#steins law
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How to shatter the class solidarity of the ruling class
I'm touring my new, nationally bestselling novel The Bezzle! Catch me WEDNESDAY (Apr 11) at UCLA, then Chicago (Apr 17), Torino (Apr 21) Marin County (Apr 27), Winnipeg (May 2), Calgary (May 3), Vancouver (May 4), and beyond!
Audre Lorde counsels us that "The Master's Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master's House," while MLK said "the law cannot make a man love me, but it can restrain him from lynching me." Somewhere between replacing the system and using the system lies a pragmatic – if easily derailed – course.
Lorde is telling us that a rotten system can't be redeemed by using its own chosen reform mechanisms. King's telling us that unless we live, we can't fight – so anything within the system that makes it easier for your comrades to fight on can hasten the end of the system.
Take the problems of journalism. One old model of journalism funding involved wealthy newspaper families profiting handsomely by selling local appliance store owners the right to reach the townspeople who wanted to read sports-scores. These families expressed their patrician love of their town by peeling off some of those profits to pay reporters to sit through municipal council meetings or even travel overseas and get shot at.
In retrospect, this wasn't ever going to be a stable arrangement. It relied on both the inconstant generosity of newspaper barons and the absence of a superior way to show washing-machine ads to people who might want to buy washing machines. Neither of these were good long-term bets. Not only were newspaper barons easily distracted from their sense of patrician duty (especially when their own power was called into question), but there were lots of better ways to connect buyers and sellers lurking in potentia.
All of this was grossly exacerbated by tech monopolies. Tech barons aren't smarter or more evil than newspaper barons, but they have better tools, and so now they take 51 cents out of every ad dollar and 30 cents out of ever subscriber dollar and they refuse to deliver the news to users who explicitly requested it, unless the news company pays them a bribe to "boost" their posts:
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/04/saving-news-big-tech
The news is important, and people sign up to make, digest, and discuss the news for many non-economic reasons, which means that the news continues to struggle along, despite all the economic impediments and the vulture capitalists and tech monopolists who fight one another for which one will get to take the biggest bite out of the press. We've got outstanding nonprofit news outlets like Propublica, journalist-owned outlets like 404 Media, and crowdfunded reporters like Molly White (and winner-take-all outlets like the New York Times).
But as Hamilton Nolan points out, "that pot of money…is only large enough to produce a small fraction of the journalism that was being produced in past generations":
https://www.hamiltonnolan.com/p/what-will-replace-advertising-revenue
For Nolan, "public funding of journalism is the only way to fix this…If we accept that journalism is not just a business or a form of entertainment but a public good, then funding it with public money makes perfect sense":
https://www.hamiltonnolan.com/p/public-funding-of-journalism-is-the
Having grown up in Canada – under the CBC – and then lived for a quarter of my life in the UK – under the BBC – I am very enthusiastic about Nolan's solution. There are obvious problems with publicly funded journalism, like the politicization of news coverage:
https://www.theguardian.com/media/2023/jan/24/panel-approving-richard-sharp-as-bbc-chair-included-tory-party-donor
And the transformation of the funding into a cheap political football:
https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/poilievre-defund-cbc-change-law-1.6810434
But the worst version of those problems is still better than the best version of the private-equity-funded model of news production.
But Nolan notes the emergence of a new form of hedge fund news, one that is awfully promising, and also terribly fraught: Hunterbrook Media, an investigative news outlet owned by short-sellers who pay journalists to research and publish damning reports on companies they hold a short position on:
https://hntrbrk.com/
For those of you who are blissfully distant from the machinations of the financial markets, "short selling" is a wager that a company's stock price will go down. A gambler who takes a short position on a company's stock can make a lot of money if the company stumbles or fails altogether (but if the company does well, the short can suffer literally unlimited losses).
Shorts have historically paid analysts to dig into companies and uncover the sins hidden on their balance-sheets, but as Matt Levine points out, journalists work for a fraction of the price of analysts and are at least as good at uncovering dirt as MBAs are:
https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2024-04-02/a-hedge-fund-that-s-also-a-newspaper
What's more, shorts who discover dirt on a company still need to convince journalists to publicize their findings and trigger the sell-off that makes their short position pay off. Shorts who own a muckraking journalistic operation can skip this step: they are the journalists.
There's a way in which this is sheer genius. Well-funded shorts who don't care about the news per se can still be motivated into funding freely available, high-quality investigative journalism about corporate malfeasance (notoriously, one of the least attractive forms of journalism for advertisers). They can pay journalists top dollar – even bid against each other for the most talented journalists – and supply them with all the tools they need to ply their trade. A short won't ever try the kind of bullshit the owners of Vice pulled, paying themselves millions while their journalists lose access to Lexisnexis or the PACER database:
https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/24/anti-posse/#when-you-absolutely-positively-dont-give-a-solitary-single-fuck
The shorts whose journalists are best equipped stand to make the most money. What's not to like?
Well, the issue here is whether the ruling class's sense of solidarity is stronger than its greed. The wealthy have historically oscillated between real solidarity (think of the ultrawealthy lobbying to support bipartisan votes for tax cuts and bailouts) and "war of all against all" (as when wealthy colonizers dragged their countries into WWI after the supply of countries to steal ran out).
After all, the reason companies engage in the scams that shorts reveal is that they are profitable. "Behind every great fortune is a great crime," and that's just great. You don't win the game when you get into heaven, you win it when you get into the Forbes Rich List.
Take monopolies: investors like the upside of backing an upstart company that gobbles up some staid industry's margins – Amazon vs publishing, say, or Uber vs taxis. But while there's a lot of upside in that move, there's also a lot of risk: most companies that set out to "disrupt" an industry sink, taking their investors' capital down with them.
Contrast that with monopolies: backing a company that merges with its rivals and buys every small company that might someday grow large is a sure thing. Shriven of "wasteful competition," a company can lower quality, raise prices, capture its regulators, screw its workers and suppliers and laugh all the way to Davos. A big enough company can ignore the complaints of those workers, customers and regulators. They're not just too big to fail. They're not just too big to jail. They're too big to care:
https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/04/teach-me-how-to-shruggie/#kagi
Would-be monopolists are stuck in a high-stakes Prisoner's Dilemma. If they cooperate, they can screw over everyone else and get unimaginably rich. But if one party defects, they can raid the monopolist's margins, short its stock, and snitch to its regulators.
It's true that there's a clear incentive for hedge-fund managers to fund investigative journalism into other hedge-fund managers' portfolio companies. But it would be even more profitable for both of those hedgies to join forces and collude to screw the rest of us over. So long as they mistrust each other, we might see some benefit from that adversarial relationship. But the point of the 0.1% is that there aren't very many of them. The Aspen Institute can rent a hall that will hold an appreciable fraction of that crowd. They buy their private jets and bespoke suits and powdered rhino horn from the same exclusive sellers. Their kids go to the same elite schools. They know each other, and they have every opportunity to get drunk together at a charity ball or a society wedding and cook up a plan to join forces.
This is the problem at the core of "mechanism design" grounded in "rational self-interest." If you try to create a system where people do the right thing because they're selfish assholes, you normalize being a selfish asshole. Eventually, the selfish assholes form a cozy little League of Selfish Assholes and turn on the rest of us.
Appeals to morality don't work on unethical people, but appeals to immorality crowds out ethics. Take the ancient split between "free software" (software that is designed to maximize the freedom of the people who use it) and "open source software" (identical to free software, but promoted as a better way to make robust code through transparency and peer review).
Over the years, open source – an appeal to your own selfish need for better code – triumphed over free software, and its appeal to the ethics of a world of "software freedom." But it turns out that while the difference between "open" and "free" was once mere semantics, it's fully possible to decouple the two. Today, we have lots of "open source": you can see the code that Google, Microsoft, Apple and Facebook uses, and even contribute your labor to it for free. But you can't actually decide how the software you write works, because it all takes a loop through Google, Microsoft, Apple or Facebook's servers, and only those trillion-dollar tech monopolists have the software freedom to determine how those servers work:
https://pluralistic.net/2020/05/04/which-side-are-you-on/#tivoization-and-beyond
That's ruling class solidarity. The Big Tech firms have hidden a myriad of sins beneath their bafflegab and balance-sheets. These (as yet) undiscovered scams constitute a "bezzle," which JK Galbraith defined as "the magic interval when a confidence trickster knows he has the money he has appropriated but the victim does not yet understand that he has lost it."
The purpose of Hunterbrook is to discover and destroy bezzles, hastening the moment of realization that the wealth we all feel in a world of seemingly orderly technology is really an illusion. Hunterbrook certainly has its pick of bezzles to choose from, because we are living in a Golden Age of the Bezzle.
Which is why I titled my new novel The Bezzle. It's a tale of high-tech finance scams, starring my two-fisted forensic accountant Marty Hench, and in this volume, Hench is called upon to unwind a predatory prison-tech scam that victimizes the most vulnerable people in America – our army of prisoners – and their families:
https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865878/thebezzle
The scheme I fictionalize in The Bezzle is very real. Prison-tech monopolists like Securus and Viapath bribe prison officials to abolish calls, in-person visits, mail and parcels, then they supply prisoners with "free" tablets where they pay hugely inflated rates to receive mail, speak to their families, and access ebooks, distance education and other electronic media:
https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/02/captive-customers/#guillotine-watch
But a group of activists have cornered these high-tech predators, run them to ground and driven them to the brink of extinction, and they've done it using "the master's tools" – with appeals to regulators and the finance sector itself.
Writing for The Appeal, Dana Floberg and Morgan Duckett describe the campaign they waged with Worth Rises to bankrupt the prison-tech sector:
https://theappeal.org/securus-bankruptcy-prison-telecom-industry/
Here's the headline figure: Securus is $1.8 billion in debt, and it has eight months to find a financier or it will go bust. What's more, all the creditors it might reasonably approach have rejected its overtures, and its bonds have been downrated to junk status. It's a dead duck.
Even better is how this happened. Securus's debt problems started with its acquisition, a leveraged buyout by Platinum Equity, who borrowed heavily against the firm and then looted it with bogus "management fees" that meant that the debt continued to grow, despite Securus's $700m in annual revenue from America's prisoners. Platinum was just the last in a long line of PE companies that loaded up Securus with debt and merged it with its competitors, who were also mortgaged to make profits for other private equity funds.
For years, Securus and Platinum were able to service their debt and roll it over when it came due. But after Worth Rises got NYC to pass a law making jail calls free, creditors started to back away from Securus. It's one thing for Securus to charge $18 for a local call from a prison when it's splitting the money with the city jail system. But when that $18 needs to be paid by the city, they're going to demand much lower prices. To make things worse for Securus, prison reformers got similar laws passed in San Francisco and in Connecticut.
Securus tried to outrun its problems by gobbling up one of its major rivals, Icsolutions, but Worth Rises and its coalition convinced regulators at the FCC to block the merger. Securus abandoned the deal:
https://worthrises.org/blogpost/securusmerger
Then, Worth Rises targeted Platinum Equity, going after the pension funds and other investors whose capital Platinum used to keep Securus going. The massive negative press campaign led to eight-figure disinvestments:
https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2019-09-05/la-fi-tom-gores-securus-prison-phone-mass-incarceration
Now, Securus's debt became "distressed," trading at $0.47 on the dollar. A brief, covid-fueled reprieve gave Securus a temporary lifeline, as prisoners' families were barred from in-person visits and had to pay Securus's rates to talk to their incarcerated loved ones. But after lockdown, Securus's troubles picked up right where they left off.
They targeted Platinum's founder, Tom Gores, who papered over his bloody fortune by styling himself as a philanthropist and sports-team owner. After a campaign by Worth Rises and Color of Change, Gores was kicked off the Los Angeles County Museum of Art board. When Gores tried to flip Securus to a SPAC – the same scam Trump pulled with Truth Social – the negative publicity about Securus's unsound morals and financials killed the deal:
https://twitter.com/WorthRises/status/1578034977828384769
Meanwhile, more states and cities are making prisoners' communications free, further worsening Securus's finances:
https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/14/minnesota-nice/#shitty-technology-adoption-curve
Congress passed the Martha Wright-Reed Just and Reasonable Communications Act, giving the FCC the power to regulate the price of federal prisoners' communications. Securus's debt prices tumbled further:
https://www.govtrack.us/congress/bills/117/s1541
Securus's debts were coming due: it owes $1.3b in 2024, and hundreds of millions more in 2025. Platinum has promised a $400m cash infusion, but that didn't sway S&P Global, a bond-rating agency that re-rated Securus's bonds as "CCC" (compare with "AAA"). Moody's concurred. Now, Securus is stuck selling junk-bonds:
https://www.govtrack.us/congress/bills/117/s1541
The company's creditors have given Securus an eight-month runway to find a new lender before they force it into bankruptcy. The company's debt is trading at $0.08 on the dollar.
Securus's major competitor is Viapath (prison tech is a duopoly). Viapath is also debt-burdened and desperate, thanks to a parallel campaign by Worth Rises, and has tried all of Securus's tricks, and failed:
https://pestakeholder.org/news/american-securities-fails-to-sell-prison-telecom-company-viapath/
Viapath's debts are due next year, and if Securus tanks, no one in their right mind will give Viapath a dime. They're the walking dead.
Worth Rise's brilliant guerrilla warfare against prison-tech and its private equity backers are a master class in using the master's tools to dismantle the master's house. The finance sector isn't a friend of justice or working people, but sometimes it can be used tactically against financialization itself. To paraphrase MLK, "finance can't make a corporation love you, but it can stop a corporation from destroying you."
Yes, the ruling class finds solidarity at the most unexpected moments, and yes, it's easy for appeals to greed to institutionalize greediness. But whether it's funding unbezzling journalism through short selling, or freeing prisons by brandishing their cooked balance-sheets in the faces of bond-rating agencies, there's a lot of good we can do on the way to dismantling the system.
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:
https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/08/money-talks/#bullshit-walks
Image:
KMJ (modified)
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Boerse_01_KMJ.jpg
CC BY-SA 3.0
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/deed.en
#pluralistic#shorts#short sellers#news#private equity#private prisons#securus#prison profiteers#the bezzle#anything that cant go on forever eventually stop#steins law#hamilton nolan#Platinum Equity#American Securities#viapath#global tellink#debt#jpay#worth rises#insurance#spacs#fcc#bond rating#moodys#the appeal#saving the news from big tech#hunterbrook media#journalism
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Soul Eater textposts part five!
Part one, part two, part three, part four, part six, part seven, part eight, part nine, part ten.
#soul eater#se#giriko#giriko soul eater#justin law#maka albarn#crona#crona gorgon#black star#black☆star#death the kid#asura#kishin asura#franken stein#dr franken stein
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If there was a hospital and all these fine ass mofos worked there I ain't being discharged ever. I will be sick all the time. *cough cough*
#I'm due for my pelvic exam#and dose of vitamin D#genre of doctors I need them all#marco the phoenix#smut thoughts running deep#trafalgar d water law#hatori sohma#uryu x y/n#ishida uryuu#ryuken ishida#isshin kurosaki#kazutaka muraki#franken stein#hongo#one piece#bleach#descendants of darkness#soul eater#fruits basket#valval rambles
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⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯ ⋆✦⋆ ⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯
“You gotta trust me this is for the best.”
“Oh so I should trust you but you don’t trust me. How does that work?”
“You’re making this personal it’s not personal—”
“It is personal now!”
“Would you stop? Just talk to me!”
⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯ ⋆✦⋆ ⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯
#Original : Law and Order SVU#Jujutsu kaisen x reader#Call of duty x reader#Genshin Impact x reader#Spiderverse x reader#Naruto x reader#fire emblem x reader#Destiny Cayde x reader#Obey me x reader#Resident evil x reader#Dividers credit : grandvhs#Witcher x reader#x reader#Trigun x reader#Steins gate x reader#Haikyuu x reader#Twisted Wonderland x reader#Bluelock x reader#Tokyo revengers x reader#The Mandalorian x reader#Slashers x reader#Marvel x reader
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Franken Stein - Anime Vs Manga - Foils
As I've noted before, one of the more facinating things about comparing the later Soul Eater Anime vs the later Manga part is seeing and comparing the ways characters and themes follow similar lines, sometimes with wildly different outcomes, or quality of execution.
And one of the more interesting examples of this is how each incarnation handles Dr Franken Stein's descent into madness, and ultimately rejecting the abyss in it's own ways.
Both rely heavily on foils and contrasts, with the Anime using Stein's lovelife by contrasting his feelings for Marie Mjolnir with his deeply unhealthy attraction to Medusa, while the Manga uses the character of Justin Law to showcase why Stein ultimately rejected total madness.
Both have the same themes, but uses wildly different means to tell their story.
The anime's biggest difference here is that it actually has Stein fall to madness, while in the manga despite all temptations, and just how close he dances at the endge he never falls in.
This by it's very nature changes Stein's story to one of recovery, rather than temptation.
Because Anime Stein gives in, and the anime is not shy about illustrating just what a terrible choice doing so is.
The anime is also different in that it very much builds upon already established character and storylines in order to tell it's tale.
The anime takes the plotpoint of Crona betraying Stein to Medusa, and uses it as a springboard to further both Marie and Crona's characters as they deal with the aftermath of that choice.
This ultimately would likely not have happened if Crona had not fallen back into obeying Medusa again, and so Thematically, Crona's fate and redepmtion is tied to Stein's.
And while Crona is deeply, deeply regretful, Marie loves Stein and so deeply, deeply angry at both Crona and Medusa, while also wanting to reacue Stein.
However, this is just one side of the story, because Stein's actual fall is also rooted in the other character motivation that this direction uses to tell this tale.
And that is Medusa and her genuine, and toxic attraction to Stein.
Stein and Medusa ultimately are very similar people, both love taking things apary, both love chaos, and both are brilliant minds.
Their attraction to each others qualities are genuine... But that is all it is. Attraction. There is no love involved here, as neither actually cares about the other as a person.
These two only compliments the other in that they bring out the absolute worst aspects about the other. It is a relationship built on perverse attraction to their love for destrution and hedonism, very much a mirrior to Maka and Crona, who ends up being very important to this section of the story.
It is also a relationship built upon being the easy road. Whereas all the healthy relationships in the series are built around having to take the hard road with your loved ones, even when it hurts, medusa represents Stein just giving in to his madness, to jump off the abyss because he sees something destructive, tempting and interesting there.
Medusa additionally takes this a step into even further depravity by adding body possession into the mix, adding a third party into this mess, one withouth any capacity for concent... Which is made even worse by the fact that the person in question is a child.
Watching medusa and how much joy she takes in having twisted Stein to her will, it is crystal clear that she not only understands just how fucked up this entire thing is, but she REVELS in it.
It is frankly one of the most disturbing things in shonen anime and manga fiction period, and though thankfully it does not go all the way to the logical and disguisting endpoint, it still leaves the viewer both disguisted, disturbed and impressed just how EVIL Medusa really is.
And on the opposite end of the spectrum, we have Marie Mjolnir.
Whereas Medusa represents everything wrong about Stein's personality, Marie represents the opposite.
She represents Stein's caring side, his loyalty to his side and students, the man who was brave enough to stand alone against Medusa to buy his students time.
Hers and Stein's relationahip was one of genuine love, and understanding, not simply built on nothing but attraction and shared similarities.
Quite the the opposite, Stein and Marie could not be more different... And yet they love each other anyway.
I'll also note that the Anime portrays Marie and Stein's relationship in a different light than the manga does. In the manga, the entire point is to hammer in just how unlikely that these two people could ever fall for the other, while the Anime has the same premise but focuses on something else, namely how well this fits into Soul Eater's themes of different people coming together despite all their many, many differences.
When Stein ultimately makes the choice to go back to Marie, it doesnt feel like it's an unlikely choice, but instead one feels that it's the right one. It feels natural, that these two souls that fell away from each other once more found the other.
They are different people... But so what? They both have the bravery to gice this another shot, because they care about each other.
Also, just a bit of speculation on my part, but we never actually learn how Marie lost her eye in the phsyical world, but it shows up here, when she and Stein reaffirm their bond. That augfests to me that Marie probably lost the eye in circumstances that in some way meant something deep and profound between these two, given how important it seems to Stein.
If so, and especially if her losing it was Stein's fault in the first place, and mayhaps the reason they broke up, would add even more weight to her choice to gice this another go, forgiving him for his mistakes which deeply hurt her personally.
But again, this is total speculation.
Ultimately the Anime take on Stein is one that is defined by this contrast, the parallels and mirrors of Medusa and Marie, and Stein's ultimate choices between them.
Meanwhile, the Manga's foils is not between two differen people close to Stein, but instead about Stein himself as a mirror and foil to Justin Law.
Now let me be blunt. Justin Law is a very boring villain. There is very little compelling about him directly... But there is something compelling about the contrast between him and Stein.
Justin fell to madness because despite his rigid adherence to justice, honor and being a good person, he completely, and totally rejected any and all human bonds, with the only ones he made being made by complete accident, and ultimately he, in his madness, rejected even these.
He had no one to support him or draw strength from in his time of need, and so he fell to madness.
Meanwhile, Stein, despite being far, far more naturally inclined and much closer to madness from the get go, ultimately does not jump over the edge in the Manga... And the reason for that is his relationship with Marie Mjolner.
Ultimately Stein despite all his flaws devotes himself to Marie and helping her avenge her dead ex boyfriend.
And ultimately these two end up reconnecting their love just the anime, even to the degree that they get much further along in their reknit relationship than their manga counterparts.
However there are some massive differences between the two adaptions in this regard.
While the anime plays them getting back together again as a natural thing, the Manga instead plays up just how unbelievable and insane it is that these two somehow managed to reknit their relationahip, to the point where Marie actually protests that Stein is not her boyfriend, even as she is pregnant with his child.
I do actually like this take too... But I do prefer the Anime version, in large part because we actually get to see The critical turning point between Marie and stein, while the manga has their lighting the old flame happen offscreen.
It also helps that while the thematic differences between stein and Law are solid, Law is not a particularily interesting character, nor do him and Law have a deep connection.
Medusa is, and does have that connection. She is a delightfully EVIL and TWISTED villain, and her relationship with Stein makes the climax of Stain's arc, if much less of a spectacle, a much more emotional and thematically satisfying affair.
And thats even withouth factoring in the fact that this fight's outcome is actually about Crona, Maka and Medusa. Stein's fall and recovery is technically the sideplot, buy damn if it's not a great one.
#soul eater anime#soul eater#medusa gorgon#dr franken stein#meta#marie mjolnir#justin law#maka albarn#crona gorgon#old flame#toxic relationship#toxic love
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Imagine believing there's anything just about imprisoning someone over fucking video game clips. IP law is such flagrant violence and so fucking counterethical to the natural act of creation.
Remember that if you think ideas and images can be owned, you agree that violations of that ownership deserve the full violence of imperial carcecal systems.
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here is part TwoooOooo!!!
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I gave him a silly staff
#soul eater#soul eater au#soul eater stein#franken stein#my au#soul eater homestuck au#homestuck#homestuck au#justin law#soul eater justin
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The idea of Justin having shenanigans with the other Death Scythes is hilarious until you realize this 17-year-old teenager is forced to hang out with a bunch of grown-ass adults because he’s in the same league as them.
Like they’re inviting him to the bar, and he’s like, “I can’t drink. I’m underage.”
And they’re talking about their marriages, relationships, and breakups and Justin’s probably like, “I’ve never had the time for any of that ‘cos I had to take care of a whole continent by myself as a literal child.”
So the other Death Scythes share stories of their wacky, vibrant lives while Justin nods and pretends to listen and goes home feeling even more isolated.
...
Fucking hell, Ohkubo, you should’ve just bumped up Justin’s age to, like, 22 or something. That way, it’d be far less tragic.
#justin law#soul eater#ON THAT NOTE are Stein and Marie technically complict in child homicide#I know Justin is a raving lunatic at this point but like they're both a decade older than him
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Soul Eater headcanons but it’s all queer shit <3
Spirit 100% dated Stein for the whole 5 years they were partners. Their first shared kiss was spin the bottle. Relationship didn’t work though for obvious reasons. Stein doing a kidney transplant in his sleep was crossing the line apparently 😕🙄
Stein is transmasc and he totally performed his own top surgery with zero anesthetic. He was collage age, he had the power of stupid white boy on his side.
Marie is also trans, Stein performed her bottom surgery and even prescribed her her hrt. Possibly was the one who changed her legal documents too but the feds can’t prove a thing.
Crona is intersex and genderqueer. Their also a lesbian. Uses any pronouns.
Ragnarok is fundamentally genderless, but he does use he/it pronouns.
Soul is transmasc. No fucker is named Soul as their government given name, no one is that fucking cool! And he tacked on Eater, too! God that is so trans of him…
Justin Law is a homophobic homosexual. The self hatred and religious guilt is so real.
Kid— I think he’s just purely unlabeled. He’s just queer. That’s it. Doesn’t care what pronouns people use for him. Not particularly concerned about dating or intimacy in general, but he isn’t really opposed to it either. He doesn’t have a preference for who he would date. What matters for him is the symmetry.
Technically speaking, Lord Death is asexual, like a plant, by nature but I’ll take it. It’s a win for the asexual community in my heart. Man’s don’t need no man or woman, fucker just uses mitosis.
#soul eater#soul eater headcanons#spirit albarn#franken stein#doctor stein#marie mjolnir#crona gorgon#soul eater evans#justin law#death the kid#lord death
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Zuck’s gravity-defying metaverse money-pit
Tomorrow (Oct 31) at 10hPT, the Internet Archive is livestreaming my presentation on my recent book, The Internet Con.
Think of everything that makes you miserable as being caught between two opposing, irresistible, irrefutable truths:
"Anything that can't go on forever eventually stops" (Stein's Law)
"Markets can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent" (Keynes)
Both of these are true, even though they seemingly contradict one another, and no one embodies that contradiction more perfectly than Mark Zuckerberg.
Take the metaverse.
Zuck's "pivot" to a virtual world he ripped off from a quarter-century old cyberpunk novel (reminder: cyberpunk is a warning, not a suggestion) was born of desperation.
Zuck fancies himself an avatar of the Emperor Augustus (that's why he has that haircut) (no, really). The emperors of antiquity are infamous for getting all weepy when they run out of lands to conquer.
But the lachrymosity of emperors has little causal relationship to the anxieties of tech monopolists! Alexander weeps because he just loves a good conquest and when he finishes conquering the world, he's terminally bored. That's not Zuck's problem at all. When Zuck attains monopoly status, his company develops an autoimmune disorder, as his vicious princelings run out of enemies to destroy and begin to knife one another.
Any monopoly faces these destructive microincentives, but tech is exceptional here because tech has the realtime flexibility and speed that brick-and-mortar businesses can never match:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/19/twiddler/
Sociopaths with tech monopolies are worse for the same reason that road-rage would be worse in a flying car: adding new capacity to indiscriminate self-destructive urges turns ordinary car crashes into low-level airburst warfare:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/28/microincentives-and-enshittification/
The flexibility of digital gives tech platforms so much latitude to break things in tiny increments. A tech platform is like a Jenga tower composed of infinitely divisible blocks. The Jenga players are the product managers and executives who have run out of the ability to grow by attracting new business thanks to their monopoly dominance. Now they compete with one another to increase the yield from their respective divisions by visiting pain upon the business customers and end users their platform connects. By tiny increments, they increase the product's cost, lower its reliability, and strip it of its utility and then charge rent to restore its functionality:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/24/cursed-bigness/#incentives-matter
This is the terminal stage of enshittification, the unstoppable autocannibalism of platforms as they seek to harvest all the value created by business customers and end users, leaving the absolute minimum of residual value needed to keep both stuck to the platform. This is a brittle equilibrium, because the difference between "I hate this service but I just can't stop using it," and "Get me the fuck out of here" is razor-thin.
All it takes is one tiny push – a whistleblower, a livestreamed mass-shooting, a Cambridge Analytica – and people bolt for the doors. This triggers the final stage: the "pivot," which is a tech euphemism for "panic."
For Zuck, the pivot got real after a disappointing earnings call triggered a mass sell-off of Facebook stock, history's worst one-day value incineration, which lopped a quarter of a trillion dollars off the company's market cap:
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-12-19/dramatic-stock-moves-of-2022-led-by-meta-dive-nordic-flash-crash
This was when the metaverse became the company's top priority.
Now, in my theory of enshittification, the step that follows the pivot is death: "Finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die":
https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys
Many people have asked me about the conspicuous non-death of Facebook! That's where I have to fall back on Stein's Law: "Anything that can't go on forever eventually stops." Facebook can't continue to annihilate value, alienate its workers, harm the public, hemorrhage money in support of a mediocrity's cherished folly forever. Can it?
Admittedly, it sure seems like it can. Facebook's metaverse pivot has thus far cost the company $46,500,000,000. That is: $46.5 billion. That's even more money than Uber torched, seeking to maintain the illusion that they will be able to create monopolies on both transport and the labor market for driving and recoup the billions the Saudi royal family let them use for the con:
https://pluralistic.net/2022/02/11/bezzlers-gonna-bezzle/#gryft
Don't worry: the Saudi royals are fine! They cashed out at the IPO, collecting a tidy profit at the expense of retail investors who assumed that a pile of shit as big as Uber must have a pony under it, somewhere:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/05/19/fake-it-till-you-make-it/#millennial-lifestyle-subsidy
Uber has doubled the cost of rides and halved drivers' wages, using illegal gimmicks like "algorithmic wage discrimination" to squeeze a little more juice out of the nearly exhausted husks of its workforce:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/12/algorithmic-wage-discrimination/#fishers-of-men
But Stein's Law hasn't been repealed. Drivers can't drive for sub-subsistence wages. Do that long enough and they'll literally starve: that's what "subsistence" means. We lost a decade of transit investment thanks to the Uber con, at the same time as traditional taxi drivers were forced out of the industry. Uber can't be profitable and still pay a living wage, and the fantasy of self-driving cars as a means of zeroing out the wage-bill altogether remains stubbornly, lethally unworkable:
https://pluralistic.net/2022/10/09/herbies-revenge/#100-billion-here-100-billion-there-pretty-soon-youre-talking-real-money
Which means we're at the point where you can get off a commuter train at a main station and find yourself stranded: no taxis at the taxi-queue, no busses due for an hour, and no Uber cars available unless you're willing to pay $95 for a ten-minute ride in a luxury SUV (why yes, this did happen to me recently, thanks for asking).
As more and more of us are exposed to these micro-crises, the political will to do something will increase. This can't go on forever. "Don't use commuter rail" isn't a viable option. "Walk three miles each way to the commuter rail station" isn't viable either. Neither is "Pay $95 for an Uber to get to the station." Something's gotta give…eventually.
"Eventually" is the key word here. Remember the corollary of Stein's Law: Keynes's maxim that "markets can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent." Sure, anything that can't go on forever eventually stops, but that is no guarantee of a soft landing. You can't smoke two packs a day forever – but in the absence of smoking cessation, the eventual terminus of that habit is stage-four lung cancer. Keep hammering butts into your face and your last smoke will come out a crematorium chimney.
Zuckerberg hasn't merely blown a whole-ass Twitter on the metaverse with nothing to show for it – he's gotten richer while doing it! In the past year, his net worth increased by 130%, to $59 billion, thanks to an increase in Facebook's share-price, driven by investors who stubbornly remain irrational, keeping the Boy Emperor solvent long past any reasonable assessment of his performance.
What are these investors betting on? One possibility is that the rise and rise of Facebook's share-price represents a bet on technofeudalism. Since the Communist Manifesto, Marxists have been predicting the end of capitalism. That end seems to have come, but what followed capitalism wasn't socialism, it was the return of feudalism, an economic system where elites derive their wealth from rents, not profits:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/28/cloudalists/#cloud-capital
Profit is the income you get from investing in capital – machinery, systems, plant – and then harvesting the surplus value created by workers who mobilize this capital. Capitalism produces massive returns for its winners – in the Manifesto's first chapter, Marx and Engels just geek out about how productive and dynamic this system is.
But capitalism is also a Red Queen's Race, where the winners have to run faster and faster to stay in the same place. Capitalism drives competition, as other would-be winners pile into the sector, replicating the systems that the current winners are using and then improving on them. This is why the prophets of capitalist end-times like the FBI informant Peter Thiel say that "competition is for losers."
Capitalism's "profits" stand in contrast to the feudalist's "rents." Rents are income you get from owning something that other people need to produce things. The capitalist owns the coffee-shop, but the feudalist owns the building. When a rival capitalist opens a superior coffee-shop and drives the old shop out of business, the capitalist loses, but the rentier wins. Now they can rent out an empty storefront in the neighborhood everyone's coming to because of that hot new cafe.
Feudal and manorial lords also made their fortunes by extracting surplus value from workers, but these rentiers don't care about owning the means of production. The peasant in the field pays for their own agricultural equipment and livestock – control over the means of production is necessary for worker liberation, but it's not sufficient. The worker's co-op that owns its factory can still find the value it produces bled off by the landlord who owns the land the factory sits on.
The jury's still out on whether American workers really see themselves as "temporarily embarrassed millionaires," but America's capitalists have a palpable, undeniable loathing for capitalism. The dream of an American "entrepreneur" is *PassiveIncome: money you get from owning something capitalists and/or workers use to create value. Digital technology creates exciting new possibilities for rent-extraction: a taxi-operator had to buy and maintain a car that someone else drove. Uber can offload this hassle onto its drivers and rent out access to the chokepoint it created between drivers and riders, charging all the traffic can bear. This is feudalism in the cloud – or as Yannis Varoufakis calls it, cloudalism.
In Varoufakis's Technofeudalism, he describes Amazon as a feudal venture. From a distance, Amazon seems like a bustling marketplace of manic capitalism, with sellers avidly competing to offer more variety and lower costs in a million independently operated storefronts. But closer inspection reveals that Amazon is a planned economy, not a market.
Every one of those storefronts pays rent to the same landlord – Amazon – which determines which goods can be offered for sale. Amazon sets pricing for those goods, and extracts 45-51% of every dollar those sellers make. Amazon even controls which goods are shelved at eye-height when you enter the store, and which ones are banished to a dusty storeroom in a distant sub-basement you'll never find:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/06/14/flywheel-shyster-and-flywheel/#unfulfilled-by-amazon
Zuck's metaverse is pure-play technofeudalism, Amazon taken to the logical extreme. It's easy to get distracted by the part of Zuck's vision that will convert us all into legless, sexless, heavily surveilled low-resolution cartoon characters. But the real action isn't this digitization of our fleshy wants and needs. Zuck didn't spend $46.5B to torment us.
The cruelty isn't the point of the metaverse.
The point of the metaverse is to rent us out to capitalists.
Zuck doesn't know why we would use the metaverse, but he believes that if he can convince capitalists that we all want to live there, that they'll invest the capital to figure out how to serve us there, and then he can extract rent from those capitalists and start earning "passive income." It's an Uber for Cyberpunk Dystopias play.
Zuck's done this before. Remember the "pivot to video?" Zuckerberg wanted to compete with Youtube, but he didn't want to invest in paying for video production. Videos are really expensive to produce and the median video gets zero views. So Zuck used his captive audience to trick publishers into financing his move into video. He fraudulently told publishers that videos were blowing up on Facebook, outperforming boring old text by vast margins.
Publishers borrowed billions and raised billions more in the capital markets, financing the total conversion of newsrooms from text to video and precipitating a mass extinction event for print journalists. Zuck kept the con alive by giving away (fewer) billions to some of those publishers, falsely claiming that their videos were generating fortunes in advertising revenue. These lucky, credulous publishers became judas goats for their industry, luring others into the con, the same way that the "lucky" guy a carny lets win a giant teddy-bear at the start of the day lures others into putting down $5 to see if they can sink three balls in a rigged peach-basket.
But when we stubbornly refused to watch videos on Facebook, Zuck stopped spreading around these convincer payouts, and precipitated a second mass-extinction event in news media, as the new generation of video journalists joined their predecessors in Facebook-driven unemployment. Given this history, it's surreal to see publishers continue to insist that Facebook is stealing their content, when it is so clearly stealing their money:
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/04/saving-news-big-tech
Metaverse is the new Pivot to Video. Zuckerberg is building a new world, which he will own, and he wants rent it to capitalists, who will compete with one another in just the way that Amazon's sellers compete. No matter who wins that competition, Zuckerberg will win. The prize for winning will be a rent increase, as Zuckerberg leverages the fact that your "successful" business relies on Facebook's metaverse to drain off all the value your workers have produced:
https://pluralistic.net/2022/12/18/metaverse-means-pivot-to-video/
This can't last forever, but how long until Zuck's reality distortion field runs out of battery? That's the $46.5B question.
The market can certainly remain irrational for a hell of a long time. But the market isn't the only force that regulates corporate outcomes. Regulators also regulate. Europe's GDPR is now seven years old, and it plainly outlaws Facebook's surveillance.
For nearly a decade, Facebook has pretended that this wasn't true, and they got away with it. Mostly, that's thanks to the fact that Ireland is a corporate crime-haven with a worse-than-useless Data Protection Commission:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/05/15/finnegans-snooze/#dirty-old-town
But anything that can't go on forever will eventually stop. Facebook has finally been dragged into EU federal jurisdiction, where it will face exterminatory fines if it continues to spy on Europeans:
https://pluralistic.net/2022/12/07/luck-of-the-irish/#schrems-revenge
In response, Facebook has rolled out a subscription version of its main service and its anticompetitive acquisition, Instagram:
https://about.fb.com/news/2023/10/facebook-and-instagram-to-offer-subscription-for-no-ads-in-europe/
For €10/month, Facebook will give you an ad-free experience across its service offerings (it's €13/month if you pay through an app, as Facebook recoups the 30% #AdTax rents that the feudal Google/Apple mobile duopoly extracts).
But this doesn't come close to satisfying Facebook's legal obligations under the GDPR. The GDPR doesn't ban ads, it bans spying. Facebook spies on every single internet user, all the time. The apps we use are built with "free" Facebook toolkits that extract rent from the capitalists who make them by harvesting our data as we use their apps. The web-pages we visit have embedded Facebook libraries that do the same thing for web publishers. Facebook buys our data from brokers. Facebook has so many ways of spying on us that there's almost certainly no way for Facebook to stop spying on you, without radically transforming it operation.
To comply with the GDPR, Facebook must halt surveillance advertising altogether. There's no way to square "spying on users" with "you can't surveil without explicit consent, and you can't punish people for refusing."
And of course, "not spying" isn't the same as "not advertising." "Contextual advertising" – where ads are placed based on the thing you're looking at, not who you are and what you do – is hundreds of years old. Context ads underperform surveillance ads by a slim margin – about 5% – but they're vastly more profitable for publishers. That's because surveillance ads are feudal, controlled by rentiers like Facebook, who own vast troves of the surveillance data needed to run these ads. Traditional ad intermediaries (agencies, brokers) took 10-15% out of the total advertising market. Ad-tech companies – the Google/Facebook duopoly – take 51% out of every ad dollar spent.
Eliminate surveillance ads and you torch their feudal estates. Facebook will always know more about someone reading a news article than the publisher – but the publisher will always know more about the article than Facebook does:
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/05/save-news-we-must-ban-surveillance-advertising
There are rents under capitalism, just as there are profits under feudalism. The defining characteristic of a system is what happens when rents and profits come into conflict. If profits win – for example, if productive companies beat patent trolls, or if news publishers escape Facebook's rent-extraction – then the system is capitalist. If rents win – if investors continue to bet large on the metaverse as its losses pass $50 billion and head for the $100 billion mark – then the system is feudal.
Anything that can't go on forever will eventually stop. The question isn't whether the platforms will eventually become so enshittified that they die – the question is whether they will go down in an all-consuming fireball, or whether they'll go down in a controlled demolition that lets us evacuate the people they've trapped inside them first:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/09/let-the-platforms-burn/
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:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/30/markets-remaining-irrational/#steins-law
Image:
Diego Delso (modified)
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Puente_de_las_cataratas_Victoria,_Zambia-Zimbabue,_2018-07-27,_DD_10.jpg
CC BY-SA 4.0
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/
#pluralistic#mark zuckerberg#meta#enshittification#facebook#twitter#elon musk#billionaires#follies#failing up#metaverse#steins law#big tech#technofeudalism
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Soul eater texts posts I’ve made (mainly Justin lmao)
I posted these on twitter but decided it’s probs better to post them here,,
#soul eater#Justin law#tezca tlipoca#black star#maka albarn#soul Evans#patty thompson#marie mjolnir#professor stein#shinigami#asura#keshin#giriko
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conquering the Soul Eater manga timeline
this can be an open discussion because i haven't read Not and i unfortunately cannot get my hands on any officially translated volumes, so if there's anything that proves my alignments wrong, feel free to tell me and i'll update this!!! i break the timeline up by month and what year of the story we are in. i'm not doing math and not considering the exact days and alignments for what day of the week the dates are lining up on, that is something i am not willing to put myself through. this is post is long af, so if you don't care about all of my explanation, i'll put a summary of the timeline at the end for easy reading.
admittedly, the beginning half of the manga is easier to label because this is when we get some distinct timeframes, but it is still a horror. because of this, i'm going to use this as a reference to how time passes with the other events in the manga. i'll be referencing the Soul Eater wiki as a basic guide as much as i can and scouring the manga for any hints about how time is passing for everything else. honestly, if the second half of the manga was speed run, the entirety of Soul Eater could take place less than a year. i don't think that is the case purely because of the pace at the beginning of the manga, so let us begin.
November (1)
this is where everything starts: the prologue chapters, the remedial lesson with Sid and Stein, Kid enrolling in the DWMA. there is no specific day in which this all starts, the wiki says it's just "after October 31st," so i'm going to start us off on exactly November 1st for the beginning of all of this. every one of these events could easily be happening within the first two weeks of November.
following this, realistically it would be a day or two before Maka and Soul take on the extra lesson where they meet Crona. Soul gets slashed and, according to my google search, wounds that are large or "surgery incisions" usually take about 1 week to stop being super inflamed. total healing times vary, but i'll say that since weapons are kinda human kinda not, that Soul would be able to be up and walking around somewhat normally in about a week, maybe less. last week of November can be when Masamune and Tsubaki's fight takes place, so this is our entire first November stacked up.
December (1)
strong start! and from here on out, the timeline gets confusing. wiki says chapters 10-15 take place from December-February. this includes the Free jailbreak, the super exam, and the whole Nidhogg and Black Dragon mission for Kid. in the next chapter (15), we're at the DWMA Foundation Eve ceremony which is supposed to take place . . . on April 1st.
this is one of the very few times we're given an exact date (Chapter 32), so i'm using it as an anchor for everything else. i'm also going to assume that these students sometimes have days off and breaks and have "normal" school life to a certain extent. i'm also going to assume that they have some sort of winter holiday off, whether it's some sort of Christmas or Yule or just the New Year doesn't matter; what actually matters is that they would get probably 2 or more weeks off of school because of it. they're in Nevada, which means that it is (maybe? probably?) the New years that is on January 1st.
let's say December starts with Chapter 9. it opens with the Witch's Mass where Medusa puts the snakes in Eruka. then it cuts to Soul having a general check-up on his wound. Stein gives Black☆Star the jar of funky water that will strengthen his soul for the phantom sword mode. for the sake of stretching this out to something reasonable, i'm going to say that this check-up takes place at least one week after the Witch's Mass, because Eruka trying to confront Medusa takes place the same day as the check-up and i doubt Eruka would have shown up to confront her like the day after the mass. after this, i want to say that the Free jail and bridge plot takes a while to set up, but . . .
tomorrow. god, i have never hated a word more. this speeds up the entire chain of events with fighting Free on the bridge. i'd say that it takes 2-3 days to break Free out, for Maka and Soul's wavelength to get messed up, and then they fight on the bridge. this puts us at week 2 of December. Maka's hands are fucked up after the fight and Soul makes a comment about how he'll have to make dinner for a while by the looks of her hands, so i'm exploiting that and saying that is when DWMA has their "winter holiday break." while all of that is happening, Crona is harvesting souls and stuff w/ Ragnarok (shown at the end of Chapter 11). i'll say that this is all in preparation for the Nidhogg in a bit.
January & February (1)
and now, we do a little time exploitation. let's say they come back to school the 2nd week of January. Maka's healed, everyone's back, wahoo!! Chapter 12 is the super written exam, and this is where my exploitation comes in.
test in one week, Maka's already been studying for a whole month. i'm imagining the first day back from winter break goes something like this: Stein walks into the room, writes "Super Written Exam" on the chalkboard, slaps it and yells "THIRD WEEK OF FEBRUARY," and Maka goes home that day and immediately starts studying. i know Maka's a nerd and reasonably was studying the whole year and between missions and whatever, but this is for my sanity. scores probably took a whole day to come out and be posted. anyone below Soul (Kid, Liz, Patty, and Black☆Star) had to take extra lessons, so those probably took up the remaining week of February.
March (1)
i am deeming March as the month of nothing but the Nidhogg mission. after the Nidhogg mission and Ragnarok eating all the souls on that boat, it's Kishin revival time at the party, which means the Nidhogg mission needs to be right at the end of March b/c then Kid knows about the Kishin being under the school and i doubt he sat on that information for a super long time or else he would've gone to investigate.
April (1)
April fools, it's Kishin awake time!! this covers Chapter 16-22 and it's got all the fun stuff: the first Crona redemption, the first Medusa death, and Lord Death calling together all of the Death Scythes. this is also supposedly the time when Maka checks out the Book of Eibon from the library, so i'm making the call that she did it after she connected with Crona and before the Death Scythes arrived b/c her purpose for taking it was because she wanted to know more about black blood and Medusa's research and somehow ended up there.
i really can't put a guess on how long it takes the Death Scythes to get to Death City because the speed at which people travel across entire countries in Soul Eater is insane. Kid flew from Egypt to Nevada and back within a day on his skateboard, there is no explanation i can come up with. for the sake of my sanity, let's say that it takes at least a week or two for the Death Scythes to get here b/c they have to find arrangements to take over whatever positions they had at their previous stations. the students are also recovering from various injuries and the city is rebuilding from the fight between Lord Death and Asura
these panels make it seem like at least the DWMA has gone on a break for a bit because of all the Kishin junk and that the Death Scythes arrived the day before school was resuming. let's say that the "tomorrow" is going to start the Monday of the third week of April.
this puts Crona's trial day of school as the Monday of the last week of April since Maka's day with her dad already happened (presumably the day before). Crona's been in the dungeon ever since April 1st, and their trial day is the same day that Arachne makes her first appearance (which is pretty rough smh, first day out of prison and you meet your evil aunt?? damn). this is all happening in Chapters 23-26.
from this point on, Maka's completely paralyzed for . . . an undisclosed amount of time. we've got Black☆Star's second run-in with Mifune maybe a day or two after Maka is set up in the infirmary at the DWMA. i used to think that the candy Black☆Star got from Mifune somehow cured her, but i have now realized that's not the case because,
May (1)
the party Kid hosts that is interrupted by the runaway train happens on the same day Maka comes back to class for the first time. Azusa says that the runaway train mission happened on May 21st (in Chapter 38), which ultimately means that, according to the timeline we've got going, Maka was in the infirmary for almost the entirety of May. this truly does make sense since, in that time, Medusa took over Rachel and Rachel's family had enough time to put up missing posters for her. May 21st is also when Medusa makes her appearance to Crona and everything starts going bad for them, which means Medusa had enough time to get in contact with Eruka again. Kid then seems to spend the rest of May after the runaway train looking for information about Eibon.
June (1)
this is the point of no return, this is the last specific date the wiki has. after June 1st, we are absolutely in the dark as to when tf anything happens (according to the wiki), so i'm probably going to get even more picky about the details. June 1st is when Kid is in the library and realizes that the Book of Eibon has been checked out. a day or two after that, Crona gets the snake and puts it in Marie's drink. all of that happens in Chapter 32, and in Chapter 33 we've got the group soul resonance lesson.
time exploitation time, Stein says "in the near future," so i will take that to mean "in a week" because that is the near future. a week after the group lesson, it's Lost Island Brew Tempest mission time. i'll say that the Brew mission happens on like in the middle of the second week of June (this also makes me realize that they don't have summer break! smh! i guess evil never rests, but whatever). this covers Chapters 34-37, Lord Death immediately calls for BJ after the Brew missions. i'll say that it takes BJ a few days to get to DWMA and his investigation takes place sometime in the third week of June. this happens on a day during the school week because Kid and Black☆Star have their fight where Kid absolutely demolishes Black☆Star, and Maka leaves her "Maka notes" at school and ends up overhearing a conversation between Crona and Eruka.
Maka Notes. anyways, Black☆Star gets suspended and goes to Japan with Tsubaki, BJ gets murdered, Stein is set up to be the murderer and he leaves with Marie to find the really culprit, and Crona leaves the DWMA all on the same day. a lot happens that day, RIP BJ, lived for two chapters. Crona was only at school for about two months, and one of those months was full of being worried about Medusa being alive!! makes me sad
July (1)
after that specific day, i feel like Chapters 41-43 have to take place in the tail end of June, if not the beginning of July. everyone has extracurricular lessons, Medusa surrenders herself, and Kim and Jackie run away from DWMA within a day or two after Chapter 43 now that everyone's extracurricular lessons are done. three days after Medusa surrenders herself, operation Capture Baba Yaga happens, which covers . . . Chapters 46-60. this is where things get even more uncertain for when things happen. there is an "unknown time skip" after Baba Yaga finishes up. i will be basing this time skip off of Black☆Star's insane amount of wounds that he has to recover from after killing Mifune (rip Mifune, wish he had lived tbh).
Black☆Star's fingers are MANGLED. he has other injuries from this fight, but i think it's those fingers that are gonna give us the best bet as to how long the time skip actually is. we see some stuff right after the battle with Justin and Giriko, then probably 2-3 days after that (putting us at the end of the first week of July), Kim and Angela are granted permission to stay with the DWMA, and Stein and Marie confront Justin, providing me with my absolute favorite panels of the manga.
anyways.
we see Black☆Star's fucked up in Chapter 61, he's got his finger cast on, again this is probably 2-3 days after Baba Yaga, still at the end of that first week of July. with Black☆Star's broken fingers, we continue on.
August & September (1)
my google search says that "fractured fingers typically take 6-8 weeks to heal, but can take up to 3-4 months to fully regain strength." i won't say that it takes 3-4 months for Black☆Star's hand to heal, mainly b/c he wouldn't be able to stay inactive for that long, but i think the 6-8 weeks is reasonable considering those fingers were obliterated. people in Soul Eater heal pretty fast and Black☆Star is super strong, so we can settle on a solid 8-10 weeks before Black☆Star is healed enough and had some physical therapy to be sort of back in action in Chapter 62. all of the other students seem to be full healed and adjusted to this schedule they've got (Ox has also grown out his bald ass head, so that's another time indication). enough time needs to have passed for Maka and Soul to have acquired 99 souls for Soul to become a death scythe. they probably had gotten some souls in the gaps between actual events and whatnot, so it's not like they're going 0-99 in a matter of 10 weeks. so, we come into Chapter 62 at around the end of the third week of September with Stein and Marie returning after beating tf outta Justin, Black☆Star is well and healed, Soul becomes a Death Scythe, and the Spartoi is officially formed.
from here, we get Maka and Soul practicing flying and abilities now that Soul is a Death Scythe and we have Gopher and Noah's forces showing up. this is definitely the next day, maybe two days, so i'm gonna say that this is that start of a new week. it seems that everyone is kind of just spending time to train and get stronger in preparations for whenever the next move from the opposing side happens.
this both emphasizes the fact that everyone is spending time getting stronger, and it also makes it clear that the other members of the Spartoi aren't on the Witch's Research mission while Maka is training and fighting in Chapters 63-65. Chapter 65 ends with a glimpse of Medusa telling Crona that they're going to start moving forward with her plan, and i will say that this ends September.
October (1)
full honesty, i can't tell how long it's been between Chapter 65 and Chapter 66. it obviously is after the run in with Gopher, but how long? i don't know!! for some reason, Maka was not assigned the Witch's Research mission even though they were looking for Medusa and her lab, which probably could be good for her high ability soul perception.
i get it, she wasn't assigned, but this whole mission consists of the rest of Maka's resonance team (minus Kid b/c he's stuck in the book) and team B, minus Ox and Harvard. maybe it was purely to play around with different team dynamics since Kilik wields Liz and Patty in Kid's absence (i'm also pretty sure they say that Kilik has the same type of ability as Stein when it comes to matching with weapons' wavelengths and whatnot). anyways, i think this whole mission probably happens over halfway into October for a few reasons.
firstly, Black☆Star being healed earlier doesn't mean he was Fully ready for missions yet. his appearance in Chapter 62 was probably his test to see if he was physically ready to take something on again. this seems to be his first mission after being recovered, so i'd say that the new Spartoi group had to do some adjusting now that everyone is ready to go by then. secondly, Gopher attempted to assassinate Maka, which probably put the DWMA more on alert since it's an enemy they haven't even seen before this point. this also might be why Maka isn't on this mission. they wanted to make sure that this mission went off without a hitch, they didn't want to rush into it so they super planned it, and it worked for the most part. lastly, Medusa said "It's time, Crona" at the end of Chapter 65. she probably already had preparations for all of this stuff, but i feel like since this is also her "reappearance" with Crona and her clown experiments, it works as a "time to get things moving" rather than "we're starting this right now." we also have no indication as to when tf she even says that, so it could be right after Maka's attempted assassination, or it could actually be right before the mission!!! with all of that, i am dubbing the Witch's Research (Chapters 66-68) mission to have happened at the end of the third week of October.
after all of this happens, Chapter 69 (nice) gives us some random school life where Soul is getting "Partner Requests" from other students, which also supports my idea that this happens late October rather than right after Maka's run-in with Gopher, because now Soul's been a Death Scythe long enough for the younger students to start trying to fuck around with Maka and Soul's partnership (unrelated but there's also some insane foreshadowing about Medusa's fuckin death in this chapter?? i might have to make my own short post about that b/c it's crazy to me). this picks up right after the Witch's Research mission (i think) because Black☆Star brings in Eruka in to Lord Death to help retrieve Kid from the Book of Eibon. there's a bunch of "one day earlier" and "the appointed day" when they're talking about performing the magic to send the Spartoi into the Book of Eibon, so for my mental health, i'm going to say that the Witch's Research team takes a day to get back, brings in Eruka the next day and Maka confesses to checking out the Book of Eibon, and then they perform the ritual to get the Spartoi in the book, which puts Chapters 69-72 in the third week of October (Kid's in the book for over two months!).
as for the entire Salvage arc, Chapters 72-81, once again there is little-to-no time indication as to how long it takes the Spartoi to get through the Book of Eibon. the DWMA teachers show up at Noah's hideout by the time the Spartoi are able to get Kid out, it's night time, but who knows!! i'm assuming that it's a mission that takes only one day based off of the fact that the witches and other Spartoi members that didn't go in the book are still hanging around the site of the ritual where the Spartoi entered even after the teachers have left to confront Justin and Noah.
good news tho, Maka was pretty injured, which means that i can use her wound healing as a basis for time passing!! we get a lot of exposition from Lord Death, Kid, and Stein in Chapter 82, then we find out Tezca didn't die, and then we see Crona in Moscow fighting the Death Scythe stationed there. and no time indication. i'm assuming that since Kid apologizes to Lord Death for being missing and he's still wearing his little white coat, that all of their conversation must be right after they get back from that mission, which i think is probably the morning after their fight with Noah since they fought at night. this keeps all of their convo in the third week of October. as for Moscow . . . we must now return to Maka's wounds from Chapter 76.
Maka gets kinda fucked up here by Giriko. even if it is a soul wavelength thing and meister's are super fit b/c of training and whatnot, Giriko is literally a chainsaw. she fights when they get out of the Book of Eibon, but i'm going to chalk that up the definite adrenaline she's feeling because she collapses as soon as that fight is over. google says that minor lacerations take less than 2 weeks to heal and major ones take 6-8 weeks to heal. i am realizing now as i type this that Kim's witch abilities could probably heal a lot of people faster (including Black☆Star earlier which i will choose to IGNORE b/c there still had to be enough time for Maka and Soul to get 99 souls) but i think i will choose to ignore that because i don't think the DWMA wants to use her like a school nurse.
November (2)
i want to say that it's been at least 3 weeks, if not a whole month. even if the timeline is fucked, if someone was really injured in the manga, there always seems to be enough time given to them to heal between big acts of the story. it's always kind of obvious when things happen back to back and Medusa probably makes adjustments to the black blood between missions, so i think that it's reasonable to give Maka the time to properly heal from those wounds. she and Soul look pretty casual in those panels, meaning they're able to have some down time.
also, that puts us at officially a whole year since the beginning; we're at the third week of November with Maka's healing time. we won't be over two years for the whole timeline since we're near the end, which kind of surprises me, but whatever. anyways, by the time Crona does their blood thing in Moscow, it seems that Maka has fully recovered from the Giriko fight. Maka, Soul, Kim, Jackie, and Stein go to Moscow after Crona does their blood orb thing, which is probably the day after it happens by the time they get there. it's also snowing in Moscow, and my google search says that it usually starts snowing in Russia around October-November, so that tracks. everyone finds out that the Ukraine blood orb happens while they're in Moscow. Justin shows up at the Ukraine blood orb during the day and Tezca gets decapitated, so some time has passed since the orb appeared b/c there is a significant lack of security and helicopters shown when it first appeared.
full disclaimer: things get very confusing after this point and i'm going to take some liberties to make things make sense. Kid confronts Lord Death about some raids that the DWMA have been doing in order to get people to find the Kishin, and then we see him go to the Lost Island to talk to Eibon, but then we also see Kid on the Lost Island while Crona kills Medusa, and then after Crona kills Medusa . . . Maka, Soul, Black☆Star, and Tsubaki are in some random village helping them hunt down a sky whale??? then, after they return and it's revealed that Crona has been added to Lord Death's list, Kid comes back from the Lost Island???? and then there is, presumably, some sort of a time skip because we see everyone preparing for the missions AND there has been enough time to build an entire air ship.
i'll tackle the air ship last. first, i'm going to put a definite order for the events i just listed b/c they don't make sense. Kid's trip to the Lost Island is shown across multiple chapters (Justin killing Tezca, Crona killing Medusa, and the sky whale mission, which is Chapter 86-88) that talk about things that do not seem to be happening at the same time, so i'm taking advantage of this. Kid's mission being interspersed means that Tezca's and Medusa's death happen before Kid is actually in the Lost Island. i think it all goes something like this: Justin goes to the Ukraine blood orb, kills Tezca, skip a day or so and Crona returns to Medusa and kills her, the raid Kid asks about happens and the news comes out (via newspaper Kid is holding in Chapter 86), then he says he's going to the Lost Island. that probably takes at least a single day to prep. going to say that by the time Kid is actually on his way to the Lost Island, it is the 1st of December.
December (2)
Kid can only be in the magnetic field for 20 minutes, so he is on the Lost Island the same day Maka and the gang deal with the sky whale, because that's the day they find out Crona's been added to Lord Death's list and Maka senses the Kishin on the moon, and then they have to plan how to get to the moon. from there, we have the preparation time skip and, according to my google search, it takes usually over a year to build an air ship/blimp.
there's no way it took the entire DWMA that long to build the air ship purely b/c 1) if it had taken a whole year, i'm pretty sure it would've been mentioned, 2) fantasy type world, DWMA has magic tools in the air ship, so there were probably some magic tools involved in the actual making of the ship, 3) the Spartoi search for Crona and train while the whole time the DWMA was preparing and planning, and i really doubt it took Maka a whole year to think about the church and, honestly, that Crona could survive on their own for a year without being noticed again (both because they're crazy and probably can't take care of themself very effectively, and that people were probably on the look out for another "black blood" event and nothing ever surfaced).
Crona hasn't been seen "since the incident in Russia," which means the DWMA has been looking, but they've gone radio silent in regards to causing any problems. Maka has been trying to see the whole world at once this entire time, so she's getting sensory soul overload, and probably can't do a search like that super often, maybe once every other day or so to try and actually get results that make any sense.
considering all of this, i turn back to the construction of the air ship. this is a mission that is extremely important, so the DWMA is putting a lot of power and planning into it. there is no previous mention (that i know of) of an airship owned by DWMA, so i'm assuming they're starting from the ground up with the help of any magic tools that speed up the process. with that, i and going to say that the air ship took AT LEAST a month to build, probably more than that.
January (2)
magic tools or not, you can't prevent all general workplace construction errors with better tools. maybe the DWMA did already have an air ship, maybe it didn't actually take that long, but it makes the most sense to me with the evidence given. there's the point to be made that "oh, why would the Kishin not come attack them if they're all just spending the time building a blimp?" Stein makes a point of saying that it would be "disadvantageous" for the Kishin to leave the moon because he still gets to spread madness from there whether they fight or not. i really doubt they'd be able to cut down an entire construction process that usually takes upwards of a year to anything less than a month. it can't be too quick because then the plans to go to the moon and find Crona would be too hasty and ill-prepared. the negotiations with the witches also began before the DWMA attacked the moon (Chapter 97). plus, i'm going to use this panel as a way to confirm to myself that things did take a bit of time to prepare.
"finally" meaning that those moon bitches had to wait a while before DWMA got to the moon. from here, we're basically at the end. even if the air ship took less or more than a month, the entire manga finishes up with the battle on the moon, which takes, at most, two days of straight fighting.
what i have decided on puts us at the very beginning of January, and that's where it ends!! Chapters 91-112 all happen within that two-ish day battle and that's where it ends. there is no 113th chapter of Soul Eater. hypothetically, if there was a 113th chapter where a funeral for Lord Death and a coronation ceremony for Kid took place, those events would probably take place within the second and third week of January.
here is the summary of the entire timeline:
November (1): very beginning of the manga, Crona and Medusa's introduction, Masamune is defeated
December (1): Medusa puts the snakes in Eruka, Free is released from witch prison and he fights Maka and gang on the bridge, winter break for the students?
January (1): essentially nothing, come back from an assumed winter break
February (1): super written exam
March (1): Nidhogg mission
April (1): Kishin revives on the eve of DWMA's anniversary, Maka befriends Crona, the Death Scythes (Maria, Azusa, and Justin) arrive, Crona trial day at school, Arachne wakes up and Maka is paralyzed, Black☆Star fights Mifune for the second time and gets the candy
May (1): Maka gets better from being paralyzed, Medusa possesses Rachel, runaway train, Medusa approaches Crona again
June (1): Kid realizes the copy of the Book of Eibon is missing, Crona puts the snake in Marie's drink, Lost Island Brew Tempest mission, BJ shows up and instantly is murdered, Crona runs away from DWMA
July (1): Maka meets the Clown in the factory, Medusa surrenders herself, Kim and Jackie run away and join Arachnophobia for a minute, Baba Yaga mission, Kid gets sucked into the Book of Eibon, Kim and Angela are allowed to stay at DWMA
August (1): everyone recovers and gets strong after Baba Yaga
September (1): Soul becomes a Death Scythe, Maka and Soul learn how to fly, Gopher tries to kill Maka
October (1): Witch's Research mission, Spartoi goes into the Book of Eibon to rescue Kid
November (2): Crona kills the Death Scythe in Moscow, Crona destroys a city in the Ukraine, Justin kills Tezca, Crona kills Medusa
December (2): Kid goes to the Lost Island to talk to Eibon, Crona is put on Lord Death's list, Maka senses the Kishin on the moon, construction of the air ship is started
January (2): Maka finds Crona in the church in Italy, the moon battle begins and ends, Lord Death dies and Kid is named the new Shinigami.
and that is the end!! if you've made it to the end of my madman rambling, please converse with me if you have any thoughts on this. DM, reblog, reply, whatever, let me know what you think. it took me multiple days to write all this up and actually look through the manga thoroughly enough to kinda figure out how and where everything happens. i did it out of pure frustration that it's hard to tell the order of things and i'm glad i found a way to make it make a bit more sense
#soul eater manga#soul eater#maka albarn#maka soul eater#soul eater timeline#soul evans#crona gorgon#crona soul eater#DWMA#lord death#death the kid#liz thompson#patty thompson#blackstar#tsubaki nakatsukasa#franken stein#stein soul eater#marie mjolnir#marie soul eater#justin law#medusa soul eater#eruka frog#spartoi#manga#god help me#i spent so long on this#I am free now
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Molly McGee: Can I interest you in some mystery meat?
Libby Stein-Torres: I politely decline.
Andrea Davenport: Not me.
Andrea Davenport: I decline with no politeness.
#the ghost and molly mcgee#tgamm#tgamm incorrect quotes#incorrect quotes#molly mcgee#molly#libby stein torres#libby#andrea davenport#andrea#source: milo murphy's law
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MAIN MASTERLIST
welcome to the masterlist of satorusplayplace!
♡ JUJUTSU KAISEN
↳ gojo satoru, itadori yuuji, fushiguro megumi, fushiguro toji, nanami kento, kugisaki nobara, geto suguru, ryomen sukuna, inumaki toge, okkotsu yuta
♡ SOUL EATER MASTERLIST
↳ dr. stein, spirits, soul, maka, death the kid, justin law, marie, crona, medusa, asura, tsubaki, black star
♡ BLUE LOCK
♡ DEMON SLAYER
#jjk#blue lock#demon slayer#jujutsu kaisen#satoru gojo#gojo satoru#megumi fushiguro#sanemi shinazugawa#tanjiro kamado#kunigami rensuke#x reader#fanfic#romance#anime#gojo x reader#toji fushiguro#nanami kento#justin law#soul eater#dr stein#angst#fluff#isagi yoichi#bachira megumi
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i think, this weekend, im finally gonna do it. im gonna swallow my pride, cast aside my ego, and finally,
FINALLY,
.
.
.
watch attack on titan.
#im gonna hate myself for doing it but#my irl best friends love aot and my brother-in-law gave it a hard recommend#and he said he’d watch steins;gate when i recced it to him so ig im honor-bound to watch aot now 😭
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