Whumpster Fire

Last character I wrote about: ...my Casualties: Unknown OC.

This is the most beautiful scientific diagram I've ever seen.

Bc like

If it's as like a palette swap or design exercise or whatever and it's like "hey here's how this character would look in xyz alternative context" for instance that one person on YouTube who made a short where they did a Cinderella/Tiana palette swap (surprisingly no one was upset about it bc of potential racism, moreso that White Tiana was oddly terrifying), like. You do you. I might think it's dumb or looks weird (see aforementioned White Tiana) but it's also none of my business.

When it becomes "I know better than the original artist" or "I don't like this character being xyz race", that's when we have an issue imo

In my experience watching discourse icebergs colliding from a distance, most of the time people whitewashing a character will deny it or at least deny its intentionality, and it seems to often be drawing dark-skinned characters with a lighter color palette and/or changing character designs to conform to white-normative beauty standards, whereas if someone draws or otherwise interprets a character that wasn't originally / canonically black as black they made a deliberate, conscious decision to do so and will be open about it.

However I would argue that yes, racist blackwashing does in fact exist, and it usually takes the form of erasing representation of marginalized ethnicites other than "Black American / Canadian / European," and often comes with dismissal of marginalization faced by a character's original ethnicity by whitewashing said ethnicity.

Okay, let them stay up till 5 in the morning and feel like shit for the next day, eat a bag of candy in one go and have a huge stomach ache, go out without an umbrella and catch a cold, watch a violent movie and get scared?

It's funny you mention this one because I think I remember one on Reddit where the parent caught the kid watching a movie past their bedtime or something, and proceeded to force the kid to stay up literally all night watching movies with the parent and then go to school on zero sleep.

I can see how, from the perspective of a cop who has grown up in Preservation culture, this must be incredibly annoying, and means even setting aside any prejudices over a SecUnit being a deadly weapon, it kind of comes across to Indah as someone who she can't trust to follow basic standards of professional ethics if it thinks it knows better.

[ID: two photos of a passage from Fugitive Telemetry that read:

"Yes, I've had experience with investigating suspicious fatalities in controlled circumstances."

Indah's gaze wasn't exactly skeptical. "What controlled circumstances?"

I said, "Isolated work installations."

Her expression turned even more grim. "Corporate slave labor camps."

I said, "Yes, but if we call them that, Marketing and Branding gets angry and we get a power surge through our brains that fries little pieces of our neural tissue."

Indah winced. Mensah folded her arms, her expression a combo of "are you satisfied now" and "get on with it."

End ID]

Indah absolutely is looking at MB as a snobby Corporate Person, with the way she sneers out 'corporate slave labor camps,' like MB was intentionally sugar-coating the reality of CR slave labor camps, as if it and any other SecUnits were the ones making the decision to enslave the human workers on their contracts. She clearly forgot (or never fully understood before) that MB was a slave from the moment it came online, and one that was routinely tortured for literal thought crimes. A slave with no end of indenture to work towards or any amount of pay to slowly try to save up to buy its freedom, no future except an endless expanse of violence and pain. If MB uses a softer term like 'isolated work installation' it is because it learned the hard way not to tell it like it is, and when called out on that, it throws the true horror of its existence within the CR into Indah's face (much like it did with the memories of governor module punishments when it first met ART and ART also initially treated it like it was some inherently evil corporate actor).

I think you're right that in the intervening weeks (months?) since it arrived at the end of Exit Strategy, Indah had learned from her first mistake of treating MB like Not A Person (the deadly weapon comment early on for which Pin-Lee was going to get her removed from her position of authority). But she still doesn't trust MB, and unless you get that very direct reminder of how horribly the CR actually treats constructs, I think it can be all too easy to see that SecUnits are physically powerful and then mentally equate that to them having any kind of actual power in those slave labor camps they're forced to guard.

Amazon made their service worse, to force people to pay for Prime.

Nowadays, if you order from Amazon, there is a week long delay before your package is shipped. (on purpose)

I remember when orders would ship out the same day. (I remember - it was real)

YouTube didn't used to have ads. Now, ads play in the middle of videos. (it's worse than TV ever was)

The best can opener I have owned is over 40 years old. Modern ones just don't hold up as well. (The ones I bought new broke ages ago)

The bread machine my mom got for her wedding lasted 30 years. It's been replaced twice in the last 5 years. (How can you fuck this up?)

The cardboard tubes in the middle of toilet paper rolls have gotten larger. (This too?) Companies increasing the price of the product while selling you less. (REALLY?)

It sounds crazy. (it's the truth) When you talk about it, YOU sound crazy. (it's true)

Even when people believe you (do they really), all they can say is "it sucks". (it's too big) Because the problem is so big, so pervasive, what can we even DO about it???

To get the necessary laws written and passed, we need politicians, to get the politicians elected we need information campaigns, to fund campaigns we need money, and all the money is being hoarded by the people profiting from enshittification. (it sounds so fake)

There are a few incandescent light bulbs that have survived for extremely long periods, such as the famous "Centennial Light." However, these are unusual cases. The Centennial Light has survived so long because gradual degradation of its filament has caused it to only consume 4 watts of power compared to its design power of 60 watts, which reduced the stress on the filament because the tiny amount of power still running through it can't get the filament up to anywhere near the normal operation temperature of incandescent bulbs.

The thing is, the way incandescent bulbs work there is a direct tradeoff between lifespan and energy efficiency; thermal radiation becomes more efficient at producing visible light that humans can see at higher temperature, but higher temperature also makes the filament evaporate faster. Modern incandescent bulbs already have pretty terrible energy efficiency compared to anything else, to the point that depending on country they've been banned. A modern 60 Watt incandescent bulb produces about 800 lumens of light. According to this report, the Centennial Light was designed for a lower temperature and longer lifespan and would have only produced about 200 lumens at its design power, so about 4x less efficient than the already extremely bad efficiency of modern incandescent lights. However, in its current state, its light output is estimated at around 0.17 lumens. That's less than a candle. That's about 0.1% of the light output it was designed for, and the light output per watt of electricity consumed would be a little over 1% of when it was new.

Could we design a light bulb to operate at a similar temperature to the Centennial Light on purpose for extremely long lifespans? Yes. Its current filament temperature is around 1450 K (a little under 1200 Celsius); this is slightly hotter than the heating elements in a toaster. It's also a bit colder than the filaments in the lower-temperature kinds of quartz-tungsten infrared heating lamps (around 1500 C, or 1800 K).