i am dead

reblog it twice and force it

down everyone’s throats

The medieval peasant I went back in time to give a bag of Doritos to, concerned: what terrible and powerful sorcerers they must have in your age, to be able to veil the vault of heaven itself from view, as you say

Me, sniffling: I didn’t realize, I can’t, it’s so much, I, I… are the chips good, at least?

Everything I’ve Ever Let Go Of Has Claw Marks On It

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Character designs concept art from Sony Animation’s GOAT (2026).

when you deposit a paycheck in a traditional bank account, you go online and see the number in your balance. to you, it looks like there is a single account that quarantines your money away from everybody else’s. you may think that when you deposit money in the bank, the bank is just holding that money for you, but actually, by depositing money is a bank, you are lending the bank company your money.

a bank company’s core function is to make money by bundling together the deposits that many customers have lent it, and investing that money in the stock market. the bank’s investments earn interest, which is the bank’s profit. if you have a savings account, you’re essentially telling the bank “hey, I plan to have this money sitting here for a while without drawing on it.” a savings account is a more stable investment base than a checking account for the bank, which is why the company incentivizes you to have one. when you earn interest on a savings account, that is the bank giving you a tiny kickback of the money they are making through investing your (and others’ blended) deposits.

the traditional banking system is insured by the federal deposit insurance corporation (FDIC), which is a government agency. if you took all your money out of the bank and hid it under your mattress, if somebody broke into your house and stole it, you will lose all your money. but the government insures money in traditional banks, usually up to $250,000 per consumer account. this means that even if the bank company’s investments all fail and the bank company loses all your cash, the government will bail the bank out, and you will not lose your money.

by putting your money in a traditional bank, you ensure your money is protected, you get a small kickback of interest, and you get access to the convenience of the bank’s online platform to track your finances. you also get a debit card to easily make purchases by drawing directly from your accounts. for the bank company, they get billions of dollars of interest-free loans, in the form of their customer’s deposits, to invest in the stock market. at its core, ignoring fees and credit cards and mortgages, this is how the banking system works.

bankification is the idea that non-banking companies are trying to operate like banks. this includes tech companies like Apple offering credit cards, but an aspect of bankification that is less understood is companies incentivizing consumers to give them interest-free loans. while banks are regulated by the government in exactly when and how they can operate within this business model, other companies trying to profit through this model are not always beholden to these regulations because their activities are not technically considered banking. let’s look at an example: loyalty programs.

in 2025, starbucks has an estimated $2 billion in deferred revenue from their loyalty program. deferred revenue is like a gift card; the company receives money because the customer paid up-front for the gift card, but the company is beholden to discount a future purchase by the pre-paid amount. there are multiple advantages to receiving deferred revenue for a company.

when a customer loads money onto their starbucks loyalty account, they are essentially buying a digital gift card. remember how banks encourage consumers to put money into savings accounts because it is a long-term holding account, which makes it a more stable investment base? once you buy a gift card, you cannot convert it back into cash. the money cannot leave the company, making a very stable investment base. starbucks offers a lot of benefits and discounts for customers who load money onto their loyalty accounts because starbucks recognizes the value of a captive investment base of interest-free loans. when many customers prepay through the loyalty program, starbucks is using that pooled money the same way a bank does: investing it to make even more money.

as a side note, two other major advantages of this gift card model for companies is inflation and breakage. money loses value over time through inflation. when you buy a gift card, you pay the money upfront, and the company can invest that money sooner at its higher value. breakage is the idea that if a gift card is bought but never redeemed, then the company essentially got money for nothing.

now, does this bankification through loyalty programs directly hurt consumers? well, not really. consumers who participate in these sorts of loyalty programs get benefits like discounts. the problem is indirect harms: that this money is uninsured for the consumer, and the deferred revenue investment base is less regulated than traditional banks.

if starbucks’ investments failed and the company died, any money those customers had paid into the loyalty program but had not yet used on purchases would disappear. the money is not insured, so the customer wouldn’t get it back. the same is true for keeping your money in any non-FDIC insured company, including companies like PayPal and Cashapp*. (*some services from those platforms, usually the credit cards, are insured because they have a backing partner bank. but a sitting balance in a free account is usually not FDIC-insured. don’t leave your money sitting in these accounts.)

because companies investing their deferred revenue is regulated and taxed differently than traditional banks’ investments, not only if there less protection for the consumer, but there is less protection for the wider economy. If a bankified company with significant investments into other bankified company fails, this can cause a shockwave effect similar to the 2008-9 financial crisis wherein all the interconnected bankified companies are destabilized. banks are heavily regulated to avoid that happening again, but bankified companies are not beholden to that legislation.

The reason it was so important for narrative purposes, was that the plot concerns the visit of the Astronaut, in his completely opaque spacesuit, to a planet populated entirely by self-aware robots (originally from Earth) who have built their own society and are petitioning to be allowed to interact with Earth again as equals.

They have a democratic government and free choice of careers etc. as the orange robot serving as guide tells the Astronaut.

The Astronaut notices that there are two different types of robot on this world; the orange ones, who are in charge, gifted access to all information and facilities. and the blue robots, who are seen as more limited in function, have less access to information and resources, and are not allowed positions of power or as wide a choice of employment opportunities. Even transportation is segregated.

The Astronaut investigates further and discovers that the blue and orange robots are actually structurally identical, there is absolutely no difference between their potential or capabilities, and it is only because the orange robots are instructed by their Educator system to consider themselves superior, that the difference exists.

The Astronaut tells the robots they are not ready for re-alignment with Earth, until they come to terms with their own unfairness, and how Earth had had to deal with this issue themselves. When that time comes, the robots will be able to ally with Earth.

Then he leaves in his spaceship, and it's only in that one final panel that we see the Astronaut is black.

Not subtle, nor should it be, but for 1950 this was a breathtakingly powerful statement, perhaps the first of it's kind in the genre.

House of leaves

Piranesi

Part 1: Long masc hairstyles + playing with fades