benzaaldehyde

The trade off of getting to play for the NHL is giving up their bodies, names, and likenesses. Their whole identities are used as a marketing tool and that’s part of their job. People are making a lot of money off of their rivalry. The NHL is getting more ticket and jersey sales from it. Fans are placing bets on their games. It really is that serious and people really are that invested.

That’s why the Irina Foundation plan is so smart. The rivalry is a narrative people are buying into, so Shane’s suggesting a new narrative. It gives the league a new marketing angle and it generates enough positive PR that people are kinda backed into a corner of letting the rivalry go. No one wants to be the guy saying a sports rivalry is more important than charity, kids, and mental health.

So no, Shane and Ilya are not stupid for feeling trapped by the stakes of this rivalry. They are trapped. They’re trapped in that tricky dissonance between the Hollander and Rozanov the media, league, and fans expect them to be and the Shane and Ilya they really are.

When Shane wakes Ilya up in the middle of the night with his plan, he’s saying: who we really are matters. What we have matters. I’m tired of giving up happiness to contort myself into the shape of who Shane Hollander is supposed to be. The real me wants you and chooses you and this is how we can make it happen.

starting to suspect that tech bros actually just don’t know what reading is

I keep thinking about how many of these chat bots are free—for now. And of course they are! It’s a classic marketing technique when you’re trying to get your foot in the door with a novel product: let folks use it, let them get used to it, then start charging for it. You don’t have to look any further than streaming to see a very recent example of how this happens.

And it’s going to happen with AI.

There’s nothing these assholes love more than making money off of other people’s hard work. But you can’t legally charge for fanfic! So how do you get around that? You charge for a chat bot (which you trained on other people’s fanfic). You can’t charge for the content, but you can charge for the thing that produces the content.

AI is theft, and there are a whooooole lot of people gleefully looking to make a buck off of our hard work.

AJ: "Was it always a conscious choice for [Ilya] to always touch Shane's face?"

CH: "That's [Connor] living in the character."

Ilya sussing out what's the deal between Shane and Rose.

"It's a long story."