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baltears · 2 years

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hello spookyshai!! its cool if u dont want to, but i was wonderin if you'd elaborate on what you like about william? i just like thinking about/mentally rewriting westworld and its characters in my free time, and your fascination with william's got me fascinated, mostly bc i see him as a stinky bastard. so obvs you'd definitely have a more nuanced take on him, which i'd also like to develop for the imaginary westworld rewrite fic that i'm never going to write ;)) regardless if u answer or not, just wanted to say i'm a fan of your blog and i hope you're havin a good day!!

omg so first of all thank you so so much for sending this, especially asking unprompted about a character you don't even like and giving me a chance to explain my feelings about him which is just incredibly cool of you. i love and am obsessed with william so giving me any excuse to talk about him at length is like gifting me $1000. if you want to know more about my meta thoughts about him after reading this, (I'm gonna talk A Lot – sorry – but i can't possibly get through everything because he's just a very complicated guy and it's a very dense show), you can always look in my william tag. I have a lot of text posts about him, but I also often talk a lot in the tags of my own posts as well as reblogs. This is gonna be a lot of totally disorganized and unedited infodumping of a lot of different meta, but i've talked about all of it at length elsewhere too and I can also totally elaborate more if you have any specific questions (you could send another ask if you wanted, but also feel free to just message me about it anytime). I'll do my best not to get too emotional (lol) but it'll be tough because this character is so close to my heart. but I'll try!

this is a huge wall of text lol so i'll also be adding more bold and italics than i normally would just to make it a little easier to read.

so first of all let's be clear, he completely is a stinky bastard. he is a horrible, awful, faithless, pathetic specimen of a man. not liking him is totally justified. just wanted to get that out of the way. personally I think not liking anything for any reason is totally valid and justified, but there are certainly good reasons why a lot of people don't like william. he is not a good dude, at least not after a certain point. No one is obligated to relate to him, empathize with him, feel bad for him, whatever... like, no one's obligated to like anything, but especially this guy. sometimes people can get a little shirty about the fact that i do, like me liking him means i think they have to. I don't think that. I do love finding other william stans, and i am very unapologetic and open about my love for him, but him being widely hated makes complete sense to me.

sigh like why i love him so much though… it's kind of hard to even put into words. on one level it's just extremely personal, like, there are a lot of things about him that i really resonate with and identify with, although I know that sounds weird (it's definitely gotten some very shocked reactions before, lol). i'm a villain liker in general, i tend to be able to relate to those types of characters easily and it kind of takes a lot for me to really dislike one on a personal level (though that's true of any sort of character, i just tend to like the majority of the characters in any work that i genuinely enjoy regardless of how shitty they are – to me the only truly bad thing a character can be is annoying, like, the kind of annoying where you just want them off your screen). Characters being any degree of evil or shitty or problematic doesn't bug me at all, personally, I tend to feel no deep internal urge to have them 'held accountable' for the things they do, unless they exist in a narrative that genuinely doesn't seem to understand that they are in the wrong, which does irritate me when it happens. But anyway, I don't want to get too oversharey but there's definitely a very high level of just personal resonance to the character for me in terms of the kinds of conflicts he has, the things he struggles with, the dominant emotions of his life, etc. so that's part of it. also though he's just… a very complex and beautifully constructed piece of character work, so I also love him just on a technical level as a writer.

He has such incredible significance in the story too, being the thematic representative of humanity, both to dolores and to the wider narrative – his capabilities for good and evil are humanity's capabilities for good and evil, right. Dolores' opinion of humanity and feelings towards humanity are very colored by her opinion of him and her feelings towards him, and thematically their relationship is sort of a microcosm of the broader relationship between hosts and humanity and very much a central piece of the narrative. Even when it's out of direct focus it's being constantly referenced and pointed back to, such as with the caleb storyline in season 3 – caleb himself is basically one big callback to william in s3, parallels out the wazoo, and his function of turning around dolores' opinion on humans is very much related to him reminding her of william – hence why her storyline in season 3 ends with her remarking on how her memories of william as a young man indicate to her that humanity is capable of goodness, because caleb's capacity to choose echoes william's capacity to choose, caleb's goodness echoes william's goodness, it all goes back to that, etc.

So… I guess I'll just jump in lol. William's Thing, the fulcrum of his character, the main feeling or sentiment that underlies all of his evil actions and kind of his general turn away from the kind and gentle person he used to be, is alienation, right. He lives his whole life (as he tells dolores in 1x07) not fitting in anywhere, not making connections anywhere, not having any sort of community or any experience with love or companionship of any kind… he's just been totally alone and alienated his entire life. like, the closest thing he had to a friend was logan, and he hates logan. I think this is the major thing people miss about him – there's this perception that his turning evil was out of some form of entitlement, that he was just angry that this woman he liked didn't like him back and it's just an issue of wounded masculinity, but to me that completely misses the mark. Like yes wounded masculinity is a piece of his character (the way he performs and weaponizes masculinity in general is… really fascinating, I'll go into a bit more detail about it, but the kind of showy machismo that he displays is definitely a tool that he intentionally developed for his own use rather than a really integral part of who he is) but it's not at all the core emotion happening there.

To William, Dolores was not only a person he was in love with or a person he was attracted to. She was also his first and only genuine human connection ever. She was his first true friend, she was his first love, she was the first suggestion anywhere in his life that it was even possible at all for him to experience a sort of deep mutual understanding and care, that somebody could actually genuinely see him and let him see them. He literally just had not ever experienced any level of real emotional intimacy before, which is a feeling i actually think a lot of people relate to if they grew up feeling very lonely. And then ultimately not only was that relationship taken away, but it was kind of retroactively deleted. When he saw her again back in sweetwater, his thought was not, "i don't have this relationship anymore," but "i never had this relationship," and further, "the single person i've ever thought i could have this kind of relationship with is actually not capable of having any kind of relationship with anyone, including me, and i literally just made all of this up in my head." After losing Dolores he is not just sad and lonely – he literally comes to the conclusion that he can never have any kind of intimate human connection or be genuinely loved, ever, because the one person in his entire life he thought he connected with is not even a person at all, but just a thing. It's very much a rug pull moment on a level that's hard to describe, it kind of takes some thought-experimenting to get to that emotional place because it's a level of shock and hurt and betrayal and like, paradigm-shifting that most of us don't regularly experience (which I think might be part of the reason why a lot of people don't seem to really understand his character or be able to parse what's going on with him emotionally). Suffice it to say it's a wound deep enough that he was pretty much never going to recover from it.

After that happens he is completely destabilized, he loses all sense of meaning and self, and he never gets a grip on it again. He had totally reconstructed his idea of his life to include the genuine possibility of meaning, and meaningful relationships, when he met Dolores. And with the loss of her, all of that suddenly went away and he basically was just left with nothing. So that alienation that he grew up with is now not just a part of his life, not just a thing that he suffers from, but he starts to feel that it's inherent to him and that it comes from him, which is partly why we start getting all the anti-social behavior he displays later in life. He develops and kind of fosters that lack of empathy in himself not because he's truly incapable of empathy (as we see when he's a young man and at a couple of later points here and there, he is in fact very capable of it) but because he feels fundamentally cut off from other people – he can't reach them and they can't reach him.

So that fundamental sense of alienation is really what informs 90% of the things he does after that point. He starts building this persona, inside and outside the park. The real world feels meaningless to him at this point because the only hint of meaning he's ever had in his life was in the park, so he buys the park, and simultaneously starts trying to "win" at life in the real world like he would in the park. The real world honestly doesn't feel any more real to him than the park does, he just knows rationally that it's different and so he behaves differently outside the park… he builds all this wealth and power for himself, he becomes a famous philanthropist. Inside the park he starts creating this character for himself, this sort of hyper-masculine, hyper-competent, totally emotionally composed, merciless, badass villain. And he makes a very concerted effort to stay in this persona as often as he can.

It's all a performance, though, right. As early as 1x05 we have Ford pointing out (to his face! legend) that his barely-hidden desperation to find meaning in the park is giving the game away. In that flashback near the end of 2x02 we get a glimpse of what's underneath, because he's performing this cold, heartless persona in front of Dolores literally while his voice is shaking because he's having to try hard not to start crying as he's talking to her. Deep down he is still very wounded, he still loves her, he still desperately wishes deep down (as jimmi simpson explained) for her to just tell him that all of it was real, for her to be real and truly be a person the way he thought she was. When he's an older man that wish is still in there, it's just been buried very deep, covered up with a lot of other things, twisted. But it's always there, it's his most closely held desire, the only thing he truly wants, and it comes out all the time in the things he does. All his tormenting of dolores, and especially his desire to make the park "real" in order to find meaning – that's that. That sense of deep confusion that's always there in his character too, the constant inner monologue of "who am I, what does this mean, does anything mean anything, what is real or not real, what is going on," that's that too, that's his destabilized sense of self and reality and meaning that came out of losing Dolores. And by this point he has also come to feel, as he says in 2x09 to his wife, that there is something very fundamentally wrong with him, in a way that's kind of at odds with how we as the audience have historically understood him.

The thing is, we saw him be a kind, loving, gentle, thoughtful person. He certainly was not perfect, for instance his later narcissism started out as a sort of basic self-centeredness, but he was a fundamentally good-hearted person who put most of his energy into trying to do the right thing. But he starts saying that he feels like that wasn't the real him, that he thinks deep down he was evil and poisonous all along, that his turn to darkness was inevitable, and that there's a sort of helplessness to his evil. There's this deep sense of shame that permeates his character along with his loneliness and alienation and resentment. He hates everything, he hates the world, but above all he hates himself – kind of amusing considering the god complex he's developed over time. But that really does seem to be the underlying emotion, that he truly thinks that deep down he was always bad. It's very heavily implied that his philanthropy outside the park and his attention to his family, his kind of good-guy persona, is something that he constructed to try and make up for his true nature, and all but stated that he doesn't feel like he's succeeded. To him, no amount of good he does will ever balance his level of evil, evil that as he says doesn't come from anything he's done but something deeper than that, something immutable, something he is. So that's why we eventually have him getting to the point of going "I might as well not bother with this anymore. I might as well just be evil, because I can't change what I am."

I've also said in other posts that the things Juliet says to him come off as obviously abusive. Like, she's technically correct that there's some sinister things going on with his private life, but listen to how she says it. You're a virus, not a person, a thing that mindlessly infects and destroys and has no other purpose. And he agrees with her! He doesn't question it at all, he just says, yes, you're exactly right, I'm not a human being with good and bad attributes, or potential to do both right and wrong. I'm a virus. Like, again, I know people get weird about having empathy for villain characters, there's the whole "cool motive, still murder," thing, because we don't want to be excusing anyone's bad actions with a sad backstory (personally I don't really care, but I understand where the concern comes from). But when he said that to Juliet it just… like I don't know how else to put it, it broke my heart. He really believes that about himself. And later he starts to question it because he's not sure anymore if he actually chose to do any of the things he did… but the way his hallucination of Emily puts it, these are his two options: you are evil, or you had no choice. One or the other. He never puts aside the idea that he is a monster that does not deserve to live, and his suicidality persists from season one (when he encourages Dolores to shoot him in the head and reacts with honest disappointment when she can't) to the end of season four when he actually does manage to engineer his own death. He is deeply, agonizingly, pathetically miserable existing the way that he is, he seems to see his even being allowed to live at all as some sort of cosmic injustice. But he doesn't know how to change back to the way he was.

All that having happened, though, we also keep getting these repeated suggestions in the story that he actually is still capable of goodness somewhere in there. The narrative keeps asking what William is exactly, what his fundamental nature is, and keeps refusing to land on one answer, instead choosing to keep things ambiguous in a way that would be sort of odd for your garden variety villain. In 2x04 we see him experiencing regret, feeling empathy and pain on behalf of others, and acting genuinely heroic, only to later backtrack and say it didn't mean anything. In 2x09 Emily tells him he is in his essence "a lie" but makes no attempt to locate what the "truth" of him would then be. In 3x06 he tries to figure out the answer to what's going on with him again only to decide he still doesn't really know, in 3x08 we get this reminder that he still stands for Dolores as a representation of both humanity's evil and its goodness, in 4x05 when his host duplicate asks him what he is, he says "Jury's still out." He is too far down his current path to turn back, but he still does not and cannot definitively and finally choose evil, because despite his self-loathing it seems like he senses deep down that his other side is still in there. All that to say I think he's getting a redemption arc in season 5, if we get a season 5 – season 5 is supposed to be the do-over season, and the character who most desperately needs and could most benefit from a do-over is William.

Um, closing thoughts… I think he's really funny. Sometimes intentionally, like, I do laugh at his little quippy comments, but I also just think it's really funny how pathetic he is and what a mess he is and how he basically imploded his entire life on accident. I do feel a lot of very genuine care and empathy for him (obviously), but he's also such a garbage fire of a human being that you sometimes just have to laugh. He's just my funny little guy, also he sucks, also I love him and he's my lil angel, also he's the worst man ever in history and deserves to be drawn and quartered (said with love). You get it. :) There's dimensions.

Trying to think of other characterization notes for your imaginary fic… oh, did you notice he puts on an accent in the park? He does this fake Southern drawl when he's playing his park character, but it's not his real accent and he drops it at other times, kind of like how Dolores sometimes does or doesn't use her "rancher's daughter" accent when she's being Wyatt in season 2. Uh… Total nerd, at heart, seeing as "all he had as a kid were books." (I kind of suspect that childhood memory might not have been totally real, by the way… made a post about that recently that's a little ways down in my tag if you're interested.)

There are more things I could say, but I think I've probably gone on long enough for the one ask lol so I'll cut it off here. Thank you again, so much, for sending this. I hope you enjoyed and got something out of this response, but if not I still do very much appreciate you asking and being curious. I hope you had a great day too!

#westworld #his brain is a conference call #william westworld

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sieclesetcieux · 2 years

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Can anyone help me to understand patreon? Do I need tiers? How does it work when you're a writer? I honestly can't figure out how to apply the patreon model to my projects.

(I don't mind producing free content, but let's be honest, some of these require a lot of time, energy and work, plus English is not my first language, I'm disabled, and this is probably the only job I'm gonna have for a while, and I've got bills to pay like everyone.)

So here are the kind of projects I have, besides the ones mentioned here:

1) A series of posts dedicated to sharing my understanding of Saint-Just and that of French historians and philosophers (Miguel Abensour) who haven't been translated to English.

Topics I'd cover for example:

About Organt

Continue on his personality with the letter to d'Aubigny + commentaries by Lejeune, Gateau, and the Duplay-Le Bas couple

Politics & philosophy: translating/explaining Abensour

On his myth: summarizing povs of Gross, Philonenko, Vinot, Huet, Bacquès

2) Translations from French to English:

Vinot's first chapter (unless someone's already done it? tell me if so)

Philonenko's article on SJ

Abensour's intro to SJ's OC (very long and hard)

Mazeau on the Terror (very important text, required reading IMO)

3) my project on representations of the French Revolution and of revolution in general (but esp that following the script created by the Frev) in various media: Les Mis of course but also Westworld, V for Vendetta, The Hunger Games trilogy, Star Wars: Rogue One, Revolutionary Girl Utena, The Dark Knight Rises and many more!

4) I guess I could also add my unfinished series of posts on historiography/reading recommendations because wow that's a lot more work than I thought -_-

So, yeah, what kind of patreon model should I use to finance these projects? Or should I use something other than patreon?

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cutlier · 2 years

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YOU GOT A DEATHWISH? / CUTLIER.

INTRO

low activity, independent & selective rp for frankie nichols aka "c" of hbo's westworld s4. written by mel (they/them). not spoiler free.

INFO

(full rules can be found here)

Basic rundown: mun =/= muse, normal rp etiquette applies so no godmodding/etc. don't take my stuff without asking, just be chill and vibe with me.

Common triggers associated with Westworld include heavy themes of violence, guns, death, blood/gore, body horror, mental illness, suicide, and sexual assault. Please don’t hesitate to let me know if you need anything specific tagged.

I will typically use 90x90px icons, small text, and some bold/italicized font in my threads but I am not particularly attached to anything and have no problem with going iconless, leaving text at default size for accessibility, or limiting my use of bold and italic if necessary.

This is a no drama space. I do not tolerate any sort of guilt-tripping, anon hate, sub posting about other RPers on tumblr, or callout culture. I also will not take kindly to character/ship/show hate.

Shipping (namely in the romantic and/or sexual context) is not my main priority, but I am multiverse and multiship friendly and always happy to discuss potential based on our muses’ chemistry. In my portrayal, Frankie is a lesbian, and I will ship her only with other female muses. I will NOT ship with anyone under the age of 18, and I will not do smut.

I am duplicate-friendly. Whether a duplicate of my muse or a different character, all are welcome here.

BASIC

FULL NAME : Francine* Nichols KNOWN AS : Frankie, C AGE : verse-dependent, typically late 20s to early 30s GENDER & PRONOUNS : Cis Female / She/her ORIENTATION : Lesbian / Lesbiromantic ETHNICITY : Biracial, Black and White PLACE OF BIRTH : Los Angeles, California CURRENT RESIDENCE : Verse-Dependent FACECLAIM : Aurora Perrineau

*personal headcanon

#* thanks to you her hobbies are sugar and violence / OOC.#pinned post.

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cutlier-moved · 2 years

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YOU GOT A DEATHWISH? / CUTLIER

INTRO

low activity, independent & selective rp for frankie nichols aka "c" of hbo's westworld s4. written by mel (they/them). not spoiler free.

INFO (full rules can be found here)

This is a sideblog. Any new follows, ooc messages, or inbox prompts sent will be done from my main blog, @cagedchoice.

Basic rundown: mun =/= muse, normal rp etiquette applies so no godmodding/etc. don't take my stuff without asking, just be chill and vibe with me.

I am duplicate-friendly. Whether a duplicate of my muse or a different character, all are welcome here.

#pinned post.

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cagedchoices · 5 months

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#CAGEDCHOICES. an independent, selective & private roleplay blog for CALEB NICHOLS from the HBO television series WESTWORLD, featured in seasons 3 & 4. canon and personal headcanon-based portrayal written by mel (they/them, 29yrs, timezone PST -8:00).

LOW ACTIVITY / SLOW REPLY.

a loose study in - the value of FREE WILL, questioning the nature of your own REALITY, what it means to be HUMAN, remembering your TRUE SELF, DEFYING CONTROL, taking back your own NARRATIVE & fighting for something to BELIEVE IN.

CARRD. MUSIC. PINTEREST. VIDEO. HEADCANONS. MEMES. META. VERSES.

(BETA TEXT EDITOR + XKIT REWRITTEN)

BLOGROLL. @cutlier - frankie nichols, westworld @anonymousones - multifandom & oc multimuse (inactive) @fuckedchoices - nsft/usfw sideblog @leannain - brianna mackenzie, outlander

— mobile header/dash icon/pinned post psd (c) —

#pinned post.#updated 2.5.24

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tipsformeblog · 1 year

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AI and Passive Income: A Philosophical and Practical Guide for People Living with Chronic Illness, Starting with No Money

AI and Passive Income: A Philosophical and Practical Guide for People Living with Chronic Illness, Starting with No Money, text and audio versions #chronicillness #pwme #energyimpairment

If you prefer to listen there’s an audio version here or above. By the way I’ve also just added an audio version of a previous post on deep fakes and chronic illness here. Next Monday you can meet the new energy limiting chronic illness advocacy bot I’ve created to help us. As fans of the hit show “Westworld” know, the idea of robots achieving sentience and challenging the power dynamics of…

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#Ai #money #passive income #Philosophy #Spoonie

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keyboard-cowgirl · 2 years

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westworld s4 + text posts (part 1)

#westworld #westworld season 4 #this meme doesn't look like anything to me #dolores abernathy #clementine pennyfeather #maeve millay #so many i had to break it into two posts #i hope i get to make a s5 edition #please hbo #when will the s5 announcement return from the war

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ausetkmt · 2 years

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The big triple-A gaming companies are probably already drooling at the prospect. They could sell games at a premium to American and European customers, and then use monthly fees to buy the labor of some hungry bunch of Filipinos for a pittance, and have them do all the menial stuff of serving the valued players. Until the day the NPCs rise up in a Westworld scenario and start slaughtering the privileged players.

Nah, won’t happen. You’ve gotta keep the NPCs weak and relatively unarmed so they are helpless.

Man, this is just going to replay all the sins of the colonial powers, isn’t it?

A whole new level of cheap-ass ugly art that you can sell as NFTs!

Wow. It’s amazing how oblivious the defenders of a colonial system can be, but this article about an NFT/crypto gaming system is revealing, in a horrifying way. Some Western crypto nuts created a modified version of Minecraft in which players, after paying a hefty entry fee, could earn crypto money that could be exchanged for the real thing just by playing. It was called Critterz.

At first, people actually did make money playing!

For a while, it worked. Some Critterz players told Rest of World that, at one point, they were earning more than $100 a day playing the game. At its peak, it had around 2,000 daily players, some of whom enlisted other players to help build their in-game empires for a cut of the crypto they earned. One U.S. player, who goes by “Big Chief,” described how his team, composed largely of young people in the Philippines, gathered building materials for him. He then paid professional Minecraft builders around $10,000 in crypto to turn those materials into a lavish casino.

“At first.” Then, like most of these crypto schemes, the grifters took their profits and left the participants hanging. In addition, Minecraft announced that you can’t use their game in these NFT cons. The value is plummeting, and is heading towards zero.

But, as with Axie Infinity, once the game became more popular, the value of its crypto token began to drop. Worth 85 cents at its peak in January, it had decreased to around 3 cents by May. But the depreciation was gradual, and many players continued playing and building. Then, on July 20, 2022, in a post on the Minecraft website, developer Mojang Studios dropped a bombshell: Minecraft would not support integrations with NFTs. The company laid out its position and stated in bold text that “blockchain technologies are not permitted to be integrated inside our Minecraft client and server applications nor may they be utilized to create NFTs associated with any in-game content, including worlds, skins, personal items, or other mods.”

During its heyday, though, the mechanisms of the game were ripe for exploitation. If you had the capital, you could help poor people buy-in, and then rake in a percentage of their subsequent earnings. Sweet! Then you could sit back and do nothing in your wealthy home country, like the US, while the peons on your Minecraft plantation send you money.

It was clear from the languages used in the Critterz chat log that almost all guild members, also known as “scholars,” came from low-income countries, and, overwhelmingly, the Philippines. Many were also former players of Axie Infinity, and worked for guild owners that ran Axie guilds too. Charles Franzis, a 19-year-old student at Bulacan State University, just north of Manila, got into Axie Infinity last October. He joined a guild called Big Chief Academy and enrolled as a scholar, hoping to earn some extra money that would support him through his studies.

Big Chief was the owner of the plantation, with a swarm of desperate poor peasants playing for him.

Big Chief, who is based in the U.S., owns around 60 Critterz NFTs, which, at their peak, were worth more than $300,000 (at the time of publication, they had reduced in value to around $5,000). At one point, he managed around 200 guild scholars in Critterz.

But hey, they liked playing the game, and he paid them a cut, so it was OK. It was OK, right? They got more than half of what they earned, the rest going into Big Chief’s pockets, instead of 100%, but that was the cost of his beneficent patronage.

Big Chief said that he split earnings 60/40 in favor of his scholars, and that, unlike other games like Axie Infinity, most of them actually enjoyed playing Minecraft. “These kids are playing Minecraft, a game that they already liked and played, and earning as much as a CPA (certified public accountant) in the Philippines,” he said.

It was a force for good! I’m sure every colonized country has heard these arguments, that being under the thumb of a paymaster has been a civilizing influence. Meanwhile, 40% of the wealth produced in their country is being siphoned off to a rich country, which is making no investment in their homeland.

Big Chief framed guilds in play-to-earn gaming as a force for good, arguing that they provide people in poorer parts of the world with an opportunity to make money. “That’s why it’s really annoying when people talk about exploitation,” he said. “I couldn’t tell you what the hourly rate comes to, but I could tell you that people make very little money and the cost of living is very low in the Philippines.”

Don’t forget the patronizing attitude!

Big Chief said he felt bad for his guild members who were no longer able to make money from Critterz. “I treated a lot of these kids like they’re my kids, so it’s kind of sad now that I can’t really offer them much. Before, I was really helping a lot of these kids, giving them an opportunity to make some extra cash for their families and it just kind of sucks that I can’t really do that right now,” he said.

Aww, he was so helpful to these people he saw remotely as percentages on a spreadsheet.

Critterz is doomed, it’s already collapsing in value, and once Mojang shuts them down, it’ll be a worthless game. Poor Big Chief. He won’t be able to milk this grift for profit. But don’t you worry, the designers are dreaming big of future horizons in game development. Look at this nightmare fantasy:

But he also envisions NFT games that could exploit the wealth gap between players to deliver a different experience. “With the cheap labor of a developing country, you could use people in the Philippines as NPCs (“non-playable characters”), real-life NPCs in your game,” said Kossar. They could “just populate the world, maybe do a random job or just walk back and forth, fishing, telling stories, a shopkeeper, anything is really possible.”

#NFT's #Colonialism in internet economies #Colonialism in real time #Phillipines #Critterz #NPC's

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writerloading · 3 years

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Westworld + @screenshotsofdespair

#westworld #ww #westworld hbo #westworld edit #westworldedit #westworld text post #text post #hbo show #dolores abernathy #evan rachel wood #charlotte hale #tessa thompson #william westworld #jimmi simpson #ed harris #bernard lowe #maeve millay #teddy flood #screenericedit

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methodwriting · 3 years

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i've only been watching westworld a couple days now but if something happens to hector i will kill everyone in this room and then myself

#maeve and him are like serious goals #westworld #hector escaton #maeve millay #a text post

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sergeant-angels-trashcan · 3 years

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what KILLS me is that William was right!!! Dolores WAS different/aware/etc!! that robot loving lil bitch was RIGHT!! he was so caught up in being into dolores and then being heartbroken that he lost all conviction about it! he went on a psychotic murderous rampage for her, OBSESSED over the park because of her, are you telling me she never had a slipup where she sort of remembered him and kindled that hope again?? is that what you’re telling me??

all that conviction he gained in the park gone in an instant. the maze COULD have been for him!

imagine Robert paid attention for five fucking seconds or for some weird reason Arnold was still in the picture?? like c’mon you’re telling me the hosts don’t have some sort of alert program when someone’s as enthusiastically pro-robot consciousness as William? Imagine they take William under their collective wing and he takes over Delos (and is still a bit of a bastard!) for the express purpose of protecting the hosts and being rich and respectable and powerful enough to start real discussions about AI rights

and of course he’s still in love with Dolores and Robert/Arnold are like. it’s possible her feelings for you are hers, unscripted, but that’s not really the point, that can’t be your ultimate goal or whatever

and the tragic love story of william and dolores! dolores who remembers him sometimes and he keeps coming back to the park to see her and going slightly insane, but Robert has explained to him that they can’t magic her out to the real world and they can’t let her retain her memories because that’s horrific

and then!!! when they’re at the church and she’s telling him someone is coming for her, someone who loves her and she loves, and he’s just like oh fuck OFF theodore-- and she says William! She’s talking about him! Jesus fuck how devastating?? to realize that you were right, that you weren’t crazy, she is special, she remembers (how much does she remember?) but it’s been too long and he’s gone too far and it doesn’t matter anymore. he’s just cared about this for so long that it’s routine, it’s what he’s supposed to do even if he doesn’t think it will work, doesn’t care. the Man in Black, gone unhinged after decades of waiting for Dolores to remember and wrangling shit at Delos.

Maybe he DOES still care but he’s been forcing himself not to for decades??

If he doesn’t fully understand what Arnold did, that pain is requisite for consciousness, in the show he at least seems to GRASP it, or the importance of trauma? The whole dichotomy between him killing Maeve’s daughter and not feeling anything vs. Maeve attaining personhood/sentience/consciousness because she could not and did not WANT to stop feeling the pain of losing her daughter. It’s making me feel so many things. Just imagine William knowing that, wanting to make Westworld “real” wanting the hosts to be able to fight back, and realizing that the only way to do that is to be the worst possible version of himself (The Man in Black). Which in a very twisted way kind of makes sense! he is trying to “wake up” the hosts. And he’s doing that by being brutal and sadistic and terrible but he’s doing it for their own good, for the greater good

THIS IS THE KIND OF FUCKERY I WANT FROM THIS SHOW!! William being cold and hard and detached because if he’s NOT he’s going to absolutely lose his shit because he ~has~ to terrorize Dolores so she can wake up.

Or??? OR if they put that brutal, crystal-clear knife purpose William, the one who made it to the edges of the park, they put that version of him in a host (The Man In Black was originally a host in the movie, I think?) and he’s the exact opposite of Stubbs. Stubbs is responsible for the safety of the hosts. The Man in Black is responsible for trying to wake them up, which involves tormenting them.

He’s programmed not to feel things, to be a little numb, why killing Maeve’s daughter, killing his own daughter, are not as impactful as you’d think they would be for him. His core drive to feel something real with real stakes will make the stakes real and allow the hosts to win, but he never can. The maze is NOT for him, it is NOT for The Man in Black who is a host, because that’s the cruelest thing you could do to him. Because to FEEL, to know what he is, and to remember all of that--that he did all those horrible things to his kind, and he did it with a grim sort of enjoyment--that he’s the ULTIMATE pawn, I don’t know if he could take it.

and eventually you have pre-losing-Dolores-William as a host, who doesn’t know everything the Man in Black does, who is still young and hopeful and idealistic and winds up fighting with himself (either himself as a human or as a host), despising everything he became, everything he had to become. And his existence is the ultimate act of hope and self-hatred human William has ever done, because one day Dolores will remember him and he wants to be there for her (the maze is for him!) as she remembers him, not the man he had to become

host!William being capable of evolving beyond who he was all those years ago, the ANGST, he’s all hopeful and idealistic and will that version care about Dolores? Does that William have what it takes to be next to the evolved version of Dolores? Can he stomach it? The Man in Black version of himself tinkering with his hopeful version’s code, uploading part of who he became because the William that slaughtered an army to find Dolores will probably do okay next to a Dolores about to upend the entire world.

and their shared belief that westworld is the only real world... season two would have been FERAL. dolores wouldn’t have had to hack teddy because THAT’S JUST WHO WILLIAM IS NOW. and they love each other in a brutal bloody way but they aren’t NICE to each other, Dolores calls William “Billy” when he doesn’t follow her orders

just. the UNHINGEDNESS. can you IMAGINE the William that made it to the edge of the park and sent Logan into the wild next to a Dolores who is going to lie, steal, cheat, and kill a lot to get to the mainland? GIVE ME MY FUCKED UP POWER COUPLE

anyway why did robots happen to me

#westworld #westworld meta #them being unhinged together #dolores abernathy #william westworld #does he not have a last name i love that #the hurt/comfort for this unhinged power couple would be off the charts #does this make sense my brain is just screaming ROBOTS ROBOTS ROBOTS over and over #all those different versions of the man in black he had to fight are real and at large #this post was supposed to end at 'that robot loving lil bitch was right' and here we are #the adhd in me hates how many blocks of text there are

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