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mostlysignssomeportents · 6 months

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“If buying isn’t owning, piracy isn’t stealing”

20 years ago, I got in a (friendly) public spat with Chris Anderson, who was then the editor in chief of Wired. I'd publicly noted my disappointment with glowing Wired reviews of DRM-encumbered digital devices, prompting Anderson to call me unrealistic for expecting the magazine to condemn gadgets for their DRM:

https://longtail.typepad.com/the_long_tail/2004/12/is_drm_evil.html

I replied in public, telling him that he'd misunderstood. This wasn't an issue of ideological purity – it was about good reviewing practice. Wired was telling readers to buy a product because it had features x, y and z, but at any time in the future, without warning, without recourse, the vendor could switch off any of those features:

https://memex.craphound.com/2004/12/29/cory-responds-to-wired-editor-on-drm/

I proposed that all Wired endorsements for DRM-encumbered products should come with this disclaimer:

WARNING: THIS DEVICE’S FEATURES ARE SUBJECT TO REVOCATION WITHOUT NOTICE, ACCORDING TO TERMS SET OUT IN SECRET NEGOTIATIONS. YOUR INVESTMENT IS CONTINGENT ON THE GOODWILL OF THE WORLD’S MOST PARANOID, TECHNOPHOBIC ENTERTAINMENT EXECS. THIS DEVICE AND DEVICES LIKE IT ARE TYPICALLY USED TO CHARGE YOU FOR THINGS YOU USED TO GET FOR FREE — BE SURE TO FACTOR IN THE PRICE OF BUYING ALL YOUR MEDIA OVER AND OVER AGAIN. AT NO TIME IN HISTORY HAS ANY ENTERTAINMENT COMPANY GOTTEN A SWEET DEAL LIKE THIS FROM THE ELECTRONICS PEOPLE, BUT THIS TIME THEY’RE GETTING A TOTAL WALK. HERE, PUT THIS IN YOUR MOUTH, IT’LL MUFFLE YOUR WHIMPERS.

Wired didn't take me up on this suggestion.

But I was right. The ability to change features, prices, and availability of things you've already paid for is a powerful temptation to corporations. Inkjet printers were always a sleazy business, but once these printers got directly connected to the internet, companies like HP started pushing out "security updates" that modified your printer to make it reject the third-party ink you'd paid for:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/11/ink-stained-wretches-battle-soul-digital-freedom-taking-place-inside-your-printer

Now, this scam wouldn't work if you could just put things back the way they were before the "update," which is where the DRM comes in. A thicket of IP laws make reverse-engineering DRM-encumbered products into a felony. Combine always-on network access with indiscriminate criminalization of user modification, and the enshittification will follow, as surely as night follows day.

This is the root of all the right to repair shenanigans. Sure, companies withhold access to diagnostic codes and parts, but codes can be extracted and parts can be cloned. The real teeth in blocking repair comes from the law, not the tech. The company that makes McDonald's wildly unreliable McFlurry machines makes a fortune charging franchisees to fix these eternally broken appliances. When a third party threatened this racket by reverse-engineering the DRM that blocked independent repair, they got buried in legal threats:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/20/euthanize-rentier-enablers/#cold-war

Everybody loves this racket. In Poland, a team of security researchers at the OhMyHack conference just presented their teardown of the anti-repair features in NEWAG Impuls locomotives. NEWAG boobytrapped their trains to try and detect if they've been independently serviced, and to respond to any unauthorized repairs by bricking themselves:

https://mamot.fr/@[email protected]/111528162905209453

Poland is part of the EU, meaning that they are required to uphold the provisions of the 2001 EU Copyright Directive, including Article 6, which bans this kind of reverse-engineering. The researchers are planning to present their work again at the Chaos Communications Congress in Hamburg this month – Germany is also a party to the EUCD. The threat to researchers from presenting this work is real – but so is the threat to conferences that host them:

https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/researchers-face-legal-threats-over-sdmi-hack/

20 years ago, Chris Anderson told me that it was unrealistic to expect tech companies to refuse demands for DRM from the entertainment companies whose media they hoped to play. My argument – then and now – was that any tech company that sells you a gadget that can have its features revoked is defrauding you. You're paying for x, y and z – and if they are contractually required to remove x and y on demand, they are selling you something that you can't rely on, without making that clear to you.

But it's worse than that. When a tech company designs a device for remote, irreversible, nonconsensual downgrades, they invite both external and internal parties to demand those downgrades. Like Pavel Chekov says, a phaser on the bridge in Act I is going to go off by Act III. Selling a product that can be remotely, irreversibly, nonconsensually downgraded inevitably results in the worst person at the product-planning meeting proposing to do so. The fact that there are no penalties for doing so makes it impossible for the better people in that meeting to win the ensuing argument, leading to the moral injury of seeing a product you care about reduced to a pile of shit:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/11/25/moral-injury/#enshittification

But even if everyone at that table is a swell egg who wouldn't dream of enshittifying the product, the existence of a remote, irreversible, nonconsensual downgrade feature makes the product vulnerable to external actors who will demand that it be used. Back in 2022, Adobe informed its customers that it had lost its deal to include Pantone colors in Photoshop, Illustrator and other "software as a service" packages. As a result, users would now have to start paying a monthly fee to see their own, completed images. Fail to pay the fee and all the Pantone-coded pixels in your artwork would just show up as black:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/10/28/fade-to-black/#trust-the-process

Adobe blamed this on Pantone, and there was lots of speculation about what had happened. Had Pantone jacked up its price to Adobe, so Adobe passed the price on to its users in the hopes of embarrassing Pantone? Who knows? Who can know? That's the point: you invested in Photoshop, you spent money and time creating images with it, but you have no way to know whether or how you'll be able to access those images in the future. Those terms can change at any time, and if you don't like it, you can go fuck yourself.

These companies are all run by CEOs who got their MBAs at Darth Vader University, where the first lesson is "I have altered the deal, pray I don't alter it further." Adobe chose to design its software so it would be vulnerable to this kind of demand, and then its customers paid for that choice. Sure, Pantone are dicks, but this is Adobe's fault. They stuck a KICK ME sign to your back, and Pantone obliged.

This keeps happening and it's gonna keep happening. Last week, Playstation owners who'd bought (or "bought") Warner TV shows got messages telling them that Warner had walked away from its deal to sell videos through the Playstation store, and so all the videos they'd paid for were going to be deleted forever. They wouldn't even get refunds (to be clear, refunds would also be bullshit – when I was a bookseller, I didn't get to break into your house and steal the books I'd sold you, not even if I left some cash on your kitchen table).

Sure, Warner is an unbelievably shitty company run by the single most guillotineable executive in all of Southern California, the loathsome David Zaslav, who oversaw the merger of Warner with Discovery. Zaslav is the creep who figured out that he could make more money cancelling completed movies and TV shows and taking a tax writeoff than he stood to make by releasing them:

https://aftermath.site/there-is-no-piracy-without-ownership

Imagine putting years of your life into making a program – showing up on set at 5AM and leaving your kids to get their own breakfast, performing stunts that could maim or kill you, working 16-hour days during the acute phase of the covid pandemic and driving home in the night, only to have this absolute turd of a man delete the program before anyone could see it, forever, to get a minor tax advantage. Talk about moral injury!

But without Sony's complicity in designing a remote, irreversible, nonconsensual downgrade feature into the Playstation, Zaslav's war on art and creative workers would be limited to material that hadn't been released yet. Thanks to Sony's awful choices, David Zaslav can break into your house, steal your movies – and he doesn't even have to leave a twenty on your kitchen table.

The point here – the point I made 20 years ago to Chris Anderson – is that this is the foreseeable, inevitable result of designing devices for remote, irreversible, nonconsensual downgrades. Anyone who was paying attention should have figured that out in the GW Bush administration. Anyone who does this today? Absolute flaming garbage.

Sure, Zaslav deserves to be staked out over an anthill and slathered in high-fructose corn syrup. But save the next anthill for the Sony exec who shipped a product that would let Zaslav come into your home and rob you. That piece of shit knew what they were doing and they did it anyway. Fuck them. Sideways. With a brick.

Meanwhile, the studios keep making the case for stealing movies rather than paying for them. As Tyler James Hill wrote: "If buying isn't owning, piracy isn't stealing":

https://bsky.app/profile/tylerjameshill.bsky.social/post/3kflw2lvam42n

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/2023/12/08/playstationed/#tyler-james-hill

Image: Alan Levine (modified) https://pxhere.com/en/photo/218986

CC BY 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/

#pluralistic #playstation #sony #copyright #copyfight #drm #monopoly #enshittification #batgirl #road runner #financiazation #the end of ownership #ip

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thegnomelord · 3 months

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KOSA update:

For anyone who hasn't seen (me included lol), the verge has put out an article about KOSA and how its not as clear if congress will pass it now as multiple other bills are competing against it and legislators are struggling to decide which to back.

https://www.theverge.com/2024/2/29/24086559/kids-online-safety-act-schatz-tech-groups

One of the proposed bills is this one

In short, instead of making a bunch of tech bros surrogate parents on the internet, instead it would invest a ton of money into actually going after and investigating actual child predators, modernize the cyber tipline, and do research on prevention/ detection programs, among a few other things.

So please, if you're American, you still have time to call up your reps and tell them you're against Kosa, which is good, but giving them suggestions like this bill is better

#gnome's tea break #fuck kosa #kosa bill #stop kosa #kosa

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dailysarkariupdate · 1 year

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Aadhar Card New Portal 2023: आधार कार्ड यूजर्स के लिए UIDAI लाया नई सुविधा ! अब शिकायतों का होगा चुटकियों में समाधान

Aadhar Card New Portal: क्या आपके पास भी आपके आधार कार्ड को लेकर कुछ शिकायते है जिनका समाधान ना होने की वजह से आप परेशान है तो ना केवल आपकी परेशानी को दूर करने के लिए बल्कि सभी शिकायतों का पर्याप्त समाधान करने के लिए Aadhar Card New Portal को जारी किया गया है जिसकी पूरी सूचना हम आपको इस लेख मे प्रदान करेगे। यहां पर हम आपको बता देना चाहते है कि, Aadhar Card New Portal की मदद से आधार कार्ड…

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nostalgebraist · 1 year

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Honestly I'm pretty tired of supporting nostalgebraist-autoresponder. Going to wind down the project some time before the end of this year.

Posting this mainly to get the idea out there, I guess.

This project has taken an immense amount of effort from me over the years, and still does, even when it's just in maintenance mode.

Today some mysterious system update (or something) made the model no longer fit on the GPU I normally use for it, despite all the same code and settings on my end.

This exact kind of thing happened once before this year, and I eventually figured it out, but I haven't figured this one out yet. This problem consumed several hours of what was meant to be a relaxing Sunday. Based on past experience, getting to the bottom of the issue would take many more hours.

My options in the short term are to

A. spend (even) more money per unit time, by renting a more powerful GPU to do the same damn thing I know the less powerful one can do (it was doing it this morning!), or

B. silently reduce the context window length by a large amount (and thus the "smartness" of the output, to some degree) to allow the model to fit on the old GPU.

Things like this happen all the time, behind the scenes.

I don't want to be doing this for another year, much less several years. I don't want to be doing it at all.

----

In 2019 and 2020, it was fun to make a GPT-2 autoresponder bot.

[EDIT: I've seen several people misread the previous line and infer that nostalgebraist-autoresponder is still using GPT-2. She isn't, and hasn't been for a long time. Her latest model is a finetuned LLaMA-13B.]

Hardly anyone else was doing anything like it. I wasn't the most qualified person in the world to do it, and I didn't do the best possible job, but who cares? I learned a lot, and the really competent tech bros of 2019 were off doing something else.

And it was fun to watch the bot "pretend to be me" while interacting (mostly) with my actual group of tumblr mutuals.

In 2023, everyone and their grandmother is making some kind of "gen AI" app. They are helped along by a dizzying array of tools, cranked out by hyper-competent tech bros with apparently infinite reserves of free time.

There are so many of these tools and demos. Every week it seems like there are a hundred more; it feels like every day I wake up and am expected to be familiar with a hundred more vaguely nostalgebraist-autoresponder-shaped things.

And every one of them is vastly better-engineered than my own hacky efforts. They build on each other, and reap the accelerating returns.

I've tended to do everything first, ahead of the curve, in my own way. This is what I like doing. Going out into unexplored wilderness, not really knowing what I'm doing, without any maps.

Later, hundreds of others with go to the same place. They'll make maps, and share them. They'll go there again and again, learning to make the expeditions systematically. They'll make an optimized industrial process of it. Meanwhile, I'll be locked in to my own cottage-industry mode of production.

Being the first to do something means you end up eventually being the worst.

----

I had a GPT chatbot in 2019, before GPT-3 existed. I don't think Huggingface Transformers existed, either. I used the primitive tools that were available at the time, and built on them in my own way. These days, it is almost trivial to do the things I did, much better, with standardized tools.

I had a denoising diffusion image generator in 2021, before DALLE-2 or Stable Diffusion or Huggingface Diffusers. I used the primitive tools that were available at the time, and built on them in my own way. These days, it is almost trivial to do the things I did, much better, with standardized tools.

Earlier this year, I was (probably) one the first people to finetune LLaMA. I manually strapped LoRA and 8-bit quantization onto the original codebase, figuring out everything the hard way. It was fun.

Just a few months later, and your grandmother is probably running LLaMA on her toaster as we speak. My homegrown methods look hopelessly antiquated. I think everyone's doing 4-bit quantization now?

(Are they? I can't keep track anymore -- the hyper-competent tech bros are too damn fast. A few months from now the thing will be probably be quantized to -1 bits, somehow. It'll be running in your phone's browser. And it'll be using RLHF, except no, it'll be using some successor to RLHF that everyone's hyping up at the time...)

"You have a GPT chatbot?" someone will ask me. "I assume you're using AutoLangGPTLayerPrompt?"

No, no, I'm not. I'm trying to debug obscure CUDA issues on a Sunday so my bot can carry on talking to a thousand strangers, every one of whom is asking it something like "PENIS PENIS PENIS."

Only I am capable of unplugging the blockage and giving the "PENIS PENIS PENIS" askers the responses they crave. ("Which is ... what, exactly?", one might justly wonder.) No one else would fully understand the nature of the bug. It is special to my own bizarre, antiquated, homegrown system.

I must have one of the longest-running GPT chatbots in existence, by now. Possibly the longest-running one?

I like doing new things. I like hacking through uncharted wilderness. The world of GPT chatbots has long since ceased to provide this kind of value to me.

I want to cede this ground to the LLaMA techbros and the prompt engineers. It is not my wilderness anymore.

I miss wilderness. Maybe I will find a new patch of it, in some new place, that no one cares about yet.

----

Even in 2023, there isn't really anything else out there quite like Frank. But there could be.

If you want to develop some sort of Frank-like thing, there has never been a better time than now. Everyone and their grandmother is doing it.

"But -- but how, exactly?"

Don't ask me. I don't know. This isn't my area anymore.

There has never been a better time to make a GPT chatbot -- for everyone except me, that is.

Ask the techbros, the prompt engineers, the grandmas running OpenChatGPT on their ironing boards. They are doing what I did, faster and easier and better, in their sleep. Ask them.

#nostalgebraist autoresponder meta

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beardedmrbean · 8 months

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California became just the third state in the nation to pass a "right to repair" consumer protection law on Tuesday, following Minnesota and New York, when Governor Gavin Newsom signed SB 244. The California Right to Repair bill had originally been introduced in 2019. It passed, nearly unanimously, through the state legislature in September.

“This is a victory for consumers and the planet, and it just makes sense,” Jenn Engstrom, state director of CALPIRG, told iFixit(which was also one of SB244's co-sponsors). “Right now, we mine the planet’s precious minerals, use them to make amazing phones and other electronics, ship these products across the world, and then toss them away after just a few years’ use ... We should make stuff that lasts and be able to fix our stuff when it breaks, and now thanks to years of advocacy, Californians will finally be able to, with the Right to Repair.”

Turns out Google isn't offering seven years of replacement parts and software updates to the Pixel 8 out of the goodness of its un-beating corporate heart. The new law directly stipulates that all electronics and appliances costing $50 or more, and sold within the state after July 1, 2021 (yup, two years ago), will be covered under the legislation once it goes into effect next year, on July 1, 2024. For gear and gadgets that cost between $50 and $99, device makers will have to stock replacement parts and tools, and maintain documentation for three years. Anything over $100 in value gets covered for the full seven-year term. Companies that fail to do so will be fined $1,000 per day on the first violation, $2,000 a day for the second and $5,000 per day per violation thereafter.

There are, of course, carve outs and exceptions to the rules. No, your PS5 is not covered. Not even that new skinny one. None of the game consoles are, neither are alarm systems or heavy industrial equipment that "vitally affects the general economy of the state, the public interest, and the public welfare."

“I’m thrilled that the Governor has signed the Right to Repair Act into law," State Senator Susan Talamantes Eggman, one of the bill's co-sponsors, said. "As I’ve said all along, I’m so grateful to the advocates fueling this movement with us for the past six years, and the manufacturers that have come along to support Californians’ Right to Repair. This is a common sense bill that will help small repair shops, give choice to consumers, and protect the environment.”

The bill even received support from Apple, of all companies. The tech giant famous for its "walled garden" product ecosystem had railed against the idea when it was previously proposed in Nebraska, claiming the state would become "a mecca for hackers." However, the company changed its tune when SB 244 was being debated, writing a letter of support reportedly stating, "We support 'SB 244' because it includes requirements that protect individual users' safety and security as well as product manufacturers' intellectual property."

#nunyas news #interesting

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justinspoliticalcorner · 2 months

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Ilana Berger at MMFA:

Google is allowing right-wing propaganda organization PragerU to run climate-denying ads on its search engine even though the tech giant previously committed to prohibiting ads that feature claims that contradict the “well-established scientific consensus” about climate change. In 2021, Google updated its ad policy to prohibit ads for or on content that “contradicts well-established scientific consensus around the existence and causes of climate change.” Yet, nearly three years later, Google is still profiting from ads that contain climate change misinformation. When Media Matters searched for phrases like “climate change,” “global warming,” and “climate crisis” on Google Search, the search engine returned PragerU ads that promised its website reveals “the truth about climate change” — or what it calls the “fake climate catastrophe.” “Climate policies are causing inflation and keeping poor countries trapped in poverty,” the ad-description text read. “Get the facts with our Climate Change and Energy playlist.”

[...]

PragerU is deeply rooted in climate change denial

Along with the Daily Wire, PragerU is financially dependent on generous donations from fossil fuel billionaire Farris Wilks. Recently, PragerU Kids, a PragerU offshoot that produces conservative “educational” content targeted at school age children, has partnered with five different states to bring right-wing propaganda into public school classrooms. Media Matters reviewed PragerU Kids’ ”educational” content and found it was rife with misinformation about climate change. In one video, a cartoon narrator explains why embracing climate denialism is akin to participating in the Warsaw uprising, when Polish Jews attempted to liberate Warsaw from German occupation during WWII.

Google profits off of right-wing propaganda factory PragerU's climate change denialism ads.

#PragerU #Dennis Prager #Google #Climate Change #Climate Change Denialism

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emilyscartoons · 11 months

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✨Well well well, one year since my book was published!!✨

I don’t talk about it a lot cos once a project is done, I kind of move on and forget about it. But that’s silly of me, as I’m supposed to be telling you all about how it’s very much out there and available online and in bookshops - it’s about a tech billionaire who tries to take over the world, and it contains as many jokes as I could humanly stuff into 400 pages. I’m really proud of it and if you enjoy my work on here at all, I would LOVE it you read it!

It was really hard - took me all of 2020 and 2021, all of age 29 and age 30. I really enjoyed the first few months when I was coming up with the ideas, and also the last 2 days of it, when I knew it was nearly done. I remember thinking “Ooh, how idyllic! Look at me, drawing my comic book! What a life!”

Much has changed for me since. I fell in love a couple of times, including with the nation of Brazil. I got really sick and lost half my hair. Went to Comic Con and felt like a princess. Moved to Lisbon. Started yoga. Spent a lot of money, enjoyed it, then worried about it. After the worst birthday of my life (30, high lockdown) I had the greatest birthday of my life (32, Berlin). Read four 900-page books, spent longer scrolling. Published some comics I’m really proud of. Decided to try to be more honest.

Thanks again and massive respect to my brilliant collaborators and pals Paul Martinovic and Nicola Barr who contributed so much to this project, as well as Picador and Dark Horse Comics 🙏 and thanks to the ledge Lucy Mattot for the photo.

That’s it! Felt like making a fuss and giving you all an update, in case you’re interested. Please buy my funny book ❤️❤️❤️ luv you ❤️❤️❤️

#comic #webcomics #graphicnovel #graphic novel #comic book

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cityof2morrow · 2 days

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Sim Studies

Published: 6-3-2024 | Updated: N/A SUMMARY Did you know there are people out there who do extensive historical, psychological, mental health, tech, and design research based on sims? Did you know there are a host of positive mental health benefits associated with simming? Did you know simming has been used as a form of therapy by health providers…or that it has been implicated in international conflict(s)? Did you know it has made people more curious about others and can encourage civic engagement? Did you know simmers help each other become more tech-literate? The Sims/SimCity franchises have been around in one form or another since at least 1989 and continue to be a focus in game studies (ludology). This research is a part of my professional work and teaching – my research focuses on the psychology and cultural implications of simming. Occasionally, I’ll share interesting things scholars and curious playtesters have discovered about simmers and simming (there are some documented disturbing practices among simulation gamers but this project leans toward the positive/pro-social stuff). Look for more under the #CO2SIMSTUDIES tag. RECOMMENDED SIMS READS: I’ve only located a handful of trade (less-academic, intended for the average reader) publications specifically about The Sims, but I recommend the following to start with – this is a mixture of research-based and biographical reflections on simming:

The Black Simmer by Amira Virgial (@xmiramira) in Black Futures (2021; 2020), edited by Kimberly Drew and Jenna Wortham

Players Unleashed! Modding The Sims and the Culture of Gaming (2011) by Tanja Sihvonen

Women and Gaming: The Sims and 21st Century Learning (2010) by James Paul Gee and Elisabeth R. Hayes

Sims is the subject of several chapters in Women and Video Game Modding: Essays on Gender and the Digital Community (2020), edited by Bridget Whelan.

CREDITS Thanks: Simming and game studies communities. Sources: Beyno (Korn via BBFonts), EA/Maxis, Offuturistic Infographic (Freepik).

#co2simstudies #sims2

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avatar-news · 2 years

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Everything we know about Avatar Studios’ first movie

It’s time for a good ol’ masterpost!

Here’s everything we here at Avatar News know about Avatar Studios’ first movie! Info that Avatar News is the exclusive source for is specified, otherwise everything is official public info from Paramount/Avatar Studios/etc.

Last updated on February 18th, 2023.

Title

The movie is currently designated “ANIMATED AANG AVATAR” in Paramount's slate, but is untitled

The Avatar franchise has been officially named “Avatar Legends” since 2022

A potential working title is Avatar The Last Airbender: Echoes and Aftershocks, based on a Paramount employee’s resume

A rumored title is Hidden Kingdom

Release

Release date: October 10th, 2025

Will be released in theaters exclusively at first, then stream on Paramount+ after

Previously estimated for 2024 internally at Paramount, but not announced publicly (source: Avatar News)

Story

Featuring “Aang and his friends”

Aang and Team Avatar will be young adults (source: Avatar News)

A movie with a Zuko-focused storyline was/is in development, it’s possible that this is that movie (source: Avatar News) - Update: The Zuko movie is separate

Brand-new original story, not an adaptation of an existing story from a comic, novel, etc.

Crew on this specific movie

Director: Lauren Montgomery (storyboard artist on ATLA, supervising producer on TLOK Books 2-4, showrunner of Voltron: Legendary Defender)

Writer: Kenneth Lin (Netflix’s House of Cards, Paramount’s Star Trek: Discovery)

Producers: Michael Dante DiMartino and Bryan Konietzko (showrunners of ATLA and TLOK, Chief Creative Officers of Avatar Studios), Eric Coleman (executive in charge of production of ATLA, suggested the creation of the character of Zuko in early development)

Production companies: Paramount Pictures, Nickelodeon Movies, Paramount Animation, Nickelodeon Animation Studio, Avatar Studios, Flying Bark Productions

Crew at Avatar Studios whose involvement in this specific movie, if any, we don’t know yet

Composer: Jeremy Zuckerman (composer of ATLA and TLOK)

Writer: Tim Hedrick (writer on ATLA/TLOK/VLD, showrunner of Fast & Furious: Spy Racers)

Head of story(board): Steve Ahn (storyboard artist and assistant director on TLOK)

Executive art director: Christie Tseng (character designer on TLOK)

Art director: William Niu (background designer on TLOK)

Consultant on native representation: Migizi Pensoneau (Reservation Dogs)

Many, many more crewmembers, of course.

Animation

Animation studio: Flying Bark Productions (Rise of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (2018-2020), Glitch Techs (2020), Monkie Kid (2020-), Marvel Studios’ What If...? (2021), Rise of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: The Movie (2022))

Animation style: traditional 2D + substantial CG

History of statements on animation style: Sep 2 2021: “series of CG films” - Brian Robbins (president and CEO of Nickelodeon and chief content officer of kids and family for Paramount+) Dec 2 2021: “outstanding and customized [...] unique production look” that “integrates [...] traditional 2D and CG” - Paramount recruiting for Avatar Studios Jun 29 2022: “our main bread and butter is 2D animation” / “homage to anime” / “[not] gonna be [...] hardcore straightedge 2D” / “start with hand-drawn, handmade artwork and then: what can technology do to help us enhance it, to help us deepen it, to help the filmmaking, to make it more cinematic” / “not [...] starting purely 3D and then trying to stylize” / “looking hard to form our own look” / “not doing anything purely 3D” - Bryan Konietzko (Avatar Studios co-Chief Creative Officer) Oct 13 2022: “2D Avatar feature film” / “couple traditional 2D animation with substantial CG elements” - Flying Bark Productions (the movie’s animation studio)

Cast

No cast info for this specific movie yet

Dante Basco is attached as Zuko, reprising his role from ATLA

A global casting call is going out for Asian and Indigenous voice actors in their 20s for Aang, Katara, Sokka, and Toph

Janet Varney, the voice of Korra in TLOK (2012-2014) has announced that she doesn’t want to voice Korra in the future; she wants an Indigenous voice actor to voice Korra (Korra is from the Water Tribe in the world of Avatar, which is inspired by Indigenous culture in the real world). It’s possible other voice actors will make the same choice.

Characters we know will definitely be in this movie: Aang - previously voiced as a child by Zach Tyler Eisen in ATLA (2005-2008) and as an adult by D. B. Sweeney in TLOK (2012-2013) Katara (source: Avatar News) - previously voiced as a child by Mae Whitman in ATLA (2005-2008) and as an elder by Eva Marie Saint in TLOK (2012-2014) Zuko - see above “Aang[’s] friends”

Other

Three theatrical animated movies are currently in development at Avatar Studios

Each movie has a standalone story-- they’re not a trilogy-- so the story of this movie won’t be continued in the next movie after it

The second movie is focused on Zuko (source: Avatar News)

The third movie is focused on the new earth Avatar after Aang and Korra (source: Avatar News)

The image above is official canon art of the Gaang as adults, but it’s from the lead-up to the release of The Legend of Korra in 2012, not from this upcoming movie. Fun fact: it was drawn by Joaquim Dos Santos, co-showrunner of TLOK and director of Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse (2023) and Spider-Man: Beyond the Spider-Verse (2024)!

#news #movie #aang movie #masterpost

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mariacallous · 6 months

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If you have push notifications turned on for sensitive apps, you may want to reconsider your settings.

The United States government and foreign law enforcement can demand Apple and Google share metadata associated with push notifications from apps on iOS and Android, according to a US senator and court records reviewed by WIRED. These notifications can reveal which apps a person uses, along with other information that may be pertinent to law enforcement investigations.

US Senator Ron Wyden, an Oregon Democrat, highlighted the government surveillance technique in a letter sent to the US Department of Justice (DOJ) today. Wyden is specifically asking the DOJ to allow Apple and Google to discuss government requests for push notification records with their users, which Wyden says the US government has required them to keep secret thus far.

“In the spring of 2022, my office received a tip that government agencies in foreign countries were demanding smartphone ‘push’ notification records from Google and Apple,” Wyden wrote in the letter, which was first reported by Reuters. “My staff have been investigating this tip for the past year, which included contacting Apple and Google. In response to that query, the companies told my staff that information about this practice is restricted from public release by the government.”

App developers deliver push notifications using Apple’s Push Notification Service on iOS or Google’s Firebase Cloud Messaging on Android. Each user of an app is assigned a “push token,” which is transferred between the app and the mobile operating system’s push notification service. Push tokens are not permanently assigned to a single user, and new tokens may be generated when a person reinstalls an app or switches to a new device.

To identify a person of interest and whom they may have been communicating with, law enforcement must first go to an app developer to obtain the relevant push token and then bring it to the operating system maker—Apple or Google—and request information on which account the token is associated with. This puts the tech giants in “a unique position to facilitate government surveillance of how users are using particular apps,” Wyden writes.

According to Wyden, the records that governments can obtain from Apple and Google include metadata that reveals which apps a person has used, when they’ve received notifications, and the phone associated with a particular Google or Apple account. The content of push notifications is not included in this information, but, for at least some apps, law enforcement could obtain information about the content of specific pushes through additional requests based on the information from the push tokens.

While Wyden’s letter says that governments outside the US have requested people’s push notification records, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) has done so as well. A February 2021 search warrant application submitted by an FBI agent to the US District Court in Washington, DC, requested details for two accounts controlled by Meta (then Facebook), specifically citing a request for push notification tokens. The search warrant request related to an investigation into a person accused of taking part in the January 6, 2021, attack on the US Capitol.

Meta, which owns Facebook, WhatsApp, and Instagram, did not immediately respond to WIRED’s request to comment. A spokesperson for Signal, the popular encrypted messaging app, also did not respond. The DOJ declined to comment.

Although Wyden is asking the DOJ to allow Apple and Google to discuss government requests for push notification records, the senator’s letter appears to have enabled them to do just that.

An Apple spokesperson tells WIRED that the company has updated its Law Enforcement Guidelines in its transparency report to reflect government requests for push notification records. The company will also begin to detail these requests in its next transparency report. Apple's updated rules for police requests say push notification records “may be obtained with a subpoena or greater legal process.”

“Apple is committed to transparency and we have long been a supporter of efforts to ensure that providers are able to disclose as much information as possible to their users,” Apple says in a statement. “In this case, the federal government prohibited us from sharing any information and now that this method has become public we are updating our transparency reporting to detail these kinds of requests.”

Google confirmed to WIRED that it receives requests for push notification records, but the company says it already includes these types of requests in its transparency reports. The company says requests from US-based law enforcement for push notification records require court orders with judicial approval.

“We were the first major company to publish a public transparency report sharing the number and types of government requests for user data we receive, including the requests referred to by Senator Wyden,” a Google spokesperson tells WIRED. “We share the senator’s commitment to keeping users informed about these requests.”

A WIRED review of Google’s most recent transparency report for the period between December 2019 and December 2022 found that it does not specifically break out government requests for push notification records, and Google confirmed that it aggregates this data in its transparency report.

Google’s transparency report shows that the US government requested Google Cloud Platform data from enterprise customers 175 times during the period, and of those, used a search warrant 13 times. It is unclear whether any of those requests for user data included push notification records—details that may, following Wyden’s letter, be revealed in the future.

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girlfriendsofthegalaxy · 6 months

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tuesday again 11/28/2023

tuesday again no problem will be taking a break for the 12/12 edition (not next week but the one after)

listening

previously featured Os Mutantes, a countercultural brazilian rock group, is back bc i heard A Minha Menha on an instagram reel by @/ vintagepulps on a showcase of brazilian pulp magazine covers.

youtube

the SECOND that driving riff hit i experienced a brief moment of fuckor bc this is exactly and precisely the kind of song i like. this translation tells me it translates to My Girl. it's got moon/sun imagery. it's exactly the kind of song to drive around to in the summer while having an absolutely crippling crush on the person in the passenger seat. spotify

reading

you wouldn't download a woman...

TWICE

watching

I'm No Angel (1933, dir. Ruggles) a 1936 black comedy written by Mae West and starring the babiest Cary Grant you've ever seen. i added it to my letterboxed bc i saw screenshots of this one specific dress. that’s so much sideboob. good for her.

we don't use the term "adventuress" anymore to describe a woman who does various physical or social stunts to land a husband and i think that's a shame. Tira (yes) is a burlesque dancer and (separately) a lion tamer at a down on its luck circus, becomes famous through putting her head in a lion's mouth, and leverages that fame to fall in and out and back into love.

your enjoyment of this movie will hinge on your tolerance for astrologers, circuses with animals in them, and depictions of black housemaids that have not aged super well, even if they're mostly there to stroke her ego. i'm sort of torn on what rating this would get today-- i'm assuming R bc there's a woman expressing desire but nothing actually happens beyond kissing and some sitting in laps. some peril for the lions i guess?

i do not think this particularly nailed its landing, and i'm not totally sure why they got back together, but mae west in straight up burlesque and the shimmiest dresses you've ever seen is so much fun to watch it doesn't really matter. this is sort of sidelining the her very funny, extremely quotable script. apparently any movie she wasn't allowed to write or heavily doctor her own lines just completely flopped, which i also think is very funny.

just straight up on the internet archive

playing

triple header for Things That Came Out This Decade: Genshin Impact (September 2020), Deliver Us Mars (2023) and Gamedec (2021).

brief Genshin update: your main companion in the game, Paimon, the little fairy bitch, has been the recipient of some worrying foreshadowing lately. hey Paimon you wanna tell us anything???

Deliver Us Mars, free on Epic this week. i want to like this game. i think there should be more weird little eurojank original scifi B-franchises like this and you should be able to feed your family by making them. i do not want to continue playing this particular little franchise.

it's the second game by KeokeN (The Netherlands) and published by Wired Productions (UK, although they are partnered with Koch, which means they’ll be bought up soon), a studio of under 20 counting support staff (some of who are certainly part time or on hourly contracts) and an intern. after doing that basic background research i ratcheted my expectations back a couple notches and deleted a somewhat catty paragraph about video game hair.

this is a sequel to Deliver Us The Moon, which was a successful Kickstarter and Steam greenlight (TM (C) R) and it seems they spent the four interval years mostly polishing up the predecessor Deliver Us The Moon, which i do not own and do not plan on playing.

Deliver Us Mars bills itself as an action-adventure, but during my time with it, it was more of a cinematic movie/walking sim with extremely light puzzle/platform mechanics. there are extensive childhood flashbacks following a dad around as he trains his daughter to be an astronaut. the timing and insertion of these never quite clicked for me-- they take forever and they were never as interesting as what they interrupted.

youtube

this game is not good at signposting or tutorializing. i had to restart a chapter twice bc the unique controls popped up for a brief fleeting moment on screen and weren’t in the keybinding settings. i could never quite get the mouse and keyboard camera sensitivity right, and platforming/vertical elements seem to only be partially implemented: you can only really successfully approach certain segments from extremely specific dead-on angles. there are like three big boxes in your path that you have to clamber over at one point and i do not think it should take a solid minute and a half for me to get over them. some reviewers praised the lack of signposting during the launch sequence (causing you to frantically look around at a million unlabeled buttons and levers to see if any of them were highlighted as a thing you can click) as a fun way to ramp up stress but i fucking hated it.

after two and a half hours, and only just making it to a ship OUTSIDE mars, i decided there are other games in the world. this hits some sort of minimal viable story benchmark for me, i can see why some people love it, but i don’t want to find out what happens bad enough to play through a slow game that handles terribly and isn’t much fun to exist in.

does get points for big fuckoff dishes.

Gamedec is an isometric RPG, where you are a near-future private investigator who handles delicate personal matters inside wildly popular MMORPG VR games. unfortunately all the trailers suck shit.

youtube

this is catnip to me. i love a no-combat game where i have to walk around and talk to everyone and click on everything and write things down in a little notebook. i loooooooove being nosy. i've played through the first two and a half chapters (kinky second life, racketeering farmville, and real life uh oh) and i'm having a fucking marvelous time. the writing team clearly had a lot of fun, the VR game worlds feel very alive and vibrant-- there's a ton of possible weird little flavor interactions that go a very long way toward making me forget this is a limited-perspective isometric. this is like praising an RPG for doing what it says on the tin and being an RPG, but the most recent RPGs ive played have been fucking terrible. it's not shoehorning me into one-true or main-path choices. extremely forgiving of failure, which is good bc i straight up accidentally killed my first client. i know he was a kid but he kinda had it coming imo. sometimes kids just suck shit

im so delighted by this shitty little apartment-- it's got to be fucking bizarre to exist in, bc of the ultra-loft ceilings you need to make it be isometric, but it somehow manages to feel like a studio apartment and a seedy back office all at the same time. a game that is in general very fun to Look at. will have more thoughts as i continue playing but this is really scratching some sort of itch for me. commits to the bit. funny but sincere. a pastiche in ways i personally do not find annoying. has not hit me with like konami code style references yet. due to the fact this is also in my epic games store library i believe this was also free at some point

making

fallow week for me. phil has been regrowing skin at a good clip and i can no longer feel each individual vertebra, AND we have another vet appt on friday to get more/different antibiotic goop and all of her vaccinations and microchipping done. mack made a hairball and is getting put back on an actual wire slicker brush grooming schedule. my beautiful girl seems to have a particularly dense coat among the domestic shorthairs of my acquaintance, although that may be bc she is a new england girlie and we constantly exist in air conditioning?? mixed feelings about scheduled brushies from her, even with short and light sessions. we’ll get there.

helping.

#tuesday again #tuesday again no problem #phil

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mostlysignssomeportents · 10 months

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Tesla's Dieselgate

Elon Musk lies a lot. He lies about being a “utopian socialist.” He lies about being a “free speech absolutist.” He lies about which companies he founded:

https://www.businessinsider.com/tesla-cofounder-martin-eberhard-interview-history-elon-musk-ev-market-2023-2 He lies about being the “chief engineer” of those companies:

https://www.quora.com/Was-Elon-Musk-the-actual-engineer-behind-SpaceX-and-Tesla

He lies about really stupid stuff, like claiming that comsats that share the same spectrum will deliver steady broadband speeds as they add more users who each get a narrower slice of that spectrum:

https://www.eff.org/wp/case-fiber-home-today-why-fiber-superior-medium-21st-century-broadband

The fundamental laws of physics don’t care about this bullshit, but people do. The comsat lie convinced a bunch of people that pulling fiber to all our homes is literally impossible — as though the electrical and phone lines that come to our homes now were installed by an ancient, lost civilization. Pulling new cabling isn’t a mysterious art, like embalming pharaohs. We do it all the time. One of the poorest places in America installed universal fiber with a mule named “Ole Bub”:

https://www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/the-one-traffic-light-town-with-some-of-the-fastest-internet-in-the-us

Previous tech barons had “reality distortion fields,” but Musk just blithely contradicts himself and pretends he isn’t doing so, like a budget Steve Jobs. There’s an entire site devoted to cataloging Musk’s public lies:

https://elonmusk.today/

But while Musk lacks the charm of earlier Silicon Valley grifters, he’s much better than they ever were at running a long con. For years, he’s been promising “full self driving…next year.”

https://pluralistic.net/2022/10/09/herbies-revenge/#100-billion-here-100-billion-there-pretty-soon-youre-talking-real-money

He’s hasn’t delivered, but he keeps claiming he has, making Teslas some of the deadliest cars on the road:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2023/06/10/tesla-autopilot-crashes-elon-musk/

Tesla is a giant shell-game masquerading as a car company. The important thing about Tesla isn’t its cars, it’s Tesla’s business arrangement, the Tesla-Financial Complex:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/11/24/no-puedo-pagar-no-pagara/#Rat

Once you start unpacking Tesla’s balance sheets, you start to realize how much the company depends on government subsidies and tax-breaks, combined with selling carbon credits that make huge, planet-destroying SUVs possible, under the pretense that this is somehow good for the environment:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/14/for-sale-green-indulgences/#killer-analogy

But even with all those financial shenanigans, Tesla’s got an absurdly high valuation, soaring at times to 1600x its profitability:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/01/15/hoover-calling/#intangibles

That valuation represents a bet on Tesla’s ability to extract ever-higher rents from its customers. Take Tesla’s batteries: you pay for the battery when you buy your car, but you don’t own that battery. You have to rent the right to use its full capacity, with Tesla reserving the right to reduce how far you go on a charge based on your willingness to pay:

https://memex.craphound.com/2017/09/10/teslas-demon-haunted-cars-in-irmas-path-get-a-temporary-battery-life-boost/

That’s just one of the many rent-a-features that Tesla drivers have to shell out for. You don’t own your car at all: when you sell it as a used vehicle, Tesla strips out these features you paid for and makes the next driver pay again, reducing the value of your used car and transfering it to Tesla’s shareholders:

https://www.theverge.com/2020/2/6/21127243/tesla-model-s-autopilot-disabled-remotely-used-car-update

To maintain this rent-extraction racket, Tesla uses DRM that makes it a felony to alter your own car’s software without Tesla’s permission. This is the root of all autoenshittification:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/24/rent-to-pwn/#kitt-is-a-demon

This is technofeudalism. Whereas capitalists seek profits (income from selling things), feudalists seek rents (income from owning the things other people use). If Telsa were a capitalist enterprise, then entrepreneurs could enter the market and sell mods that let you unlock the functionality in your own car:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/06/11/1-in-3/#boost-50

But because Tesla is a feudal enterprise, capitalists must first secure permission from the fief, Elon Musk, who decides which companies are allowed to compete with him, and how.

Once a company owns the right to decide which software you can run, there’s no limit to the ways it can extract rent from you. Blocking you from changing your device’s software lets a company run overt scams on you. For example, they can block you from getting your car independently repaired with third-party parts.

But they can also screw you in sneaky ways. Once a device has DRM on it, Section 1201 of the DMCA makes it a felony to bypass that DRM, even for legitimate purposes. That means that your DRM-locked device can spy on you, and because no one is allowed to explore how that surveillance works, the manufacturer can be incredibly sloppy with all the personal info they gather:

https://www.cnbc.com/2019/03/29/tesla-model-3-keeps-data-like-crash-videos-location-phone-contacts.html

All kinds of hidden anti-features can lurk in your DRM-locked car, protected from discovery, analysis and criticism by the illegality of bypassing the DRM. For example, Teslas have a hidden feature that lets them lock out their owners and summon a repo man to drive them away if you have a dispute about a late payment:

https://tiremeetsroad.com/2021/03/18/tesla-allegedly-remotely-unlocks-model-3-owners-car-uses-smart-summon-to-help-repo-agent/

DRM is a gun on the mantlepiece in Act I, and by Act III, it goes off, revealing some kind of ugly and often dangerous scam. Remember Dieselgate? Volkswagen created a line of demon-haunted cars: if they thought they were being scrutinized (by regulators measuring their emissions), they switched into a mode that traded performance for low emissions. But when they believed themselves to be unobserved, they reversed this, emitting deadly levels of NOX but delivering superior mileage.

The conversion of the VW diesel fleet into mobile gas-chambers wouldn’t have been possible without DRM. DRM adds a layer of serious criminal jeopardy to anyone attempting to reverse-engineer and study any device, from a phone to a car. DRM let Apple claim to be a champion of its users’ privacy even as it spied on them from asshole to appetite:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/14/luxury-surveillance/#liar-liar

Now, Tesla is having its own Dieselgate scandal. A stunning investigation by Steve Stecklow and Norihiko Shirouzu for Reuters reveals how Tesla was able to create its own demon-haunted car, which systematically deceived drivers about its driving range, and the increasingly desperate measures the company turned to as customers discovered the ruse:

https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/tesla-batteries-range/

The root of the deception is very simple: Tesla mis-sells its cars by falsely claiming ranges that those cars can’t attain. Every person who ever bought a Tesla was defrauded.

But this fraud would be easy to detect. If you bought a Tesla rated for 353 miles on a charge, but the dashboard range predictor told you that your fully charged car could only go 150 miles, you’d immediately figure something was up. So your Telsa tells another lie: the range predictor tells you that you can go 353 miles.

But again, if the car continued to tell you it has 203 miles of range when it was about to run out of charge, you’d figure something was up pretty quick — like, the first time your car ran out of battery while the dashboard cheerily informed you that you had 203 miles of range left.

So Teslas tell a third lie: when the battery charge reached about 50%, the fake range is replaced with the real one. That way, drivers aren’t getting mass-stranded by the roadside, and the scam can continue.

But there’s a new problem: drivers whose cars are rated for 353 miles but can’t go anything like that far on a full charge naturally assume that something is wrong with their cars, so they start calling Tesla service and asking to have the car checked over.

This creates a problem for Tesla: those service calls can cost the company $1,000, and of course, there’s nothing wrong with the car. It’s performing exactly as designed. So Tesla created its boldest fraud yet: a boiler-room full of anti-salespeople charged with convincing people that their cars weren’t broken.

This new unit — the “diversion team” — was headquartered in a Nevada satellite office, which was equipped with a metal xylophone that would be rung in triumph every time a Tesla owner was successfully conned into thinking that their car wasn’t defrauding them.

When a Tesla owner called this boiler room, the diverter would run remote diagnostics on their car, then pronounce it fine, and chide the driver for having energy-hungry driving habits (shades of Steve Jobs’s “You’re holding it wrong”):

https://www.wired.com/2010/06/iphone-4-holding-it-wrong/

The drivers who called the Diversion Team weren’t just lied to, they were also punished. The Tesla app was silently altered so that anyone who filed a complaint about their car’s range was no longer able to book a service appointment for any reason. If their car malfunctioned, they’d have to request a callback, which could take several days.

Meanwhile, the diverters on the diversion team were instructed not to inform drivers if the remote diagnostics they performed detected any other defects in the cars.

The diversion team had a 750 complaint/week quota: to juke this stat, diverters would close the case for any driver who failed to answer the phone when they were eventually called back. The center received 2,000+ calls every week. Diverters were ordered to keep calls to five minutes or less.

Eventually, diverters were ordered to cease performing any remote diagnostics on drivers’ cars: a source told Reuters that “Thousands of customers were told there is nothing wrong with their car” without any diagnostics being performed.

Predicting EV range is an inexact science as many factors can affect battery life, notably whether a journey is uphill or downhill. Every EV automaker has to come up with a figure that represents some kind of best guess under a mix of conditions. But while other manufacturers err on the side of caution, Tesla has the most inaccurate mileage estimates in the industry, double the industry average.

Other countries’ regulators have taken note. In Korea, Tesla was fined millions and Elon Musk was personally required to state that he had deceived Tesla buyers. The Korean regulator found that the true range of Teslas under normal winter conditions was less than half of the claimed range.

Now, many companies have been run by malignant narcissists who lied compulsively — think of Thomas Edison, archnemesis of Nikola Tesla himself. The difference here isn’t merely that Musk is a deeply unfit monster of a human being — but rather, that DRM allows him to defraud his customers behind a state-enforced opaque veil. The digital computers at the heart of a Tesla aren’t just demons haunting the car, changing its performance based on whether it believes it is being observed — they also allow Musk to invoke the power of the US government to felonize anyone who tries to peer into the black box where he commits his frauds.

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/2023/07/28/edison-not-tesla/#demon-haunted-world

This Sunday (July 30) at 1530h, I’m appearing on a panel at Midsummer Scream in Long Beach, CA, to discuss the wonderful, award-winning “Ghost Post” Haunted Mansion project I worked on for Disney Imagineering.

Image ID [A scene out of an 11th century tome on demon-summoning called 'Compendium rarissimum totius Artis Magicae sistematisatae per celeberrimos Artis hujus Magistros. Anno 1057. Noli me tangere.' It depicts a demon tormenting two unlucky would-be demon-summoners who have dug up a grave in a graveyard. One summoner is held aloft by his hair, screaming; the other screams from inside the grave he is digging up. The scene has been altered to remove the demon's prominent, urinating penis, to add in a Tesla supercharger, and a red Tesla Model S nosing into the scene.]

Image: Steve Jurvetson (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Tesla_Model_S_Indoors.jpg

CC BY 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/deed.en

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thebirdandthebee · 2 years

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Easy As

A Carmen Berzatto Universe

A/N: Here’s another request from my inbox - Carmen and Vanessa’s first date! This does not, however, include their first kiss. Feel free to slide more requests for these two my way :) Happy Sunday!

Vanessa Monaghan is the breath of fresh air that Carmen had been gasping for.

Chapter 20: Dancing Bears

Carmen shifted in his seat at Trunk Noodle. He and Vanessa had exchanged a few texts since meeting at the supermarket last week and while he’d felt confident enough walking her through the neighborhood grocer, he was now sweating bullets.

He’d been stressed all day, from texting Syd to let her know he’d need the night off to figuring out what to wear – and attempting to manage his curls when he desperately needed a haircut.

He’d suggested the restaurant, which was a hole in the wall Vietnamese place in West Loop from which he frequently ordered takeout. He’d arrived 10 minutes early and was greeted by the staff warmly. They knew Carmen as a customer and a chef, and reassured him he always had a table.

At 7 p.m. on the dot, the doors to the restaurant, whose dining room was no bigger than a home’s family room, opened up and there stood Vanessa.

She was better looking than he recalled, and he’d had several days to romanticize her silky brunette hair and long kohl lashes. She beamed a wide smile upon seeing him and he stood, meeting her halfway in a brief, but tight hug before he pulled out her chair.

“It smells amazing in here,” she gushed before even saying hello.

“I love this place,” Carmen nodded, taking his seat. “I didn’t even think to ask if you liked Vietnamese, I just assumed,” he shrugged softly, a small smile on his face.

“I’ve never had Vietnamese,” Vanessa confessed, to which Carmen grinned, “but I have a feeling I’ll like it.”

Their server brought over shots of fresh coconut milk with lime before taking drink orders.

“Why don’t you order?” Vanessa suggested.

“Are you sure?” Carmen asked.

“Our server addressed you by name, so something tells me you’ve been here before – I’ll try anything,” she smiled. Carmen’s heart skipped a beat.

“No allergies?” He asked, closing his menu. He knew it front to back by heart anyway.

“None,” she shook her head. Carmen rattled off four or five dishes when the server returned with their Cokes and she gladly clinked her glass bottle against his.

“So you know what I do,” Carmen cleared his throat softly. “What do you do for a living?” He asked.

“I work in marketing,” she began, crossing her legs. “For a firm called Olson Group downtown, I’ve been there since I left school.”

“So what exactly does that mean? Like commercials?” He asked.

“Kind of – commercial adjacent,” she nodded, “I help clients of all industries, so retail, restaurant, tech and ecommerce with branding, advertising, public relations management, pretty much anything that’s public-facing for their company.”

“Who’s your favorite client?” Carmen asked, ready to listen to her talk about anything. He liked the way her mouth shaped around the words she spoke.

“Right now, probably United Airlines,” she grinned, “they’re doing this retro PanAm-type of throwback branding overhaul and it’s just been a blast going through old school inspiration and updating it to fit 2021, but with a nod to the past.”

“That’s a huge company,” he commented, surprised.

“Our firm does a lot of big clients,” she nodded. “Our headquarters are here, but we have offices all over North America and Europe – I got to do a transfer year in Luxembourg, it was one of the best years of my life,” she grinned.

“Are you from Chicago?” Carmen asked, realizing he was practically interrogating this woman. “Sorry, god, I don’t mean to grill you.”

“I’m an open book,” she laughed. “It’s like a universal truth that people enjoy talking about themselves, right? I am from Chicago,” she nodded, “and I don’t mean Evanston or Rockford, but Chicago.”

“River North,” Carmen nodded.

“Lincoln Park,” she replied. “But I should caveat I went to grade school in Evanston.”

“I see,” Carmen quirked a small, knowing smile. Vanessa couldn’t believe someone with eyes that blue even existed. There was something about the round of his shoulders, prominent nose and jawline that made Carmen breathtakingly beautiful.

“I knew it!” she laughed, “stop judging me!”

“I’m not judging! Just filing it away for later,” Carmen’s first laugh helped draw his shoulders down from his ears.

Dishes started to pile up on their table as plate after plate was delivered and Vanessa excitedly dug into everything she could, enjoying every bite.

“This one’s a little risky,” Carmen said, stabbing a piece of lemon pepper squid, twirling it about in a sauce before holding it up in front of Vanessa without second thought. She gladly leaned over their small table to take a bite.

“It’s so’good,” she moaned. Carmen’s arms broke out into goose bumps. “Everything is so good,” she commented, holding up her fork with excitement at the spread in front of her, deciding on what to eat next.

Carmen explained more and more of what they were eating and they compared the dishes, ranking them as conversation flowed.

“So why did you decide to come back to Chicago? Miss home?” Vanessa asked.

“Something like that,” Carmen nodded, averting his gaze to the table before looking back to Vanessa. He might as well be honest. “I actually hadn’t planned on it, but my brother, who owned The Beef, he died,” he said, picking up his drink. “And he left it to me.” Vanessa’s eyes softened.

“I’m sorry to hear that, Carmen,” she said with heartfelt honestly. “What was he like?” Carmen swallowed softly. People never asked follow up questions, and if they did, it was never that.

“Eccentric in the best way possible,” Carmen recalled the older days, cooking in their family kitchen and how he idolized Mikey growing up – before things changed. “He was a really good storyteller and knew how to bring people together.”

“Is he your only sibling?” Vanessa asked, taking another bite of her spring roll.

“I’ve got a sister, Natalie,” he nodded. “What about you? Only child?” Vanessa threw her head back with a laugh.

“Am I putting off only-child energy?” She asked. “No, I’ve got two sisters – Nicola, she’s 20 and goes to DePaul, and Hannah, she’s in sixth grade.”

“Three girls,” Carmen raised his brows.

“My Dad thinks it’s penance for his wild boy days,” she laughed. “He raised us on his own – he’s incredibly in touch with his feminine side. My mom died a few weeks after Hannah was born, drunk driver accident,” she offered, seeing as Carmen had really opened himself up by telling her about his brother, she felt compelled to do the same.

“I’m sorry,” Carmen winced. He wasn’t sure what was worse, losing someone by their choice, or against their will.

Vanessa simply smiled, reaching across to squeeze his hand on the tabletop.

“Do you think we could order more of these?” she held up her fork, which had speared a pork wonton.

“Anything you want,” Carmen said sincerely. He’d serve his heart up on a platter it meant she’d smile at him again.

After dinner was finished, they’d agreed to take a stroll and try to walk off their overstuffed stomachs. The weather was nice enough as Chicago approached the end of summer and they weren’t far from Oz Park, which Carmen learned was one of Vanessa’s favorite parks in the city.

Carmen skirted the side of the walkways that were closest to the street and when a large group of people came by, Vanessa deftly stepped closer into his side, tucking her hand around one of his biceps. His brain shorted at her soft skin pressed against his.

“Oh,” she said softly, pausing in front of the retaining wall of a brownstone where a small bear had been spray-painted just above where the wall met the sidewalk. “I need to take a photo quick,” she said, whipping out her phone and crouching down to snap a picture. “Bears are my favorite animal,” she explained, “which sounds really juvenile, but my sisters and I always send each other pictures when we see them out in the wild.”

Carmen gulped softly.

“Why bears?” He asked.

“It’s actually a story our Mom used to tell us that her mother told her,” she said, stepping back into his side and lacing her fingers with his. Carmen squeezed her hand softly as they began to move forward again. “There’s this belief in our grandmother’s culture that when you pass away, you come back reincarnated as an animal, and everyone wants to be a bear because they’re the king of the animal kingdom,” she explained. “So when people pass, they come back to the world as an animal and those that are bears are so happy, they dance,” she laughed. “I don’t know, it sounds silly, but it’s always stuck with us.”

Carmen paused, gently tugging Vanessa’s hand so she’d step closer to him.

“It’s not silly,” he assured. “It actually makes more sense than most things people have said to me about the afterlife – thank you for sharing that with me.”

“Carmen?” Vanessa asked as they continued their way toward Oz Park. He looked over at her, not minding when an errant curl flopped onto his forehead. “I know our first date isn’t over, but I’d really like to go on a second date.”

“Me too.”

#Carmy #carmy smut #carmy fluff #Carmen Berzatto #carmy berzatto #carmen berzatto x reader #carmen berzatto fluff #Carmen berzatto x ofc #carmen berzatto smut #the bear #the bear hulu #the bear fic #the bear fan fic

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thtupidity · 1 year

Text

So I actually did this a lot faster than expected so uhhh here's the character pages. There were also all the locations until Jan 2021 (or whenever the space station update was) but nothing really of importance.

Anyways here's the core crew's entries, only Jake, Tricky, Fresh, and Yutani had 4 pages unlike the 2 the others got (except for Dino, Boombot, and Miss Maia who all share a single page)

Jake, the first character you meet in subway surfers is the group's leader!

[no speach bubble]

- his grades don't actually reflect his intelligence because he's "too much of a dreamer to focus on schoolwork"

- he constantly wants to go further than everyone else which is why he doesn't turn down challenges and dares (how can this possibly go wrong)

- his need for thrill makes him kinda insensitive towards his friends, he still cares about them and will do risky things for them. Sometimes just for fun.

Tricky, meet the gang's rebel girl— and dance diva!

"I gotta admit, that my ballet training comes in handy when I'm jumping obstacles in the tunnels! But I have to be careful not to twist an ankle — my tracher and my parents would kill me..."

- she can only use her money on things her parents allow her to

- if she gets caught by Ted her parents would make sure she never skates again

- she is a complete perfectionist and takes angles and physics into consideration, and if she can't emulate it perfectly she gets frustrated

Fresh, Fresh was birn in the wrong time: his head is totally in the 1980s

"I live my life by the five elements of hip-hop: MC'ing, DJing, breakdancing, graffiti and education! Okay and skating. Is there room for a sixth element? Who decides this stuff?"

- there isn't much that we already know i.e just saying "he loves the 80s" over and over again and his paragraphs are short. Justice for my boy.

- "Fresh is the most levelheaded of the gang — good at defusing arguments and keeping them all together. He thinks before he speaks, which is kore than you can say for Jake!" ...damnnn

- He feels as if his family is stifling sometimes, so he likes being able to get away from them.

Spike, keeping it real!

[no speach bubble]

- Spike is pointed out to have his fashion more closer to the 70s compared to everyone else's 80s vibe. So food for my "Spike is older" headcanon yum yum

- His boots are shit for skating

Yutani, the gang's resident tech genius, whose inventions are out of this world!

"Whatever my home planet is like, I hope it has lower gravity than Earth — imagine the jumps and tricks you could pull off! And it'd hurt less when you fell, too."

- Yutani thinks there is a tech-based solution to any problem

- She thinks she's an alien because of her missing birth records

- Yutani being able to understand the turbine is implied to be related to her alien orgin

- She also sometimes says more than she's supposed to on her streams (let Yutani do the next interactive stream, grill her on information instead)

Lucy, the punk girl of the gang

"Who said goths have to be mopey and depressed? Sure, I hang out in dark tunnels a lot— but I know how to have fun!

- so there isn't anything important just describing her outfits. But them calling her punk and then talking about her being goth is mildly annoying.

Frank, who *is* that guy?

[no speach bubble]

- nothing much (predictably) just making fun of his clothes.

King, who made him king?

"Heavy is the head that wears the crown, that's what they alwayd day. They should try wearing a crown made of paper! Saves a lot of neck strain."

- not a subway surfer, but he hangs around them because he wants to be included in the fun (justice for King)

- His design is based off of a kid on the album "you've come a long way, baby" by Fatboy Slim

Ella, fresher than Fresh!

"That little brother of mine doesn't know real music when he hears it..."

- She likes reggae music over Hip-hop

- that's about it sadly

Ninja, the moonlight shadow! (i love this title)

"I will strike when you least expect it. Not now. Or now. Look, it won't be when you're watching me."

- He still has no canon name

- A lot of talk about ninjas being assassins so I like to take it as their way of saying Ninja has killed and will kill again.

- His Yang outfit could be useful for sneaking around in the snow

Tagbot, the cyber-surfer

"My databanks contain over three million tags in two hundred languages! I can also spell-check your tags, if you like."

- Yutani is the one who built him, and its stated that he's inspired by Jake. Love her still but would like to know her reasoning to this bold choice.

Tasha, bringing good cheer!

"Give me an "S"! Give me a "u"! Give me a "b"! Give me a "w"! Give me a "a"! Give me a "y"! What d'you mean, why? It's today's word hung word! LOOK, I JUST NEED THE "Y" AND I'VE COMPLETED IT!!"

- there isnt actually a lot here, other than like "hah bet you didn't think you'd find someone like her being a subway surfer!" So were moving on. Most of these are like this. (Justice for Tasha)

Zoe, playing dead.

"Must...tag...walls..."

- she's one of those fast zombies which is horrifying

- She's also not very talkative

- She hasn't tried to eat anyone's brain... "yet"

- Again shes implied to have been dead since the 50s

Brody, too cool for school

"I surf anywhere... beaches, subways... its all just boards to me!"

- young lifeguard

- He's posh?? Maybe??

(These all share a page unfortunately)

Dino [no sub title]

"Roar! What else do you expect me to say? Im a dinosaur."

- "maybe its secretly Yutani"

Boombot [no sub title]

"I don't break down when I break-dance!"

- I hope youre hungry. For nothing. (Justice for boombot)

Miss Maia [no sub title]

"People think i'm mysterious because I wear this respirator mask... really, I just want to avoid breathing in paint fumes. It's good sense!"

- I hope youre hungry. For nothing. (Justice for Maia)

Guard and Dog, don't let them catch you!

"This job would be great if it weren't for those kids. I'd never have to do anything! Although them the boss might fire me for doing nothing..."

- Ted's boss reveal when

- Hes always following them around the world. He's the biggest hater in the subway surfers universe no one does it like him.

- Subway company either makes him wear costumes on holidays or he just does it himself

- He dresses up as NYPD, which im pretty sure is a crime to impersonate an officer...

#subway surfers #//I almost missed Lucy sorry girl #//most are just talking about their outfits

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