Elly, artist/writer/musician/activist, 25+. Various fandoms, Canadian politics, classical music (....also a fandom, technically? a bandom...?), occasional art, occasional frenchposting, very frequent unhinged tag rants, elder millennial laments.
@lysimachias YGO/multifandom-ish art blog
@ten-thousand-year-elegy ygodm/loz crossover longfic blog
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#elly talks politics for the whole umbrella of politics/organizing-related talk (#cdnpoli for Canadian specific politics, #community organizing for "how to get involved" type stuff)
#asks As you can see I am very ask-friendly and enjoy chatting even if we've never interacted, don't be shy!
#bric-à-brac for miscellaneous musings, mini-essays, etc
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Welp. Google's AI horseshit has arrived. And I'm not complying. They can pry my ID out of my cold dead hands. I will simply go elsewhere. Remember folks, DO NOT GIVE THEM YOUR IDs. Do not comply. Resist, fight it, use other browsers or sources beyond youtube and google controlled services. Call them. Email them. Make noise. Fight back.
I've been using Google as my main mail service since 2006, and every single account or service I've ever signed up for was made with that address. For a long time I thought it'd be impossible to divorce myself from Google.
It took less than 5 minutes to switch to a ProtonMail account, less than 2 hours to download and/or offload every byte of data from my Google account, and less than 3 days to change every single account or service I've ever signed up for to the new address.
As of today, the only single one I have that's still tied to it is YouTube. It's the only thing I'd lose access to if I deleted my Google acount entirely.
They really, really want you to believe that it's a hassle to switch to a different email system. But it's not. Most websites and/or services allow you to change the email address associated with it.
I've been using Google for almost 2 decades and it only took a few days to move everything. It's not a painful sacrifice; it's an easy change that, frankly, has absolutely been worth it.
You can and should switch to a free, encrypted Proton email account. You also get all of the below perks. For free. There is no trick. It is paid for by the people with paying plans. I am one of them. The (completely functional) free tier is there to entice you into getting a paid account with even more perks. (It worked on me.) But there's no penalty or pressure for staying with the free account.
Also get your stuff off the google drive and put it on Proton's drive. It is encrypted. Only you with your password can access it. Not even Proton can see what you put in there.
I find Qwant better than Ecosia, both in getting better results and being privacy-focussed instead of Bing reskinned. It doesn't plant trees though.
Anyway other than that yes all of this!! I've made a proton account and am slowly transitioning over instead of all at once - any time I log in somewhere, I change the email after and update my password manager. When I get an email from a service I try to remember to log in and change it. Takes longer overall to get rid of google than doing it all at once, but it's a lot more sustainable for me.
Also Proton imported all 16 years of emails from gmail for me, with like, three clicks. It gets all my emails forwarded so I still see stuff from my gmail address, but I'm hoping that I can slow those forwarded emails to a trickle over time.
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For those who don't know: Ikumi Nakamura is the woman who was senior artist on Bayonetta, and designed the titular character along with Hideki Kamiya. Their greatest moment of bonding was over their insistence that Bayonetta keep her glasses on at all times.
Nakamura cannot go to horny jail. She is the warden.
The idea of “but everyone knows that” needs to stop.
I saw a post about someone chiding Millennials for not knowing about JKRowlings transphobia, and asking how it is at all possible that people can exist in the world and the internet and, you know, not know.
Which I mean, I get. It is so present in so many of my online spaces that it seems astounding that someone could simply be ignorant! It feels impossible!
But let me tell you a story:
I went on a girls trip with a bunch of friends. All of us are rather incredibly liberal and all of us are incredibly online.
One girl would not stop talking about Harry Potter.
At one point, another girl asked her why she was ok with supporting it, and she had no real clue that JK Rowling was at all transphobic. She had heard that she likes to support Lesbian causes and thought “oh ok cool!” And that was it. She was AGOG with the news and rather horrified.
I must once again emphasize that she was an incredibly online person. She’s a foodie and a restaurant blogger.
Later in the trip we were picking restaurants and I suggested one I found on Google, and she gasped at me. Actually gasped, asking how I could ever be okay picking that one.
The shock must’ve been on my face, because she then told me all of the shitty things that restaurateur does. He abuses staff. Underpays them. Fires them on a whim. Is known for being one of the worst people to his employees in the entire restaurant business on this coast.
And she was so shocked I had never heard of this. Because in her mind, I was just as online as her. And in her online world, EVERYONE knew about this guy.
So I think the moral of this story is: always approach the other person with some empathy. Even online people, even people you think MUST know about how bad people are, may not have heard. It may truly be just them being on a different sphere of the internet than you.
So be gentle, be kind when letting people know they might not have heard about the cancellation of XYZ person. Don’t assume that everyone knows all the same info as you.
By all means, let them know so they can make informed decisions, but being kind will go a lot further than attacking them for some info they might not know yet.
So many political posts I hate boil down to "I don't want to organize and work with people I hate and fight for small, incremental victories, I just want to start a revolution where everyone magically becomes an automaton who acts exactly the way I think they should act"
Like damn man, I want that too. Unfortunately I live in reality though so we're stuck with the first thing.
"Modern movements are too fractured, too aimless, with too much infighting and corruption among the leadership. What we need is a revolution, which famously never have any issues with those things" okay then. Good luck I guess
This whole line of thinking comes down to "the current systems and leadership are bad. What we need is a fresh start with only people who are good, and then all the systems will be good". Which is simply not how anything has ever worked!
"We don't have enough people, funding, and power to bring about changes through elections! We have to do an armed revolution instead which thankfully doesn't require people, funding, or power to pull off."
My next book is The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI, out next month. Pre-order it now, including as a DRM-free audiobook or ebook, at my Kickstarter, and help me continue to prove that DRM-free isn't just the right way to reach an audience, it's also the best way to reach them.
The "Third Way" in liberal politics involves saying things that working people love, but doing things that sociopathic plutocrats love. It works …right up until voters notice that you're not doing the things. That realisation breeds cynicism and fury and paves the way for fascist strongmen.
It's really ugly, and no one does it uglier than Canada's Liberal Party. Remember that time Prime Minister Justin Trudeau marched with Greta Thunberg to protest Canada's shitty, planet-wrecking climate policies?
Gee, Justin – it sure would be great if you could have a word with the fella who decided to bail out America's doomed tar sands pipeline and vowed to pump and torch 173,000,000,000 barrels of Canadian oil:
Trudeau's "Third Way" eventually proved so unpopular that he opened the door to an authoritarian takeover of Canada by an otherwise totally unelectable, Trump-aligned far-right maniac. The only thing that saved Canada from a fate dumber than Trump was Trump himself, who wouldn't stop promising to make Canada the 51st state, an idea that was even more repellent to Canadians than five more years of Third Way bullshit:
And boy did Canadians find a Third Way bullshitter to move into 24 Sussex Drive: Mark Carney, an austerity-crazed central banker who will endorse incredibly progressive policies…provided he never has to do any of them. When it comes to championing working Canadians while royally screwing them, Carney is the only Canadian politician capable of out-Trudeauing Trudeau.
But we shouldn't reject Carneyism due to the mere fact that Carney refuses to deliver Carneyism. The problem with Carneyism isn't Carneyism itself – the problem with Carneyism is Mark Carney.
Take Carney's policy promise to charge US tech giants a 3% tax, a move that would defeat their incredibly clever gambit of pretending to be Irish and thus not owing any tax, anywhere:
That was a good policy! So was Carney's "elbows up" policy of sticking it to America in retaliation for Trump's flagrant violation of CUSMA, the free trade agreement negotiated by (checks notes) one Donald J Trump:
Unfortunately, Mark Carney didn't get the memo from (checks notes) Mark Carney, and the very instant Trump arranged his face into his trademarked confused scowl, Carney dropped the tax, apologising profusely:
In the last days of the Trudeau government, the Liberals passed a bill that transformed Canada's Competition Bureau from the weakest antitrust regulator in the world into one of the strongest (on paper, at least):
It's impossible to overstate how useless the Competition Bureau was before this bill passed. In its entire history, the Bureau had only challenged three mergers, and had never successfully challenged a merger. Canada's do-nothing competition enforcers allowed the company to be captured by Made-in-Canada oligarchs whose ripoffs and abuses would make the Hudson's Bay Company blush:
If Canada was ever going to be a real country (and not just two monopolists and a mining company in a trenchcoat) it needed a serious competition enforcer. Nominally, it has one, thanks to the 2024 Competition Act. The only problem was Carney, who made sweeping real-terms cuts to the Bureau's funding. Thanks to Carney, Canada has a Competition Bureau with all the powers it needs to save Canada from its oligarchs – but it can't afford to do any of that stuff.
Monopolists rip Canadians off like crazy. We even have a guy who mistook Les Miz for an HBR case-study, and embarked upon the country's worst-ever price-fixing campaign, gouging the country on bread prices:
(The Bread Bandit isn't solely to blame for the price-fixing scandal. He had help! The plan was actually devised by Pete "Third Way" Buttigieg. Mayor Pete cited his work setting up Canada's bread cartel as his proudest accomplishment from his days as a McKinsey ghoul:)
You don't have to be a monopolist to steal from Canadians. Ripping off Canadians is the game everyone can play! Consumer protection agencies are incredible value for money, saving the public hundreds for every dollar that we spend on them. Guess who just eliminated Canada's consumer protection agency?
Oh, to be a scammer in Mark Carney's Canada! Whatever Galen Weston doesn't steal is yours for the taking!
But again, the problem isn't Carneyism – the problem is Carney. Carneyism is great. Carneyism gave us that remarkable speech at Davos, where Mark Carney declared a "rupture" in the US-dominated global system of trade and politics, promising a future of "minilateralism" in which "middle powers" like Canada band together for mutual prosperity:
If only Mark Carney had been there to hear those stirring words! He might have understood what a fucking insane idea it is to turn over Canada's military to Palantir, the company that, more than any other, has fused itself with the Trump regime's domestic program of ethnic cleansing and its international program of extraterritorial aggression:
Carneyism isn't merely a rejection of the old international order. Domestically, Carneyism promises technocratic excellence, skilled leadership that delivers first-class services for the Canadian people. This is a great pitch! It got Mamdani elected, and Mamdani's sincere pursuit of governmental excellence thrills New Yorkers in new ways every day:
Here, too, Carneyism is entirely sound – the problem is Carney's vicious anti-Carneyism and his plan to fire tens of thousands of civil servants and replace them with AI chatbots. It's not just that chatbots are terrible substitutes for skilled public officials, they're also controlled by US corporations that are entirely beholden to the Trump regime:
Unlike Mark Carney, I support Carneyism. Carneyism promises protection for Canadians, from monopolists and mad emperors, petty thieves and potholes. But Carney himself ardently opposes these policies. This will only get worse when the AI bubble pops and vaporises a third of the US stock market, spreading contagion to global capital markets. That will be Carney's cue to roll out his favourite go-to tactic: austerity.
We cannot afford this. Austerity is how we lose the country. Austerity – more than any other force – drives working people into the arms of fascists:
The thing is, Mark Carney has shown his political opponents how to beat him: just embrace Carneyism. The things Carney says are incredibly popular. Now we just need to elect someone who'll do them.
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
Neoliberals promise to bring about populist changes then as soon as they're in office it's just too hard and no longer realistic so they abandon it in favor of corporate handouts.
Neoconservatives promise to bring about populist changes through horrific methods that would never improve anyone's lives, then get credit for "following through on their promises" even though it never gives the results they claimed it would.
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You listen to music regularly? Why? Have you even tried quitting? Could you quit? You get music stuck in your head? Wow. You're so ruined and music brained. I bet you make your partners listen to music with you when you have sex. Music addiction has really ruined a whole generation. You know it's not realistic to expect reverb in real life, right? You're probably so desensitized that you don't even feel anything anymore when you hear a bird singing that it wants some fuck.
extra crazy to see people swinging so hard for big corporate copyright lawsuits on tumblr dot com tbh. alright girl whateverrrrr, I hope the lawyers come for your favorite fan artist next if you're so in favor of it ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
you're all frothing at the mouth for a queer climate activist getting sued now but oooh just wait until you can't order astarion keychains and baby yoda plushies and whatever the fuck else off etsy anymore
I guess in light of all the feedback I've been receiving tonight I'm going to turn over a new leaf and become a good citizen who defends copyright law. first up is snitching out the nice lady at the local farmers market who sells crochet pokemon plushies, I want to see nintendo sue that cunt into the ground
some hyper famous artists like Van Gogh transcend overratedness and become underrated because they're so normalized. Like I'll look at a van Gogh and I'm like wait this really is amazing you guys don't get it
AHHAHA well I also got another message asking for the Vivaldi freakout so. y'all brought this on yourselves <3 <3
FIRST THING TO UNDERSTAND: Baroque music is really really fucking cool. You could see it as a reaction to more constrained medieval/renaissance music, which was often obsessive about certain musical rules. Baroque comes from the Portuguese barroco, "an irregularly-shaped pearl", and was actually used as a criticism meaning something very weird, dissonant, overly extravagant, etc. It's seen as very structured but is in fact a collection of big ol' "fuck yous" to the previous era of musical structure.
SECOND THING TO UNDERSTAND: Vivaldi was really really fucking cool. He was nicknamed "The Red Priest" as a young spicey ginger, and for many years he was the violin maestro at a combo orphanage/music school for girls. He wrote a zillion works specifically for the girls to perform, coached them in music theory and instruments, and helped many of them launch esteemed careers abroad. Also the board of directors hated him and kept firing him and then realizing they needed him and bringing him back, for reasons completely lost to history, but probably related to his spiciness.
THIRD THING TO UNDERSTAND: "The Four Seasons" is really really fucking cool. It's written to accompany four sonnets with super vivid imagery including sudden spring/summer storms ("Thunderstorms, those heralds of Spring, roar, casting their dark mantle over heaven!"), mad drunken revelry, the chase of hunting dogs, slipping on ice and eating shit, etc. When you hear it played properly it's very much not "this pretty song kinda reminds me of spring" but "oh wow I can hear dogs barking in the viola section, chirping birds in the violins, a summer storm wrecking the fuck out of my grain, and dangerously crackling ice!"
FOURTH THING TO UNDERSTAND: "The Four Seasons" is rarely played in the spirit of its time. This is Mozart's fault. Well, not really, he didn't tell anyone to play it wrong. But he did give rise to a cult of strings players who play in a very "Mozartian" style - light, pretty, clean, effortless. And for some reason (ahem. some reason i won't go into as this is long enough), this playing style has become the predominant mode for The Four Seasons. Which makes it sound like light, pretty, clean, fancy music.
As we covered above, it is baroque music, so it is not any those things! It's weird and crunchy and extravagant, with musical affectations that would have been considered revolutionary at the time. If you're playing it in the baroque tradition you're also going to be adding your own ornamentations and expressions. Bringing your own weirdness is encouraged in baroque music.
Basically, it's a crime that everyone sees Four Seasons as "fancy music that plays in movies when rich people are onscreen" when it was written by The Red Priest Who Ran A Girls School For Orphans When That Was Very Much Not The Done Thing And Pissed Off the Board At Every Opportunity, and written during a musical period that history has classified specifically as a fuck-you to "pretty and clean and fancy."
For some real crunchy Four Seasons, I will always recommend Adrian Chandler & the Serenissima. BUCKLE UP TO GET YOUR SHIT WRECKED AND YOUR WHEAT CROPS MURDERED BY A SUMMER STORM!!
some hyper famous artists like Van Gogh transcend overratedness and become underrated because they're so normalized. Like I'll look at a van Gogh and I'm like wait this really is amazing you guys don't get it
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When I was a kid I thought Master Chief was gender fluid bc I didn't understand who Cortana was so anytime she talked I just thought it was chief being a girl for that sentence
