#Campaign Spending

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Emily Singer at Daily Kos:

Not content with buying the presidency, billionaire Elon Musk has now set his sights on the Wisconsin state Supreme Court. A group tied to him is spending more than $1 million ahead of an April election to determine the fate of abortion rights, voting rights, and even what party controls the legislature in the state. The group Building America’s Future, a PAC Musk has donated to, is spending $1.6 million on ads in the race to boost conservative nominee Brad Schimel, a former state attorney general who has groveled at Musk and President Donald Trump's feet. "Very important to vote Republican for the Wisconsin Supreme Court to prevent voting fraud!" Musk wrote in a post on X, supporting Schimel’s candidacy. Schimel faces off against Susan Crawford, a circuit court judge for Dane County, in the April 1 contest, which will determine whether liberals maintain the 4-3 majority they won in 2023. If Schimel wins, conservatives will retake the state’s highest court and help Republicans impart their right-wing agenda on the decidedly purple state. Schimel’s victory would put the future of abortion rights in Wisconsin in doubt. He has supported a law��passed in 1849 that says, “Any person, other than the mother, who intentionally destroys the life of an unborn child is guilty of a Class H felony.” The law is currently blocked from enforcement after a lower state court ruled that it pertains only to feticide, not to consensual medical abortions. But if Schimel wins and the court flips back to conservative control, the state Supreme Court could hear an appeal of the case that allows the ban to go into effect.

Elon Musk, not content with buying the 2024 elections to get Donald Trump elected into office, is trying to turn the Wisconsin Supreme Court red by spending almost $3M worth.

[badolmen]

People against piracy fail to realize that no, I can’t just ‘buy it.’ They stopped making DVDs and Blu-Rays. They’re barely offering digital copies for download. I am not spending money I could use for food or bills to pay for a subscription service just so I can always have access to a beloved piece of media. Especially not when the service will remove media on a whim without concern for how the loss of access to that piece will make its artistic conservation nigh impossible.

For example, I recently learned that Disney+ had an original film called Crater. It’s scifi, family friendly, and seems cool - I would love to buy it as a holiday gift for my little brother! But: it’s exclusive to D+ and THEY REMOVED IT LITERALLY MONTHS AFTER ITS RELEASE.

The ONLY way I can directly access this film is through piracy. The ONLY available ‘copies’ of this film are hosted on piracy websites. Disney will NEVER release it in theaters, or as something to buy, and it may NEVER return to the streaming service. It will be LOST because we aren’t allowed to purchase it for personal viewing. If I can’t pay to own it, I won’t pay for the privilege of losing it when corporate decides to put it in a vault.

So yes, I’m going to pirate and support piracy.

Edit: if you are able, use $5 you would otherwise use for a streaming subscription to donate to a GazaFunds campaign.

[bacchuschucklefuck]

while teen while goblin while aroace while injured while doing your best

[shorthaltsjester]

doing questionable things like rewatching a bard’s lament for “fun” and scanlan and vex you will always be famous. the fact that scanlan brings up that they’ve travelled across planes to fix vex’s daddy issues but then it’s vex’s daddy issues that ground her rebuttal to scanlan when she tells him to stop treating kaylie like an object. and god. vex’s “fuck him! fuck him for not saying anything sooner. and fuck us for not asking.” in the immediate aftermath, and then once she has time to put her walls back up, vex’s “my take-away from scanlan is that we all talk too much.”

the fact that vex was the one who made that comment that without his magic scanlan is just some guy but he’s also the some guy that vex spends the campaign looking up to (even if she does it through barbs and snark), the fact that when vex was fighting against saundor hearing things like “unproven ally” scanlan was all jokes until he realized how much vex believed what was being said to her. the fact that when scanlan comes back, it’s vex who literally sees through his disguise.

what do you mean scanlan was a deadbeat father who discovered a daughter that he did love but loved only as an object until vex called him out on it? what do you mean vex was a woman who struggled to forgive in part due to her crapshoot father and she was the first to forgive scanlan when he came back?

vex and scanlan also have such interesting interactions in terms of the balance of snark, silliness, and sincerity. it’s not uncommon from any characters of sam or laura’s since they are both silly little guys who also love drama and roasting each other especially when it comes to character rp, but as always it’s so dynamic when it’s the two of them bouncing off each other, especially when they’re doing so through scanlan and vex who are already bitchy characters (affectionate) with humour as a deflection method. but it’s a silly and deeply sincere moment when vex finally puts the witch hat scanlan gave her back on with his promise that he won’t run away from the final battle. it is one of my favourite laughable moments in c1 but it also reeks of sincerity when scanlan asks vex if she prefers planetar scanlan or normal scanlan and vex tells him he is fucking hot as a planetar, but she loves him like he was and he’s her favourite when he’s just himself.

like. they’re insane do you understand. the dawnfather asks vex to prove herself and scanlan turns her into a dragon to help her succeed, pelor asks vox machina what vex means to them and scanlan says she’s greedy and mean and the most perfect of them all. the knowing mistress asks scanlan to prove himself and vex escorts him on a broom he unlocked for her and then she picks an impossible lock for him, ioun tries to remind scanlan that his strength is the joy he provides to his friends and he makes a deflective quip that he’s really powerful and vex undercuts his deflection with a sincere assertion that he is. scanlan cast his last wish spell letting her see her brother on her wedding day. vex sent herself across the continent alone with her worry and grief while scanlan’s corpse lay awaiting resurrection to ensure that his daughter could be there to either bring him back or say goodbye.

they are the platonic chosen soulmates of all time to me. i make a post like this like once a year minimum and it’s because they Haunt me. both sam and laura said what if we made high charisma characters using their charisma as a shield and humour as a weapon and they saw through each other’s masks but they never explicitly talked about it to one another. good riddance to talks machina but i will never forget the episode post bard’s lament with laura and sam where sam revealed that vex was the only one who said anything that actually got through to scanlan and another episode where laura revealed that the reason vex was so angry and sad when scanlan left was that vex felt like her and scanlan had a unique bond where they were the only two who really saw one another’s masks for what they were. also laura providing the insight that while vex was actively working on being more forgiving, another reason she was so open and happy with scanlan when he came back was that vex didn’t want to scare him away again.

what am i supposed to do with all that? be normal about scanlan and vex? literally impossible

[eyeofthebrainstorm]

There's something very compelling to me about how Vax and Vex are the Apollo/Artemis trope with a twist. Vex is a huntress and she uses bow and arrows, but while Artemis is goddess of the moon and chaste, Vex is very sensual and ends up under the protection of the sun god. Vax is a theater kid and he's charming, with that main character energy and poetic destiny. But unlike Apollo he's dark and connected to shadows and death. He's also very devoted to a woman who will eventually become a tree.

[ridaine]

Another outfit for Freyja's already massive wardrobe... Forgive me I could not help myself the madness took over.

[stardustedknuckles]

It's looking like there's a growing divide between Campaign watchers and Tlovm watchers in terms of like. We're here for the characters. 12-episode seasons aren't. They can't be. I'm already making peace with everything we'll lose in the Mighty Nein show, and I know I will enjoy it for what it is but I also know that almost nothing that made the story so special will translate to the screen, because turning it into a show automatically means (in this day and age) that plot must be the number one priority. They've already come out and told us it's going to be different, the characters we know and love but new stories.

Because that's how this has to work. And I feel bad for campaign one lovers, because while it is certainly the easier of the two to translate to a big, overarching story, even though it's a more "traditional" high fantasy story with easier archetypal characters, the archetypes and the plot aren't what cemented most people's love for the campaign. So much of the love for critical role is stored in the interpersonal dynamics and the payoff that comes from hundreds of hours of tiny interactions that one day become cornerstones of development and even affect or dictate the plot.

There's no room for that. There's no room for Bard's Lament in a story that cannot afford to remove and replace a main character. A lot of tlovm is for people who have been here for all of campaign one. Most of it, however, isn't. It's for a new crowd. While CR may have creative control, you can bet your ass that there were months and years devoted to figuring out how to map a character-focused love of the show into a plot that hits the right beats to be viable in the show market.

And it worked. Tlovm has consistently high viewing numbers, and its popularity has brought and will continue to bring new people into the universe who have never interacted with CR previously. That's not a bad thing - imagine finishing your favorite show and discovering it has another FIVE HUNDRED HOURS of the equivalent of behind the scenes content. That's incredible for these newcomers. But man, it is in many ways a loss for us.

[mysteryfeesh]

Guys they all have two hands. No guys hear me out-

[liltaireissocute]

remember those 2 weeks Vax spend with Percy in his Whitestone lab? 'cause i do

[nellasbookplanet]

While I think the execution could at times have been better I really enjoyed the imodna arc which, to me, was both verbalized and problematized with the 'maybe it’s our destiny to harness it'/'maybe it’s our destiny to fight it'/'together either way' exchange back during their first kiss. No moment better crystallized their likenesses, but also their differences. They were both lonely figures tempted by dark powers who found a kindred soul in the other but, crucially, their responses were polar opposites. Laudna, with her lack of self-worth and seeing herself as a dead end, was seeking comfort that Imogen wouldn’t judge or hate her when she inevitably gave in. Imogen, meanwhile, was seeking comfort that Laudna understood the temptation and likewise wouldn’t judge, but ultimately had no plans to give in to predathos. She saw the temptation for the self destruction that it was, and as she came to love Laudna she wanted to live. Laudna saw her own survival and happiness as an impossibility, and her love for Imogen became an excuse to embrace self destruction in the name of self sacrifice, not understanding that this harmed not only her but Imogen as well.

This dichotomy became more pronounced throughout, and was in the end something they had to face and grow out of. When it became clear Laudna was barely fighting back against Delilah anymore, endangering both herself and the party, Imogen all but broke up with her. She could not make Laudna see sense, but she could stop enabling her. She could show that, were Laudna to continue in this direction, Imogen would no longer follow. Still love, and never hate or judge, but not follow. Through this, Laudna was forced to see Imogen didn't want her self-sacrifice, but rather for her to allow herself to be a burden, to accept help to deal with Delilah. In the end, she chose not to die for Imogen, but to live for her, allowing herself the vulnerability of seeking happiness and self worth.

Later, Imogen asked if Laudna would be prepared to fight her if she was corrupted, showing she wouldn’t want Laudna to follow her if she ultimately gave in to temptation either. And Laudna does help fight her in the predathos fight, just like Imogen helped fight when Laudna was overtaken by Delilah in Aeor. But that fighting was also what helped them pull the other back out. If they had simply accepted that their loved one gave in to evil temptation for power, they truly would have lost each other. Only by challenging and demanding growth (admittedly mostly from Imogen towards Laudna) could they actually hold true to their promise to be together either way.

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Maxwell Tani at Semafor:

Soon after Vice President Kamala Harris became the Democratic nominee, deputy campaign manager Rob Flaherty turned his attention to sports. The campaign needed to introduce Harris quickly to people who aren’t obsessed with politics. Sports is perhaps America’s last remaining monoculture, and Flaherty and the Harris team decided to book her on sports shows and podcasts. But one by one, the biggest personalities and shows politely turned them down. “Sports and culture have sort of merged together, and as sports and culture became more publicly and sort of natively associated with this Trump-conservative set of values, it got more complicated for athletes to come out in favor of us,” Flaherty, 33, told me in an interview last week. “It got more complicated for sports personalities to take us on their shows because they didn’t want to ‘do politics.’” “That’s not to say Steph Curry and Steve Kerr and LeBron [James] and all them coming out wasn’t impactful or important,” he said. “It was more impactful because it had gotten so much harder. But certainly the culture that has been associated with heavy sports-watching has become associated with right-wing culture in a way that makes it harder for us to reach people.”

Flaherty declined to say who turned Harris down, but she didn’t appear on key shows hosted by sports figures sympathetic to Democrats, like Colin Cowherd, Bill Simmons, or the Kelce brothers. (As Semafor first reported at the time, Harris did appear on All The Smoke, a popular but more niche basketball podcast, and NFL hall-of-famer Shannon Sharpe’s Club Shay Shay podcast.) The campaign’s failure to completely crack the sports sphere was, to Flaherty, ominous, and part of a larger trend in which some influencers who had felt comfortable engaging with the Biden White House, demurred when asked to help Harris make her case to their followers. “When it’s not cool to talk about politics,” he said, “you’re kind of afraid of the audience.” “Campaigns, in many ways, are last-mile marketers that exist on terrain that is set by culture, and the institutions by which Democrats have historically had the ability to influence culture are losing relevance,” he said. “You don’t get a national eight-point shift to the right without losing hold of culture.”

[...] Flaherty was also paying close attention to how the race was being run on the Republican side. Donald Trump was leaning into new podcasts, and his opponents were tapping a large network of right-leaning and conservative personalities to amplify their message.

Then, he acknowledged that the Republican Party had done a better job building up its alternative digital media ecosystem with podcasters, YouTube streamers, and friendly pundits. But he argued that the then-Biden campaign would overcome those obstacles by better navigating the “personalized internet,” by which sophisticated algorithms feed Americans highly specific information tailored to their tastes and online behavior. Speaking with me again last week, Flaherty said that remained their theory of the case the entire time. The campaign knew from the beginning that the race was going to come down to voters who do not pay attention to politics or mainstream news and instead get their information from people on YouTube, their friends’ Instagram stories, or links or memes dropped in a group chat. This firstly meant a shift in paid advertising from previous campaigns. Instead of just blanketing the airwaves in the battleground states, the campaign also invested heavily in ads on YouTube, recognizing the rapid growth in streaming. That’s where, the campaign’s data showed, many of Harris’ key voters were spending their time.

More importantly, this meant building out a strategy focused more on podcast appearances and interviews with influencers than on traditional media. Flaherty said the campaign skipped opportunities to talk to the major legacy news outlets because of Harris’ extremely limited time and its survey data, which showed that their audiences overwhelmingly supported Harris already. “There’s just no value — with respect to my colleagues in the mainstream press — in a general election, to speaking to the New York Times or speaking to the Washington Post, because those [readers] are already with us,” Flaherty said. Flaherty isn’t dismissive of television and other legacy media. “One of the most important moments of the campaign for the vice president was her interview with Bret Baier. That was a huge fundraising moment. It was a huge social moment,” he said.

“When Trump did the McDonald’s thing, it was smart, because it was a thing that obviously drove television coverage, but it also drove social media engagement too,” he said. “And those things often happen in tandem, but they don’t always, and so it was the sweet spot. It drove traditional coverage and nontraditional media. I don’t think TV is dead. It’s still probably the most important thing, but it’s the literal TV and what’s on it that matters.” As the campaign wore on, though, Flaherty said he realized their failure to gain traction in certain corners of media reflected a deeper problem — one that wasn’t solved when Harris replaced Biden on the ticket. The Harris campaign, representing what many voters saw as an embodiment of the status quo, was running contrary not just to ideological distrust of establishment figures but to media trends. The media successes of 2024 were independent, nontraditional online personalities who themselves were avatars of the rewards of going up against the Establishment.

Rob Flaherty, Kamala Harris’s digital campaign chief, told Semafor’s Maxwell Tani that the Democrats’ loss of hold on the culture played a big role into Donald Trump’s win.

[lazylittledragon]

happy deathiversary to the queen. can we do the rest of the bastards now

[shorthaltsjester]

@percahliaweek -- Day 3: Glasses / Feathers

perc'ahlia & their various griefs x loose garment by MUNA

[burntlikethesun]

beloved actor and national treasure david tennant remarked at an lgbt awards ceremony that our vile anti-trans idealogue minister for equalities should shut up and now the soon to be ex-prime minister is beefing with him a literal week before the election

[cosmosarcana]

petition for an aabria run acofaf style campaign with lou, emily, ally, and erika where lou and ally's character have the exact same dynamic as pete and fabian. brennan is there too so he can look to aabria when ally proposes and CRITS for the most insane shit like "do you see what i fucking deal with?"

[curapicas]

Gosh, just. The way Percy can never win when it comes to Ripley.

If he follows her, he's facing his own thirst for revenge and giving in to his most self-destructive impulses. But if he doesn't, SHE follows him and destroys everything he loves until he follows her back to a secondary location - and while at it, she gets more time to mass produce and spread guns, doubling his guilt. This isn't even touching in how even with the Briarwoods attack, Percy still fears her the most not only bc she's the one who personally tortured him, but also is the one most alike him in a twisted dark mirror situation.

This no-win situation also reflects on how her biggest ally is Orthax, a creature that can't be destroyed in their world even if defeated.

Like. Telling Ripley outloud that he forgives her is the one real win Percy ever got over her