Damn you, Susan!

(Fantastic Four #14)

Peter Tork with the Fairfax Street Choir (in their bass vocal section); pictured in photo 1 with Ralph Pennuneri, Hosanna Bauer, and Bill Craig. Via the Fairfax Street Choir Facebook page, except for photo 4 (courtesy of Mark Kleiner).

Photo 2: “Peter Tork has his banjo but never played it with the choir that I remember but He was a really good musician and I remember him playing at the Lady. [...] I've heard some of his live stuff on tape that he did at the Sleeping Lady and was blown away by how great he really was as a musician.” - Marla Hunt Hanson, Facebook, January 3, 2021

“Peter showed me some banjo picking patterns... he was a nice guy fun to play music with.” - David Carlson, Facebook, January 2021

“To us, he wasn’t famous, he was just Peter. [...] He was just a sweet, dear man that, you know, everybody loved... He was just a good guy. You know, ‘Sleep on the couch, have a good one. You know, we love you. Come on in.’ [...] His destiny in this lifetime was with The Monkees. We were like his backup friends, or his backup band, whatever you want to call it.He came to us wounded, like a wounded bird, really. […] He never really got to escape from being one of The Monkees. It was very hard, you know, it was hard for him. I wish we could have given him more. [...] I said to him, ‘Well, why are you going back when they treated you so badly, and blah blah blah?’ And he said, they offered him something he couldn’t turn down, something like that, so it had to do with money of course, because… so, yeah, he went back, poor thing. God bless him. [...] [W]hen you’re a Monkee, the fans will come out of, you know, somehow they’ll seep in through the furnace floor or a little crack in the window. You’re always on display, you’re always having someone looking at you or tagging at you or pulling at you or saying, ‘God, I remember that episode…’You know, and you’re always having to be on the stage or on— in gear, or answering with a smile to your fan group, whatever that is. You’re trained to do that through the industry itself. You know, anyway, I don’t want to go that far. In this group consciousness that he was a part of for a short period of time, he didn’t have to do that. He just didn’t have to do that. And that’s why I think that was — he’ll never forget that group or the Sleeping Lady however many lifetimes he lives. And I’ll tell you this, he was happy in a very strange way for as long as he was there with us. He was happy in a different way, not in the way that you are when you’re famous. In the way you are when you’re happy. [...] Someone like Peter Tork, who shines a light out onto this world, can only shine as brightly as we allow them to. […] When you see a flame, move back and let it shine, don’t go in there and try to get it, because the reason that it’s alive is because it’s got oxygen, air, and there’s not a lot of moths hanging out around it trying to, you know, take its life. I think a lot of that is true about Peter. That’s how — what I think.” - Marla Hunt Hanson, interview with the Nesmith Tork Goffin & King podcast, February 2020

"Back in Marin. Peter Tork began to hang out at the Sleeping Lady. (He works there as a waiter now). One night The Fairfax Street Choir was there. He was amazed, saw a home, and joined. He grins as he adds: ‘In some ways I was a cold, lonely hitchhiker being picked up by a warm school bus.’ [...] He’s happy. Content. And hopeful. For the Choir. And himself." - San Diego Reader, December 6, 1973 (originally published in the Chicago Reader; interview conducted by Chuck Stepner) (read more here)

“What a group! 35 voices strong; some harmonies! It was something, very encouraging, very comforting.” - Peter Tork, Goldmine, May 1982 (x)

Peter Tork: "As soon as The Monkees was over, I went to Marin County to try to recapture some of my Greenwich-Village-days happiness, and I did. I was very, I was very lucky, there was a lovely scene in Fairfax, Marin County, and I had a great time up there for a couple of years, worked as a waiter in a cooperative restaurant and it was great, it was actually great. The thing about The Monkees, it was so difficult, was to be yanked out of — off the street, flung to the pinnacle and then, you know, and then dropped.” Q: “Yeah.” PT: “So, so I went back to the street, where I’d, you know, gotten my roots together. It was great.” - GOLD 104.5, 1999 (x)

wow ok i am now squarely in the target demographic for Chatelaine Magazine but their content is so great i'm not even mad about it, is this what it feels like to know middle age is fast encroaching?

in which Mickie Most crashes Alan and Eric's lunch date to ask them if they want to cover a song 🙏

the she/theys vs he/theys and wlw vs mlm posts are symptoms of a larger problem within the queer community 👍

Kekkon surutte, Hontou desu ka? 365 days to the wedding, Tamiki Wakaki, Weekly Big Comic Spirits 2022/49

Coming up with the Lucent Brood encryption levels system for a fic & deciding to base it on sumerian numbers, I’m reading the names and getting extremely vivid flashbacks to my 2020 ancient history thesis… Ah yes, šar, you sound just like the tears on a sum(m)er morning banging my head against Excel tables tasted.

At the pace we're retreading fashion and music trends, we'll catch up to the present and realize we are the purveyors of our own interests.

Anyway, apart from the Peak Inconvenience of the coffee shop abruptly closing down their pickup window and forcing me into crowded tourist hell (without, I must add, closing the window or putting up a sign or anything, so I got to just stand there for five minutes like a moron), they gave me a much bigger drink than the one I ordered.  Which would have been fine a year ago because it didn’t matter what I drank!  But now my body hates dairy and I could no longer be sure the drink had oat milk in it, so I kinda just gave up, took two lactaids, had about a third of it, and dumped the rest out. 

It’s fine; I just won’t go back until October when the tourists start to thin out.

“If buying isn’t owning, piracy isn’t stealing”

20 years ago, I got in a (friendly) public spat with Chris Anderson, who was then the editor in chief of Wired. I'd publicly noted my disappointment with glowing Wired reviews of DRM-encumbered digital devices, prompting Anderson to call me unrealistic for expecting the magazine to condemn gadgets for their DRM:

https://longtail.typepad.com/the_long_tail/2004/12/is_drm_evil.html

I replied in public, telling him that he'd misunderstood. This wasn't an issue of ideological purity – it was about good reviewing practice. Wired was telling readers to buy a product because it had features x, y and z, but at any time in the future, without warning, without recourse, the vendor could switch off any of those features:

https://memex.craphound.com/2004/12/29/cory-responds-to-wired-editor-on-drm/

I proposed that all Wired endorsements for DRM-encumbered products should come with this disclaimer:

WARNING: THIS DEVICE’S FEATURES ARE SUBJECT TO REVOCATION WITHOUT NOTICE, ACCORDING TO TERMS SET OUT IN SECRET NEGOTIATIONS. YOUR INVESTMENT IS CONTINGENT ON THE GOODWILL OF THE WORLD’S MOST PARANOID, TECHNOPHOBIC ENTERTAINMENT EXECS. THIS DEVICE AND DEVICES LIKE IT ARE TYPICALLY USED TO CHARGE YOU FOR THINGS YOU USED TO GET FOR FREE — BE SURE TO FACTOR IN THE PRICE OF BUYING ALL YOUR MEDIA OVER AND OVER AGAIN. AT NO TIME IN HISTORY HAS ANY ENTERTAINMENT COMPANY GOTTEN A SWEET DEAL LIKE THIS FROM THE ELECTRONICS PEOPLE, BUT THIS TIME THEY’RE GETTING A TOTAL WALK. HERE, PUT THIS IN YOUR MOUTH, IT’LL MUFFLE YOUR WHIMPERS.

Wired didn't take me up on this suggestion.

But I was right. The ability to change features, prices, and availability of things you've already paid for is a powerful temptation to corporations. Inkjet printers were always a sleazy business, but once these printers got directly connected to the internet, companies like HP started pushing out "security updates" that modified your printer to make it reject the third-party ink you'd paid for:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/11/ink-stained-wretches-battle-soul-digital-freedom-taking-place-inside-your-printer

Now, this scam wouldn't work if you could just put things back the way they were before the "update," which is where the DRM comes in. A thicket of IP laws make reverse-engineering DRM-encumbered products into a felony. Combine always-on network access with indiscriminate criminalization of user modification, and the enshittification will follow, as surely as night follows day.

This is the root of all the right to repair shenanigans. Sure, companies withhold access to diagnostic codes and parts, but codes can be extracted and parts can be cloned. The real teeth in blocking repair comes from the law, not the tech. The company that makes McDonald's wildly unreliable McFlurry machines makes a fortune charging franchisees to fix these eternally broken appliances. When a third party threatened this racket by reverse-engineering the DRM that blocked independent repair, they got buried in legal threats:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/20/euthanize-rentier-enablers/#cold-war

Everybody loves this racket. In Poland, a team of security researchers at the OhMyHack conference just presented their teardown of the anti-repair features in NEWAG Impuls locomotives. NEWAG boobytrapped their trains to try and detect if they've been independently serviced, and to respond to any unauthorized repairs by bricking themselves:

https://mamot.fr/@[email protected]/111528162905209453

Poland is part of the EU, meaning that they are required to uphold the provisions of the 2001 EU Copyright Directive, including Article 6, which bans this kind of reverse-engineering. The researchers are planning to present their work again at the Chaos Communications Congress in Hamburg this month – Germany is also a party to the EUCD. The threat to researchers from presenting this work is real – but so is the threat to conferences that host them:

https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/researchers-face-legal-threats-over-sdmi-hack/

20 years ago, Chris Anderson told me that it was unrealistic to expect tech companies to refuse demands for DRM from the entertainment companies whose media they hoped to play. My argument – then and now – was that any tech company that sells you a gadget that can have its features revoked is defrauding you. You're paying for x, y and z – and if they are contractually required to remove x and y on demand, they are selling you something that you can't rely on, without making that clear to you.

But it's worse than that. When a tech company designs a device for remote, irreversible, nonconsensual downgrades, they invite both external and internal parties to demand those downgrades. Like Pavel Chekov says, a phaser on the bridge in Act I is going to go off by Act III. Selling a product that can be remotely, irreversibly, nonconsensually downgraded inevitably results in the worst person at the product-planning meeting proposing to do so. The fact that there are no penalties for doing so makes it impossible for the better people in that meeting to win the ensuing argument, leading to the moral injury of seeing a product you care about reduced to a pile of shit:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/11/25/moral-injury/#enshittification

But even if everyone at that table is a swell egg who wouldn't dream of enshittifying the product, the existence of a remote, irreversible, nonconsensual downgrade feature makes the product vulnerable to external actors who will demand that it be used. Back in 2022, Adobe informed its customers that it had lost its deal to include Pantone colors in Photoshop, Illustrator and other "software as a service" packages. As a result, users would now have to start paying a monthly fee to see their own, completed images. Fail to pay the fee and all the Pantone-coded pixels in your artwork would just show up as black:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/10/28/fade-to-black/#trust-the-process

Adobe blamed this on Pantone, and there was lots of speculation about what had happened. Had Pantone jacked up its price to Adobe, so Adobe passed the price on to its users in the hopes of embarrassing Pantone? Who knows? Who can know? That's the point: you invested in Photoshop, you spent money and time creating images with it, but you have no way to know whether or how you'll be able to access those images in the future. Those terms can change at any time, and if you don't like it, you can go fuck yourself.

These companies are all run by CEOs who got their MBAs at Darth Vader University, where the first lesson is "I have altered the deal, pray I don't alter it further." Adobe chose to design its software so it would be vulnerable to this kind of demand, and then its customers paid for that choice. Sure, Pantone are dicks, but this is Adobe's fault. They stuck a KICK ME sign to your back, and Pantone obliged.

This keeps happening and it's gonna keep happening. Last week, Playstation owners who'd bought (or "bought") Warner TV shows got messages telling them that Warner had walked away from its deal to sell videos through the Playstation store, and so all the videos they'd paid for were going to be deleted forever. They wouldn't even get refunds (to be clear, refunds would also be bullshit – when I was a bookseller, I didn't get to break into your house and steal the books I'd sold you, not even if I left some cash on your kitchen table).

Sure, Warner is an unbelievably shitty company run by the single most guillotineable executive in all of Southern California, the loathsome David Zaslav, who oversaw the merger of Warner with Discovery. Zaslav is the creep who figured out that he could make more money cancelling completed movies and TV shows and taking a tax writeoff than he stood to make by releasing them:

https://aftermath.site/there-is-no-piracy-without-ownership

Imagine putting years of your life into making a program – showing up on set at 5AM and leaving your kids to get their own breakfast, performing stunts that could maim or kill you, working 16-hour days during the acute phase of the covid pandemic and driving home in the night, only to have this absolute turd of a man delete the program before anyone could see it, forever, to get a minor tax advantage. Talk about moral injury!

But without Sony's complicity in designing a remote, irreversible, nonconsensual downgrade feature into the Playstation, Zaslav's war on art and creative workers would be limited to material that hadn't been released yet. Thanks to Sony's awful choices, David Zaslav can break into your house, steal your movies – and he doesn't even have to leave a twenty on your kitchen table.

The point here – the point I made 20 years ago to Chris Anderson – is that this is the foreseeable, inevitable result of designing devices for remote, irreversible, nonconsensual downgrades. Anyone who was paying attention should have figured that out in the GW Bush administration. Anyone who does this today? Absolute flaming garbage.

Sure, Zaslav deserves to be staked out over an anthill and slathered in high-fructose corn syrup. But save the next anthill for the Sony exec who shipped a product that would let Zaslav come into your home and rob you. That piece of shit knew what they were doing and they did it anyway. Fuck them. Sideways. With a brick.

Meanwhile, the studios keep making the case for stealing movies rather than paying for them. As Tyler James Hill wrote: "If buying isn't owning, piracy isn't stealing":

https://bsky.app/profile/tylerjameshill.bsky.social/post/3kflw2lvam42n

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/2023/12/08/playstationed/#tyler-james-hill

Image: Alan Levine (modified) https://pxhere.com/en/photo/218986

CC BY 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/

Been with you the whole time, Nick.

Bob Marley & The Wailers: Legendary Pioneers of Reggae Music

Bob Marley & The Wailers: Legendary Pioneers of Reggae Music Album: Bob Marley & The Wailers Essentials Genre: Reggae, Ska, Rocksteady Arguably the most influential reggae outfit of all time, Bob Marley & The Wailers would go on to change the face of the genre with their ideologically and politically charged output. Renowned for incorporating elements of ska and rocksteady into their vibrant…

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"What emerged in two interviews with Trump, and conversations with more than a dozen of his closest advisers and confidants, were the outlines of an imperial presidency that would reshape America and its role in the world. To carry out a deportation operation designed to remove more than 11 millions people from the country, Trump told me, he would be willing to build migrant detention camps and deploy the U.S. military, both at the border and inland. He would let red states monitor women's pregnancies and prosecute those who violate abortion bans. He would, at his personal discretion, withhold funds appropriated by Congress, according to top advisers. He would be willing to fire a U.S. Attorney who doesn't carry out his order to prosecute someone, breaking with a tradition of independent law enforcement that dates from America's founding. He is weighing pardons for every one of his supporters accused of attacking the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, more than 800 of whom have pleaded guilty or been convicted by a jury. He might not come to the aid of an attacked ally in Europe or Asia if he felt that country wasn't paying enough for its own defense. He would gut the U.S. civil service, deploy the National Guard to American cities as he sees fit, close the White House pandemic-preparedness office, and staff his Administration with acolytes who back his false assertion that the 2020 election was stolen."

-- "How Far Would He Go", TIME Magazine's interviews with Donald Trump, April 30, 2024.

I know we're saturated in coverage of Trump and it's easy (and probably better for our mental health) to usually ignore most of the articles when we see them, especially since he's so full of shit and infuriating. But it's also important to recognize that he is going to be the Republican nominee for President and he could absolutely be elected in November, and if you thought his first term was scary and dangerous, you need to understand that in a second term he's going to have people around him that are better prepared and VERY willing to do the crazy shit that he wants to do to this country. They aren't even hiding the fact that they are seeking vengeance against political opponents whom they feel have wronged them, and are ready to fundamentally dismantle the democratic foundations that are barely holding this country together after nearly 250 years.

Just look at what Trump says about the people who he incited to attack the United States Capitol in an attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 election and halt the peaceful transfer of power that has happened every four years since 1789:

"Trump has sought to recast an insurrectionist riot as an act of patriotism. 'I call them the J-6 patriots,' he say. When I ask whether he would consider pardoning every one of them, he says, 'Yes, absolutely.' As Trump faces dozens of felony charges, including for election interference, conspiracy to defraud the United States, willful retention of national-security secrets, and falsifying business records to conceal hush-money payments, he has tried to turn legal peril into a badge of honor."

Oh, and please note that Trump -- a former President of the United States and possible future President of the United States -- said on the record in these interviews with TIME: "There is a definite antiwhite feeling in the country and that can't be allowed either." We are at a point where political leaders are outright saying that in this country again, and it's because of Donald Trump.

So, take the time to recognize that Trump is straight-up telling us the country we're going to be living in if he wins again in November. And understand that your vote matters -- and WHO you vote for matters -- because, as I've been saying for years now, ELECTIONS HAVE FUCKING CONSEQUENCES.

Sometimes I remember I was supposed to be a published playwright and I get mad

Project 25. The Heritage Foundation.

It's behind every single anti-lgbt law pushed the last year. They are why Roe v Wade was overturned. They are successful, well funded, and a massive threat.

What you can do is educate yourself and others about it. Get to know your enemy. Protest. Wear pride pins. Put out your flags. Show solidarity. We are ALL under attack by this white supremacist christo-fascist group.

Remember when 2020 had kpop stans organizing on twitter and gen z using tik tok to make Trump meets flop while white vets made themselves frontline walls at BLM protests that were organized to handle shit like kettling thanks to their amazing black organizers? Remember how people actually Showed up to those protests for awhile?

We need that cross-generational Fuck The System energy again. Not just for a summer this time. This needs to go passed the election.

They're playing a long game and so do we.

Get inspired.

Their goals include saving the children and traditional family, and "to lay the groundwork for a White House more friendly to the right."

This translates to destroying the EPA, disability rights, and criminalizing being LGBT. Also to overthrow the US government, as stated in their manifesto.

They want to replace our democracy with a theocracy. No Republican in office was elected without their approval.

They're the kind of right that makes being LGBT punishable by death. That makes it a crime just to exist where others can see you. They want librarians who work in libraries that make LGBT books accessible to be registered sex offenders. They want you prosecuted and even specify that no mercy should be shown to people the "left" likes (ex: immigrants, black people, etc)

That's the extreme right who's been manipulating our laws.

And they plan to make things a lot worse within the first 180 days a Republican is elected president.

Source

If you don't have plans coming up.... Start organizing them. We will be okay if we work together.

We will be okay if we work together.

If we have each other, we'll be okay. We have to rely on each other. You have to be reliable. You, person reading this, have to show up. That's how this works.

I have your back if you have mine. Do not leave me to the wolves and I won't leave you.