Wrench in the Machinery

They know. The developers know that the Destroy ending is the obvious correct answer. The kneejerk reflex after all this fighting is to want them destroyed.

That's why they arbitrarily hold a gun to EDI and the Geth's heads over and go, "You better not. You BETTER FUCKING NOT. I'll shoot. I SWEAR I'LL DO IT."

Which completely ruins any philosophical nuance that deciding the Reapers' fate might have. "Should we seek symbiosis with them, take control of them, or kill them and also murder a bunch of other unrelated people in cold blood too why not?"

They knew the choices they were offering weren't very compelling. So they put a hand on the scale.

Because the thing is? Destroy is the kneejerk, of course. But after much consideration? Objectively, Destroy is the right answer for the Reapers. Or would be if they didn't have that gun. The very existence of the Control ending proves that.

The problem with Control as an option is that it eliminates the Reapers' capacity for agency. The ME3 ending states in no uncertain terms that the Reapers are slaves to program. They obey the Catalyst unthinkingly. They destroy societies in an endless cycle because that is what the Catalyst believes is best, based on his own ideas.

He, the Catalyst, is a self-aware AI.

But the Reapers are not. They just obey the Catalyst. For all their bluster in ME1 and 2, for all Sovereign and Harbinger like to talk big, they're all just word-processing. The Catalyst is the only thinking machine among them.

And the proof of that is that if Shepard replaces the Catalyst and sends them contradictory orders, the Reapers all universally obey the new protocol without question. They're in the midst of destroying worlds when the program "Do not destroy these races," comes through. And so they all drop what they're doing and leave without an ounce of hesitation or consideration.

Because they're just obedient machines.

And if that is true? If they're not intelligent, free-thinking artificial life like the Geth or EDI?

Then what value is their existence? They're just complicated warships built for genocide. That is the totality of their being.

And if that is true? Then why would we "seek coexistence" with brainless killing machines? Why would we want to control them, to arm a god-emperor with an armada of planet-killing super-weapons to keep the galaxy in line?

If Reapers obey the Catalyst unquestioningly, if they will obey Shepard unquestioningly, if they are just unthinking and unquestioning machines....

Then obviously we should just destroy them. That is the conclusion that the Catalyst and his choices inevitably brings us back to. If they're just the Catalyst's weapons of slaughter and nothing more, then those weapons of slaughter should not exist. They should all be destroyed and their destruction celebrated in the same way we would celebrate all the world nations disarming their nuclear arsenals.

But the game says no. If you destroy the Reapers, you destroy EDI and the Geth. Because it thinks they're the same, even as it introduces this plot point that completely upends any claim the Reapers have to being intelligent.

In the end, the final choice of ME3 is flawed at a point of basic principles. I reject the notion that it's founded on, that what you choose to do with the Reapers is a reflection of your beliefs towards EDI and the Geth, and their right to coexist with organic lifeforms.

Because they're alive.

And the Reapers are not.

So if it feels inescapable and like evidence of it is everywhere, whether at times or always, that might just because you're in a Western country where you're surrounded by Christians who believe that, fundamentally, in their worldview. And also they talk and make art about it all the time and run the vast majority of news outlets. And spent over a thousand years burning any art or texts that disagreed with them. Etc. etc.

If you're gonna come to as drastic and painful a conclusion as that, at least take the time first to make sure you're not working with biased evidence (surrounded by too many people and cultural products that believe original sin is real)

how often do we find human remains / burials attributable to a peaceful death of old age, or at least to disease / wild animals? and attributable to human violence, i.e. with traces of weapon impacts?

I personally am much more convinced and compelled by newer theories that, if any piece of technology made us human, it was not the weapon - it was the carrier bag, the story, and/or fire. (But not fire with the primary purpose of violence, mind you - fire with the primary purpose of heat and food and sanitation)

Here's a quote on this from one of my absolute favorite thinkers and writers, Ursula K. Le Guin:

If you haven't got something to put it in, food will escape you- even something as uncombative and unresourceful as an oat. You put as many as you can into your stomach while they are handy, that being the primary container; but what about tomorrow morning when you wake up and it's cold and raining and wouldn't it be good to have just a few handfuls of oats to chew on and give little Oom to make her shut up, but how do you get more than one stomachful and one handful home? So you get up and go to the damned soggy oat patch in the rain, and wouldn't it be a good thing if you had something to put Baby Oo Oo in so that you could pick the oats with both hands? A leaf a gourd a shell a net a bag a sling a sack a bottle a pot a box a container. A holder. A recipient. The first cultural device was probably a recipient. . . . Many theorizers feel that the earliest cultural inventions must have been a container to hold gathered products and some kind of sling or net carrier. So says Elizabeth Fisher in Women's Creation (McGraw-Hill, 1975). But no, this cannot be. Where is that wonderful, big, long, hard thing, a bone, I believe, that the Ape Man first bashed somebody with in the movie and then, grunting with ecstasy at having achieved the first proper murder, flung up into the sky...? I don't know. I don 't even care. I'm not telling that story. We've heard it, we've all heard all about all the sticks and spears and swords, the things to bash and poke and hit with, the long, hard things, but we have not heard about the thing to put things in, the container for the thing contained. That is a new story. That is news... It sometimes seems that that story is approaching its end. Lest there be no more telling of stories at all , some of us out here in the wild oats, amid the alien corn, think we'd better start telling another one, which maybe people can go on with when the old one's fin- ished. Maybe. The trouble is , we've all let ourselves become part of the killer story, and so we may get finished along with it. Hence it is with a certain feeling of urgency that I seek the nature, subject, words of the other story, the untold one, the life story.

Fire is literally the reason our brains are larger than any other species of ape's, because harnessing fire meant we spent radically less energy spent on digestion - and those excess resources instead changed the evolution of the human brain.

Also fire is probably the reason we're not fully covered in hair anymore, evolutionarily - because we evolved in equatorial Africa, where not wearing a fur coat everywhere was an evolutionary advantage due to, you know, the temperature of it all. Once we could make our own heat to survive the cold nights and winters, less insulation was a huge evolutionary advance in equatorial regions especially

Wherever humans have gone in the world, they have carried with them two things, language and fire. As they traveled through tropical forests they hoarded the precious embers of old fires and sheltered them from downpours. When they settled the barren Arctic, they took with them the memory of fire, and recreated it in stoneware vessels filled with animal fat. Darwin himself considered these the two most significant achievements of humanity. It is, of course, impossible to imagine a human society that does not have language, but—given the right climate and an adequacy of raw wild food—could there be a primitive tribe that survives without cooking? In fact, no such people have ever been found. Nor will they be, according to a provocative theory by Harvard biologist Richard Wrangham, who believes that fire is needed to fuel the organ that makes possible all the other products of culture, language included: the human brain. Every animal on earth is constrained by its energy budget; the calories obtained from food will stretch only so far. And for most human beings, most of the time, these calories are burned not at the gym, but invisibly, in powering the heart, the digestive system and especially the brain, in the silent work of moving molecules around within and among its 100 billion cells. A human body at rest devotes roughly one-fifth of its energy to the brain, regardless of whether it is thinking anything useful, or even thinking at all. Thus, the unprecedented increase in brain size that hominids embarked on around 1.8 million years ago had to be paid for with added calories either taken in or diverted from some other function in the body. Many anthropologists think the key breakthrough was adding meat to the diet. But Wrangham and his Harvard colleague Rachel Carmody think that’s only a part of what was going on in evolution at the time. What matters, they say, is not just how many calories you can put into your mouth, but what happens to the food once it gets there. How much useful energy does it provide, after subtracting the calories spent in chewing, swallowing and digesting? The real breakthrough, they argue, was cooking.

-via Smithsonian Magazine, June 2013. Emphasis mine. In the time since this article was published, what was considered a "provocative theory" in 2013 has become a matter of increasing scientific evidence and scientific consensus.

Richard Wrangham lays out his theory as a whole in his 2010 book Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human.

For more current summaries on the history of fire, and scientific and archeological evidence for its role in human evolution:

Evolutionary fire ecology: An historical account and future directions. August 2023. BioScience, volume 73, issue 8, pages 602–608. Permalink: https://doi.org/10.1093/biosci/biad059, paywall-free.

The discovery of fire by humans: a long and convoluted process. By J. A. J. Gowlett. June 2016. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, volume 371, issue 1696, epage 20150164. Permalink: doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2015.0164, paywall free.

Or, less scholarly:

Current archeological evidence suggests that humans are, if anything, defined by the hearthfire.

By cooking. By our ability to keep ourselves warm. By our ability to provide for ourselves and each other. By humanity's millennia-long quest to beat back the ravages of starvation and hunger.

is this machamp’s name “homo matsuri”

as in

“Dig” in Japanese was originally “Ana wo horu,” which translates to “Dig a hole,” with the direct object’s being “Ana,” “a hole” and the verb’s being “horu,” “dig.”

The common writing of “ana,” “穴,” is the same as a colloquial term for the buttocks, “ketsu.”

“Horu,” in addition to it’s more standard definition, is also a slang verb meaning “to have anal sex (between two men).”

3 can be san or mi. 1 can be ichi, hi, or to.

mito is a polite archaic word for genetalia.

My loving nesting partner is disabled. They have DID, C-PTSD, Chronic Fatigue, among other things. They primarily work from home on the computer but we have a problem. We share a laptop and I am working on stuff when my partners need to be and vice versa. Them having their own computer would do us both a favor and help get things done faster without scheduling who uses it when. Anything and everything means the world to us and I just want to be able to give them something they need. They rarely ask for anything even though they fucking deserve the world. Please help us out!

- P*ypal - [email protected]

- V*nmo - @thespookygalpal

It's never done that before so I looked it up and turns out Roku TVs have added all sorts of creepy things in the privacy section since I last checked.

One of which being they take screenshots from what you're watching and send them to third parties to identify it.

Fucking hell! Remember when every fucking device in your life wasn't a spy implanted in your home and working against your interests to try and sell your data? Remember how nice that was??

Remember when the TV was just a tool that would play the things you plugged into it?

So you can avoid them stealing things from you, the artist/writer, etc.

Pro GenAI websites/Programs:

Facebook

Instagram

X/Twitter (Remember, Grok gives people cancer)

Threads

Pro Writing Aid

Grammarly

Duolingo

Google Docs

Microsoft Word/all Microsoft products Takes from and will feed their machine.

Youtube (taking advantage of people who are hearing impaired. ==;;)

Adobe Products. All of them. If you HAVE to use them (Some businesses require it), save offline because there is a film of at least some privacy protections there, so if you have to sue, you can say it violates US privacy law. Remember, contracts do not circumvent US law.

Corel won't feed the machines, but still uses AI stolen from other artists. Which sucks since Corel Draw is the second best overall for vector programs. (Plus I love Painter, but I bought the offline version to avoid AI). (Canadian company)

Canva Takes and feeds their machine.

Deviant Art Not only supports AI, but put a tool in and said they are going to steal your work if you like it or not for their machine.

Sketchup went Pro-GenAI. The thing is that you can do the same thing in Blender these days with precise measurements.

Autodesk has stated they are Pro-Gen AI here. It is not clear if they will use your models to feed their machine. But be on guard. They make Maya and 3Dmax. You can replace it with Blender.

Neutral ground:

Tumblr (there is a way to opt out [Link] and they don't have an active AI machine.) https://www.tumblr.com/dookins/743519550598987776/heres-how-to-disable-third-parties-like-ai

Etsy allows GenAI, but still has some (minor) restrictions. I'd still be cautious. (Also be cautious of drop shippers). Complaints about too much AI and AI images+patterns made by Ai still exist on the website. They lean slightly more pro-AI, but still won't let it run completely amok, say like Facebook. They won't feed your work into a machine, but also don't ban it through robots.txt.

Bluesky They don't use an AI algorithm except for in the "Discover" section of their website, but while they are anti-GenAI strongly, they don't seem to block the Gen AI bots from entry, so you'd still have to use Nightshade or Glaze (links below). There is no opt-out because they don't need an opt out. (Leaning towards strong position on AI, but I wish they would block GenAI bots).

Searxng- If you super want to screw over Google, in general, and have some tech savvy, you can set up your own search engine through searxng. It's easier on Windows and Linux than it is on a Mac. (Mac you need Docker), but if you're determined on privacy, Searxng adds a layer of privacy. Some of it sometimes uses bits of AI, but most of it doesn't and you can fuss with the settings so it doesn't spit out AI results. At sheer minimum Google will stop spitting out weird videos on Youtube at you because in your private browsing, you searched for the origin of ball bearings while not logged in for a book and Google likes to break privacy laws.

Strong positions against AI:

Scrivener (Creator vowed against AI) Writing program. There is an active forum, and versions for Mac, Linux and PC. It is paid, but at ~60 USD, it's cheaper than most programs. There is usually a holiday sale around Christmas. It has a learning curve, but with an active forum with the programmer of it there to ask obscure questions it's not a dead zone. They often take suggestions and implement them over time. (Especially if you rank the importance, applications, etc) US company.

LibreOffice Open source and free Spreadsheet and Word processor program that can replace Microsoft Word. Some people might have seen older versions where it was called Neo Office (now extinct) and Open Office. LibreOffice is still populated, plus the forums are super helpful if you get stuck. The UX is pretty intuitive if you've used Microsoft Word. Scrivener, BTW, supports exporting to odt (the native file) as well as .doc, and this can open both. The slight thing is that sometimes it doesn't export to .doc smoothly. And I DO wish more magazines, and agent (big clue here) supported .odt files since it is free. Part of the reason .odt isn't as supported is because Microsoft and Adobe have a deal with the devil with each other, so Adobe's Book formatting program InDesign doesn't support ODT. (BTW, if you have a good open source replacement for InDesign that supports ODT, let me know.)

Dabble (as suggested by SF stories, see reblog) is a writing program. Similar to Scrivener. Has vowed against AI and to resist it. 108 dollars a year for Basic. It is almost twice the price of Scrivener who lets you update for fairly cheap. 29 dollars a month, v. 59 dollars for the whole program (Scrivener) for the same features of Premium. You choose.

yWriter is a free Writing program and like Scrivener, and has vowed against AI Last I looked it had some UX issues, but some people swear by it. The learning curve is higher than Scrivener which is saying something.

Ellipsus is an online writing program and vowed against AI. The main feature I like (which Scrivener doesn't have) is the ability to change spellcheck based on region/language. It is a requested feature of Scrivener, but lower priority. So if you have a Brit, you can get the spelling for the character. They are a British-based company.

Cara.app (The creator of the website sued GenAI there is no chance they'll convert) is an artist website. Cara is trying to institute an auto Glaze/Nightshade into the website if given enough funds. People see it as a soft replacement for deviant art. (which went fully AI) If you believe in human art, please donate if you can. Zhang Jingna, the Creator,is Chinese-Singporean. She lives in Singapore.

Clip Studio Paint added AI, but saw the light and decided to protect artists instead because of protest and removed it. There are tutorials and a good forum if you get super stuck. Based in Japan, so the UI and UX is really clean.

Davinci Resolve Pro is a film editing software that's super good. There is a free version and a paid version. The forums are responsive. The programmers aren't always present. There is a healthy group of tutorials. US company. Clean UX. It does take a little bit of time to remember the shortcuts.

Tahoma2D is anti-AI and open source animation program. Takes a little getting used to, but is good for animations and doesn't crash as often as Animate. Programmers are in the forums and some bugs are fixed within hours. The forums are super responsive and helpful.

Krita open source and free, no AI. I'd rank it secondary to Clip Studio Paint (which is paid) I haven't tried the forums, but it's pretty intuitive and can stand for a lower level replacement for Painter, and do a lot of the basics of Photoshop. It's usually ranked higher than the equally open source Gimp.

Writer P AKA Writer+ (app for when you're on the go) is a simple word processor app for your phone that doesn't use AI. The original programmer stopped updating, so Writer+ person took over and isn't out to make a profit since it's free in the spirit of the original app. It has subfolders you can use. Since it was programmed before GenAI it doesn't have AI. Intuitive, easy to use. Fairly easy to upload the files through three dots->share. The files can save to your card or phone with some settings fussing. Simple word processor.

Inkscape is a free vector program and no AI. It is harder to use than illustrator and has less features. But if you're doing smaller vectors for one-offs with less complexity, it'll do you after some learning curve. Best of the lot. I hate Affinity Designer which is the same thing, only paid. (Neither Affinity program was worth the money paid)

Affinity (Designer, etc) swore to be AI-free and does Vector and Photos. The UX is messy, I dislike the program and regret paying for it. Inkscape and Krita are better UX and do the same thing. The forums aren't as friendly since there has been an onslaught of people seeing it's supposed to be a replacement for Photoshop and Illustrator, but the programmers aren't present. The people on the forums are often on edge about this assertion. And the capabilities of the program don't outshine basically Krita or Inkscape capabilities (both free). What is usually intuitive is not. UK company. If you're going to pay for a program, go for Clip Studio Paint which rivals Corel Painter.

Blender is a 3D art program and does not use GenAI. It can do 2D animation, but Tahoma is easier to use in this regard. It's open source and free. Plus there are plenty of tutorials. The forums can be touch and go sometimes, but there are plenty of sub Blender communities that might be responsive. It can also do animation.

Handmade vowed against AI and promised to never sell itself for stock prices to prevent AI (as a replacement for Etsy.)

Proton (to replace Google Suite) as suggested by SF Stories (see reblog) Vowed against AI. They are missing a spreadsheet, but have online and offline capabilities, plus a built-in VPN.

But you need a pro website...

Look up robots.txt and AI bots: https://www.cyberciti.biz/web-developer/block-openai-bard-bing-ai-crawler-bots-using-robots-txt-file/

Use cloudflare:

Use Nightshade:

https://nightshade.cs.uchicago.edu/whatis.html

which will poison the algorithm

Use Glaze:

Take Away:

The thing is you think you doing it alone will do nothing, but the more AI feeds on itself, AI images, the worse they become, and the less detailed so, denying it the images, adding poison or not being able to read the human text is eventually going to lead to an AI collapse.

And why not help that along?

Practical Organising

“Only the Organised Survive”: A Rebel Worker Handbook

Direct Action in Industry by the Direct Action Movement

Weakening the Dam by the Twin Cities branch of the IWW

How to Hold a Good Meeting and Rusty’s Rules of Order by the Industrial Workers of the World

Community Control of the Poor community

A Practical Guide to Anarchist Organisation – Compiled by Andrew Flood

How to Fire Your Boss: A Workers Guide to Direct Action

The Bosses Need Us… We Don’t Need Them: Common Sense Reasons for Worker Self-Management

Organising in the Workplace

Organising Communities by Tom Knoche

Anarchist Agitation & Community Building by Ronald A. Young

My gut reaction to this was "I wouldn't, fuck him", but then I realised that I do actually have thoughts about this.

Open with a white-text-on-black-screen intro that explains that dialogue in this film has been taken wherever possible from historic recordings. Where it couldn't be, it has been constructed from records of the relevant parliament/private discussions that are on record, even if not word for word. Add that all events depicted are real. And, to reinforce this, a huge load-bearing pillar of the marketing for the film would emphasise that this is extremely limited in artistic interpretation, it's all things the man actually said and did. This, the marketing would stress, is the REAL Churchill, in all his complexity. This is the nuanced and complex and very human guy we don't see in the history books, strengths and flaws and all of it.

The first... half, maybe even two thirds of the film would be pre-WW2. A full account of all his actions in power, painting the picture of the man he was. His belligerence disguised as wit, sending in the army against striking Welsh miners, his initial admiration for fascism and eugenics, all of it. All reproduced from things he actually said and did.

Then, the realisation that Hitler included Britain in his fascist plans. The U-turn into hating the guy, all while believing in the same underlying points.

Then, most of the WW2 section would be in montage form. And at this point, the audience sees why he was actually fairly well suited to the task of opposing Hitler, because all those flaws meant he was ego-driven to resist the Nazis or die trying, and that was what was needed at the time. We've set up that ego, that belligerence, that eloquence. Here it is, in context, actually being useful.

But, this would be juxtaposed with all the things we're carefully not told, that are nonetheless historic record. The starving of India to get food to Britain. The lack of bomb shelters in London, and then claiming credit for sending people into the Underground when they thought to do it. The use and abuse of non-British Commonwealth troops in roles kept from the white soldiers. All of that goes in.

And then, once the war was done, the fallout. The rest of the film would cover his fall from power, first of all - the fuck up at the Potsdam Conference, then his continued use of lurid and hyperbolic war rhetoric in the general election campaign that basically made Clement Atlee and let Labour win.

Labour's creation of the NHS, and national parks, and other such things. Churchill's opposition. The fallout to places like India, the Suez, etc.

And then his return for a final term as Prime Minister in which he was unpopular, unsuccessful, and also very unwell; he was 77 and had multiple strokes, which were hidden from the public. He was against the dissolution of the empire, but Labour had already pulled the trigger on it, so his final years were basically a lot of war crimes and whining as countries declared independence; which won't be a surprise to the audience, because we've literally heard his views on eugenics and imperialism already. Of course those didn't go away with WW2. All that congealed ego and imperialist drive, so useful against Hitler while keeping the worst costs away from the UK, made him a fossil unsuited to the role of peacetime leadership in a post-war recovering nation beginning to decolonise.

And finish on how, at the end, he supported the UK's application to join the EEC - the precursor to the EU.

The whole thing would make the Churchill cultists so fucking angry. They'd 100% claim liberal bias and piss themselves. But that's why you'd have to go so hard on stressing in the marketing that all of it is true; he literally said this. He literally did this. It's all real. Even the EU bit. Yeah, you voted against Churchill.

But I am enjoying how the responses to it are falling neatly into three interrelated categories:

Hey, a Winston Churchill movie I would actually watch!

We should also include (personal anti-Churchill bugbear of the commenter; so far, no two have even been alike, which speaks volumes)

Aside from the hallucinations, immense energy requirements, and potentially negative mental health effects, generative artificial intelligence still has an issue with accuracy. However, that hasn’t stopped major tech companies like Google from rolling out features like AI search summaries to its users. Most of the results seem fine at first glance and usually feature multiple source citations, but that doesn’t mean the product works perfectly. A recent study reported by the New York Times found that Google’s “AI Overview” offers correct and reputably sourced summaries 9 out of 10 times. But while 90 percent sounds like a passing grade, the failure rate adds up in a matter of minutes. Given that the company will process over five trillion searches in 2026, the ensuing math means AI Overview is churning out tens of millions of questionable answers each hour. That’s hundreds of thousands of errors every minute.

I don't have exact numbers yet, but at least twenty users were terminated at the same exact time, recieving an "internally generated report" refusing to declare reason for the ban. I quote, "Upon review of your account we have determined that it does not align with our terms of service". No reason given, this was clearly a deliberate action by staff as they themselves claim

All people who recieved tumblr premium were affected by the initial mass ban. As this would be near impossible to collate for a normal user (and who would even pay for this?), i can only conclude the following

Tumblr staff has given a month of tumblr premium to all those affected by the banwave

However, on the same day, and according to the evidence obtained,

Tumblr staff used the same means they used in march, the exact same means they apologized about using, terminating all followers of evilprincess-v

All members affected were followers of the same account, and they all recieved a message of termination without reason, and declaring itself internally generated.

Hey we all remember 2020, right? When we voted out Donald Trump the first time??? That was a thing that happened a mere six years ago, and yes, America subsequently massively fucked it up and voted him back in, but we did remove him by voting once before.

Anyone also remember 2024, when Jair Bolsonaro was removed by voting in Brazil? And when he tried a coup, Brazil actually fucking punished him, disqualified him from running, and sent him to jail, instead of letting him off scot-free to do it again?

Also a spate of worldwide post-Trump elections, where the far-right wasn't in power per se but was gunning to be, and voting ensured they stayed out (2025 Moldova, 2025 Romania where massive protests annulled Russian meddling and forced a re-run where the pro-EU candidate won, 2025 Canada where the Conservatives lost after previously being up 20 points, 2025 Australia where the far right was just fuckin wiped out, 2025 Netherlands where Geert Wilders lost, AND SO FORTH).

And of course, the result referenced in the original post, 2026 Hungary where Viktor Fucking Orbán was removed by voting? Despite the massive structural hurdles facing the Hungarian voting public, far more than is the case in America even now?

(Lololol the Kremlin and Trump have immediately pivoted to "Orbán who? Never heard of him. Never knew him. Shh.")

Anti-voting has always been a deeply stupid ideology by people who want miraculous revolution to be suddenly achieved with no downsides and no widespread catastrophe, by doing nothing more than posting violent rhetoric online. Because they have no interest in actually doing the kind of hands-on, slow, systematic work that leads to positive social change in real life, and because they have no understanding of how anything actually works.

Relentless, hypocritical, purity-test politics are literally the best friend of authoritarians everywhere, because they ensure that liberal/left coalitions will never get their fucking act together long enough to put their weight behind the non-authoritarian candidate.

We've all said this before, but sometimes it bears restating.

Nobody has ever suggested that social change can be achieved solely by voting in decent or lesser-evil candidates. Voting is one tiny part of that effort. "Oh so you just want us to vote and do nothing else??" No. No, nobody has ever said that. You can and you should do a lot more than that: protest, mutual aid, fundraising, organizing, pressure campaigns, community protection groups, literally whatever. You can and should continue to hound the politicians you voted for if they're not living up to their campaign promises, as long as you actually voted for them in the first place.

So I wouldn't even answer this ask EXCEPT it's a fantastic example of someone who hates you and wants you to undermine your cause pretending to be on your side, so let's go through the points.

1.) Makes the assertion that you've already failed eight months in advance. Wants you to give up and give in because you think the cause is already lost.

2.) Implies that everyone else is secretly gonna do it, so you may as well too. Wants to chip away at your resolve.

3.) Claims to be on your side and therefore a trustworthy source.

4.) "Boycotts don't work." Demonstrably they do, as long as people are organized and persistent. Look at how Target and Starbucks are sweating and begging people to come back. Boycotts work.

HBO, the dragon-fucking, mobster murdering, gang cussword network does not have a lot of play with parents, or the general public. At best, they're third fiddle to Disney and Netflix, and HP is an obvious play for them to steal market share and shed their historical perception (see also: Sesame Street)

Production is clocking in around $100 million per episode. This thing is primed to be a failure. If it does anything less than the absolute best numbers of any TV show in the last decade, it is a failure.

A huge portion of their built in audience has less than zero interest in supporting this project, and will actively shit talk it to whomever wants to hear.

Again, Harry Potter is so uncool right now. I know it's been 30 years almost since the first film, but it's been less than 20 since the last one, not counting the Fantastic Beasts. It's only been four years since a Harry Potter was released! We've had, on average, one film every two and a half years.

In the spirit of "my uncle who works at Ninetendo", I have a ... let's say friend of a friend? ... who used to work at WB. And oh, honey. The TEA.

So a number of years ago, this friend was on the team tasked with figuring out whether a new HP series was financially viable. They had the ACTUAL streaming numbers, the subscriber data, the parks stuff, all the shit companies don't release. Their job was to gauge the popularity of HP, break it down by what does and doesn't make money, and determine whether new HP was worth the investment (because it would NOT be cheap).

The numbers, my loves, were catastrophic.

Yes, HP makes WB a lot of money. But it is NOSTALGIA money. MILLENNIAL nostalgia money. The people buying house scarves and theme park tickets are reliving their own childhoods, and we're not making any more 80s/90s babies, are we? No, we are not. And millennials' kids want nothing to do with this shit, and most millennials don't have as much money as you'd expect to spend on nostalgia in the first place. The only people engaging with this shit are the hardcore fans (a shrinking population due to JKR's shit parade) and people who might buy a Harry Potter chocolate bar on clearance because it's cheap chocolate. The hardcore fans already have their streaming subscriptions, and the cheap-chocolate crowd aren't going to get them for HP. There is also the very real chance that a shitty remake will tarnish memories of the original films, thereby reducing THEIR value. It was concluded that the best strategy was to shut up and keep profiting off the old stuff.

So why, I asked friend-of-friend, is a new series coming out now?

Now, FOF no longer works there. They are not privy to the inside scoop on this series. They told me so. And so I asked them to speculate, on the basis of zero inside knowledge: why now?

They started snickering.

And they told me that anyone who's worked anywhere near David Zaslav is convinced that this series only exists because he wants his name on an HP thing. That's it. This is a vanity project for DAVID FUCKING ZASLAV. It's going to fail, but it'll fail with his name on it, and that's all that matters. Its whole purpose is to buff Zaslav's ego.