#16/02/2021

[ferola-lita]

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Leveraged buyouts are not like mortgages

I'm coming to DEFCON! On FRIDAY (Aug 9), I'm emceeing the EFF POKER TOURNAMENT (noon at the Horseshoe Poker Room), and appearing on the BRICKED AND ABANDONED panel (5PM, LVCC - L1 - HW1–11–01). On SATURDAY (Aug 10), I'm giving a keynote called "DISENSHITTIFY OR DIE! How hackers can seize the means of computation and build a new, good internet that is hardened against our asshole bosses' insatiable horniness for enshittification" (noon, LVCC - L1 - HW1–11–01).

Here's an open secret: the confusing jargon of finance is not the product of some inherent complexity that requires a whole new vocabulary. Rather, finance-talk is all obfuscation, because if we called finance tactics by their plain-language names, it would be obvious that the sector exists to defraud the public and loot the real economy.

Take "leveraged buyout," a polite name for stealing a whole goddamned company:

Identify a company that owns valuable assets that are required for its continued operation, such as the real-estate occupied by its outlets, or even its lines of credit with suppliers;

Approach lenders (usually banks) and ask for money to buy the company, offering the company itself (which you don't own!) as collateral on the loan;

Offer some of those loaned funds to shareholders of the company and convince a key block of those shareholders (for example, executives with large stock grants, or speculators who've acquired large positions in the company, or people who've inherited shares from early investors but are disengaged from the operation of the firm) to demand that the company be sold to the looters;

Call a vote on selling the company at the promised price, counting on the fact that many investors will not participate in that vote (for example, the big index funds like Vanguard almost never vote on motions like this), which means that a minority of shareholders can force the sale;

Once you own the company, start to strip-mine its assets: sell its real-estate, start stiffing suppliers, fire masses of workers, all in the name of "repaying the debts" that you took on to buy the company.

This process has its own euphemistic jargon, for example, "rightsizing" for layoffs, or "introducing efficiencies" for stiffing suppliers or selling key assets and leasing them back. The looters – usually organized as private equity funds or hedge funds – will extract all the liquid capital – and give it to themselves as a "special dividend." Increasingly, there's also a "divi recap," which is a euphemism for borrowing even more money backed by the company's assets and then handing it to the private equity fund:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/09/17/divi-recaps/#graebers-ghost

If you're a Sopranos fan, this will all sound familiar, because when the (comparatively honest) mafia does this to a business, it's called a "bust-out":

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bust_Out

The mafia destroys businesses on a onesy-twosey, retail scale; but private equity and hedge funds do their plunder wholesale.

It's how they killed Red Lobster:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/23/spineless/#invertebrates

And it's what they did to hospitals:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/28/5000-bats/#charnel-house

It's what happened to nursing homes, Armark, private prisons, funeral homes, pet groomers, nursing homes, Toys R Us, The Olive Garden and Pet Smart:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/06/02/plunderers/#farben

It's what happened to the housing co-ops of Cooper Village, Texas energy giant TXU, Old Country Buffet, Harrah's and Caesar's:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/05/14/billionaire-class-solidarity/#club-deals

And it's what's slated to happen to 2.9m Boomer-owned US businesses employing 32m people, whose owners are nearing retirement:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/12/16/schumpeterian-terrorism/#deliberately-broken

Now, you can't demolish that much of the US productive economy without attracting some negative attention, so the looter spin-machine has perfected some talking points to hand-wave away the criticism that borrowing money using something you don't own as collateral in order to buy it and wreck it is obviously a dishonest (and potentially criminal) destructive practice.

The most common one is that borrowing money against an asset you don't own is just like getting a mortgage. This is such a badly flawed analogy that it is really a testament to the efficacy of the baffle-em-with-bullshit gambit to convince us all that we're too stupid to understand how finance works.

Sure: if I put an offer on your house, I will go to my credit union and ask the for a mortgage that uses your house as collateral. But the difference here is that you own your house, and the only way I can buy it – the only way I can actually get that mortgage – is if you agree to sell it to me.

Owner-occupied homes typically have uncomplicated ownership structures. Typically, they're owned by an individual or a couple. Sometimes they're the property of an estate that's divided up among multiple heirs, whose relationship is mediated by a will and a probate court. Title can be contested through a divorce, where disputes are settled by a divorce court. At the outer edge of complexity, you get things like polycules or lifelong roommates who've formed an LLC s they can own a house among several parties, but the LLC will have bylaws, and typically all those co-owners will be fully engaged in any sale process.

Leveraged buyouts don't target companies with simple ownership structures. They depend on firms whose equity is split among many parties, some of whom will be utterly disengaged from the firm's daily operations – say, the kids of an early employee who got a big stock grant but left before the company grew up. The looter needs to convince a few of these "owners" to force a vote on the acquisition, and then rely on the idea that many of the other shareholders will simply abstain from a vote. Asset managers are ubiquitous absentee owners who own large stakes in literally every major firm in the economy. The big funds – Vanguard, Blackrock, State Street – "buy the whole market" (a big share in every top-capitalized firm on a given stock exchange) and then seek to deliver returns equal to the overall performance of the market. If the market goes up by 5%, the index funds need to grow by 5%. If the market goes down by 5%, then so do those funds. The managers of those funds are trying to match the performance of the market, not improve on it (by voting on corporate governance decisions, say), or to beat it (by only buying stocks of companies they judge to be good bets):

https://pluralistic.net/2022/03/17/shareholder-socialism/#asset-manager-capitalism

Your family home is nothing like one of these companies. It doesn't have a bunch of minority shareholders who can force a vote, or a large block of disengaged "owners" who won't show up when that vote is called. There isn't a class of senior managers – Chief Kitchen Officer! – who have been granted large blocks of options that let them have a say in whether you will become homeless.

Now, there are homes that fit this description, and they're a fucking disaster. These are the "heirs property" homes, generally owned by the Black descendants of enslaved people who were given the proverbial 40 acres and a mule. Many prosperous majority Black settlements in the American South are composed of these kinds of lots.

Given the historical context – illiterate ex-slaves getting property as reparations or as reward for fighting with the Union Army – the titles for these lands are often muddy, with informal transfers from parents to kids sorted out with handshakes and not memorialized by hiring lawyers to update the deeds. This has created an irresistible opportunity for a certain kind of scammer, who will pull the deeds, hire genealogists to map the family trees of the original owners, and locate distant descendants with homeopathically small claims on the property. These descendants don't even know they own these claims, don't even know about these ancestors, and when they're offered a few thousand bucks for their claim, they naturally take it.

Now, armed with a claim on the property, the heirs property scammers force an auction of it, keeping the process under wraps until the last instant. If they're really lucky, they're the only bidder and they can buy the entire property for pennies on the dollar and then evict the family that has lived on it since Reconstruction. Sometimes, the family will get wind of the scam and show up to bid against the scammer, but the scammer has deep capital reserves and can easily win the auction, with the same result:

https://www.propublica.org/series/dispossessed

A similar outrage has been playing out for years in Hawai'i, where indigenous familial claims on ancestral lands have been diffused through descendants who don't even know they're co-owner of a place where their distant cousins have lived since pre-colonial times. These descendants are offered small sums to part with their stakes, which allows the speculator to force a sale and kick the indigenous Hawai'ians off their family lands so they can be turned into condos or hotels. Mark Zuckerberg used this "quiet title and partition" scam to dispossess hundreds of Hawai'ian families:

https://archive.is/g1YZ4

Heirs property and quiet title and partition are a much better analogy to a leveraged buyout than a mortgage is, because they're ways of stealing something valuable from people who depend on it and maintain it, and smashing it and selling it off.

Strip away all the jargon, and private equity is just another scam, albeit one with pretensions to respectability. Its practitioners are ripoff artists. You know the notorious "carried interest loophole" that politicians periodically discover and decry? "Carried interest" has nothing to do with the interest on a loan. The "carried interest" rule dates back to 16th century sea-captains, and it refers to the "interest" they had in the cargo they "carried":

https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/29/writers-must-be-paid/#carried-interest

Private equity managers are like sea captains in exactly the same way that leveraged buyouts are like mortgages: not at all.

And it's not like private equity is good to its investors: scams like "continuation funds" allow PE looters to steal all the money they made from strip mining valuable companies, so they show no profits on paper when it comes time to pay their investors:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/20/continuation-fraud/#buyout-groups

Those investors are just as bamboozled as we are, which is why they keep giving more money to PE funds. Today, the "dry powder" (uninvested money) that PE holds has reached an all-time record high of $2.62 trillion – money from pension funds and rich people and sovereign wealth funds, stockpiled in anticipation of buying and destroying even more profitable, productive, useful businesses:

https://www.institutionalinvestor.com/article/2di1vzgjcmzovkcea8f0g/portfolio/private-equitys-dry-powder-mountain-reaches-record-height

The practices of PE are crooked as hell, and it's only the fact that they use euphemisms and deceptive analogies to home mortgages that keeps them from being shut down. The more we strip away the bullshit, the faster we'll be able to kill this cancer, and the more of the real economy we'll be able to preserve.

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/2024/08/05/rugged-individuals/#misleading-by-analogy

[toskarinarchive]

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[thealieninhiding]

The Katie McGrath Archives (WIP)

A repository of my ongoing digital archeology & archival work please contact me if you have anything to contribute and buy me a coffee if you value my content

message me if you want a link to her complete filmography 🤫

Updates

(last updated 2024-07-03)

2024-07-03

Scans:

2014-02-07 London Times - Dracula sets

Audio:

(Un)likeminded 2x02 How to Survive The Apocalypse

2024-05-24

Video:

2017 Katie McGrath interview [CW|KMcGsource]

2017 Supergirl Season 3 Sweet dreams (are made of this) Music Video

2017 CW SDCC Promo Supergirl and Arrow

2019-01-01 The CW Promo Open To All

2021-04-25 Supergirl Season 6 Katie McGrath Lena Luthor

2021-09-15 Supergirl Season 6 Katie McGrath Reflecting on Supergirl

2024-05-22

Audio:

Interview - 2009-07-17 Katie McGrath Mr Media interview

Interview - 2009-10-15 Geek Syndicate Merlin BTS special

Video:

BTS - 2008-10-08 Blue Peter Merlin BTS

Events - 2009 TV Choice Awards Digital Spy interview

Events - Getty Videos of 2009 TV Choice Awards, 2010 Merlin Series 3 launch, 2011 W.E. premiere, 2017 King Arthur Premiere

2024-05-17

Archived interviews

2008-12-07 Tribune Magazine - What Katie Did

2011-10-14 What's on TV - Merlin's Katie McGrath- 'Bad girls have more fun!'

2012-12-03 Fanhattan Blog - Colin Morgan, Katie McGrath and Bradley James on Season 5 and The Series Finale

2018-08-01 The TV Junkies - Supergirl SDCC 2018 Interviews- Lena’s Impractical Lab Outfits, the Return of Reporter Kara and a More Grounded Season 4

Audio

HHush samples

Interview - 2009-2011 Sci-fi Talk rewind merlin the series specials episode 1

Interview - 2011? Merlin S4 Sci-fi talk byte katie mcgrath on morgana

Interview - 2013 BBC Radio 1xtra part 1 & part 2

(Un)likeminded 1x02 While You Were Dreaming

Trees a crowd- Irish folklore segment

Magazine scans

2008-09-20 Radio Times

2009-06-08 TV Week (Aus)

2010-09-05 Sunday Express

2010-09-30 Totally Merlin Magazine

2011-12 Total Film

2012-03-14 Sci-Fi Now

2012-10-06 Radio Times

2013-04-06 Irish independent

2013-09-02 Marie-Claire (UK)

2013-12 Instyle

2013-12 Total Film

Video:

Fans - 2012-04-16 Merlin4 [carlospyrrhus]

Fans - 2017-08-30 Supergirl cast together on set [Joyce Law]

Interview - 2009-09-?? Merlin S2 audio interview with Katie McGrath [BJsRealm] part 1

Interview - 2010-09-06 Merlin Series 3 - BBC Radio 1xtra Interview with Angel Coulby & Katie McGrath [BJsrealm]

Interview - 2011-10-14 Merlin S4 Colin Morgan, Eoin Macken Katie McGrath on The Late Late Show

Interview - 2012-07-15 Colin Morgan and Katie McGrath at SDCC 2012 - innerSPACE [merlinnetwork2]

Interview - 2012-07-18 Katie McGrath Talks Merlin At Comic Con 2012 [ThinkHeroTV]

Interview - 2012-10-25 BBC Radio 1 Breakfast - Colin & Katie part 1 & part 2 [BJsRealm]

Interview - 2012-12-03 Merlin S5 Katie McGrath interview international press day [BJsRealm]

Interview - 2012-12-03 Colin, Bradley, Katie phone interview [BJsRealm]

Interview - 2013-11-09 Katie McGrath on BBC One Saturday Kitchen [BJsRealm]

Interview - 2019-07-22 ENTREVISTA SUPERGIRL Elenco fala sobre a nova temporada [Warner Channel Brasil]

Interview - 2019-07-23 Melissa Benoist Teases Directing An Episode Of 'Supergirl' [ET Canada]

Interview - 2020-02-21 ‘Supergirl’ Celebrates 100th Episode [ET Canada]

Panels - 2011-07-28 Merlin Comic Con 2011 Panel [ThinkHeroTV]

[dystopianam]

[DOWNLOAD] COLORED CEILING LIGHTS (16 COLORS - 5 DIFFERENT INTENSITIES + INVISIBLE RECOLORS) - UPDATED 07/02/2024

Finally here are the colored lights! I've always loved NL neons, but I've always hated that they were huge and impossible to put in residential lots unless you want to make your home look like a fantasy, alien or futuristic house.

I specify that those who use lighting mod see the intensities from 4 to 5 very bright (like me in the video), but those who do not use lighting mod see the intensities from 4 to 5 as in the video the intensities from 1 to 3 are shown! Intensities 4 to 5 are for those who don't have lighting mods!

EXPLANATIONS AND CREDITS

(Skip it if you want, but it's full of credit for other persons)

For years I looked for invisible recolors of NL neons, or someone who had changed the mesh of these, but I never found anything.

I remember that, perhaps, I had once found an invisible recolor of the round neon lights that you can place on the wall, but honestly that recolor never worked for me ;_:

So I gave up, I lost hope of having some comfortable neon lights that I could put in my house and I went on with my life, until...one day I don't remember what I was doing in game, I took a cc lamp I had and saw that it had a beautiful colored light. I told @jacky93sims "this light is beautiful, but the mesh is huge and impossible to use".

At first, since I just wanted to do something personal, I wanted to change the mesh of that cc, but I had difficulty because I didn't know how to do one thing yet (which I now know how to do). So Jacky said to me "but instead of changing the mesh why don't you take a lamp from the game you like and change the light using the light from this cc?" and she proceeds to send me a tutorial on how to do it. She then added "it's a Nightlife light, it's called [name of light]".

And that's where it all started.

I looked for that lamp in the game, I found it, and it was this one that I asked you about a few days ago.

However, there was a little mystery surrounding it: this neon does not emit light, but both Jacky and I saw blue light. Just me and her. Nobody else.

It was strange. Right now my suspicion is that we probably have a different light from everyone else because we use two lighting mods which, although different, use the same settings for that particular light.

But...Jacky doesn't have NL, yet she saw the RGB color of that NL light, how was that possible? Snooping around a bit in the file, we then discovered that the RGB value was set to emit that particular color. Jacky then understood how to make the RGB codes work on simPe, she explained it to me and out of curiosity I started trying other colors: BINGO! The light could become any color I wanted! And what's even more beautiful? Even Jacky, without having NL could do it! It therefore meant that we could create neons without needing NL and above all... without editing game files.

I was so happy. So to test that light would work for everyone, I sent the light to @simstraffikcone @ash1c , but... it was a fail. It didn't work for them. Right now I thought it was because Traffikcone not have a lighting mod, while Ash has the Maxis Match Lighting mod, which I remember not having that specific NL light with the blue light as Jacky and I see it.

I was confused. I could edit a lot of non-RGB lights and make the colors work on many of them, but no one but me saw those colors when I sent the files. Then Jacky suggested to try using the source of these RGB spotlights... and finally, with this the others were able to see all the colors too!

I hope that the creator of these spotlights doesn't mind that I used the same source, their post is from 18 years ago, the last time they was online was 2021 and they doesn't have a TOU. From the name of the light it seems like a custom light, but not having a custom installation I can't say. This creator is a pro when it comes to editing game lights, I saw them talk about it on some posts on MTS!

In the end, It doesn't matter what kind of light it was, I just needed the RGB values to work.

PROS AND CONS

But at this point you're thinking, looking at they profile on MTS "but sorry, this creator also made RGB ceiling lights, so what are yours for?" and here... comes the part where I explain why my lights exist (don't fall asleep, I'm almost done, I swear)

Its ceiling lights have two requirements that I tried to bypass: you need NL to make them work and to do extra steps, editing game files. Some people are uncomfortable doing these things, others don't have all the expansions!

My lights don't need NL to work and you don't have to do any extra steps, you don't have to edit any of the game files, you just put them in the download folder and play with them.

And why this? Because I don't use the source of their ceiling lights, but that of their spotlights!

But here too you may be wondering...why not use spotlights then? Well...it is a question that includes many factors:

- The spotlights are very nice to use in the garden, but what if you want to use those colored lights indoors? Wouldn't it be strange to have garden lights around the house INSIDE the rooms? I think sims can bypass them, but it's not very aesthetic! With my ceiling lamp not only you not take up space in the house and you can't see it, if you don't want to see it at all you also have the option of making it invisible!

- True, you can mess around with colors to get colors other than red, blue and green, but my lights come with 16 ready colors! So you don't have to bombard an area full of spotlights to form a color! (Mine can mix too btw)

- The spotlights can illuminate a maximum of one or two objects that they point to, this means that to illuminate multiple objects you should use lots of spotlights. My lights on the other hand illuminate practically every object in the room!

- The ONLY con my lights have is that following the light settings of the RGB spotlights, my lights illuminate all objects and sims, but not the walls and floors. This means that you won't always get nice effects, you have to experiment a little. Sometimes rooms that are too empty will have bad effects, it is better to use them on rooms full of objects that reflect light. I tried to solve this problem, but unfortunately I haven't succeeded yet. And this is the same reason why I'm only doing the ceiling version.

I want to point out, however, that I am not discrediting their lights. Indeed, without their work today I couldn't even create these lights! So BIG THANKS to their works! I invite you to also download their (absolutely compatible with mine) They are NOT necessary to make mine work, but if you want to use their too, you can!

Another of the advantages that these lights have is that they work both for those who do not have lighting mods and for those who have them. (Obviously those who have lighting mods have better light and shadow effects, but I can't do nothing about this).

The solution was to create different intensities. People who have lighting mods see lights that basically have low intensity with high intensities. People without a lighting mod see lights with low intensity...well, with very low intensity.

For this reason I made sure that each set of lights has unique guids and that they can all work together. You can put all 5 sets in your download folder, figure out which lights you see best, and delete the ones you don't see well.

I can already tell you that people who don't use lighting mods can use intensities 3 to 5, while those who use lighting mods can use intensities 1 to 3!

So to summarize, the pro of this light are:

Base Game compatible. (You don't need NL!)

Work with and without lighting mods.

5 different intensity which you can choose.

16 ready colors to use.

Invisible recolors for all the 5 sets of intensity.

Ready collection files for all the 5 sets (residential and community lots)

You don't need to edit game files. Installation is simple. Put everything in the download folder and it works. (Everything except the collections you have to put them in the collection(s) folder)

By enabling moveobjects you can put them ANYWHERE, they work both inside and outside the house, and you can use invisible recolors to hide them.

Because they use the light from the RGB spotlights, you can mix colors and sometimes you can create some really cool gradient effects!

They work better with the light off, but even with the light on it has a nice effect because the colors that reflect on the furniture can still be seen.

And the downside...precisely, is only that the walls and the floor don't light up, but I'll see if I can resolve this in the future.

Stop! I'm done torturing you with my chatter! In the download you will find a .rar with all 5 sets + a folder with two collections for every set! (One for community lots and one for residential lots)

Thanks to jgwhiteus for the source of the light, Jacky for explaining how to use the RGB codes on simPE and Ash and Traffikcone for testing the lights for me!

DOWNLOAD (SFS)

(Recommended but not necessary, this rug fix. Game rugs are buggy and don't reflect well the light and the shadows.)

UPDATED (07/02/2024)

They were already clean, I just compressed everything (I had forgotten) and added some merged files (a merged file for each intensity + an all in one with all the intensities divided into 3 merged packages)

[digimonarchive]

Digimon in all animated media - Anime, Movies and OVA

1st pic = Digimon Adventure anime (Japan: March 7, 1999 - March 26, 2000; USA: August 14, 1999 - June 24, 2000)

2nd pic = Digimon Adenture 02 anime (Japan: April 2, 2000 - March 25, 2001; USA: August 19, 2000 - May 19, 2001)

3rd pic = Digimon Tamers anime (Japan: April 1, 2001 - March 31, 2002; USA: September 1, 2001 - June 8, 2002)

4th pic = Digimon Frontier anime (Japan: April 7, 2002 - March 30, 2003; USA: September 9, 2002 - July 14, 2003)

5th pic = Digimon Savers / Data Squad anime (Japan: April 2, 2006 – March 25, 2007; USA: October 1, 2007 - November 2, 2008)

6th pic = Digimon Xros Wars / Fusion anime (Japan: July 6, 2010 - March 25, 2012; USA: September 7, 2013 - August 16, 2015)

7th pic = Digimon Xros Wars: The Evil Death Generals and the Seven Kingdoms anime (a.k.a Digimon Xros Wars part 2) (Japan: April 3, 2011 - September 25, 2011; USA: March 8, 2015 - August 16, 2015) **

8th pic = Digimon Xros Wars: The Young Hunters Who Leapt Through Time anime (a.k.a Digimon Xros Wars Hunters or Digimon Xros Wars part 3) (Japan: October 2, 2011 - March 25, 2012) ***

9th pic = Digimon Adventure Tri OVA (Japan: November 21, 2015 - May 5, 2018; USA: September 15, 2016 - September 20, 2018)

10th pic = Digimon Universe Appli Monsters anime (a.k.a Appmon) (Japan: October 1, 2016 - September 30, 2017)

11th pic = Digimon Adventure: (a.k.a Digimon Adventure 2020 or Digimon Adventure reboot) (Japan: April 5, 2020 - September 26, 2021; USA: November 19, 2022 - April 13, 2023)

12th pic = Digimon Ghost Game (Japan: October 3, 2021 - March 26, 2023)

13th pic = Digimon Adventure (Movie) short film (Japan: March 6, 1999; USA: October 6, 2000 as the first segment part of Digimon The Movie)

14th pic = Digimon Adventure: Our War Game! movie (Japan: March 4, 2000; USA: October 6 2000 as the second segment part of Digimon The Movie)

15th pic = Digimon Adventure 02: Vol. 1: Digimon Hurricane Landing!/Vol. 2: Transcendent Evolution! The Golden Digimentals movie (a.k.a Digimon Adventure 02 Vol 1 and 2) (Japan: July 8, 2000; USA: October 6, 2000 as the third segment part of Digimon The Movie) ****

16th pic = Digimon Adventure 02: Diablomon Strikes Back / Digimon: Revenge of Diaboromon movie (Japan: March 3, 2001; USA: August 5, 2005)

17th pic = Digimon Tamers: The Adventurers' Battle / Digimon: Battle of Adventurers movie (Japan: July 14, 2001; USA: October 16, 2005)

18th pic = Digimon Tamers: The Runaway Digimon Express / Digimon: Runaway Locomon movie (Japan: March 2, 2002; USA: October 2, 2005)

19th pic = Digimon Frontier: Revival of the Ancient Digimon!! / Digimon: Island of Lost Digimon movie (Japan: July 20, 2002; USA: October 23, 2005)

20th pic = Digital Monster X-evolution movie (Japan: January 3, 2005; USA: August 1, 2020)

21st pic = Digimon Savers The Movie: Ultimate Power! Activate Burst Mode!! movie (Japan: December 9, 2006)

22nd pic = Digimon Adventure 3D: Digimon Grandprix! short film OVA (Japan: July 20, 2000)

23rd pic = Digimon Savers 3D: The Digital World in Imminent Danger! short film OVA (Japan: July 8, 2006)

24th pic = Digimon Adventure 20th Anniversary Memorial Story Project OVA short films (Japan: November 22 2019 - December 25, 2020)

25th pic = Digimon Adventure: Last Evolution Kizuna movie (Japan: February 21, 2020; USA: September 29, 2020)

26th pic = Digimon Adventure 02: The Beginning movie (Japan: October 5, 2023; USA: November 8, 2023)

** This is the 2nd part of Digimon Xros Wars saga with Taiki, Kiriha and Nene on their adventure while Akari and Zenjirou are left out.

*** This is the 3rd part of Digimon Xros Wars saga with Tagiru, Yuu and Taiki as the protagonists. This 3rd part has the overly long title so we fans prefer to call it 'Digimon Xros Wars: Hunters' or 'Digimon Young Hunters'.

**** Yes, this movie has an overly long title. I had a hard time deciding whether to highlight it in bold or not.

Happy Digimon Day!

[astraofdelos]

My Personal Headcanons for the Batfamily

(All ages are calculated for the last day of 2024. If people want me to add onto this for other Batfamily members or associates, lmk)

Bruce Thomas Wayne: 43, 02/19/1981

— 19 when he went off to the LoA (2000)

— 24 when he became Batman (2005)

— 27 when he took in Dick (2008)

Barbara Joan Gordon: 24, 09/23/2000

— 12 when she became Batgirl (2012)

— 17; paralyzed (2017)

— 18 when she became Oracle (2018)

Richard John “Dick” Grayson-Wayne: 24, 11/11/2000

— 10 when he became Robin I (2010)

— 15 when he became Nightwing (2015)

Cassandra Carolyn “Cass” Cain-Wayne: 22, 01/26/2002

— 18 when she became Batgirl II (2020)

— 19 when she became Black Bat (2021)

— 21 when she became Orphan (2023)

Jason Peter Todd-Wayne: 22, 8/16/2002

— 13 when he became Robin II (2015)

— 15; died (2017)

— 18 when he became Red Hood (2020)

Timothy Jackson “Tim” Drake-Wayne: 19, 07/19/2005

— 13 when he became Robin III (2018)

— 16 when he became Red Robin (2021)

Stephanie Brown: 19, 08/11/2005

— 14 when she became Spoiler (2019)

— 16 when she became Robin IV (2021)

— 16 when she became Batgirl III (2021)

— 18 when she became Spoiler again (2023)

Duke Thomas: 17, 08/13/2007

— 14 when he became Robin (2021)

— 15 when he became Signal (2022)

Damian Thomas al Ghul- Wayne: 12, 08/09/2012

— 10 when he became Robin VI (2022)

[gyeomsweetgyeom]

all nct dream imagines can be found here- Mark and Haechan found on the 127 masterlist personal favorites are marked with ☆

last updated August 6, 2024

⭒˚｡⋆the newlywed miniseries⋆⭒˚｡⋆

Renjun

[6:47 pm] posted March 27, 2021

A surprise party for the birthday boy with kisses as a gift

you suck at crushes posted August 22, 2021

Renjun wants to help you get with Yangyang who wants to help you couple up with Renjun but they’re both annoying, maybe one less than the other

[5:11 pm] posted January 22, 2022

On your first date with Renjun you get distracted by his pretty eyes

[10:26 am] posted October 8, 2022

You thought Tsundere!Renjun didn’t like you so why is he cuddling you and making it impossible to get out of bed?

☆ [11:56 pm] posted March 12, 2023

You love your best friend, even when she’s throwing up outside a frat house, but you love her brother even more when he picks you both up

[10:14 am] posted October 7, 2023

Renjun would prefer to be awake with you but he can’t bring himself to wake you up himself so he does everything he can to get other factors to do it instead

[5:36 pm] posted January 27, 2024

Your friends find all the lingering touches and glances between you and Renjun to be annoying why won’t you confess?! Wait- did you guys just kiss?!

[4:02 pm] posted February 18, 2024

Renjun is unusually cute and clingy

Jeno

[3:28 pm] posted March 21, 2021

Prompt generator- Jeno can’t get enough kisses with you rose flavored lip balm

☆ [12:24 pm] posted November 16, 2021

Jeno calls you too often and is too comfortable

[8:51 am] posted April 18, 2022

Jeno is unusually cuddly, why?

☆ [3:43 pm] posted November 5, 2022

Making the bed is something that you and Jeno are supposed to do together, do you even want to be together?

[6:19 pm] posted April 2, 2023

You and Jeno have to work through some relationship issues due to him forgetting your anniversary

☆ [9:19 pm] posted July 8, 2023

When you don’t agree about this being you best time having sex, Jeno decides to imitate your moans to try and change your mind (MDNI)

[12:14 am] posted July 22, 2023

Jeno sleeps can only really sleep well when you scratch his back

☆ [9:33 pm] posted October 31, 2023

Jeno is much too tired to argue with his toddler who should be in bed after a long night of trick-or-treating

[8:41 pm] posted December 19, 2023

Jeno is a nervous dad who happens to get more nervous when your daughter is playing out in the snow 

[3:16 pm] posted February 10, 2024

Jeno would never admit that he likes your trashy reality show-did you watch the season premier without him?!

☆[9:16 am] posted July 14, 2024

Jeno tries to be cute and send you flowers, it's just a shame it wasn't a successful try

Jaemin

☆ mr. worst cup {College and Barista!au} posted April 4, 2021

Jaemin messes up your order and in turn messes up any chance at any sort of relationship with you (or so he thinks)

[2:38 pm] posted June 24, 2021

Some people just don’t like seeing you and Jaemin in love- lovesick they might argue

[4:16 pm] posted January 17, 2022

Jaemin is throwing a fit and you don’t care

[7:14 pm] posted July 15, 2022

You thought Jaemin hated strawberries more than he liked you

[2:37 pm] posted January 22, 2023

Jaemin would do anything for you and that includes running across town and buying you multiple bouquets when he hears you’ve had a bad day

[11:22 pm] posted February 19, 2023

A night out at the club was supposed to help you get over Fuckboy!Jaemin, not get in his bed

[3:41 pm] posted June 17, 2023

You and Barista!Jaemin kiss each other hello and goodbye much to your friends’ disgust- 00′s line cafe 7dream au

[8:02 pm] posted September 17, 2023

Jaemin has been clingy for days, good thing you can have your shower time for yourself, right? wrong.

[2:41 pm] posted October 14, 2023

pregnant!reader experiences a pregnancy scare and Jaemin comforts her

[9:18 pm] posted December 25, 2023

Your son can’t resist the Christmas tree, even less so when he finds out there’s a toy hidden somewhere beneath the tree

[7:09 pm] posted January 13, 2024

Your usually hyper daughter is playing with your cats so gently, why? She’s practicing for a baby you didn’t know about

[8:08 am] posted April 28, 2024

CEO!Jaemin walks his daughter to school

[8:04 am] posted June 1, 2024

you wake up to hear Jaemin and your daughter talking over the baby monitor

Chenle

[2:51 pm] posted December 11, 2021

Did he just bite you? He just bit you

[3:13 am] posted September 26, 2022

College!Chenle decides to come over, joy… it’s not like you were sleeping or anything

☆[5:18 pm] posted May 13, 2023

Situationship!Chenle likes to steal your phone and make horrible pictures of you your new lockscreen, but your new lockscreen has him change his mind 

Jisung

[6:22 pm] posted November 27, 2021

You’re supposed to be there for a surprise! Why aren’t you there for the surprise?! Oh…

☆[3:56 pm] posted September 4, 2022

Did College!Jisung mean to kiss you while he was leaving?

[4:12 pm] posted August 12, 2023

Jisung comforts you after a stressful exam

☆[5:51 pm] posted June 29, 2024

You just took a pregnancy test and saw it said pregnant, what does Jisung mean "how did this happen?"

[barrencelenny]

I feel like fic recs tend to be things that are complete, so I thought I'd rec some things that haven't been updated in a while (>a year) or abandoned, but I still like to go back and reread

with links and comments under the cut <3

Poured Over Ice in an Old-Fashioned Glass by prepandemicwriting (bealeciphers) [2016-02-04, 28k]

-classic bartender!barry fic. they're both kinda disasters all around? hilarious

Run Away With Me by asexual-fandom-queen (2016-05-23, 14k]

-the only time asking someone to run away with you has ever worked lmao.

Painting the Roses Red by Solarcat [2016-07-01, 20k]

-Family of Rogues but there's a third snart sibling that Len's got to protect. Lucy Snart that only exists in this fic and my brain ily <3

I bet these memories follow you around by MissSugarPlum [2017-06-07,5k]

-Lisa and Barry in high school at the same time, Barry being tiny and full of rage, Lisa being reluctantly charmed, mwah. chef's kiss.

Bolt from the Blue by town_without_heart [2017-06-16, 170k]

-pre-canon meeting is always delicious to me. eobard being aware of it is the cherry on top (what a creeper)

The Good in You (the Bad in Me) by blue_wonderer [2017-08-02, 26k]

-I have a soft spot for fics where Barry and Lisa are friends what can I say. set pre-canon, and barry is a goddamn delight

Get Me Through The Night by Mentalrebel [2017-08-07, 11k]

-super interesting formatting. it's a lifeline au? I have no idea what that it, but it's fun

Ties and Barricades by yersifanel [2017-09-01, 10k]

-pre-canon meet-ugly where len kidnaps his soulmate as part of his getaway.

Realignment (time & company) by writerdragonfly [2018-02-13, 12k]

-me? rec a time travel fic? of course. time traveller's wife au. gives some really interesting backstory to Len's mother/family

Unexpected Development by nirejseki [2018-04-05, 20k]

-it's so funny it's practically a crack fic. calling the reverse flash Mr. Banana is an inspired choice

since I can remember I've been runnin' from you by youmakemesoangry [2019-01-26, 14k]

-barry getting haunted by post oculus len yes oh yes

Sticky Fingers by MoriartyMastermind [2019-03-05, 18k]

-barry stealing wallets as the flash is like objectively funny okay

Resonance by Moriavis [2019-06-16, 40k]

-looove a soulmate fic and this one is so unique. Barry and Len meet when Barry's still a child, and it ends before they meet as adults, so really it's mainly a Leonard snart character study

Ice and Lightning by vomitingwords [2020-03-26, 2k]

-potentially the only figure skating au for this ship?

Zero to Sixty by scrubmarine [2020-06-26, 25k]

-barry meeting len out of costume because he's running away from Iris is a hilarious set up, and he kind of deserves it

Just Friends by Thundersnow [2021-08-11, 168k]

-a classic fake dating au, trying to figure out how a blueberry coffee could taste good has been a question that has followed me for years.

Shiva by crestfaller [2021-11-07, 17k]

-I always need more fics dealing with the loss of Henry tbh, and this is a really good exploration of grief.

What It Might Cost by Kateera [2022-05-17, 20k]

-a classic deaging fic, len is heartbreakingly cute

Stand Still by Taste_of_Bitterness [2022-09-15, 25k]

-len doesn't go on the waverider after running to stand still. Barry's kind of a mess here, tbh?

I Think I Love You by youmakemesoangry [2023-05-03, 67k]

-it's post Len and mick's legends trip, and they're helping out team flash. there's a truth spell involved. It's a classic trope. (also there's this bit where mick's reading Frankenstein and he calls creature victor's kid, and that's such a mood, my gothic fiction class spent like an hour talking about his daddy issues once)

[calderacitylovers]

Wholesome Zutara Short Stories

Tell Me Where Your Heart Is by badlucksav | Published: 2021-04-12 | 2,363 words

Katara accidentally discovers a secret stash of love letters Zuko has written to an anonymous woman but never sent. Could he be talking about her? “And I can’t help but hope that maybe that’s a sign, that you feel for me as I feel for you. Maybe you’re afraid to put it to words, as I am. But I cannot ever speak these feelings to you unless I know...I won’t put you in that position.”

Tales of Tenderness by emicha | Published: 2021-04-06 | 3,068 words

Toph, Iroh, Sokka, Gran Gran, Aang, and Azula observe how the relationship between Zuko and Katara unfolds over the years. “This is the picture of two souls that have seen too much bad already, who’ve grieved and hurt more than one single lifetime should permit; the picture of two people who still have it in them to hold a person so different from oneself this close.”

MOONTIDES by  MarkedMage | Published: 2020-11-24 | 10K Words

He smells like fire and feels like home. She smells like rain and feels like love. A short story about Zuko and Katara’s first kiss inspired by this and this glorious animation by Hayley Foster Wong.

GOLD by ifyouwereamelody | Published: 2020-11-27 | 3,7K Words

Zuko and Katara’s first kiss in a fall garden.

A Love Story Told in Reverse by cablesscutie | Published: 2021-04-26 | 9,324 words

A collection of sweet outtakes from Zuko and Katara’s life: from their childhoods to becoming parents. “Her head tips to rest on his shoulder, and with his heart in his throat, he gives into the months-old urge to kiss her hair. She makes a happy little hum, and Zuko can’t breathe.”

just say when by hawktasha | Published: 2021-03-16 | 6,131 words

After Sokka and Suki’s wedding, Katara wakes up with the worst hangover of her life, with the best friend she has been harboring feelings in secret for the last few years laying next to her, no clothes at all on either of their bodies. Oh, and she had no idea how they ended up in that predicament.

Engagement Chicken: The Engagement Scheme by DontStopHerNow | Published: 2022-09-18 | 23K words

After a night of commiseration about marriage expectations, Katara and Zuko agree to fake an engagement to get the meddlers off their backs. They'll call Chicken on the arrangement when everyone else objects. This can't last a month! Featuring: meddling friends, heartfelt words cloaked in half-truths, chaperones, Fire Nation engagement traditions, Southern Water Tribe wedding traditions, background couples, and a squid-whale with a mistaken identity

The Dragon of the West’s Guide to Flirting by bluesunflower44 | Published: 2021-05-12 | 4,341 words

“Now. Take very good care of this, it’s a family heirloom. Although no one passed it down to me, since I wrote it, it will be a family heirloom one day. I just know it.” Uncle Iroh is good with the ladies. So taking his advice when it comes to romance should go just fine...right?

Strike a Match by Naladot | Published: 2022-09-03 | 22K

At Republic City's second annual HeiBai festival, Fire Lord Zuko has contracted a matchmaker to find him a permanent political ally—or, well, a wife. He asks Katara to chaperone his meetings. But this arrangement only threatens to reveal the truth: there are a lot of things neither of them have ever dared to talk about.

Seven Years Bad Luck by riathermopolis | Published: 2021-08-08 | 20.6K words

The gaang reunites every summer for a week on Ember Island, which in theory Katara supports whole-heartedly. The only problem is that apparently some higher power on the island is on a mission to humiliate her. At least, that's her best guess for why she suddenly can't act like a normal person around Zuko. Or: Katara repeatedly embarrasses herself in front of Zuko.

Maiden Mother Crone by MoonShoesReyes  | Published: 2021-02-12 | 10,8K Words

Post-canon. After the ravages of war, Katara learns to wear three faces: maiden, mother, and crone. A sweet story of Zuko supporting Katara in her journey of self-discovery and finding a purpose. A sprinkle of Blue Spirit and Painted Lady. "After years of being empty, Katara finally knew who she was - or at least, she knew who she was at the core. Though her cast of masks stayed ever-changing, the Painted Lady was always kind and just."

Bound to Burn by Selemetis | Published: 2020-10-02 | 10,3K Words

Post-canon. Zuko witnesses the kiss between Aang and Katara. Over the coming months Zuko and Katara work their way back together. "Zuko knew he had to let Katara go for her to see where she wanted to stand."

So Close and Still So Far by EKWolf2020| Published: 2022-09-18 | 6,4K Words

It is the ten-year celebration of the end of The Hundred-year-old war. Expectations and excitement are in the air for most of the world. But for Katara, she feels dread as some news has come to her that could change everything. Will she follow with expectations, or will she find that there is another path for her?

The Brave Man Only Once by ifyouwereamelody | Published: 2021-02-19 | 2,2K Words

Firelord Zuko and Ambassador Katara’s first kiss. “He flinches as a voice rips him abruptly out of his own thoughts and drops him back into the meeting; the table of council members is watching him, staring with raised brows that beg the answer to a question he doesn’t know, but Katara refuses to look his way.”

Til Kingdom Come by bluenebulae | Published: 2020-07-26 | Words: 6,2K

Four years after Sozin’s Comet, Katara finds her way home. A proposal story. Supportive Gaang. “I’ve spent four years exploring every corner of this world, Zuko. I’ve been a waterbending master and a shop girl, an assistant in an abbey and an advisor to the Earth King and a whole bunch of people in the Fire colonies still think I’m an actual spirit. I think, now, I just want to be Katara. And that means being here.”

Voyage by amoeve | Published: 2015-07-24 | Words: 4,2K When Zuko asks Katara to marry him, it is for love. But it’s also an alliance that shows the world that the war is truly over, and everyone wants to get in on the fun. For their wedding Zuko and Katara work their way through over-the-top combination of customs and traditions from the four nations. Hilarious and absurd, but wholesome. “She’s a waterbender. When they travel, the little ship skims across the surface of the sea, eating up the miles, and they have ice houses to sleep in every night. He’s a firebender. He lights their way when the fogs descend, keeps them warm when they sleep, and fries the fish she catches in his hands.”

But Who’s Counting? by halfhoursonearth | Published: 2023-12-28 Words: 7K

After the Last Agni Kai Zuko and Katara are waiting for the news from the GAang and get to explore their friendship and growing connection. A tender and beautiful story. “Tears are gathering in her eyes, and a new tightness pulls at Zuko’s chest. Though he still isn’t used to the casual way his new friends touch one another, this is not the first time he has felt the instinct to reach for Katara, in particular—to lay a comforting hand on her shoulder or arm. But wiping tears from her face is something new, and Katara watches him with wide eyes as his hand rises to her cheek.”

happiness (that's all rolled up in you) by soopsiedaisies | Published: 2024-01-17 | 3,8K words

A first kiss story. Zuko and Katara are cooking dinner for the Gaang on the Ember Island. Sweet, thrilling, and beautiful. "She reckons that she likes a lot of things about Zuko. She likes his face, for starters: his nose, his eyes, his mouth. She likes his scar and the way he dresses. She likes how he picks up the slack left by the others like those tasks were his anyway and she likes his smile. She likes the way he kisses and she really likes his hair."

For the Fire Nation | 2019-11-25 | 2,8K words

He falls in love with her for his country before he falls in love with her for himself. A short and beautiful AU story that explores how love and duty aren’t always mutually exclusive.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

The AI hype bubble is the new crypto hype bubble

Back in 2017 Long Island Ice Tea — known for its undistinguished, barely drinkable sugar-water — changed its name to “Long Blockchain Corp.” Its shares surged to a peak of 400% over their pre-announcement price. The company announced no specific integrations with any kind of blockchain, nor has it made any such integrations since.

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/2023/03/09/autocomplete-worshippers/#the-real-ai-was-the-corporations-that-we-fought-along-the-way

LBCC was subsequently delisted from NASDAQ after settling with the SEC over fraudulent investor statements. Today, the company trades over the counter and its market cap is $36m, down from $138m.

https://cointelegraph.com/news/textbook-case-of-crypto-hype-how-iced-tea-company-went-blockchain-and-failed-despite-a-289-percent-stock-rise

The most remarkable thing about this incredibly stupid story is that LBCC wasn’t the peak of the blockchain bubble — rather, it was the start of blockchain’s final pump-and-dump. By the standards of 2022’s blockchain grifters, LBCC was small potatoes, a mere $138m sugar-water grift.

They didn’t have any NFTs, no wash trades, no ICO. They didn’t have a Superbowl ad. They didn’t steal billions from mom-and-pop investors while proclaiming themselves to be “Effective Altruists.” They didn’t channel hundreds of millions to election campaigns through straw donations and other forms of campaing finance frauds. They didn’t even open a crypto-themed hamburger restaurant where you couldn’t buy hamburgers with crypto:

https://robbreport.com/food-drink/dining/bored-hungry-restaurant-no-cryptocurrency-1234694556/

They were amateurs. Their attempt to “make fetch happen” only succeeded for a brief instant. By contrast, the superpredators of the crypto bubble were able to make fetch happen over an improbably long timescale, deploying the most powerful reality distortion fields since Pets.com.

Anything that can’t go on forever will eventually stop. We’re told that trillions of dollars’ worth of crypto has been wiped out over the past year, but these losses are nowhere to be seen in the real economy — because the “wealth” that was wiped out by the crypto bubble’s bursting never existed in the first place.

Like any Ponzi scheme, crypto was a way to separate normies from their savings through the pretense that they were “investing” in a vast enterprise — but the only real money (“fiat” in cryptospeak) in the system was the hardscrabble retirement savings of working people, which the bubble’s energetic inflaters swapped for illiquid, worthless shitcoins.

We’ve stopped believing in the illusory billions. Sam Bankman-Fried is under house arrest. But the people who gave him money — and the nimbler Ponzi artists who evaded arrest — are looking for new scams to separate the marks from their money.

Take Morganstanley, who spent 2021 and 2022 hyping cryptocurrency as a massive growth opportunity:

https://cointelegraph.com/news/morgan-stanley-launches-cryptocurrency-research-team

Today, Morganstanley wants you to know that AI is a $6 trillion opportunity.

They’re not alone. The CEOs of Endeavor, Buzzfeed, Microsoft, Spotify, Youtube, Snap, Sports Illustrated, and CAA are all out there, pumping up the AI bubble with every hour that god sends, declaring that the future is AI.

https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/business-news/wall-street-ai-stock-price-1235343279/

Google and Bing are locked in an arms-race to see whose search engine can attain the speediest, most profound enshittification via chatbot, replacing links to web-pages with florid paragraphs composed by fully automated, supremely confident liars:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/16/tweedledumber/#easily-spooked

Blockchain was a solution in search of a problem. So is AI. Yes, Buzzfeed will be able to reduce its wage-bill by automating its personality quiz vertical, and Spotify’s “AI DJ” will produce slightly less terrible playlists (at least, to the extent that Spotify doesn’t put its thumb on the scales by inserting tracks into the playlists whose only fitness factor is that someone paid to boost them).

But even if you add all of this up, double it, square it, and add a billion dollar confidence interval, it still doesn’t add up to what Bank Of America analysts called “a defining moment — like the internet in the ’90s.” For one thing, the most exciting part of the “internet in the ‘90s” was that it had incredibly low barriers to entry and wasn’t dominated by large companies — indeed, it had them running scared.

The AI bubble, by contrast, is being inflated by massive incumbents, whose excitement boils down to “This will let the biggest companies get much, much bigger and the rest of you can go fuck yourselves.” Some revolution.

AI has all the hallmarks of a classic pump-and-dump, starting with terminology. AI isn’t “artificial” and it’s not “intelligent.” “Machine learning” doesn’t learn. On this week’s Trashfuture podcast, they made an excellent (and profane and hilarious) case that ChatGPT is best understood as a sophisticated form of autocomplete — not our new robot overlord.

https://open.spotify.com/episode/4NHKMZZNKi0w9mOhPYIL4T

We all know that autocomplete is a decidedly mixed blessing. Like all statistical inference tools, autocomplete is profoundly conservative — it wants you to do the same thing tomorrow as you did yesterday (that’s why “sophisticated” ad retargeting ads show you ads for shoes in response to your search for shoes). If the word you type after “hey” is usually “hon” then the next time you type “hey,” autocomplete will be ready to fill in your typical following word — even if this time you want to type “hey stop texting me you freak”:

https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/provocations/neophobic-conservative-ai-overlords-want-everything-stay/

And when autocomplete encounters a new input — when you try to type something you’ve never typed before — it tries to get you to finish your sentence with the statistically median thing that everyone would type next, on average. Usually that produces something utterly bland, but sometimes the results can be hilarious. Back in 2018, I started to text our babysitter with “hey are you free to sit” only to have Android finish the sentence with “on my face” (not something I’d ever typed!):

https://mashable.com/article/android-predictive-text-sit-on-my-face

Modern autocomplete can produce long passages of text in response to prompts, but it is every bit as unreliable as 2018 Android SMS autocomplete, as Alexander Hanff discovered when ChatGPT informed him that he was dead, even generating a plausible URL for a link to a nonexistent obit in The Guardian:

https://www.theregister.com/2023/03/02/chatgpt_considered_harmful/

Of course, the carnival barkers of the AI pump-and-dump insist that this is all a feature, not a bug. If autocomplete says stupid, wrong things with total confidence, that’s because “AI” is becoming more human, because humans also say stupid, wrong things with total confidence.

Exhibit A is the billionaire AI grifter Sam Altman, CEO if OpenAI — a company whose products are not open, nor are they artificial, nor are they intelligent. Altman celebrated the release of ChatGPT by tweeting “i am a stochastic parrot, and so r u.”

https://twitter.com/sama/status/1599471830255177728

This was a dig at the “stochastic parrots” paper, a comprehensive, measured roundup of criticisms of AI that led Google to fire Timnit Gebru, a respected AI researcher, for having the audacity to point out the Emperor’s New Clothes:

https://www.technologyreview.com/2020/12/04/1013294/google-ai-ethics-research-paper-forced-out-timnit-gebru/

Gebru’s co-author on the Parrots paper was Emily M Bender, a computational linguistics specialist at UW, who is one of the best-informed and most damning critics of AI hype. You can get a good sense of her position from Elizabeth Weil’s New York Magazine profile:

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/ai-artificial-intelligence-chatbots-emily-m-bender.html

Bender has made many important scholarly contributions to her field, but she is also famous for her rules of thumb, which caution her fellow scientists not to get high on their own supply:

Please do not conflate word form and meaning

Mind your own credulity

As Bender says, we’ve made “machines that can mindlessly generate text, but we haven’t learned how to stop imagining the mind behind it.” One potential tonic against this fallacy is to follow an Italian MP’s suggestion and replace “AI” with “SALAMI” (“Systematic Approaches to Learning Algorithms and Machine Inferences”). It’s a lot easier to keep a clear head when someone asks you, “Is this SALAMI intelligent? Can this SALAMI write a novel? Does this SALAMI deserve human rights?”

Bender’s most famous contribution is the “stochastic parrot,” a construct that “just probabilistically spits out words.” AI bros like Altman love the stochastic parrot, and are hellbent on reducing human beings to stochastic parrots, which will allow them to declare that their chatbots have feature-parity with human beings.

At the same time, Altman and Co are strangely afraid of their creations. It’s possible that this is just a shuck: “I have made something so powerful that it could destroy humanity! Luckily, I am a wise steward of this thing, so it’s fine. But boy, it sure is powerful!”

They’ve been playing this game for a long time. People like Elon Musk (an investor in OpenAI, who is hoping to convince the EU Commission and FTC that he can fire all of Twitter’s human moderators and replace them with chatbots without violating EU law or the FTC’s consent decree) keep warning us that AI will destroy us unless we tame it.

There’s a lot of credulous repetition of these claims, and not just by AI’s boosters. AI critics are also prone to engaging in what Lee Vinsel calls criti-hype: criticizing something by repeating its boosters’ claims without interrogating them to see if they’re true:

https://sts-news.medium.com/youre-doing-it-wrong-notes-on-criticism-and-technology-hype-18b08b4307e5

There are better ways to respond to Elon Musk warning us that AIs will emulsify the planet and use human beings for food than to shout, “Look at how irresponsible this wizard is being! He made a Frankenstein’s Monster that will kill us all!” Like, we could point out that of all the things Elon Musk is profoundly wrong about, he is most wrong about the philosophical meaning of Wachowksi movies:

https://www.theguardian.com/film/2020/may/18/lilly-wachowski-ivana-trump-elon-musk-twitter-red-pill-the-matrix-tweets

But even if we take the bros at their word when they proclaim themselves to be terrified of “existential risk” from AI, we can find better explanations by seeking out other phenomena that might be triggering their dread. As Charlie Stross points out, corporations are Slow AIs, autonomous artificial lifeforms that consistently do the wrong thing even when the people who nominally run them try to steer them in better directions:

https://media.ccc.de/v/34c3-9270-dude_you_broke_the_future

Imagine the existential horror of a ultra-rich manbaby who nominally leads a company, but can’t get it to follow: “everyone thinks I’m in charge, but I’m actually being driven by the Slow AI, serving as its sock puppet on some days, its golem on others.”

Ted Chiang nailed this back in 2017 (the same year of the Long Island Blockchain Company):

There’s a saying, popularized by Fredric Jameson, that it’s easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism. It’s no surprise that Silicon Valley capitalists don’t want to think about capitalism ending. What’s unexpected is that the way they envision the world ending is through a form of unchecked capitalism, disguised as a superintelligent AI. They have unconsciously created a devil in their own image, a boogeyman whose excesses are precisely their own.

https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/tedchiang/the-real-danger-to-civilization-isnt-ai-its-runaway

Chiang is still writing some of the best critical work on “AI.” His February article in the New Yorker, “ChatGPT Is a Blurry JPEG of the Web,” was an instant classic:

[AI] hallucinations are compression artifacts, but — like the incorrect labels generated by the Xerox photocopier — they are plausible enough that identifying them requires comparing them against the originals, which in this case means either the Web or our own knowledge of the world.

https://www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/chatgpt-is-a-blurry-jpeg-of-the-web

“AI” is practically purpose-built for inflating another hype-bubble, excelling as it does at producing party-tricks — plausible essays, weird images, voice impersonations. But as Princeton’s Matthew Salganik writes, there’s a world of difference between “cool” and “tool”:

https://freedom-to-tinker.com/2023/03/08/can-chatgpt-and-its-successors-go-from-cool-to-tool/

Nature can claim “conversational AI is a game-changer for science” but “there is a huge gap between writing funny instructions for removing food from home electronics and doing scientific research.” Salganik tried to get ChatGPT to help him with the most banal of scholarly tasks — aiding him in peer reviewing a colleague’s paper. The result? “ChatGPT didn’t help me do peer review at all; not one little bit.”

The criti-hype isn’t limited to ChatGPT, of course — there’s plenty of (justifiable) concern about image and voice generators and their impact on creative labor markets, but that concern is often expressed in ways that amplify the self-serving claims of the companies hoping to inflate the hype machine.

One of the best critical responses to the question of image- and voice-generators comes from Kirby Ferguson, whose final Everything Is a Remix video is a superb, visually stunning, brilliantly argued critique of these systems:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rswxcDyotXA

One area where Ferguson shines is in thinking through the copyright question — is there any right to decide who can study the art you make? Except in some edge cases, these systems don’t store copies of the images they analyze, nor do they reproduce them:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/09/ai-monkeys-paw/#bullied-schoolkids

For creators, the important material question raised by these systems is economic, not creative: will our bosses use them to erode our wages? That is a very important question, and as far as our bosses are concerned, the answer is a resounding yes.

Markets value automation primarily because automation allows capitalists to pay workers less. The textile factory owners who purchased automatic looms weren’t interested in giving their workers raises and shorting working days. ‘ They wanted to fire their skilled workers and replace them with small children kidnapped out of orphanages and indentured for a decade, starved and beaten and forced to work, even after they were mangled by the machines. Fun fact: Oliver Twist was based on the bestselling memoir of Robert Blincoe, a child who survived his decade of forced labor:

https://www.gutenberg.org/files/59127/59127-h/59127-h.htm

Today, voice actors sitting down to record for games companies are forced to begin each session with “My name is ______ and I hereby grant irrevocable permission to train an AI with my voice and use it any way you see fit.”

https://www.vice.com/en/article/5d37za/voice-actors-sign-away-rights-to-artificial-intelligence

Let’s be clear here: there is — at present — no firmly established copyright over voiceprints. The “right” that voice actors are signing away as a non-negotiable condition of doing their jobs for giant, powerful monopolists doesn’t even exist. When a corporation makes a worker surrender this right, they are betting that this right will be created later in the name of “artists’ rights” — and that they will then be able to harvest this right and use it to fire the artists who fought so hard for it.

There are other approaches to this. We could support the US Copyright Office’s position that machine-generated works are not works of human creative authorship and are thus not eligible for copyright — so if corporations wanted to control their products, they’d have to hire humans to make them:

https://www.theverge.com/2022/2/21/22944335/us-copyright-office-reject-ai-generated-art-recent-entrance-to-paradise

Or we could create collective rights that belong to all artists and can’t be signed away to a corporation. That’s how the right to record other musicians’ songs work — and it’s why Taylor Swift was able to re-record the masters that were sold out from under her by evil private-equity bros::

https://doctorow.medium.com/united-we-stand-61e16ec707e2

Whatever we do as creative workers and as humans entitled to a decent life, we can’t afford drink the Blockchain Iced Tea. That means that we have to be technically competent, to understand how the stochastic parrot works, and to make sure our criticism doesn’t just repeat the marketing copy of the latest pump-and-dump.

Today (Mar 9), you can catch me in person in Austin at the UT School of Design and Creative Technologies, and remotely at U Manitoba’s Ethics of Emerging Tech Lecture.

Tomorrow (Mar 10), Rebecca Giblin and I kick off the SXSW reading series.

Image: Cryteria (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HAL9000.svg

CC BY 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en

[Image ID: A graph depicting the Gartner hype cycle. A pair of HAL 9000's glowing red eyes are chasing each other down the slope from the Peak of Inflated Expectations to join another one that is at rest in the Trough of Disillusionment. It, in turn, sits atop a vast cairn of HAL 9000 eyes that are piled in a rough pyramid that extends below the graph to a distance of several times its height.]

[me-and-your-husband]

me-and-your-husband's miscellaneous masterlist

* denotes smut!

Marvel

steve rogers

his favourite day* || 2k words I| 01/08/2021

it's your birthday, and steve has something to give you.

over it Il 550 words || 01/16/2021

steve thinks you need better taste in men.

peter parker

-peter parker with a size kink*

Chris Evans + characters

chris evans

-Chris having a library in his house*

andy barber

together ll 1.7k words I| 12/02/2021

you and andy spend your valentine's day together. part of "Happy Hoelentines" valentine's day gift exchange.

I'll be here Il 2k words Il 04/09/2021

jacob barber grew up with you around. when he gets charged with murder, how will your relationship with his family change? will your feelings for andy resurface once laurie is out of the picture?

johnny storm

-waking up with johnny in between your legs*

Attack on Titan

armin arlert

sensitive* |I n/a words Il 04/07/2021

you want armin really bad.

home* I| 5k words I| 04/08/2021

four years after you're presumed dead, you come knocking on the scout's doorstep.

[seoul-bros]

Jikook Week 10 Complete ✔️(13/02 - 20/02/2024)

Their tenth week in the military is now complete. It's time to celebrate this milestone with a look back at this week in 2022.

BTS was on an extended break after their trip to the US in late 2021. Jimin had been out of the hospital for just over a week after his double whammy of appendicitis and COVID. News of BTS and in particular Jimin and Jungkook was in scarce supply but there were some oases in the desert that week

Firstly, the BTS Factbook was released on the 13/02/2023 with Jikook looking dashing in black and white.....

& breathtaking in blue and white. That last Jimin picture is just wow!

On 16/02/22, Big Hit announced that BTS would appear for three nights in Seoul from 10 to 13/03/22 including a live viewing to theatres across the world on 12/03/22. I remember being so excited about this and buying my ticket as soon as they became available. It was my first step towards actually seeing BTS live in concert.

We were right in the middle of Hobiuary. On 18/02/22, JK rang JHope during his Birthday Live. He was just about to jump in the shower so Hoseok didn't share the screen with us.

Oh how things have changed since Chapter 2 began!

Jimin posted on Twitter , "I sincerely wish a happy birthday to my bright brother. Please stay by my side and stay healthy" Jhope reposted on Instagram both his and JK's (Happy Birthday Bro) messages. 3Js always around for each others birthdays.

Hobi's was the first live of the year. It was closely followed by "Belatedly Cracking Bureom" with Jimin, RM and Suga on 20/02/22.

They talked about what they had been up to during their break and their plans for this year. RM mentioned JK's dance lessons. Jimin told us about his vocal lessons.

Jimin had a new perm and people in the comments were comparing him to Yuzuhiko from Atashinchi.

After his bout with illness, Jimin was dead set on getting his physical health and beauty back but RM was there to remind him that he is already the beauty standard for many around the world and that his likeness has inspired a plethora of professional and amateur artists.

They told us they were just about to start preparing for the PTD in Seoul concerts, as soon as V was let out of quarantine after his COVID, and asked us to look forward to it. The wheels were beginning to turn on a new year that would bring the fandom some major surprises and see the start of Chapter 2 and their amazing solo explorations.

Post Date: 20/02/2022

[themaveriqueagenda]

it's trans+ history week, so i finally have an opportunity to make a detailed post about maverique history.

so here it is:

a detailed timeline of maverique history.

31/05/2014 — @queerascat coined maverique as "a non-binary gender characterized by an unconventional and unothodox internal sense of self and the interrelationship between that sense of self and society"

15/06/2014 — queerascat reworded the definition as: "a non-binary gender characterized by autonomy and inner conviction regarding a sense of gender which is unorthodox, unconventional and entirely independent of conventional concepts of gender". they created the maverique flag on the same day.

18/06/2014 — tearun suggested maver as an equivalent to man/woman and rique as an equivalent for boy/girl, the latter was never heard of again due to it sounding like "reek"

19/06/2014 — someone suggested mav as an equivalent to boy/girl, @whatdoesenbymean suggested Mv (pronounced "mav") as a title

21/06/2014 — after some confusion, queerascat reworded the definition one last time as "a gender characterized by autonomy and inner conviction regarding a sense of self that is entirely independent of male/masculinity, female/femininity or anything which derives from the two while still being neither without gender nor of a neutral gender"

22/06/2014 — the @maveriques blog was created

24/06/2014 — maveriques posted a CMYK analogy to explain maverique

28/06/2014 — maveriques posted a list of proposed maverique terms

29/06/2014 — someone suggested Mv (pronounced "miv") as a title

06/07/2014 — queerascat uploaded a video about their label change and the term maverique in their youtube channel

12/03/2015 — maveriques clearly defined maverique as not an umbrella term

11/10/2015 — queerascat posted a gender tag video from a maverique perspective on their youtube channel

13/10/2015 — someone suggested maveriquine as an equivalent for masculine/feminine

~2015/16 — there was discourse on aliagender and aporagender being racist, and that maverique was a good term to use instead because it was coined by a Black person, queerascat pushed back against this

31/07/2016 — maverine was suggested as an equivalent to masculine/feminine

18/11/2016 — @moonstruck-melts suggested the earth and sun symbols for maverique, and @feekins suggested pluto as a symbol

03/02/2017 — @the-christian-closet suggested the comet symbol for maverique, mistaking it for an alternative sun symbol

05/02/2017 — maveriques posted a poll asking how people feel about the sun as a maverique symbol

12/02/2017 — maveriques posted the results, with most maveriques liking it but having reservations

24/02/2017 — courage-archive-deactivated2018 / sneer posted the symbol with the two extending arms

17/07/2017 — veriquinity was suggested as an equivalent to masculine/feminine

~2021: the maverique subreddit was created

06/01/2022 — renée yoxon went on the fifty shades of gender podcast to talk about being maverique, trans, nonbinary and genderqueer

06/2022 — reddit user ChaoticStrange suggested a maverique visibility day on 31/05 and others agreed

16/01/2023 — renée yoxon briefly spoke about being maverique on the gender reveal podcast

18/06/2023 — @themaveriqueagenda on tumblr was born

20/08/2023 — themaveriqueagenda on instagram was born

[bad268]

Writing Inktober 2023

300 word minimum and no repeats are the challenges this year. Maybe. Hopefully. Probably. (haha yes)

BTW the medal emojis are the winners from the polls :)

01/10 Dream

Sebastian Montoya X Reader (W.C. 386)

02/10 Spiders

Seth Borden X Reader (W.C. 338)

03/10 Path

Max Verstappen X Reader (W.C. 367)

04/10 Dodge

Benny Rodriguez X Reader (W.C. 348)

05/10 Map

Sebastian Vettel X Reader (W.C. 338)

06/10 Golden

Justin Herbert X Reader (W.C. 342)

07/10 Drip

TMR Newt X Reader (W.C. 342) 🥈

08/10 Toad Sacrifice

Andrea Kimi Antonelli X Reader (W.C. 338)

09/10 Bounce

Marcus Armstrong X Reader (W.C. 384)

10/10 Fortune

Johnny Cade X Reader (W.C. 485) 🥉

11/10 Wander

Peter Parker X Reader (W.C. 402) 🥇

12/10 Spicey Scandal

Pierre Gasly X Reader (W.C. 391)

13/10 Rise Tonight

Colby Brock X Reader (W.C. 370)

14/10 Castle

Oscar Piastri X Reader (W.C. 370)

15/10 Dagger Nightmare

Lando Norris X Reader (W.C. 419)

16/10 Angel

Mick Schumacher X Reader (W.C. 395)

17/10 Demon

Kimi Raikkonen X Reader (W.C. 327)

18/10 Saddle

Daniel Ricciardo X Reader (W.C. 318)

19/10 Plump Wet

Ollie Bearman X Reader (W.C. 365)

20/10 Frost

Paul Aron X Reader (W.C. 389)

21/10 Chains Bouquet

Charles Leclerc X Reader (W.C. 369)

22/10 Scratchy Flight

Joe Burrow X Reader (W.C. 390)

23/10 Celestial Redeemer

Corpse Husband X Reader (W.C. 400)

24/10 Shallow Chosen

P! SBI X Reader (W.C. 358)

25/10 Dangerous

Callum Ilott X Reader (W.C. 310)

26/10 Remove Shots

Dennis Hauger X Reader (W.C. 348)

27/10 Beast

Christian Lundgaard X Reader (W.C. 339)

28/10 Sparkle

Dino Beganovic X Reader (W.C. 406)

29/10 Massive Approval

Felipe Drugovich X Reader (W.C. 358)

30/10 Rush

Clement Novalak X Reader (W.C. 386)

31/10 Fire

Pato O’Ward X Reader (W.C. 343)

Bonus: Break

Tadashi Hamada X Reader (W.C. 363)

Average W.C. 369

Want to read other years’ Inktober stories, check these out:

2021 // 2022 // 2024

On a side note, I looked back at last year’s entries, and I definitely thought Bouquet was Banquet, so instead of admitting I was wrong, I did it as a sub this year. If you noticed, no you didn’t :)

Also funny story about Shallow, I kept reading it as Swallow, so I couldn't do it

MASTERLIST // HITLIST

[digitalgate02]

The UPDATED (OG) Adventure universe’s Partnership double year math count

Updated Digimon Adventure OG Timeline’s Partnership Math Count List 

Not particularly spoilers from the movie, just stuff stated by the official timeline from the pre-release stream for the movie in Japan (Oct 26)

Early 80s - Oikawa Yukio & Hida Hiroki make the first contact with the Digital World, befriend Pipimon (no partnerships)

1995 - Hikari and Taichi find a Koromon egg* (no partnerships)

1996 - 2 (Rui; someone else gets a digimon later in that year*)

1997 - 4 (Menoa)

1998 - 8 (Possibly the previous 5 mentioned from Adv’99 anime/novels)

1999 - 16 (Adv Eight, Meiko*)

2000 - 32 (Ken*)

2001 - 64 (Michael)

2002 - 128 (Daisuke, Miyako, Iori)

2003 - 256

2004 - 512

2005 - 1,024

2006 - 2,048

2007 - 4,096

2008 - 8,192

2009 - 16,384

2010 - 32,768

2011 - 65,536

2012 - 131,072

2013 - 262,144

2014 - 524,288

2015 - 1.048,576

2016 - 2.097,152

2017 - 4.194,304

2018 - 8.388,608

2019 - 16.777,216

2020 - 33.554,432

2021 - 67.108,864

2022 - 134.217,728

2023 - 268.435,456

2024 - 536.870,912

2025 - 1.073.741,824

2026 - 2.147.483,648

2027 -  4.294.967,296

2028 (02 Epilogue) - 8.589.934,592

↓ Original notes + "Why there's still no retcon of the lore" below ↓

First, the OG notes from the outdated post:

→ This count is not about “which was the very first digimon-human contact”, and yes about people with a digivice. Because if we were going to count who was the first human to have contact with a digimon, it’s actually two and they’re Oikawa Yukio and Iori’s dad, Hida Hiroki.

→ I’m ignoring all the inconsistencies with other material (WS & ▽) because they seem to not match well with the original count. So, in this case, Ken’s statement in the anime (Aug 2000) is the one to be accounted for here. I don’t know if Ryo counts as Chosen (possibly yes, judging by 02 flashbacks) but I’m not sure where to place him here.

→ I’m only adding Michael to the count, even if he’s not a main character and yes a side character, because 02 ep 14 had this statement regarding him. And I like Michael too so, let me have him there :V

→ Menoa states in the movie she met Morphomon when she was nine, and according to the Dash X novel version, she’s the same age as Taichi. Which means she became a Chosen in 1997.

→ I couldn’t think of how to include Maki & Daigo’s group in this because ▽ contradicts with the original lore’s math – The fact the Pt4 book released with the movie on Japanese theaters state them being in Elementary School the time they went to their adventure in the DW, and later the confession scene means they’re in University/College makes them possibly been Chosen Children way before 1995, and I’d take it granted that they were chosen by someone else IF weren’t for the Homeostasis being involved in the scene and the digivice being way too modern for that time (it was basically Taichi group’s model. If you look at Rui’s digivice in the leaked footage from DigiFes2022, his model seems to be different and an older version)

→ That said, Meiko is the only character in ▽ that does not fall into contradiction with the math count. Because in 1999 there was not only Taichi’s group, but also other 8 non-featured Chosen according to Kakudou’s notes. So we can consider Meiko one of those other 8 children.

→ When it comes to Wallace, I prefer to think he is game in the original math – Taichi and Hikari met that Koromon in 95, but they had no digivice until 1999. Which means it can be possible that Wallace had encountered Gummy-Choco’s egg before 1995 and only became an official Chosen Child later.

Now, the new notes:

→ To avoid spoiling any detail about the movie itself, I’ll make sure to tell you they might have changed how the math works only. It’s not like, “everyone gets a digimon at the same time” but rather… “A X number of people get partnered with a digimon in different periods of a year” – Which means yes, you can still count Rui and Ukkomon as the origins of the Digimon partnership, but that later in the same year someone else (or, say, Wallace in the main timeline) got a partner months later.

→ That said, I’m opting to update this list and work within the idea that various sources of partnership (Homeostasis, Holy Beasts, etc) can be counted in the math. Remember – Homeostasis (not referred to as this in the OG series but yes in the novels) had selected Taichi & co., but the Holy Beasts chose Dai-Miya-Iori. And some other entity probably chose Ken in August 2000. This could explain why there’s a higher number of partnerships happening at the same time in Adv’99 and 02.

→ As I mentioned before, and indirectly supported by the staff (check the official timeline at the top of the list), ▽ has violated the lore to the point it goes in direct conflict with the new 02 movie and the entire timeline. So I guess it’s better to consider ▽ as its own timeline/Alternate universe than forcing it into the main timeline.

→ That said, and since Meiko does exist in Kizuna/main timeline, I suppose Maki and Daigo also do exist, and maybe they got their “ages” retconned and down to something suitable to the universe’s math count. They can still be part of the previous five kids mentioned in Adv’99 anime/novels, but they are probably around their teen years, or even early 20s instead, not fully adults working for the government I suppose. Or alternatively, just not Chosen yet. Pick your favorite route, Maki/Daigo fans!!

→ Yes, the Koromon from the very first movie IS NOT THE SAME PARTNERED WITH TAICHI. This never was confirmed, and was just fandom's theory. Considering how ▽ also made this mistake and possibly was one of the lore's violation, I prefer to believe this means it's not the same Koromon/Agumon partnered with Taichi in Adv'99.