#Delisted Shares

[delistedshares]

https://delistedstocks.in/current-offerings/api-holdings-pharmeasy-limited/

Navigating the world of unlisted stocks, particularly PharmEasy shares, requires a strategic approach. By leveraging platforms like DelistedStocks, investors can effectively buy or sell PharmEasy unlisted shares, taking into account key factors such as historical share prices and current market trends. Keep a close eye on PharmEasy share prices and adhere to regulatory guidelines to ensure a successful and compliant investment experience on DelistedStocks.

[lunamehta]

Looking for Startup Investing

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[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.]

[silicon14blog]

WHAT DO YOU MEAN SEGA'S DELISTING THE DREAMCAST GAMES FROM STEAM, INCLUDING CRAZY TAXI AND JET SET RADIO?????

[some-triangles]

I've now played through Nine Sols twice and have gotten both endings! That means it's time to post

So, hilariously, I got the true ending first! The old woman doesn't have a third phase if you go for the normal ending, which explains why it felt so brutal I had to post about it if you do what I did. I guess the creators of the game thought you would get through your first go-round w/o finding everything, get the normal ending, and then go back to scrape and get the true ending, for which you've been prepared by beating Eigong previously. But it's a metroidvania, finding all the hidden stuff is the point. So of course I went hard mode first.

None of that is nearly as interesting as the endings themselves, though! Potted summary of Nine Sols plot: the cat furries (Han) of Peilang (China) accidentally invented the deadly Tianhuo virus (COVID) while trying to find the cure for death. So they blasted an entire island into space, taking everyone who could afford to come, and put them all in suspended animation while scientists kept looking for a cure. Why space? Because the suspended animation/paradise simulation machine requires such incredible computational power to run that they need a bunch of organic brains to do it. Luckily their spy satellite spotted a planet (Earth [Formosa]) full of primitive apemen (Formosan native peoples) whose virus-free brains would be perfect for the project.

So they kidnap a bunch of humans and bring them to their space island, which is using our sun for power, causing climate change (climate change) on earth. The humans live in a simulated primitive village and send off a bunch of kids to go "live with the gods" every year, thus keeping the simulation program supplied with fresh brains. This goes on for hundreds of years. Meanwhile the scientists come up with a COVID vaccine which turns the cat furries who take it into immortal, hivebrained mutants.

You play one of the 10 people who are responsible for this whole mess (the CCP secretariat.) You get thrown out of the council and murdered when you find out that they made COVID in a lab and get mad about it, and then you go on a roaring rampage of revenge in the hope of wresting power away from your former colleagues. Meanwhile, your mentor has decided that the mutants are the immortality they were looking for all along and decides to turn everyone into pink goo, in the usual fashion.

So! When you are on the verge of confronting her and thwarting her plans, you are given two options! Or so I thought. It turns out you only get two options if you do everything you can to bond with your human friends, which mostly involves sharing all of china's cultural treasures with the adorable kid who follows you around. (And drinking a dude's vomit. No time to explain that.) The normal, regular, you didn't do that ending involves you taking the whole station back to Penglai (again, China) where you now have a permanent population of Formosans to use for the brain machines but you are presumably nice about it, and you have turned your little buddy into a collaborator. In the GOOD ending, you send all the humans back to earth (land back) and then you blow the space island up, incidentally genociding yourself. The sole survivor of the Han furry race is a fat cat in a hover chair named Kuafu, who loves bubble tea so much he had a tank of it built into his work uniform. He will not be reproducing.

So, lest you think my bracketing is excessive - this game was made by Red Candle, a Taiwanese game company which is best known for having their last game delisted from Steam for taking a shot at Xi Jinping. The soundtrack was created by Collage, an incredible band of native Formosan descent who write their songs in a bunch of languages - Amis, Hokkien, Japanese, English - but, pointedly, not in Mandarin. The political stuff is extremely on purpose. The second ending isn't exactly meant to be happy - your death devastates your little human friend, and life is going to be hard for the humans back on gradually thawing Earth. But the game is very clear that it's the correct ending, the right thing to do.

It would if nothing else be a really interesting way to resolve the political status of Taiwan. It's a One China policy, but not that one, because they're all fucking dead over there.

Taiwan's continued existence as an independent entity is probably the best thing our imperial sphere has ever done. Can you believe one of our dictatorial buffer states democratized itself? Like, the hereditary dictator's son decided that they needed to modernize and by that he actually meant to stop being a dictatorship, if only to stop making his political patrons (us) look bad? And now because of their buffer status they get to be the only real democracy in East Asia, insulated from power and power brokers by their liminality. And still it's a colony, and the native people have lived through occupation after occupation, to the point where some young people are starting to prefer the Japanese to the KMT because better the devil you never knew. What a mindfuck. You can see why just blowing the mainland to smithereens might be tempting to some.

Anyway. What a wonderful, fascinating game, and what a statement. (You just have to game out of your mind to get to it.) Probably harsher than anything that was in Devotion, which is why it's wise to deliver your political messaging through cute furries, as long as the furry in question isn't Winnie the Pooh.

[toa-archive]

While Trollhunters is aired on netflix, in some countries children's channels have also picked up a temporary contract to air it. Three such instances were Cartoon Network in Sweden, Norway and Denmark who shared identical websites and had video clips never shown on the English speaking side of things.

One of them did not stop there. Oh no, the Danish Cartoon Network site decided Troldejægerne needed youtuber sponsorship involvement! All three websites are now gone and all traces of Trollhunters on their respective youtube accounts have been delisted likely when the contracts ran out. This means the below is lost media now surviving purely from spamming friends/long suffering victims when they were first found. Due to the original language barrier and the videos being removed it is unknown who this person is. Should his name be found however this post will be updated with it.

First up, a thumbnail! For whatever reason and possibly because search engines have an annoying habit of picking up things they shouldn't, the original still exists in cache form attached to an entirely unrelated video. Hopefully this proves it wasn't all a weird fever dream? Those who saw the video at the time I can feel you cringing at your screens.

The following were taken as the video was being watched as it was about 20 minutes or so long from memory. This abomination of chocolate, of which very little was in liquid form when it was poured in there and there were gummy worms involved too, representing 'mud'. Despite ground up brownies and who knows what else this thing was so thick the straw got stuck and had zero suction. The face is still being used as a discord emote because, well.

Then we had the fusion art because why not I guess?

Afterwards the chocolate abomination clearly was not enough. He melted gummies, mixed in flour and created slime for exact purposes I genuinely do not recall. The cake did not deserve it and this stuff got literally everywhere it was so sticky.

The last thing screenshot was pretty cute though! Grow your own crystal kits have never really gone out of fashion so he made his own DIY version. There was either two or three though only only the cute pink heart was screenshot.

Anyway enjoy this random bit of Trollhunters trivia!

[tocitynews]

Tupperware, Iconic Food Container Brand, Files For Bankruptcy – Los Angeles California reporting

Tupperware began to struggle as more families gave up making dinner from scratch and started dining out more.

Doubts around Tupperware's future have floated around for some time. Last year, the company sought additional financing as it warned investors about its ability to stay in business and its risk of being delisted from the New York Stock Exchange.

Shares have fallen 75% this year and closed Tuesday at about 50 cents apiece.

Tupperware experienced explosive growth in the mid 20th century with the rise of Tupperware parties, first held in 1948. Tupperware parties gave many women a chance to run their own businesses out of their homes, selling the products within social circles.

The system worked so well Tupperware removed its products from stores three years later. Social changes, namely fewer dinners made from scratch and more nights spent dining out, took a toll Tupperware sales.

[aresmarked]

hey, ive seen a lot of good stuff about project sekai and mizuki's character on your blog and others whose opinions i trust and im intrigued to see what the hypes about, but i also swore i wouldnt play anymore gacha games after i got into arknights. do you know if theres a resource or website where i can read the story without having to interact with the gacha game elements?

hey! i can def help with that (and may i say, i'm truly delighted my rambles and others have piqued your interest, I've always appreciated your own analyses for other fandoms we've shared).

For just reading the story, though without L2D animations: sekai.best. Event stories, card stories, even the mini-convos that the characters have in the various areas, you can read them here. I'm constantly cross-referencing here when writing. You can also change in the settings what server you're looking at, so you can look at EN's translations, or at the stories only currently in JP for example.

For watching events with their official TLs: the official EN channel's playlists. Weirdly hard to find the channel so direct link here. Currently way behind as well. Someone noted, i think it was proseka-facts? that recording for this seems to happen on someone's phone.

For the most complete record of the story outside of the game's internal archive: the JP channel playlist. One playlist unlike EN, and updated far more regularly/frequently, currently only a single event behind (only the most recent event is not yet uploaded). However, no subtitles.

For the next most complete record where you can watch that has subs: this utterly massive playlist where the creator, bless them, is trying to have links to all the event story in one list. A bit behind, but is in-between the official EN and JP playlists.

However, since some channels have been delisted, and there have been times in the past I've noted some events only get partially TL'd (bless the TLers doing this on their own time) what I'd recommend is using sekai best's event list to see order and if an event isn't in the list, trying to search it up on its own, to see if anyone made a 'backup' for that event.. or if someone's TL'd it but the playlist owner just hasn't had the time to put it into the master playlist.

Hope this all helps! And I do look forward to your thoughts on it; would love to discuss sometime :3

[miss-rum-hee]

Finally finished this in time for my favorite franchise's birthday!

It's a shame how poorly this game has been treated throughout the years, and with the recent delistings, it really does feel like it's the end for this series...

But the community is still here, and the memories we share will never fade.

so thanks, LittleBigPlanet

[krissiefox]

And some other good video game news, too! After being absolute wankers and delisting every single Unreal game a few years ago, Epic is now giving away Unreal Gold and the first Unreal Tournament away for free!

Here's hoping they'll also bring back the rest of the Unreal games, in time. Note: I recommend running both installers once you download them, as the files for the games are hosted online. Better to have the game installation already downloaded and set up in case the files on internet archive ever go poof.

[delistedshares]

Unlisted Gems: A Guide to Investing in Private Companies

Unlisted stocks, also known as private placements or pre-IPO investments, offer a unique opportunity for investors seeking to capitalize on early-stage growth potential. Unlike publicly traded companies, unlisted stocks are not available for purchase on traditional stock exchanges. This exclusivity can present both significant risks and rewards.  

Investing in unlisted stocks requires a different approach than investing in publicly traded companies. Due to the lack of liquidity in the private market, investors must be prepared to hold their investments for a longer period of time. Additionally, there is often a higher degree of risk associated with unlisted stocks, as these companies may be less established and face greater challenges.  

However, the potential rewards of investing in unlisted stocks can be substantial. If a private company successfully goes public or is acquired, investors may realize significant returns on their investment. Moreover, unlisted stocks can offer exposure to innovative industries and cutting-edge technologies that may not be represented in the public markets.  

To successfully invest in unlisted stocks, it is essential to conduct thorough due diligence. This involves evaluating the company's management team, business model, financial health, and competitive landscape. It is also important to understand the terms of the investment, including the valuation, ownership structure, and exit strategy.  

Investing in unlisted stocks is not suitable for all investors. It requires a high tolerance for risk and a long-term investment horizon. However, for those who are willing to take on these risks, unlisted stocks can offer the potential for significant returns.

[lunamehta]

What Is an Angel Investor? Angel investors are wealthy private investors focused on financing small business ventures in exchange for equity. Unlike a venture capital firm that uses an investment fund, angels use their own net worth. Become Angel Investors for Startups Becoming angel investors for startups is a great way to make money and help the startup community. Angel investors provide startups with early-stage funding to help them get started. To become an angel investor, you will need to have a good understanding of the startup industry, have a good network of contacts, and be able to assess the potential of the startup. Additionally, you will need to be comfortable with taking some risks, as investing in startups can be risky. With the right knowledge and resources, you can become an angel investor and help startups grow.  What is Startup Investing Startup investing is the act of investing money in a startup business venture. This type of investing typically involves purchasing shares of equity in a startup company, which can provide investors with a significant return on their money if the business is successful. Startup investing can be a risky endeavour, as many startups fail and investors may lose their money. However, startup investing can also be extremely lucrative and can lead to large returns if the business succeeds. Which companies are Unicorns and How to Invest in Unicorns by Planify A Unicorn company is a privately-held startup valued at over 1 billion dollars. Some famous Unicorns include Groww Pre IPO, Zerodha Upcoming IPO, Upstox Unlisted shares, and HDFC Securities Upcoming IPO. These companies are privately owned, so there is no direct way to invest in them. However, there are some indirect ways to invest in Unicorns. There are venture capital firms that invest in privately-held companies, giving individuals a chance to invest in private companies. Another option is to invest in companies that provide services to Unicorns, such as Planify Web Services. Finally, it is possible to invest in a publicly-traded company that is related to a Unicorn. For example, Groww IPO was a way for investors to indirectly invest in the company.

[hypersomniagame]

HYPERSOMNIA JUNE DEV LOG : “FASHIONABLY LATE”

Hi! I already wrote this entire dev log but I closed the tab by accident, so it's now 10:55pm and I'm going to try and speedrun writing something that took me an hour to write.

For all of you who follow HYPERSOMNIA, you should already know what the gist is here I've been saying this for 6 months.

if you don't know what this is or are confused on what HYPERSOMNIA is read the other dev logs i've said this like every time lol

So, just as a heads up this log isn't going to be super long with new content because I have been insanely busy these last few months! I just graduated High School and the last few months have been me cramming to make sure I pass and could graduate and now I am!!! Yay!!!

I won 2 awards at my grad (One of them being excellence in arts :D) and the other I was given a check for 200$ so I snagged one of these!

Super happy I finally got a display tablet for drawing, I've wanted one of these since I was like 14 and it feels awesome to have one now. I got this thing super cheap too, this thing usually goes for like 300-350 Canadian and I got it for 130! Super super happy about this.

That's all from me personally, but I would like to say just as 1 last thing before the updates, Happy Pride Month to all who identify as LGBTQ+, I myself am queer and just want to remind all of you that you are loved and accepted. Hopefully I can get this out before midnight so it's still pride month LOL

OK! NOW FOR UPDATES! I don't have too much to share today but I do have somethings I want to show off.

First things first, I've been respriting some characters! Ross and Jack are the biggest edits I've made so far so I'd like to show them off.

(Left is old, and right is new!)

Ross' walking sprites were updated! I was kind of dissatisfied with how Ross looks like he's struttin' everywhere so I redid it to give him a more casual walk. I'm very happy with this change and I plan for it to be the base walking animation going forward. I also updated his side profiles slightly to look closer to the key art I illustrated.

Jack also had his idles redone! He I think was the biggest thing I needed to resprite, his old sprite is kind of cluttered and poorly detailed so for his new one I simplified a lot of the shading and reshaped his hair and mask. I think it came out really well.

Also, just earlier I was working on music for the game.

I'm really happy with how this came out, I just got high and made Half-Life music (Which is what I was aiming for LOL)

Hopefully I can get to a point where I can finish off the soundtrack for the demo and post it all. Some friends of mine were a bit sad I delisted the tracks I had up initially so I hope to get those up again soon.

I've also been storyboarding out some early game cutscenes, I can't show a lot because it's all a bit spoiler-y but I will put this in the log.

And one last thing too, THE MOTHER DIRECT!

on July 27 at 6PM ET, MOTHER FOREVER will be hosting the MOTHER Direct, which HYPERSOMNIA is a part of!

There'll be a ton of indie games, fan projects, and other things relating to or inspired by the MOTHER series! Please give it a watch if you can. If you can't make it, the event will remain on MOTHER FOREVER's YouTube channel, and I'll be uploading HYPERSOMNIA's trailer on YouTube, Twitter, Steam, and here. If you do catch the stream or end up watching it after, leave a comment! Tell 'em Ferris sent ya. Do it, or I'll cry. I'm expecting at least 1 "Ferris sent me!" or I'll cry. I swear, I will do it!

If this is your first log you're reading, or even your first time seeing ANYTHING relating to HYPERSOMNIA, I got a whole bunch of links for you to check out if you wanna know more about me and my stupid little game.

TWITTER

YOUTUBE

STEAM

UNIQUE INDIE RPG'S [SHOW US YOUR GAME!]

[PREV] [ABOUT HYPERSOMNIA] [NEXT]

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

By: Aaron Sibarium

Published: May 9, 2024

The school has declined to investigate faculty members for celebrating terrorism and calling for the destruction of Israel.

Yale University spent more than a year investigating a Jewish professor for six words of an op-ed he published in a pro-Israel newspaper, raising questions about the school’s approach to anti-Semitism and free speech as the campus continues to cope with the fallout of the Israel-Hamas war.

Evan Morris, a professor of biomedical engineering at Yale School of Medicine, penned the 2022 op-ed in the Algemeiner along with 14 other professors. They described a pattern of anti-Semitism in the Yale Postdoctoral Association, a group that runs social and academic events for researchers.

The authors listed several examples of anti-Semitic and anti-Israel bias. In one aside, they claimed that a researcher at the medical school, Azmi Ahmad, had "blocked an Israeli postdoc from speaking" at an October 2021 screening of a film about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Those six words triggered a marathon investigation by the medical school’s Office of Academic and Professional Development—a body responsible for disciplining professors for "unprofessional behavior"—that began in February 2023, over six months after the op-ed was published, and concluded in April 2024.

The office told Morris that it had been "tasked with assessing the accuracy" of the six-word statement, according to an email reviewed by the Washington Free Beacon. It did not tell him who filed the complaint, what policy he had allegedly violated, or what the consequences of that violation could be but said the review was likely to be completed by June 2023.

Instead, it dragged on without updates for over a year, according to Morris and emails reviewed by the Free Beacon. During that time—including in the post-October 7 era—Yale repeatedly declined to sanction students and professors for vicious anti-Israel speech, citing the importance of free expression.

The university took no action against Zareena Grewal, a professor of ethnicity, race, and migration, after she called October 7 "an extraordinary day" and stated that "settlers are not civilians." Nor did it investigate a Yale Law School student group that called for "armed struggle" against Israel and said that Hamas should be delisted as a terrorist organization.

"Yale is committed to freedom of expression," a university spokesperson, Karen Peart, said of Grewal’s remarks. "The comments posted on Professor Grewal’s personal accounts represent her own views."

By contrast, Morris earned a rebuke from the head of the university’s professional development office, Robert Rohrbaugh, who on April 11 shared the findings of the school’s investigation in an email.

"We were not able to substantiate the allegation that one postdoc was blocked from speaking by the postdoc identified in your article," Rohrbaugh said. "Our request to you for the future is that when attributing conduct to a named university community member, particularly a trainee, you be as diligent as possible to be sure information presented is accurate."

The protracted and seemingly selective probe has outraged Jewish faculty members, who say that the finger-wagging at Morris—and the decision to engage in it amid a nationwide surge in campus anti-Semitism—is tone deaf to say the least.

"Apparently, you have learned nothing from the last 6 months of rampant, unremitting and sometimes destructive and threatening anti-Semitism on campus,"  Morris wrote to Rohrbaugh. "Yale spends its resources and 2 years investigating 6 words in an OpEd by its faculty but fails to discipline professors who call for the annihilation of the Jewish people."

Pnina Weiss, a pediatrician at Yale Medical School who did not sign the 2022 op-ed but reviewed the correspondence between Morris and Rohrbaugh, said the investigation was  "hard to reconcile" with Yale’s stated commitment to free speech.

"The administration has defended the right of professors like Zareena Grewal to post on social media—celebrations of the rape, kidnapping, and cold-blooded murder of Israelis on October 7," she told the Free Beacon. "Yet when a group of 15 Jewish faculty write an op-ed about anti-Semitism and the suppression of an Israeli postdoc’s speech, the faculty are ‘investigated’ and reprimanded for misusing the word ‘block.’"

Double standards, Weiss continued, "are the cornerstone of anti-Semitism."

Aside from the verbal slap on the wrist, Yale has yet to formally sanction Morris, and the school declined to comment on its decision to single him out for investigation or say whether any other discipline remains on the table. In a statement on Rohrbaugh’s behalf, the university’s communications office said that the medical school was "not aware of any disciplinary action" against Morris, suggesting the rebuke in April was unofficial.

"Yale University and the School of Medicine vigorously reject anti-Semitism," the communications office said. "For example, the School of Medicine provides support for educational events on anti-Semitism organized by Dr. Morris through a grant from the Academic Engagement Network."

Ahmad, the postdoc named in the 2022 op-ed, did not respond to a request for comment.

The blowback to the investigation comes as Yale president Peter Salovey is preparing to submit testimony to Congress about the school’s handling of anti-Semitism, which, while less heavily criticized than Columbia’s, has generated its share of bad press.

Administrators stood by for days as protesters occupied a university plaza, defaced a World War II memorial, and harassed Jewish students who attempted to film the chaos, culminating in an April 20 confrontation that injured one student and prompted a sheepish apology from protest organizers. Additional encampments and occupations—one of which shut down a major intersection—sprung up sporadically in the following weeks.

Those disruptions followed a string of quieter scandals at the Ivy League university, where the campus aftershocks of Hamas’s assault fueled charges of hypocrisy and double standards. At Yale Law School, for example, the Schell Center for International Human Rights—which in 2022 spon.sored a talk on Israeli "apartheid"—resisted calls to host an event about Oct. 7, telling one Jewish student that the situation was "complex."

"What kind of 'Center for International Human Rights' would refuse to host an event condemning the largest pogrom since the Holocaust," Jewish students at the law school asked in an open letter. "Does the Schell Center not think that Israelis are entitled to human rights, too? Or is it perhaps because they were Jewish?"

The center only agreed to host an event after weeks of pressure, including from Jewish alumni. In the interim, several students posted defenses of the Oct. 7 massacre on a law school-wide listserv, which soon devolved into ad hominem back-and-forths.

"Expecting Palestinians to peacefully respond to unspeakable war crimes and illegal collective punishment they've experienced at the hands of Israel is laughable," Iesha Phillips, the lead editor of the Yale Journal of Law & Liberation, responded to one Jewish student. "Too many lives have been lost over the past few decades. We shouldn't only start to care because it's now affecting Jewish folks."

The law school’s hands-off approach to those posts contrasted sharply with its response to Trent Colbert, a second-year law student, when he invited students to his "traphouse" in 2021. Within hours of sending the invitation, Colbert was hauled into a meeting with school administrators who demanded he sign a pre-drafted apology and hinted he could face discipline—including consequences with the bar—if he refused.

They would later claim the encounter had been misconstrued. "We would never get on our letterhead and write anything to the bar about you," Yaseen Eldik, then the law school’s diversity director, told Colbert a month after their first meeting. "You may have been confused."

The backpedaling foreshadowed the tactics Yale used with Morris: launch an investigation, raise the possibility of discipline, then suggest after the fact that the probe’s target overreacted and imagined the threat.

"My prior communication did not question the right of faculty authors to voice their opinion or ask you to change your opinion," Rohrbaugh wrote in response to Morris’s message criticizing the investigation. "Although we found that one of the statements made about a trainee in a national media outlet could not be substantiated, my communication did not raise the topic of apology."

Rohrbaugh also chided Morris for declining to be interviewed as part of the investigation, after the school repeatedly refused to tell him what rule he’d been accused of breaking or who made the accusation, according to emails reviewed by the Free Beacon.

"Have I violated a Yale morality code?" Morris had asked Rohrbaugh in May 2023. "If so, where can I find it?"

He never heard back.

==

Never forget: the process is the punishment.

[program-251]

So I attempted to do a mass attack sadly I couldnt finish adding all the characters from my list and 2 got delisted. I also wanted to add a lot more detailing, but this is as far as I got.

Art Fight - Attack: A peaceful day in the environment Character list under the cut

characters belong to: (there is three Florists (which is why their doing the spiderman pointing meme) that each belong to different people: -Pilot_Starz -EliseNeverDied - @friskdreemurr00 then there are two Botanists belonging to: -Smig - @dakasanctuary and finally characters who dont share a name/title XD -Thicket Full of thorns ( Olliepop ) -The Sprout ( @friskdreemurr00 ) -The forager ( @appleeejuiceee ) -The Cultivator ( @pinkapop ) -The Camoflager ( @deathsangel-eva ) -The Carrier ( @wicked-gator ) -Berrycat ( cosmistar ) -The Thistle ( aphyxiation ) -Tree Scug ( notturtwig ) - Petal ( Vulkiri ) -Thyme ( @princecake ) - Miros cat ( @partyswirl ) -The overgrown ( Yarrowplant ) -the mycelium ( deadbirdstudio ) -The gardener ( SpearmintSeaslug ) - The Guide ( aveskori ) -The Pond ( SmallTinyLittl1 ) -The Lich ( @peculiurperennial ) -The Charlatan ( HeadlessMule ) -Wormgrass ( @soaricarus ) anyways imma like go explode

[rocketbirdie]

idk if you or your friend with the spofify ailments are android users but i cannot recommend xManager enough for getting ad free listening!! i have been using it for over a year now and my only issue has been losing the little lyrics thing when you're opening a song but it doesn't bother me much. i also use a desktop version but don't have access to my computer atm if you prefer desktop listening or have an iPhone (unsure about how to go about this with anything that isn't a windows pc unfortunately) but will happily share! i found the install very easy with online guides and i am not a very tech literate person haha

thanks for the recommendation!! if you don't mind me adding another rec for iphone users: i use an app called musi. it allows you to just listen to music (or anything, really) through youtube (while also being able to turn off your phone screen!!).

you don't need to make an account or log in with a youtube account. you can add as many videos as you want and organize them into playlists, there's no limit. loop, shuffle, playback speed (no lyrics tho). it's free to download, there are ads but it's a single $5 purchase to get rid of them for good, definitely worth it.

the only thing of course is that you obviously can't play videos that are delisted or removed, which sucks if you're like me and you like to listen to video game osts. they get copyright struck all the time :(