G L O B A L A R M S E M B A R G O N O W

The sexuality of a police officer is cop.

The gender of a police officer is cop.

When you become the enforcer and protector of capital, you are making the deal to be slightly favored by the system over others like you, in exchange for being its servant. Your solidarity is with the system that you serve, even if it hates you.

ASSAD ZAMAN

So this is the Panasonic PRONOTE PD CF-62, it's a Pentium 133mhz running Windows 95, released in August 1996. Panasonic did this sort of trick more than once, they did a similar thing with an under-keyboard CD-ROM drive in the PD CF-41, from 1995.

This one is so fancy because that's not just a self-loading under-keyboard laptop CD-ROM drive, it's a HYBRID PD/CD-ROM self-loading under-keyboard laptop drive! It has to be this complex because it takes PD discs (which are the size of caddies) and caddyless CD-ROMs!

So what's PD discs?

They're an optical format by Panasonic, the Phase-change Dual (or Phase-change Disc). They're from 1996, store as much as CD, but are rewritable... much like the later CD-RWs which used basically the same technology, just in a slightly different format. Unlike CD-RWs (which you had to burn (usually), they acted like a hard drive, fully rewritable at any point. That's why the disc is hard-sectored, which you can see through the shutter gap. Those vertical lines indicate where sectors start and end.

So yeah, this laptop has a complex drive that can take both types of discs, and the whole thing folds under the keyboard. Fucking wild.

But the root reason, of course, is that they did this because it's a cool design, and they wanted to do that. Why did they think this was cool, why did they want to do this?

Pervert reasons.

And in a way, they are reality, aren't they? Somehow the financial class of the imperial core is able to do whatever they want with numbers and ignore the actual reality that affects millions of people. You cannot make oil barrels in a computer, you cannot speculate on the price of a crop that underperforms because of fertilizer. But they try anyways.

I'm already used to this in Argentina. Liberal economists who say that inflation is a "purely monetary phenomenon" who believe everything can be summed up to numbers and gambling with exchange rates and debt while the actual factories, farms, schools and daily budgets of people suffer and decay. The "real economy" they say, as far as I'm concerned the "real" economy is the only one that exists. However, somehow they manage to impose their strange, nonsense gambling idea of the world upon us, with real effects, like a religion.

from the very beginning, louis' trauma has been reduced to "well he was a bad person, too!" as though he needs to be the stereotypical Perfect Victim™. yes, of course louis is a bad person as well, they never shy away from showing us that. that does not, however, remove the truth that he is a victim as well. and to attempt to retcon his experiences or use a cop out statement in order to further hammer home that his abuser is also a victim—something we're never allowed to forget—is textbook antiblack racism. there is something deliberate about how both the in-universe characters and show writers often try and dance around or skirt over the trauma louis has experienced his entire mortal and immortal life. and claiming that you're leaving these things for you audience to interpret is especially sinister given half of them are intent upon demonizing one character over the other at every single turn.