“There's a perception that there are two sets of rules,” says Gurbir Grewal, head of the SEC's enforcement division. “We want everyday Americans to have confidence when they invest in the market. They should have confidence knowing that there's a dedicated group of professionals to deal with new threats, traditional frauds, making sure that their retirements are safe.”

Many Wall Street denizens don’t seem to grasp what’s afoot, even as Hwang’s treatment underscores the shift.

i love...wanpee...........🍊🍶🧡💚

Just some thoughts about recent WEBTOON discourse from an originals creator. I recognize my inherent bias in this situation.

But please recognize that saying "fuck you" to a company means supporting the workers, not making them out to be unfortunate suckers... "would have/could have/should have's" don't get people out of situations.

"I never would have signed with them" is an incredibly tone-deaf thing to say. "this is why you shouldn't put all your eggs in one basket" is true, but it doesn't help people who are contractually obligated into exclusivity.

Most of us are making merch, running patreons, trying to get book deals, etc... and most of us aren't able to stop working and still pay our bills. we're trying. we'd all love to, but we can't.

If you really want things to be better, maybe try not putting down the people who are in the bad situation? it ends up feeling like people using our pain and mistreatment as an outlet to advertise themselves...

Our company is getting worse and worse by the year and we're risking a lot to talk about it! Please listen! The only power we have is complaining about things, and it's risky every time!

a pet peeve of mine is stuff proudly labelled vegan but it's farmed w slave labor. like how is that vegan then.

we made this without exploiting or harming any animals!!! (but the human children forced into dangerous and underpaid agricultural labour to make this product don't matter i guess???)

like how are you gonna try to sell me child abuse chocolate and tell me it's vegan like come on

Them: Why are you crying

Me: the heart of the Persephone Demeter Hades myth is a young girl who got kidnapped and abused by powerful men and laws out of her control and a mother who went to the ends of the world to try to get her back. and it's twisted into a romantic fantasy with sidelining and villainizing the mother. it was never Hades x Persephone it was Hades v Demeter and Persephone

For everyone who thinks Harry (or any celeb) doesn’t need PR 🥴

link

(What Was I Made For playing in the distance)

Anyway I want you all to look at my boy

the fact that he really is The One True Morty is making me crazy

love how the show was like “no we’re changing the race of the main character to do some deep social commentary instead of the bad dirty racist books!" and then hinges their entire marketing on undermining his narrative, discrediting his story, and making a different race-changed poc into a villain (but for different reasons than he was in the book lmao)

the "who can be trusted with louis' story?" and it's pictures of two white men and an Evil Muslim like. bitch are you actually kidding me.

Completely self indulgent post but here's one of the post-canon scenarios I have in my head for G Gundam.

Maybe skip this post if you don't like dark themes. Not all of what I've outlined is dark (most of it isn't), but I do cross the line past what appears in the show in regards to DG cells and abduction.

The shuffles all get roped into restoration projects on Earth between the 13th and 14th gundam fights, partially to have something to do alongside their training, partially out of inspiration by the common points of the Kasshus' and Master Asia's goals, and partially because netting their countries some decent publicity is likely to earn them favors during the Gundam Fight's off-years.

Sai is contacted by Kyral about an effort to clear out the infamous buildup of trash and cadavers on Everest; he wants Sai to leverage Neo China's help as something of a reparation kind of deal and Sai goes sure why not.

Sai recruits Argo because Bolt Gundam is built to withstand the cold, and he thinks Argo and Nastasha could help reverse engineer that quality to enable the use of their Gundams as both heavy work equipment and protection from the harsh environmental conditions that normally prevent this kind of operation.

George gets involved because someone he knows has a distant relative who died on the mountain a century ago, and they wanted him to check in with the forensics team on the project. This detail is important because eventually it becomes clear that there is a mystery to solve (that I myself haven't figured out all the details of yet but broadly know the setup and conclusion); DG-infected people are disappearing and not being investigated due to stigma. Our heroes are naturally going to be pissed about this, and will need an "in" with the field if they want to do anything about it.

First massively self-indulgent element: The forensics/body identification team inexplicably includes the real-world author Kathy Reichs, who somehow exists in this universe, and there's a little side bit about her having written a Bones book right before the 12th fight that featured a cooked cadaver found inside a gundam after entry into the Earth's atmosphere. There are a lot of weird coincidences in the book that parallel the DG incident, which creeps everyone out, but the similarities are merely born of the writer threading the needle of being believable and interesting in a way that became very true to life.

What does become relevant is when the Shuffles eventually meet up, she's able to explain the implications of a bunch of weird shit the fighters discovered (also Marie Louise read her book, and one of the in-universe liberties Reichs took writing about the gundams' black boxes that she explains in the afterword leads to ML realizing something important; that Neo Germany does not have its gundam's remains.)

While the Everest project is happening, Domon, Chibodee, and Allenby all want to continue their training somewhere on Earth, and receive a proposal from (an OC of mine who is) a historic preservationist (and an acquaintance of Allenby's): she has acquired the grounds of an abandoned castle in Europe* after submitting a plan to restore it, and needs to hire people to help with the labor.

*the castle is probably somewhere in Germany because I also want this pitch to have drama over Schwarz (pre-13th fight), Schwarz (Kyoji), and Schwarz (the next guy who was supposed to inherit the mask when the older ninja retired). Also Germany is fucking pretty.

In exchange for the help of the three gundam fighters, they and Rain get paid, plus room and board anywhere on the grounds, plus full access to the grounds and miles of sparsely-inhabited countryside for training purposes, and the privacy and ability to practice with their gundams that comes with being in the middle of fucking nowhere. Rain sets herself up to work a clinic in the next town over as well as practicing pro re nata wilderness medicine (I'm convinced every medic supporting the gundam fight would need to be able to do this.)

The group involved in the Castle project sticks around for a time, makes some good progress, and engage in occasional Shenanigans that come up when you put a bunch of weirdos in a Situation.

They aren't in town a lot save for Rain, but when they are they eventually start to pick up on gossip and news about the Mysterious Disappearances correlated with DG cell infection (as well as details that turn out to be important later). Eventually Rain brings this to Domon and Chibodees' attention and they decide that, yeah, this is tied to the DG, this is their problem, they should convene with the rest of the Shuffle Alliance about it.

Also of course Schwarz is involved because I'm the one writing this; the culprits' DG-tissue harvesting operation relies on having him captured and helpless, using cells from his body to "update" other victims' DG infections to a less aggressive strain. One thing I haven't decided is whether I want a reinstantiated Wong to head this shit, or make up my own morally bankrupt opportunistic asshole looking to twist the DG to their own benefits. I also need to decide where on the planet the center of all this insanity is, and it needs to be a place that isn't going to have any unfortunate implications (because that's a genuine risk with dark story elements)

... That's about as much as I have that is thought-out enough for me to explain. I return to thinking about this scenario a lot because it puts most of the characters way out of their element (and has a bunch of details that appeal to me specifically), and it kind of evolved into an incomplete plot outline that I don't currently have any plans to flesh out.

I think it's an interesting enough direction to go, because it follows through with a lot of the themes present in G, but takes advantage of the genre shift to avoid DBZ-crazy power scaling and adjusts the conflict more to a matter of where the main characters' prowess is most effective (Both in and out of the gundams. I'm assuming there are a ton of guys similar to Michelo's gang that just need fighting interspersed with everything else I described. In fact, kicking Some Group of Douchebags out of their protection racket is probably how team Castle even gets ahold of evidence related to missing persons.)

🖤

truly exhausted of “”feminist”” films that don’t even really say anything revolutionary or even explore basic issues in depth and instead rely on 2013 tumblr esque dialogue to make a movie that feels hollow and removed from any subtlety or nuance because it’s too busy throwing basic statements at you like a hand grenade and almost play into these ideas of strawmen and make characters feel less like people and more like caricatures. but then because the film is so heavily based on this idea of being “”feminist”” any criticism is written off as just “hating women” because apparently film criticism dies whenever the movie is supposedly some feminist piece of art. a movie being by women and about women doesn’t inherently make it good and if all you’re doing is providing a more sanitised version of a movie that was made ten, twenty, fifty years ago then your stories are not only bland but also unoriginal.

Observing peoples reactions to morally gray or black actions committed by different characters is so funny. Throughout all of G. War the character tags were chock-full of people unironically enraged claiming “Bruce isn’t even capable of doing something bad like that.” about an action that is pretty well in line with his character journey thus far, meanwhile there are still new posts that gain traction that open with lines like “I know Jason has committed his fair share of sins/crimes but” like bro when. In 2010?

Also. The whole premise of the b*tfamily™ that you so love is built on the load bearing wall being that they are a crime family. Hell, do people just collectively forget the part where Bruce manufactures and freely uses weapons with his own furry brand logo plastered all over them, causing all sorts of 'explosions and more!' property damage all over the streets of Gotham? Pretty sure that makes him a terrorist but you people don't feel the need to go around reminding fandom of that every five minutes.

Stranger Things was supposed to be a show about outcasts finding a family for themselves. It was meant to be a show that gave everyone who was outside the “norm” a rallying point and a story of love triumphing over hate, good triumphing over evil.

Instead, we got a show where characters that are canonically/heavily implied to be LGBTQ+ are plot devices and not people. We got a show where abuse victims don’t deserve to escape their abuse. We got a show where poor characters are treated like animals and die insignificant and forgotten. We got a show where women are girlbosses incapable of error, plot devices, or heartless. We got a show that let abusers off the hook and tried to vindicate them. We got a show where the only POC characters are both attacked and one is shot at (EDIT: I forgot that Argyle is also a POC, but the writers made him a walking stereotype). We got a show where anyone who is unapologetically themselves is punished for daring to be something other than what is expected.

Stop calling it a "brand" stop calling it "marketing" it's just a dude in his house selling little things so they can have some extra money and being a human I hate what the internet has done to people's brains

Cut for grooooossneeeeess

I forgot that for some reason this society has decided that giving a girl sleeping pills and telling her to get literally fucked within the marriage program is the better option than artificial insemination

The book is entirely unaware of that, and in fact seems to be treating artificial insemination as the WORST option

Idk about other people with uteruses but if for some reason the population was the lowest in recorded history and we couldn't do pod babies or cloning, I'd pick artificial insemination before a convoluted marriage plan, not least because it would get shit on track quicker

(Literally one woman has had three husbands foisted upon her and allowed to divorce one before being out back in the program it makes no sense from a dystopian worldsaving standpoint)