. If the trend was doing a ‘largest of’ or ‘biggest of’ video, they would do that. At that moment in time, Prime was the trend, and to piggy-back on the success of KSI and Logan Paul, Matthew Beem made a video that was completely consistent with his over-the-top style, with countless others providing reviews for the same reasons (content and views). A YouTuber making a video is hardly news, and Pinely admits that he “Doesn’t blame them” [those who jump on trends] for doing it, so... why the alarmist references to a dystopia? And how does another YouTuber (Matthew Beem) independently deciding to create a video to jump on a bandwagon for free have anything to do with Logan Paul?

TLDR; The Pinely video was framed as a type of negative review on Logan Paul and consumerism, but it didn’t provide much evidence of an issue separate from the public’s general excitement about Prime or larger than Logan Paul advertising a product. Nevertheless, the video boasted a thumbnail of a puppetmaster Logan and a title referencing a ‘consumerist dystopia.’ While generally, clips of intense reactions of the public and possibly stretched truth about the taste of Prime were shown, I think the video’s framing might need tweaking or it might not amount to much more than Pinely’s feelings that Prime was getting so much hype.

[tietensgo]

note: spoilers

As i did for Squid Game, I am going to write down my thoughts about Alice in Borderland and its ending, which I thought was lovely and satisfying, despite my initial impressions.

1. Firstly are the parallels I picked up on*, given the title and character names:

Arisu: Alice

Usagi: White Rabbit (I’m late, I’m late)

Chishiya: The Cheshire Cat

(Danma) Hatter: The Mad Hatter (and the Beach is his teaparty)

Mira: The Queen of Hearts

Kuina: The Caterpillar*

Ann: The Duchess**

*I did not note this one personally, but looked into it and it made sense, given Kuina’s bent for smoking and the transformation from caterpillar to butterfly

**Also didn’t pick up on this one, (and the connection is less obvious to me) but it’s rumoured along with several more about Arisu’s close friends Chota, Karube, and others.

2. Secondly is the unfolding of the plot:

So Season 2 was much anticipated, and was an interesting change of pace from Season 1. We’ve figured out the mechanics of the game now, the ins and outs of visas, game rules, what the suits mean, and the practicalities of the world. The focus shifted more to understanding how the world came about, who rules it, and most importantly, how to leave.

I loved the ability of the show to keep a steady pace that alternated between the mind-bending, sadistic games that still gripped in both conception and visuals (death by sulfuric acid was terrifyinnggggg I couldn’t watch it) and the middle bits, the exploration of character arcs like the romance between Arisu and Usagi, Ann’s exploration of the physical world, or the persistent questioning about the meaning of life.

3. Lastly was the ending.

I must say I initially didn’t like it. I fully appreciated the nod that was given to the most plausible theories at the beginning of the last episode: Is this time travel? Is this some sort of deep brain simulation? IS IT ALIENS??!?! This part of the Episode 8 conversation with Mira showed that the showmakers (author even?), knew that the audience’s mind had been asking these questions almost since the Moment Arisu arrived in Borderland.

Compared to all of these theories though, saying it was a rogue meteor strike was... a let down. BUT. The more I thought about it, the more I realized it could’ve been anything, tbh, that caused them to be transported, because the point is that ANY near-death experience can take you to Borderland, the space between life and death. And it brings to front and center the conversations that each person had been having thus far about the meaning of life. The hypothesis is that when the body is fighting to survive an accident of some sort in the real world, the mind is also doing a sort of ‘Systems Check’, trying to search for a reason to keep going, a purpose for which to exist. And Borderland provides a place for such a battle to take place, a limbo of sorts where people are forced to remember how precious life is and why it needs to be fought for- enough that they get shaken out of their stupor and wake up.

Of course, this is not a perfect solution. Did Chota and Karube die in Borderland because they didn’t think life was precious enough? (No.) And what happens to the physical bodies of those who choose to become citizens? (They die, eventually. Time works differently in Borderland, but even Game Runners don’t appear to live forever.) I don’t purport to have every answer. I just mean that... by all accounts, /everyone/ affected by the meteor could’ve died. (It was a meteor, which a huge explosion!) But Borderland took the consciousness? souls? of the dead people there and provided a way for /some/ of them to live.

If you look at it that way, Borderland, despite the random death games and constant terror, actually /reduces/ the number of people who die from a mass-casualty event, and, makes sure that, of those that come back to life, most of them are determined to live life to the fullest when they get back.

ALSO, in the Netflix version, we see that the last shot is of a player with a Joker card. This is expanded on a bit more in the manga, but basically he’s some sort of limbo-esque character, giving credence to the idea that Borderland is a last-chance type of world, where, if you fight hard enough, and convince enough people to try with you, and hold on to hope long enough, you can earn one last chance to be returned back to the real world and live.

TLDR; Alice in Borderland Season 2 did not pull any punches with the games, which were as visceral and heart-pounding as ever. I personally enjoyed discussing extensively with my watch-mate about how we would approach each game, and loved seeing the details of the Alice in Wonderland characters woven into the narrative so well. The ending was at first disappointing, but the more I thought about what the Borderland represented, the more appropriate the ambiguity became, and eventually I could accept Borderland for what it is: a train station between the real world and the afterlife, where people fight for the opportunity to go board the train back to the real world and live.

[azuremist]

Hey, do y’all remember how Tencent said they were developing faceID AI to identify people in riots, and then they suddenly created an AI art generator to turn your selfies into anime?

Do y’all remember that time that someone discovered facial recognition cameras couldn't see through Juggalo makeup, then Facebook had a fun “see what you'd look like with Juggalo makeup” thing, and then facial recognition cameras could suddenly see through Juggalo makeup?

Do y’all remember how, on Twitter, Elon started a tirade against artists who ask for credit when their art is reposted, and he suddenly he created one of the first big art AI programs?

Do y’all remember how AI destroyed the field of translation, despite the inferiority of the machine translations, because people didn’t care about the quality of the translations? They just wanted it done for free?

Do y’all know how companies will see a lot of money going into a New Tech Thing (like, say, AI art apps) and will jump to try and implement that New Tech Thing into their tech? For example, how it felt like every big company and celebrity had an NFT to sell?

Just wondering.

[tietensgo]

i saw the avatars on instagram and i went oh CUTE! for five seconds and then was like... but it’s made by meta... :(( and now they’ll have a representation of my effing face... i noped out of that and just felt a bit :/ afterwards. like it’s a cute idea but i don’t trust you???

[librarychair]

As much as I want to support ethical farming practices I will be buying the cheapest bag of frozen chicken thighs as much as the next frugal/poor person which is why animal welfare needs to be legislated, not left up to the invisible hand of the free market or some bullshit. Invisible hand of the free market finds itself around a lot of throats.

[emptymanuscript]

There are a lot of essays around about how economics is NOT a science. I wish I could remember the scientist who summed it up best for me (I think it was Michio Kaku but I was watching a LOT of Kaku at the time and I can’t find evidence that it was him, so I think I have to just leave it unattributed) that the fundamental problem with economics is the term: externality.

Externalities are the things outside the system that is supposedly dictating how things work but still influencing it. Economic theories, unlike theories of any scientific discipline, are not required to account for externalities.

One of the most common externalities is environmental impact and that was what set the scientist I heard off. The thing he and the economists were talking about was potential nuclear fallout from a space mission.

While not the likely outcome, there was a real potential for the mission to irradiate Earth’s atmosphere.

The scientist was arguing that the potential for the launch vehicle to explode in the higher atmosphere, which has happened - that’s not an abstract possibility, and would result in spreading the nuclear materials powering the mission through the atmosphere and over the entire planet should be accounted for in the process of risk evaluation for the mission.

The economist said that the radiation threat was just an externality. So the possibility should be ignored for risk assessment.

A risk is not a risk if it isn’t what the economist is interested in. Replace risk with factor and you have hit why calling economics the “dismal science” is only half correct. You cannot be scientific if you simply ignore the parts you don’t like.

The factors put in and left out of economic theory make it bs even where it’s correct, the same as a broken clock is not fixed in the moments that it is correct.

The biggest load of bs that economists, and non-economists trying to use economic theory to justify themselves, have been trying to foist off on humanity like it’s perfumed gold for decades in spite of ample proof to the contrary is the idea that selfish individual action results in mass beneficial action.

The most famous real life example of this is trickle down economics but understand that is simply an example. It is based on the underlying idea that if everyone does what is best for themselves it will result, miraculously, in everything evening out to be the best outcome for everybody. This is the idea championed by all of Ayn Rand’s heroes and skewered by the game Bioshock. The extremely well known effects of the Tragedy of the Commons, that any economist will be happy to explain to you like you’re an idiot, are externalities.

The idea that the best possible choice for an individual will inevitably lead to the best possible outcome for everyone is the root of the justification for deregulation as a political policy. Somehow, via the great chain, a business cutting corners to provide cheaper, less safe food so they can increase their profit margin and an underpaid consumer buying the cheapest possible product so that they CAN have a chance at making ends meet will result in everyone being better off.

And for anyone who will decide that that is a consumer choice and an issue of personal responsibility, I will remind them now that such things as morality and long term thinking are externalities.

[elodieunderglass]

Probably the starkest way to talk about this is American fishing industries.

Perhaps you are an American who is upset about environmental damage and the impact of eating fish. You decide not to eat fish. You remove your $5/month from the system.

Now, here’s where the path forks. If you’re personally changing your consumption habits because knowing what you know about fish has made eating fish unpleasant for you, then it is a complete sentence. That’s one of the best possible reasons to do anything, and may fortune follow your endeavour.

But let’s say you’re changing your consumption habits as part of your plan to SAVE THE WORLD. it is patently obvious that this action won’t save the world, but you feel that “if everyone did it” the world would be saved. In fact, you’re planning to go one step further than virtually anyone else, and as a result of some truly game-changing campaigning and devoting your tremendous talents to this one cause, you have successfully convinced so many people to join you in this behavioral change that you’ve removed $10,000 a month from the fish-buying system. Holy cow, that must be materially saving the world a little bit, right? How shall we quantify this impact? how many fishy lives have we saved with this? How healthy is the ocean getting?? This is pushing the needle in the right direction, right??

Well, in the case of the American fishing industry… no. The American fishing industry made $165 billion in commercial sales in 2019, which means about thirteen billion seven hundred and fifty million dollars a month, which means that it can absorb a change of -10,000 spent in grocery stores without noticing - no Congressman is going to pound his fist on the desk and say “by Jove, the People have changed their minds about fish!” when it’s about the same impact as a freezer in a supermarket breaking down - but honestly, we knew that, what about PUSHING THE NEEDLE IN THE RIGHT DIRECTION? HOW ELSE CAN WE COMBAT OVERFISHING APART FROM BUYING LESS FISH? It feels so goddamn obvious that it HAS to be the path forward! This is the way, guys, let’s try to make it $100,000 and THEN we’ll make a difference -

The most depressing externality here is subsidies. The American government directly subsidizes the American fishing industry to the tune of about $35 billion per year*. Of those, environmental groups estimate that over half of them are actively harmful. In addition to distorting The Economy, these “harmful” subsidies actively encourage increased fishing, support commercial enterprises to take risks, practice damaging behavior, or to simply stay in business when they’re no longer profitable.

* this takes into account a lot of factors, some seemingly innocuous, like state sales tax exemptions on fishing vessels, direct disaster aid payments to businesses, and marketing programs to support the industry and increase sales. Others are the result of quite specific lobbying, like the Fishermen’s Contingency Fund, where the American federal government pays out cash to commercial fishermen inconvenienced by oil and gas works - or the Surplus Fish Buyback programs… which purchase unwanted fish cheaply to put in school lunches. The combinations of direct/indirect payments, encouragements and programmes exist to keep American fishing exactly how it is.

This system means that whatever money you choose to withhold from this machine, the machine simply takes from you. You’re locking your $5 in your wallet to save a fishy life: the industry simply takes $5 from your taxes and kills 10 fish with it. You can’t “hurt a system in the profit” or “hit them in the wallet” or “vote with your dollar” when the machine is designed to extract your money regardless of blips, blips like “you not personally handing them your grocery money.” You’re going to change America’s minds about fish by Going Viral? Your tax dollars fund marketing programs to cancel out that impact. You’re hoping that rising fuel costs and climate-change-storms will make it less attractive to send boats out? Not in a subsidised economy, they don’t - it allows the industry to be disconnected from the market! What about if eVeRyOne did it - if we just scaled it bigger and managed to get 2% of fish-buyers to stop, or something? Well, the government already buys extra/unwanted fish for food programmes like school lunches or federal aid - you’d definitely instantly see more Mandatory Bargain Price Fish Meals being fed in schools, the military, state-owned care facilities, etc. But who knows how many heads the hydra might sprout to defend itself? If a $165billion/year industry backed by $35billion of government encouragement doesn’t want to stop, then it won’t. It is not part of the same market conditions that you are.

The point here is that it’s tempting to think of The Economy as something that notices you. It seems clear and obvious that “the solution to overfishing” would be “not eating fish.” And in a simplified market-led economic system it would probably be the case. You simply do not buy the fish, the supermarket sadly throws it away and tells the fisherman, and the fisherman counts up his dollars, checks the buzz on social media, and decides to run ecological whale-watches from his boat instead; the fishy lives are saved. But we don’t even live in a fantasy approximation of that system. Many parts of The Economy are completely artificial, and the machine is designed to resist market pressure. So the beguiling idea of “not feeding the machine” is easy to repeat! but ultimately it does not stop the behavior of the machine.

Solutions to stopping the machine do exist. It’s a human-made thing. You can break it, replace it, change its parameters, reduce its size, take away its nozzle for feeding itself by extracting cash from your back pocket, send it to China, stop it from emigrating to China, or bully it as much as you like. You can put it in a cage with a sustainable amount of food and tell it that it may make a sustainable amount of profit. You can paint it green and call it Eco. You can destroy its batteries, or install it with a solar panel, or adopt it out to a commune of low-income women. You can make the machine illegal. You can wait for another nation to kill it. You can kill it yourself. You can continue your stop-eating-fish campaign to fund ways to attack the machine. You can get many people together to put pressure on the machine. You can wait for it to run out of food.

But you need a bigger plan than “not feeding it,” and above all, you must not pretend that it doesn’t exist. And if you want its impact changed - if you want there to be more fish in the ocean - then you can’t get there by buying/not buying fish; you have to get there by addressing the very real machine.

[purronronner]

Tangential fun fact! The Tragedy of the Commons is a myth popularized by Garrett Hardin, a eugenicist in the 60’s. In the article he published on the subject, he defined the term using a hypothetical scenario: a peasant community who collectively share common land for all their cattle to graze on, where each peasant keeps increasing their herd size for their own gain, ultimately resulting in the land being overgrazed and the system collapsing.

This is not what actually happened. In reality, commons systems were sustained for centuries. Communities would regulate themselves, and moreover nonstop growth wouldn’t be feasible or desirable for your average herder—the logistics just don’t support it. The actual historical downfall of the commons came from wealthy landowners and nobles encroaching on the commons and privatizing the land so it could no longer be used communally.

And you know what the eugenicist author used this ahistorical hypothetical he created to argue for, in the main thrust of the paper? You guessed it, eugenics! The 1968 paper “The Tragedy of the Commons” is about how overpopulation is just like the (fictional) commons problem, and how the only way to fix things is to let poor children starve to death. No, really, he says so explicitly. Go read it for yourself if you like.

https://www.hendrix.edu/uploadedFiles/Admission/GarrettHardinArticle.pdf

The real problem is capitalism and those who support it, not fundamental human nature.

[renthony]

If the HBO Max shitshow teaches us anything at all, it should be that when it comes to streaming media, media piracy is media preservation.

Physical media is harder to erase. Download your favorite animated shows today. Burn that shit to DVD and share it with your friends. If the corporations won't produce physical media, it's up to us to do it ourselves.

Streaming exclusives are the enemy of media preservation and archiving. Nothing should be lost just because corporations don't respect the art they own. When piracy is the only option, it becomes vital to pirate, lest things get lost forever.

There are instances of lost media being found again because someone home-taped it. The torrent you seed, the episodes you download, could one day be the only reason your favorite streaming show wasn't lost forever.

Art is being destroyed. Workers are being exploited and abused. And at the end of it all, what's there to show for it? Nothing, because HBO Max is setting the precedent that you can just delete whatever you want, whenever you want, and not even tell the artists.

Animation workers aren't being respected as artists OR as workers, and shit like this is a perfect example.

[starlightomatic]

i think its gross and bad and inexcusable that the cdc says you can end quarantine after day 5 of covid. omicron infections last 8-10 days on average. day 4-5 is the peak. it's just fully not okay for covid-positive people to be wandering around and working and infecting others. im not blaming the people who don't have a choice but to follow it. i don't want you to get fired. this one is on your employers and on the cdc for giving shitty ass guidance that is not based in science but rather based on the fact that last winter's covid wave was so severe that they were worried that if we let people quarantine until they tested negative that we wouldn't have enough of a workforce to run society. regardless of the validity of that we are not at that point right now.

otherwise reasonable people are following this guidance and it's really upsetting to see. people close to me have gone to coffee with their friends or voluntarily back to work while actively covid-positive because they diligently looked up the cdc guidance and that's what it said.

im just so fucking tired.

[tietensgo]

six days after Delta airlines informed the cdc about an employee shortage and wanting their employees back, the cdc quickly came to an unrelated consensus that the number of days of quarantine should be shortened to 5 days

[tomhardysteeth]

Anyway this Twitter thread by NK Jemisin is all I care about

[bitegore]

[id: a twitter thread by N. K. Jemisin @ nkjemisin.

“A late-afternoon revision-mode thought. People ask me sometimes why I’m so *blatant* re racism and other bigotries, in my fiction. Wouldn’t a more subtle approach work?

Answer: No. A more subtle approach wouldn’t work.

SFF does subtle coverage of bigotry all the time, actually. Allegories all over the place, especially in secondary worlds. And probably because of that, readers who are fluent in SFF are used to separating real-world bigotry from its fantastic (or futuristic) counterpart.

Which is precisely how we ended up with a genre that, for most of my life, thought of itself as anti-racist. Look at all the allegories! Meanwhile no black characters. Few writers, editors, etc, of color. Open bigots everywhere.

Allegory does not reinforce reality. It obscures it.

That is, allegory allows readers who are uncomfortable with a topic to engage with that topic in a more comfortable space – away from reality. Scared of black people? Maybe you’ll empathize with these green people on Mars. Freaked out by the mentally ill? Make ‘em psychic.

And as a first step in desensitization, for people who’ve developed a pathological level of discomfort – which our racist, classist, sexist etc society encourages – that’s great! Except… most people stop there. Pat themselves on the back for coming so far. Go no farther.

Like, it’s awesome that you also think Dragon Age 2, a game about a penniless refugee who beomces a heroine, is the best game writing out there! Me, too! But you voted Trump or Brexit because fuck refugees/immigrants?

[A photo of a cat staring at the camera intensely]

But because it was the Done Thing for so long, allegorical engagement became standard in the genre… obscuring the reality that SFF had become nearly as old, white and male as a GOP convention, and just as defensive re its privilege. Overt engagement was, is, treated as gauche.

This isn’t just a genre thing. American society *loves* to pull this shit. Cf. Our media’s endless list of words to use instead of racism – racial tension, race-based bias, etc. Can’t say racism! That’s too far. How uncivil.

Reminder: calls for civility reinforce the status quo. They are a way of saying “Mm yeah you can mention X, but don’t you dare press for actual change!” Which *is* what anyone who mentions (say) the existence of racism, in a racist society, is doing. Naming it helps shame it.

Writing prominent characters who are members of marginalized groups, describing realistic examples of bigotry, and *calling* it bigotry when it appears, all can serve the same purpose, in fiction. But it’s going to feel uncivilized to some readers.

(This is apart from the matter of how to do it *well*. When just mentioning a topic, or a group, feels like a slap in the face to some readers – which it will, bc civility – then how do you slap gracefully? A little backhand, just a twist of the wrist? Practice your swing.)

Sometimes you gotta be uncivilized, when you live and write within a civilization built on bigotry. If it helps, remember that *you* weren’t the one who created this civilization… but you can help fix it.

So include green people…but also include black people. Make your character a refugee, and give them an indigenous Mexican name. Flex pronouns for your NB characters. When your characters are bigots, have somebody or the narrative *call* them bigots.

You cannot trust your audience to just figure that ish out. Some of them will, because they’ve lived it or learned better. Many will not, because they have been trained, by life and by fiction, to see only the “polite” obscuration, and to regard realism as separate and vulgar.

Nothing can fix that except us writers. Only way to move the Overton Window on what feels normal in fiction is to set your feet and shove. Rudely, if you must.

end id]

[apas-95]

ALT

ALT

ALT

To put the US position more directly: “Almost everyone is going to get COVID [...] we have the tools to ensure that people [...] work.”

[subtextsays]

Bad article is bad and disingenuous. It mentions the current highly contagious strain but does not touch on the reason for its transmissibility: namely that Onicron BA.5 doesn't give a shit if you're vaccinated or boosted or have some natural immunity from a previous infection. Earlier talk of "herd immunity" is out the window because this mutant mofo is so good at immune system infiltration. Which leaves prevention measures like masking and social distancing, and we know how well the antivaxx pissbabies handled that the first time around.

How to protect yourself from COVID subvariant BA.5

BA.5 is the most easily transmissible COVID variant to date, able to evade previous immunity from COVID infection and vaccination. As of las

[apas-95]

That... changes literally nothing. What the fuck are you talking about?

The government coming out and openly saying that they plan for everyone to be infected with Covid, and refuse to do anything about it - even literally just fucking mask mandates - isn't somehow excused by a lack of effective vaccines. It wasn't acceptable at the start of the pandemic, and it isn't now.

'Herd immunity' was always a bullshit strategy - we've known, firstly, that there's no real lasting immunity to Covid, from since the first vaccines were developed; and, additionally, 'allow the virus to spread unchecked through a vaccinated population' is the exact course of action you'd take if you wanted to generate vaccine-resistant variants as fast as possible.

The only measure that has ever actually shown any effect has been lockdowns - actual lockdowns, not the 'you need to go to work, but please don't go out afterwards - also Starbucks is a critical industry' half-measures the west has had. The west refuses to have any actual lockdowns, because lockdowns sacrifice the economic performance of businesses in order to save lives. While other countries kept people at home and delivered free food, the richest country on Earth somehow couldn't even give people more than $1200 to live off for two years? There's nothing stopping them from doing something about the pandemic. The ruling class simply doesn't care about workers dying if it cuts into their profits.

What has gotten into you people? You see a criticism of Biden and you immediately start grasping at straws (that the article doesn't mention why a new virus variant is transmissible?) and, satisfied you've found a reason to not have to actually think about the issue, you declare that everyone else is either some disingenuous liar, trying to trick you, or 'lacks critical thinking'.

[tietensgo]

:((((((((

i don’t want to draw wild conclusions or be alarmist. but when fauci said ‘as many as possible back to work’ in the midst of omicron in Dec’21 I said these people have given up...

And who is next to her when she says it?? Dr. Jha omgggggg of course it was him i said it i said it :((((((

i don’t want to be right... (be warned the readmore is long)

TLDR; The post, the graph especially, explained where the 5 days comes from and gave context to the CDC announcement. It seems like the new recommendation was motivated by a desire to prevent unnecessary work suspension for people in essential working positions (hospitals, flight attendants, wastewater treatment, etc) due to rules about isolation. But the timing/motivation, to get people back to work in the midst of a Covid surge, makes me feel like the emphasis has moved from trying to stop individuals from spreading Covid in the first place to accepting that Covid is here and working through it (likely to the benefit of economic interests), instead. The conversation is shifting.

[wack-ashimself]

[19b-archive-deactivated20250525]

Every time I read fandom posts about fictional characters 'deserving' things I'm struck by how culturally Christian ya'll are without realizing it

[19b-archive-deactivated20250525]

Your critical analysis skills won't improve until you understand that characters are tools in a story and applying real life morality to them does not lead to good writing. Does a villain 'deserve' redemption? Who cares? I want to know if it would support the story's message. Does a tragic character 'deserve' better? That doesn't matter. Did their death serve as a satisfying end to their arc? Did it impact the greater narrative in a positive way?