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sobbing and crying at the woman who stole a meth addicted kitten from her dealer and then she and the kitten got clean together

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Reblogging would be a great help, but don’t feel pressured to

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can I get a job as an editor but the only thing I do is correct when someone uses the word "prone" when they mean "supine"

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sometimes i wish i had facial hair

like sexy stubble or something that would be so cool

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I think adults need summer vacation. Like let's just close down all our jobs for three months and play outside. Please. I'm so tired.

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Amazon illegally interferes with an historic UK warehouse election

I'm in to TARTU, ESTONIA! Overcoming the Enshittocene (Monday, May 8, 6PM, Prima Vista Literary Festival keynote, University of Tartu Library, Struwe 1). AI, copyright and creative workers' labor rights (May 10, 8AM: Science Fiction Research Association talk, Institute of Foreign Languages and Cultures building, Lossi 3, lobby). A talk for hackers on seizing the means of computation (May 10, 3PM, University of Tartu Delta Centre, Narva 18, room 1037).

Amazon is very good at everything it does, including being very bad at the things it doesn't want to do. Take signing up for Prime: nothing could be simpler. The company has built a greased slide from Prime-curiosity to Prime-confirmed that is the envy of every UX designer.

But unsubscribing from Prime? That's a fucking nightmare. Somehow the company that can easily figure out how to sign up for a service is totally baffled when it comes to making it just as easy to leave. Now, there's two possibilities here: either Amazon's UX competence is a kind of erratic freak tide that sweeps in at unpredictable intervals and hits these unbelievable high-water marks, or the company just doesn't want to let you leave.

To investigate this question, let's consider a parallel: Black Flag's Roach Motel. This is an icon of American design, a little brown cardboard box that is saturated in irresistibly delicious (to cockroaches, at least) pheromones. These powerful scents make it admirably easy for all the roaches in your home to locate your Roach Motel and enter it.

But the interior of the Roach Motel is also coated in a sticky glue. Once roaches enter the motel, their legs and bodies brush up against this glue and become hopeless mired in it. A roach can't leave – not without tearing off its own legs.

It's possible that Black Flag made a mistake here. Maybe they wanted to make it just as easy for a roach to leave as it is to enter. If that seems improbable to you, well, you're right. We don't even have to speculate, we can just refer to Black Flag's slogan for Roach Motel: "Roaches check in, but they don't check out."

It's intentional, and we know that because they told us so.

Back to Amazon and Prime. Was it some oversight that cause the company make it so marvelously painless to sign up for Prime, but such a titanic pain in the ass to leave? Again, no speculation is required, because Amazon's executives exchanged a mountain of internal memos in which this is identified as a deliberate strategy, by which they deliberately chose to trick people into signing up for Prime and then hid the means of leaving Prime. Prime is a Roach Motel: users check in, but they don't check out:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/03/big-tech-cant-stop-telling-on-itself/

When it benefits Amazon, they are obsessive – "relentless" (Bezos's original for the company) – about user friendliness. They value ease of use so highly that they even patented "one click checkout" – the incredibly obvious idea that a company that stores your shipping address and credit card could let you buy something with a single click:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1-Click#Patent

But when it benefits Amazon to place obstacles in our way, they are even more relentless in inventing new forms of fuckery, spiteful little landmines they strew in our path. Just look at how Amazon deals with unionization efforts in its warehouses.

Amazon's relentless union-busting spans a wide diversity of tactics. On the one hand, they cook up media narratives to smear organizers, invoking racist dog-whistles to discredit workers who want a better deal:

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2020/apr/02/amazon-chris-smalls-smart-articulate-leaked-memo

On the other hand, they collude with federal agencies to make workers afraid that their secret ballots will be visible to their bosses, exposing them to retaliation:

https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/amazon-violated-labor-law-alabama-union-election-labor-official-finds-rcna1582

They hold Cultural Revolution-style forced indoctrination meetings where they illegally threaten workers with punishment for voting in favor of their union:

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/31/business/economy/amazon-union-staten-island-nlrb.html

And they fire Amazon tech workers who express solidarity with warehouse workers:

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/amazon-fires-tech-employees-workers-criticism-warehouse-climate-policies/

But all this is high-touch, labor-intensive fuckery. Amazon, as we know, loves automation, and so it automates much of its union-busting: for example, it created an employee chat app that refused to deliver any message containing words like "fairness" or "grievance":

https://pluralistic.net/2022/04/05/doubleplusrelentless/#quackspeak

Amazon also invents implausible corporate fictions that allow it to terminate entire sections of its workforce for trying to unionize, by maintaining the tormented pretense that these workers, who wear Amazon uniforms, drive Amazon trucks, deliver Amazon packages, and are tracked by Amazon down to the movements of their eyeballs, are, in fact, not Amazon employees:

https://www.wired.com/story/his-drivers-unionized-then-amazon-tried-to-terminate-his-contract/

These workers have plenty of cause to want to unionize. Amazon warehouses are sources of grueling torment. Take "megacycling," a ten-hour shift that runs from 1:20AM to 11:50AM that workers are plunged into without warning or the right to refuse. This isn't just a night shift – it's a night shift that makes it impossible to care for your children or maintain any kind of normal life.

Then there's Jeff Bezos's war on his workers' kidneys. Amazon warehouse workers and drivers notoriously have to pee in bottles, because they are monitored by algorithms that dock their pay for taking bathroom breaks. The road to Amazon's warehouse in Coventry, England is littered with sealed bottles of driver piss, defenestrated by drivers before they reach the depot inspection site.

There's so much piss on the side of the Coventry road that the prankster Oobah Butler was able to collect it, decant it into bottles, and market it on Amazon as an energy beverage called "Bitter Lemon Release Energy," where it briefly became Amazon's bestselling energy drink:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/20/release-energy/#the-bitterest-lemon

(Butler promises that he didn't actually ship any bottled piss to people who weren't in on the gag – but let's just pause here and note how weird it is that a guy who hates our kidneys as much as Jeff Bezos built and flies a penis-shaped rocket.)

Butler also secretly joined the surge of 1,000 workers that Amazon hired for the Coventry warehouse in advance of a union vote, with the hope of diluting the yes side of that vote and forestall the union. Amazon displayed more of its famously selective competence here, spotting Butler and firing him in short order, while totally failing to notice that he was marketing bottles of driver piss as a bitter lemon drink on Amazon's retail platform.

After a long fight, Amazon's Coventry workers are finally getting their union vote, thanks to the GMB union's hard fought battle at the Central Arbitration Committee:

https://www.foxglove.org.uk/2024/04/26/amazon-warehouse-workers-in-coventry-will-vote-on-trade-union-recognition/

And right on schedule, Amazon has once again discovered its incredible facility for ease-of-use. The company has blanketed its shop floor with radioactively illegal "one click to quit the union" QR codes. When a worker aims their phones at the code and clicks the link, the system auto-generates a letter resigning the worker from their union.

As noted, this is totally illegal. English law bans employers from "making an offer to an employee for the sole or main purpose of inducing workers not to be members of an independent trade union, take part in its activities, or make use of its services."

Now, legal or not, this may strike you as a benign intervention on Amazon's part. Why shouldn't it be easy for workers to choose how they are represented in their workplaces? But the one-click system is only half of Amazon's illegal union-busting: the other half is delivered by its managers, who have cornered workers on the shop floor and ordered them to quit their union, threatening them with workplace retaliation if they don't.

This is in addition to more forced "captive audience" meetings where workers are bombarded with lies about what life in an union shop is like.

Again, the contrast couldn't be more stark. If you want to quit a union, Amazon makes this as easy as joining Prime. But if you want to join a union, Amazon makes that even harder than quitting Prime. Amazon has the same attitude to its workers and its customers: they see us all as a resource to be extracted, and have no qualms about tricking or even intimidating us into doing what's best for Amazon, at the expense of our own interests.

The campaigning law-firm Foxglove is representing five of Amazon's Coventry workers. They're doing the lord's work:

https://www.foxglove.org.uk/2024/05/02/legal-challenge-to-amazon-uks-new-one-click-to-quit-the-union-tool/

All this highlights the increasing divergence between the UK and the US when it comes to labor rights. Under the Biden Administration, @NLRB General Counsel Jennifer Abruzzo has promulgated a rule that grants a union automatic recognition if the boss does anything to interfere with a union election:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/06/goons-ginks-and-company-finks/#if-blood-be-the-price-of-your-cursed-wealth

In other words, if Amazon tries these tactics in the USA now, their union will be immediately recognized. Abruzzo has installed an ultra-sensitive tilt-sensor in America's union elections, and if Bezos or his class allies so much as sneeze in the direction of their workers' democratic rights, they automatically lose.

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

https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/06/one-click-to-quit-the-union/#foxglove

Image: Isabela.Zanella (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Ballot-box-2.jpg

CC BY-SA 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/deed.en

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Ok wait let her speak

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you came back wrong and i am racked with guilt because i cannot bear to see you like this and i should have let you rest. i loved you so much that i defied death itself but i do not think either of us are happy

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where the hell are my pneumatic tubes this is not the future jules verne promised

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Florence + the Machine heritage post. Literally like this should be required reading for all of their fans it's so iconic

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Yosuke Ohnishi, jca annual 4 (1982)

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so one thing that intrigues me about mdzs is its preoccupation with, like, idk what to call it, multiplicity of character? several major characters are defined by having two or more apparently incongruous sides to them, aspects of their character that shouldn’t be able to coexist in one person. and those characters all present different ways of embodying and managing these conflicting aspects.

for wei wuxian it’s partly centered around the discrepancy between his reputation as the evil yiling patriarch and the perpetually smiling jiang sect disciple of his youth. after his resurrection, there’s the added complication of now having a second body, a literal second face, but interestingly, this is the point at which wwx can integrate the two sides of his personality into one, allowing him to actually live a happy life. he can embrace his darkness without it snuffing out his light. it’s almost like the physical separation from his past self allows him to put the pieces back together.

lan wangji, on the other hand, is all about separation, seclusion, and isolation. he is principled, disciplined, and respected, icy and righteous. he also repeatedly breaks rules, blurring the lines between right and wrong, and is very passionate and loving. in his relationship with wei wuxian, he is extremely gentle and protective and giving. he also enjoys violent rape fantasies. for him, there is a very strict division between these two sides, and i think that’s something that ties in with the forehead ribbon, where restraint and abandon are separated by a thin piece of cloth, but they remain firmly separate.

the fun thing about jin guangyao is that all his faces, and there are many, seem equally convincing as his real face. and in the end, we can’t really know when he is lying and when he isn’t or what is genuine and what isn’t. and it seems possible that most if not all of it is genuine, within its context, seen from a certain light. he is both innocent victim and horrible criminal, extremely skilled and incompetent, respected and looked down upon. he is very kind to those who are kind to him, and horrifyingly vicious to those who are in his way. completely devoid of emotion and very sensitive. he is just like, duality gone wild and used as a weapon. he will be whatever you need him to be, and it’s unclear if there’s anything left underneath that.

and then we have nie huaisang, the head shaker, who knows nothing, who faints at the first sign of trouble and prefers his pretty fan to the saber. who has patiently and covertly orchestrated the entire plot of the book without literally anyone being any the wiser.

i don’t really have a bigger point, but it’s a prominent theme of the novel that doesn’t seem to get a lot of attention. and i think it’s a crucial underpinning of the bigger theme of rumors and unreliable narration and the impossibility of knowing anything outside one’s direct experience.

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And finally: the one I've been waiting for, the young man whose face leapt into my mind's eye when I read @romanceyourdemons's wonderful idea about SVSSS as an American nineties TV series and led me to draw all this, your blorbo and mine: Winter Mississippi, and the useless fake silver crucifix his adoptive mother gave him.

And yes, his cutie mark is an inverted cross. He's a demon!

Notes on the supporting cast:

Pablo Escobar was still kicking around in the early nineties, and I knew I wanted the Heavenly Demons to be narcos, in conflict with the USA armed force cultivators. Huan Hua Palace's shady vibe works especially well with the CIA.

"Old Palace Master" is actually a great spy handler codename, but I was not about to give a black character a boss called "Master." I mean, you could do it in a fic. I can think of three authors just off the top of my head who I would trust to sensitively explore the hideous resonance that would give to the way Su Xiyan was abused and exploited by the OPM. But I'm not a good writer with a lot of prose to work with, I'm just a mid artist with one panel and most of it is taken up by a horny joke. I just said no.

My favorite joke in this whole thing is that the Heavenly Demons are named Jesus and Lover-of-God.

Tried to capture that devoted gege-spitting wet cat dynamic between YQY and the Original Goods.

Shen Yuan pre-novel is such a cipher. I understand that the general consensus is that he died at about around 20, but…that's not the impression I got when I read SVSSS, actually. I get it now, but when he says something about not having gotten laid for twenty years: to be honest, I read that, and assumed he was, you know, 35 minimum, and having the mother of all dry spells.

And I think it makes the story better. A twenty year old wasting his time in his mom's basement reading crap webnovels and yelling on the forums: that's just a kid having a less than maximally productive gap year! He might well have had a stellar career of his own in real life eventually! It's not super surprising that he blossomed on Qing Jing Peak! But a thirty-five year old incel NEET angrily posting in that basement….that's a man who has had something go wrong in his life. I'm not saying you can't turn it around at thirty-five, you absolutely can, but I tell you: it's harder. Something is wrong, mentally or physically or both, and in a way that leaves a mark. Fifteen years are gone. Opportunites have passed that will not return. For that guy to be handed the responsibility of Shen Qingqiu's life, and do such a goddamn virtuoso job of turning it around: that is some bestselling-loveseat-level portrayal of how a different context could pull radically different capabilities out of a person. That makes SVSSS just as much about how the PIDW!world transformed Shen Yuan, and for the better, as it is about how Shen Yuan transformed Luo Binghe and his world. And that's a better story.

It does make the relationship age gap more disturbing - but if you weren't here for disturbing relationships, what are you doing reading SVSSS?

The cell phones are of course terribly anachronistic, but here's the thing - there is no equivalent, and there's no story without it. There is no Peerless Cucumber yelling at the frustrated PIDW author for hacking out the 6000th boring papapa scene, without creators being financially dependent on direct contact and support from their fans in a way that just didn't exist in the nineties. I remember how novel and exciting it was that J. Michael Straczynski hung out on rec.arts.sf.tv.babylon5; he absolutely did not have to. Eventually I decided that The Demon Heart of Winter Mississippi was, somehow, a nineties TV show about the 2010s, and everyone could have their phones. You know Minnie Liu is writing RPF on hers.

In case any of these weren't clear:

Demon Heart = Xin Mo Winter Mississippi = Luo Binghe (from @romanceyourdemons) "Don" Teófilo Lanza = Tianlang-Jun Chucho Lanza = Zhuzhi-Lang Sue Sheehan = Su Xiyan Codename: OPM = Old Palace Master Saul Czerniak = Shang Qinghua Wally Shen = Shen Yuan/Shen Qingqiu Julius Shen = Shen Jiu/Shen Qingqiu Adam Montague = Yue Qingyuan Helmut von Nordwüste = Mobei-Jun (from @romanceyourdemons) Shelley Howe = Sha Hualing Minnie Liu = Liu Mingyan Max Liu = Liu Qingge Néné Young = Ning Yingying Michael Ventola = Ming Fan

Fun game: guess whose likenesses I used for reference for all these characters!