god nerfed me

BOOK COVER REDRAW of one of the most insane and gutwretching books ever written. (Art without text and full process on my insta!)

It was my first time designing a book cover and I have to say the process was painful. I started with a strong idea in mind: I wanted to portray Harrow at the exact moment she got her memories back. It had to be spectacular, dramatic, atrocious. There had to be skeletons, lots of skeletons, the castle of her House, and of course, Gideon's sword. Then came the hard part, colors. I changed the colors I think 4 times, just couldn't get them right, but in the end can say I'm quite happy with the result. During the whole process I kept looking at the original cover from @studiotommy.co (insta) trying to grasp even a small fragment of his tenique (ps. Posting this 2 days before a big tit announcement wasn't in my plans👀)

I hope I've done this book justice, because at the end, that's what it's all about.

Gideon: butch lesbian

Harrow: wet rat

Ianthe: girlfailure

Coronabeth: genderqueer post-ironic bimbo

Camilla: girl, probably. Hasn’t thought too much about it

Palamedes: girl, probably. Thinks about it a LOT.

They knew they were being badly exploited—that the garments they were making were being sold for more than they would make in a month. One 17-year-old said to me: “We make computers, but we don’t know how to use them.”

So one thing I found slightly jarring was that some of these same workers wore clothing festooned with knockoff trademarks of the very multinationals that were responsible for these conditions: Disney characters or Nike check marks. At one point, I asked a local labor organizer about this. Wasn’t it strange—a contradiction?

It took a very long time for him to understand the question. When he finally did, he looked at me like I was nuts. You see, for him and his colleagues, individual consumption wasn’t considered to be in the realm of politics at all. Power rested not in what you did as one person, but what you did as many people, as one part of a large, organized, and focused movement. For him, this meant organizing workers to go on strike for better conditions, and eventually it meant winning the right to unionize. What you ate for lunch or happened to be wearing was of absolutely no concern whatsoever.

This was striking to me, because it was the mirror opposite of my culture back home in Canada. Where I came from, you expressed your political beliefs—firstly and very often lastly—through personal lifestyle choices. By loudly proclaiming your vegetarianism. By shopping fair trade and local and boycotting big, evil brands.

These very different understandings of social change came up again and again a couple of years later, once my book came out. I would give talks about the need for international protections for the right to unionize. About the need to change our global trading system so it didn’t encourage a race to the bottom. And yet at the end of those talks, the first question from the audience was: “What kind of sneakers are OK to buy?” “What brands are ethical?” “Where do you buy your clothes?” “What can I do, as an individual, to change the world?”

Fifteen years after I published No Logo, I still find myself facing very similar questions. These days, I give talks about how the same economic model that superpowered multinationals to seek out cheap labor in Indonesia and China also supercharged global greenhouse-gas emissions. And, invariably, the hand goes up: “Tell me what I can do as an individual.” Or maybe “as a business owner.”

The hard truth is that the answer to the question “What can I, as an individual, do to stop climate change?” is: nothing. You can’t do anything. In fact, the very idea that we—as atomized individuals, even lots of atomized individuals—could play a significant part in stabilizing the planet’s climate system, or changing the global economy, is objectively nuts. We can only meet this tremendous challenge together. As part of a massive and organized global movement.

The irony is that people with relatively little power tend to understand this far better than those with a great deal more power. The workers I met in Indonesia and the Philippines knew all too well that governments and corporations did not value their voice or even their lives as individuals. And because of this, they were driven to act not only together, but to act on a rather large political canvas. To try to change the policies in factories that employ thousands of workers, or in export zones that employ tens of thousands. Or the labor laws in an entire country of millions. Their sense of individual powerlessness pushed them to be politically ambitious, to demand structural changes.

In contrast, here in wealthy countries, we are told how powerful we are as individuals all the time. As consumers. Even individual activists. And the result is that, despite our power and privilege, we often end up acting on canvases that are unnecessarily small—the canvas of our own lifestyle, or maybe our neighborhood or town. Meanwhile, we abandon the structural changes—the policy and legal work— to others.”

gideon “i gave my life for you and you didnt even want it, even worse you refuse to accept it, wasting my sacrifice. you lobotomized yourself to forget everything i did for you—you refuse to embrace the life i have provided you over and over again, and now im stuck as a reanimated corpse” nav

and

coronabeth “i am sick with heartbreak and jealousy that you didnt murder and consume me, your other half, refusing to let me join you on your journey forwards, instead giving that honor to some dick they assigned us. I am dejected and maimed” tridentarius

Cut to like two days later and she's down an arm, her sister is MIA, and to add insult to injury her triumphant rise to lyctorhood is being upstaged by Harrow's romantic lobotomy stunt. This was supposed to be her moment and no one actually gives a fuck about her.

It's kind of tragic. She became an immortal demigod by sheer force of will and raw intellect and still no one will give her the time of day.

She then spends months being negged by Augustine, rejected by Harrow, and basically ignored by John. Her reward for saving god from certain doom is becoming his emotional punching bag and managing his downward spiral while dealing with a zombie apocalypse and playing diplomatic negotiator over corpse zoom.

1. The court holds Google responsible for statements made by its AI, considering them Google's statements (search engines have limited liability for results in their engine as they're the words of other sites/companies/people), meaning when their AI lies/hallucinates they're liable for the defamation/harm resulting from those statements.

2. Google's defense that customers are generally aware of the lack of reliability and are responsible for fact checking was dismissed. As the court pointed out, that would "significantly diminish" AI Search's stated purpose and it can't be distinguished from Google's business practices/statements as a search tool.

3. Studies have found about 91% of Google's everyday AI responses are accurate, leaving millions of searches per HOUR with potential liability for falsehoods. 56% of correct responses weren't supported by the sources the AI listed. Both of which mean Google is now liable for a LOT more AI "errors."

4. Google was held liable for 80% of court costs in this case and this precedent is expected to reverberate around the world. This is a massive shift from the 3rd-party search provider role Google has previously played and it comes right as they've tied ALL searches to their AI search.