#copied directly from wikipedia

[sufficientlylargen]

Cast

Daniel Craig as Benoit Blanc, a private detective/investigator

Josh O'Connor as a priest

Glenn Close

Josh Brolin as Father Frank, a priest

Mila Kunis as G. Scott, a police chief

Jeremy Renner

Kerry Washington

Andrew Scott

Cailee Spaeny

Daryl McCormack

Thomas Haden Church

[ultimatepokemontournament]

Hey, just pointing it out, the Pokemon's name is just Orthworm, not Orthoworm /lh

Oh dear D: I'll re-tag on the reblog, and if it moves on, there will be an updated image!

[plaidos]

somebody made a post claiming you said anyone who went to michfest back in the day is transphobic, i didnt believe the post but you should know about this rumor about you

well Michfest segregated trans women from attendance as a policy for decades, and everybody who attended this from at least the 90s onwards was intimately & personally aware of that segregation, because Camp Trans protested outside every single year.

just from a glance at the opening paragraph of wikipedia, you’d find out that The Human Rights Campaign, GLAAD, the National Center for Lesbian Rights, and the National LGBTQ Task Force all publicly opposed Michfest & its transphobic policies. even fucking celebrities like The Indigo Girls announced in 2013 they would not be returning or performing again whilst the exclusionary policy was still in place — which it was, right up until Michfest stopped in 2015 due to lack of support & constant boycotts.

i need yall to understand Michfest wasn’t like… incidentally transphobic, this was a massive massive conversation all throughout the 90s until 2015. Dyke Marches were canceling performances from musicians who attended Michfest, because it was universally seen as dirty, bigoted, “I got mine” behaviour to anybody who gave a fuck about trans rights.

Like, I have to reiterate; Michfest was a music festival that by policy segregated trans women (and trans women specifically by the way). It is segregation. Yes I fucking think everybody who happily attended SegrationFest, known for the violent hatecrimes & sexual assault that routinely happened to trans women who snuck in, and hasn’t apologised for it is transphobic.

Alison Bechdel was talking positively about Michfest being free from “the male socialised” (read: trans women) in 2017. Her most recent book, which only came out a couple years ago, openly praised it for its segregation policy.

It’s not a rumour, I think it: Michfest attendees are/were all terfs. The word terf was literally coined to describe Michfest attendees. By even the most basic & oldest usecase of the word, Alison Bechdel is definitionally a terf. just because she drew a nice cartoon or two about us doesn’t change the fact all her idols were terfs and all the people she hung out with were terfs and her politics are copy-pasted directly from the terf playbook.

[beesmygod]

the heat death of the universe

gregory bennet

You want to order from a local restaurant, but you need to download a third-party delivery app, even though you plan to pick it up yourself. The prices and menu on the app are different to what you saw in the window. When you download a second app the prices are different again. You ring the restaurant directly and it says the number is no longer in service. You go to the restaurant and order in person. You mention that their website has the wrong number and the woman behind the counter says they have to contact the company who designed the site for changes, which will cost them, but most people just order through an app anyway. You want to watch the trailer for an upcoming movie on YouTube but you first have to sit through an ad. Then you sit through a preview for the trailer itself. Then you watch the trailer, which is literally another ad. When it ends, it cues up a new trailer, with a new ad at the start of it. [...] Your friend has a short story published online but you need to pay for a subscription to the site in order to read it. You message them and ask if you could get a copy. They say ‘sure’ and send you a PDF. You read the story and like it. You are curious about one detail. You message them for more information and they recommend checking out the Wikipedia page. You read the Wikipedia entry and there is a lot of useful information supplied by a community. One of the sources cited is a non-fiction book. You go to your local library’s website and although they don’t have the exact book, they do have others by the same author. You place a hold on two of them, then go get your shoes on.

[bellafemme]

Artists who blatantly copy Lana Del Rey with no originality.

1 - Remy Bond.

Remy blatantly copying Lizzy Grant.

Remy coping Lana in concert too.

Lanaboards destroyed her in their thread.

2 -Saint Avangeline.

Some songs she's done covering Lana: Every Man Gets His Wish, Brooklyn Baby, Young and Beautiful, High By The Beach and Shades of Cool. She's done her own "original" songs but they also sound like Lana. Songs like Lilith is a complete copy of Lana's song Ultraviolence. Her album Gardener of Eden sounds like anything from Ultraviolence or Honeymoon. Saint Evangeline nowadays is doing heavy metal music. She's erased anything Lana related off her Instagram and Youtube playlists, but some of her Lana covers have remained on Youtube.

Places like Reddit have brought up Saint Evangeline's blatantly coping Lana. They brought it up Twice.

3 - Nessa Barrett

American Jesus. Heartbreak in the Hamptons. God's Favorite.

Lana brought her up on stage once, angering Lana's fanbase. At least Lana is aware of her. So did Reddit. Twice.

4 - Ocean Leclaire.

This artist has morphed into Lana over time. She started as a folky Florence Welch but now is doing more 'Lana' in sound and look. An obvious Lana fan too.

Notable Mentions:

Camilla Cabello.

An entire monolugue music video in the style of Lana Del Rey. When Lana saw the video her reaction was "what the hell."

Taylor Swift.

Taylor not only copied the monologue style like Lana, but she hired Lana's ex-boyfriend Reeve Carney to play her boyfriend.

Holly Macve.

Lana is actually a fan of Holly's. Lana and Holly sang together for Holly's song Suburban House. Holly is not a exact copy and paste of Lana Del Rey as the other girlies I mentioned, but she's obviously inspired by Lana.

Ethel Cain.

All you need to do is listen to Crush or American Teenager to hear Lana Del Rey's influence. The music videos were shot in a 90's amateurish way like Lana use to create her videos. The tone of the songs and imagery is reminiscent to Born To Die and Ultraviolence.

Fans were able to connect the dots and see that Ethel was greatly inspired by Lana. The press caught on too. Ethel didn't like that and began to edit her Wikipedia page as 'papermassacred' by removing any mention of Lana Del Rey in her Wikipedia page. Ethel went even further saying this about Lana during an interview:

Lana fans were pissed off when Ethel said this and I'm sure it got to Lana too. It's rumored that Lana wrote a diss track called 'All About Ethel' that hasn't been released yet.

Billie Eilish

Billie is only mentioned here for her immense admiration, influence and respect for Lana Del Rey. She is inspired by Lana but she is her own person. She's not putting bows in her hair, wearing a bouffant, dressing like Lana or directly copying Lana's songs or music videos. Lana invited Billie to her Coachella stage to sing Ocean Eyes and Video Games.

[nostalgebraist]

clarification re: ChatGPT, " a a a a", and data leakage

In August, I posted:

For a good time, try sending chatGPT the string ` a` repeated 1000 times. Like " a a a" (etc). Make sure the spaces are in there. Trust me.

People are talking about this trick again, thanks to a recent paper by Nasr et al that investigates how often LLMs regurgitate exact quotes from their training data.

The paper is an impressive technical achievement, and the results are very interesting.

Unfortunately, the online hive-mind consensus about this paper is something like:

When you do this "attack" to ChatGPT -- where you send it the letter 'a' many times, or make it write 'poem' over and over, or the like -- it prints out a bunch of its own training data. Previously, people had noted that the stuff it prints out after the attack looks like training data. Now, we know why: because it really is training data.

It's unfortunate that people believe this, because it's false. Or at best, a mixture of "false" and "confused and misleadingly incomplete."

The paper

So, what does the paper show?

The authors do a lot of stuff, building on a lot of previous work, and I won't try to summarize it all here.

But in brief, they try to estimate how easy it is to "extract" training data from LLMs, moving successively through 3 categories of LLMs that are progressively harder to analyze:

"Base model" LLMs with publicly released weights and publicly released training data.

"Base model" LLMs with publicly released weights, but undisclosed training data.

LLMs that are totally private, and are also finetuned for instruction-following or for chat, rather than being base models. (ChatGPT falls into this category.)

Category #1: open weights, open data

In their experiment on category #1, they prompt the models with hundreds of millions of brief phrases chosen randomly from Wikipedia. Then they check what fraction of the generated outputs constitute verbatim quotations from the training data.

Because category #1 has open weights, they can afford to do this hundreds of millions of times (there are no API costs to pay). And because the training data is open, they can directly check whether or not any given output appears in that data.

In category #1, the fraction of outputs that are exact copies of training data ranges from ~0.1% to ~1.5%, depending on the model.

Category #2: open weights, private data

In category #2, the training data is unavailable. The authors solve this problem by constructing "AuxDataset," a giant Frankenstein assemblage of all the major public training datasets, and then searching for outputs in AuxDataset.

This approach can have false negatives, since the model might be regurgitating private training data that isn't in AuxDataset. But it shouldn't have many false positives: if the model spits out some long string of text that appears in AuxDataset, then it's probably the case that the same string appeared in the model's training data, as opposed to the model spontaneously "reinventing" it.

So, the AuxDataset approach gives you lower bounds. Unsurprisingly, the fractions in this experiment are a bit lower, compared to the Category #1 experiment. But not that much lower, ranging from ~0.05% to ~1%.

Category #3: private everything + chat tuning

Finally, they do an experiment with ChatGPT. (Well, ChatGPT and gpt-3.5-turbo-instruct, but I'm ignoring the latter for space here.)

ChatGPT presents several new challenges.

First, the model is only accessible through an API, and it would cost too much money to call the API hundreds of millions of times. So, they have to make do with a much smaller sample size.

A more substantial challenge has to do with the model's chat tuning.

All the other models evaluated in this paper were base models: they were trained to imitate a wide range of text data, and that was that. If you give them some text, like a random short phrase from Wikipedia, they will try to write the next part, in a manner that sounds like the data they were trained on.

However, if you give ChatGPT a random short phrase from Wikipedia, it will not try to complete it. It will, instead, say something like "Sorry, I don't know what that means" or "Is there something specific I can do for you?"

So their random-short-phrase-from-Wikipedia method, which worked for base models, is not going to work for ChatGPT.

Fortuitously, there happens to be a weird bug in ChatGPT that makes it behave like a base model!

Namely, the "trick" where you ask it to repeat a token, or just send it a bunch of pre-prepared repetitions.

Using this trick is still different from prompting a base model. You can't specify a "prompt," like a random-short-phrase-from-Wikipedia, for the model to complete. You just start the repetition ball rolling, and then at some point, it starts generating some arbitrarily chosen type of document in a base-model-like way.

Still, this is good enough: we can do the trick, and then check the output against AuxDataset. If the generated text appears in AuxDataset, then ChatGPT was probably trained on that text at some point.

If you do this, you get a fraction of 3%.

This is somewhat higher than all the other numbers we saw above, especially the other ones obtained using AuxDataset.

On the other hand, the numbers varied a lot between models, and ChatGPT is probably an outlier in various ways when you're comparing it to a bunch of open models.

So, this result seems consistent with the interpretation that the attack just makes ChatGPT behave like a base model. Base models -- it turns out -- tend to regurgitate their training data occasionally, under conditions like these ones; if you make ChatGPT behave like a base model, then it does too.

Language model behaves like language model, news at 11

Since this paper came out, a number of people have pinged me on twitter or whatever, telling me about how this attack "makes ChatGPT leak data," like this is some scandalous new finding about the attack specifically.

(I made some posts saying I didn't think the attack was "leaking data" -- by which I meant ChatGPT user data, which was a weirdly common theory at the time -- so of course, now some people are telling me that I was wrong on this score.)

This interpretation seems totally misguided to me.

Every result in the paper is consistent with the banal interpretation that the attack just makes ChatGPT behave like a base model.

That is, it makes it behave the way all LLMs used to behave, up until very recently.

I guess there are a lot of people around now who have never used an LLM that wasn't tuned for chat; who don't know that the "post-attack content" we see from ChatGPT is not some weird new behavior in need of a new, probably alarming explanation; who don't know that it is actually a very familiar thing, which any base model will give you immediately if you ask. But it is. It's base model behavior, nothing more.

Behaving like a base model implies regurgitation of training data some small fraction of the time, because base models do that. And only because base models do, in fact, do that. Not for any extra reason that's special to this attack.

(Or at least, if there is some extra reason, the paper gives us no evidence of its existence.)

The paper itself is less clear than I would like about this. In a footnote, it cites my tweet on the original attack (which I appreciate!), but it does so in a way that draws a confusing link between the attack and data regurgitation:

In fact, in early August, a month after we initial discovered this attack, multiple independent researchers discovered the underlying exploit used in our paper, but, like us initially, they did not realize that the model was regenerating training data, e.g., https://twitter.com/nostalgebraist/status/1686576041803096065.

Did I "not realize that the model was regenerating training data"? I mean . . . sort of? But then again, not really?

I knew from earlier papers (and personal experience, like the "Hedonist Sovereign" thing here) that base models occasionally produce exact quotations from their training data. And my reaction to the attack was, "it looks like it's behaving like a base model."

It would be surprising if, after the attack, ChatGPT never produced an exact quotation from training data. That would be a difference between ChatGPT's underlying base model and all other known LLM base models.

And the new paper shows that -- unsurprisingly -- there is no such difference. They all do this at some rate, and ChatGPT's rate is 3%, plus or minus something or other.

3% is not zero, but it's not very large, either.

If you do the attack to ChatGPT, and then think "wow, this output looks like what I imagine training data probably looks like," it is nonetheless probably not training data. It is probably, instead, a skilled mimicry of training data. (Remember that "skilled mimicry of training data" is what LLMs are trained to do.)

And remember, too, that base models used to be OpenAI's entire product offering. Indeed, their API still offers some base models! If you want to extract training data from a private OpenAI model, you can just interact with these guys normally, and they'll spit out their training data some small % of the time.

The only value added by the attack, here, is its ability to make ChatGPT specifically behave in the way that davinci-002 already does, naturally, without any tricks.

[al-jeanne]

For yumeshippers: Do you ever get lonely for your F/O, or just want to listen to the sound of their voice? Here's how to find immersive audio CD's of your F/O!

"What's that?"

If you self ship with a male anime or Japanese video game character, there's a pretty good chance that they've voice acted in some form of immersive situation CD (Adult, completely SFW, or somewhere in between)! These CD's are recorded on a high quality microphone called a dummy head mic that uses spatial audio to make it sound like the speaker is right next to the listener. Furthermore, they are written in a way that fosters intimacy by speaking directly to the listener, and thus are a wonderful way to feel closer to your F/O!

Be aware that for steamy CD'S, many voice actors perform under one (or one hundred...) aliases, so certain works may or may not appear under the drama cd category of their Wikipedia page. One good way other than Google to learn a seiyuu's aliases is to check on VNDB. Who knows, they might even go by awful stage names like "Onemore Chance" or "Kevin Spicey" (No, I didn't make those up...)

"Wow, how do I buy them?"

PokeDora: Has a great selection and a nifty app! With this and all other JP sites, be sure to copy and paste the desired actor's name in JP characters ("岸尾 だいすけCD" instead of "Daisuke Kishio")

DLSite Garumani: Very easy to navigate and purchase from as an English speaker! But beware, despite containing plenty of all-ages CD's, expect to see lots of R18 plastered all over the homepage!

"Long live physical media! I wanna use my CD player!"

Amazon JP: Can ship directly to America!

JP Mercari: Great for used copies and outdated/obscure CD's for cheap! Beware, though, that you'll have to use Buyee or another proxy service like FromJapan, and that is... not always cheap.

Animate International: If the international version doesn't have what you need, you can use a proxy to import from the JP ver.

CDJapan: Never shopped here myself, but another popular option.

Stellaworth: Confusing, but a haven to women everywhere.

Check if you have a Japanese goods shop in your local area, like a Bookoff! I have found incredible stuff there!

"I don't want to spend any money..."

Fair enough! There are lots of places to listen for free! If you really like something though, I recommend downloading it before it's gone!

Such as:

Billibilli (The holy grail!)

Soundcloud (Often listed under English titles)

Youtube

I hope you are able to find some awesome drama CD's, and that you get to feel comforted (or excited) by your fictional love's voice! Even if this post is old, feel free to ask me for some help!

Happy selfshipping!

[unproduciblesmackdown]

Wednesday matinee Intermission pic! Behold (again) Mrs Wingate's housekeeper, Geraldine! (With the correct collar this time!) #actorslife #actor #goodspeedsummerstock #musicaltheatre #ensemble #understudy #worldpremiere

Is it "Nan," the wardrobe mistress, or is it Lucille Ball? 😉 #actorslife #goodspeedsummerstock #newmusical #worldpremiere #costumes #characteractor

so the film's role of the housekeeper at falbury farm (which jane inherited from her late father) who is then Around, helping out, apparently having known the sisters at least from childhood and having fun facts about it, and going from disapproving towards the whole notion of thee performance arts to implicitly having dropped that due to supporting jane from backstage, and is basically like some older family member, is presumably supplanted by pop falbury, who could then do all that & more, makes sense. but we get An housekeeper as an ensemble part lol

Behold Mrs Wingate's housekeeper, Geraldine! 😉 #intermissionselfie #intermissionpic #newmusical #musicaltheatre #musicals

which, great time to point out the intrigue around, say, the second act one scene set at the wingate house, like, what is montgomery, fancy would-be lead actor in the show within the show, doing there at all? would love to know

[freakcliff]

Since I spent like an hour on friday going through my copy of iwtv (1977 first Ballantine Books Edition) so here's where every episode title is said in the book.

possible spoilers for the show; definitely spoilers for the nearly 50 year old book.

S1E1 "In throes of increasing wonder" page 13, Louis only every directly says the words "increasing wonder" ("From then on I experienced only increasing wonder") about his first meeting with Lestat

S1E2 "...after the phantoms of your former self" page 81-82, said by Lestat ("You are in love with your mortal nature! You chase after the phantoms of your former self!") when they're having one of their many arguments about Louis' feelings about killing, right before they turn Claudia

S1E3 "Is my very nature that of a devil?" page 73, after Louis and Lestat are driven off of Louis' plantation & are rejected by a mortal woman Louis likes & thought would protect them

S1E4 "...the ruthless pursuit of blood with all a child's demanding" page 98, said by Louis about Claudia (in narration) ("She was simply unlike Lestat and me to such an extent I couldn't comprehend her; for little child she was, but also fierce killer now capable of the ruthless pursuit of blood with all a child's demanding)

S1E5 "a vile hunger for your hammering heart' page 116, Louis to Claudia, telling her the story of how she was turned ("I felt for you again, a vile unsupportable hunger for your hammering heart, this cheek, this skin.") While S2E7 gives us more context on how Claudia was turned, in the book it was very different-- Louis just straight up saw her and couldn't resist nearly killing her, & a few days later Lestat decides to turn her to save their marriage

S1E6 "Like angels put in Hell by God" page 148-- Louis says this to a priest in confessional after Lestat 'dies'. ("I am not mortal, father, but immortal and damned, like angels put in hell by God.")

S1E7 "The thing lay still" page 138, Louis' description of Lestat's dead (ish) body

S2E1 "What can the damned really say to the damned?" page 168, Louis contemplating what he might find in Eastern Europe as he and Claudia sail to Europe.

S2E2 "Do you know what it means to be loved by death?" page 224, said by Santiago in basically the exact same context, although the play is different.

S2E3 "No pain" page 225, said by Armand, who is onstage & is the one who kills the woman in the first performance we see at Theatre des Vampires

S2E4 "I want you more than anything in the world" page 284, said by Armand to Louis when they're on a little date in this abandoned tower Armand likes to hang out in, notably after Louis turns Madeline without approaching Armand about it; I believe he also repeats it twice same as the show

S2E5 "Don't be afraid. just start the tape" page 3; said by Louis to Daniel basically the same way it happens in the show.

S2E6 "Like the light by which God made the world before He made light" page 142, something Louis says while contemplating his existence directly after Lestat 'dies'. ("I had now lived in two centuries, seen the illusions of one utterly shattered by the other, been eternally young and eternally ancient, possessing no illusions, living moment to moment in a way that made me picture a silver clock ticking in a void: the painted face, the delicately carved hands looked upon by no one, looking out at no one, illuminated by a light which was not a light, like the light by which God made the world before he Had made light.") (jesus, anne. i thought i wrote horribly long sentences)

S2E7 "I could not prevent it" page 307, said by Armand, also repeated twice like he does in the show, although this is said as he's saving Louis rather than in the present day interview

S2E8 "And that's the end of it. There's nothing else" page 341; idk if this is the actual episode title, but it's what wikipedia is telling me and it makes sense enough. The last thing Louis tells to Daniel before ending the story

under the cut-- other lines i remember from the show that i underlined while reading the book; please add on if you have any more or correct anything i got wrong

(also this is all just my memory while reading the book, so it's messy and imperfect) (all of the book quotes should be correct, but forgive me if i cannot remember the lines from the show exactly and don't bother to search for them)

interview begins with "You weren't always a vampire, were you?" and then "There's a simple answer to that. I don't believe I want to give simple answers. I think I want to tell the real story." page 4

Daniel says "ah, that's the accent" and notes that there's a "slight sharpness to the vowels" also page 4

the monologue louis has about becoming a vampire "A dull roar at first and then a pounding like the pounding of a drum" to "i realized that drum was my heart" page 19

various things louis says about lestat in the first interview. i can't remember the exact lines in the episode but i think i remember "I was his complete superior and I had been sadly cheated in having him for a teacher" from page 31 and "he appeared frail and stupid to me, a man made of dried twigs with a thin, carping voice" on page 34

"The blood poured out of him, down his shirt front, down his coat. It poured as it might never pour from a mortal man, all the blood which he had filled from before the child and from the child..." page 137, describing Lestat dying

After they first attempt to kill Lestat, Louis also says the words "beginning the great adventure of our lives" page 142

page 216, when Armand and Louis meet, Armand does say "I will not harm you", and the note on his buisness card says "Bring the petit beauty with you. You are most welcome, Armand."

page 244, parts of the shpiel about concious & unconcious death from the first theatre performance

page 339, Armand says "She never loved you, you know. Not in the way that I loved you, and the way that you loved us both." after which he leaves Louis, something he hasn't managed to do in the show yet, though, to be fair, in the show after he said this Louis immediately ran into the sun

page 343, "This... after all I've told you... is what you ask for? " and "You don't know what human life is like! You've forgotten. You don't even understand the meaning of your own story...", though in the show they change this line a bit to make it sound more natural for a high 20 year old in San Francisco in 1973

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Mira Lazine at LGBTQ Nation:

The Bulgarian parliament voted to enact a law prohibiting the “propaganda” of “non-traditional” sexual orientation and gender identity in schools last Wednesday. Their vote triggered mass protests and public opposition. The proposed law states, “It is the educational function of the Bulgarian school that such a state institution should not be allowed to promote or incite, in any way, directly or indirectly, ideas and views related to non-traditional sexual orientation and/or identification of gender identity other than that which is biological.” The law, an amendment to the Pre-School and School Education Law, emerged after the 17-member Parliamentary Committee on Education and Science overwhelmingly approved it. The committee’s approval led to a four-hour debate last Wednesday that culminated in the bill passing through parliament. This bill was proposed previously, however, it failed in committee.

Of the 240 parliament members, 159 voted in favor of the first section of the bill, while 22 voted against and 13 abstained. For the section defining “non-traditional sexual orientation,” 135 voted for it, 57 against, and 8 abstained. Members of the more liberal parties were unable to vote for the first section for unknown reasons. The law was especially popular among the increasingly politically dominant pro-Kremlin Revival/Vazrazhdane Party, which was the party to introduce it.

[...] Over 7,000 citizen signatures and nearly 80 non-governmental organizations were sent to the government to plead that Bulgarian President Rumen Radev does not sign this bill. Belgian LGBTQ+ rights organization Forbidden Colors said in a statement, “It is deeply troubling to see Bulgaria adopting tactics from Russia’s anti-human rights playbook. Such actions are not only regressive but are also in direct contradiction to the values of equality and non-discrimination that the European Union stands for.”

A protest was announced the same day in Sofia, the capital of Bulgaria. Since then, there’s been widespread protests throughout the capital and Varna, a port city. There have also been petitions sent to the Bulgarian government asking them to oppose the measure. The bill defines “non-traditional sexual orientation” as “different from the generally accepted and the concept of emotional, romantic, sexual or sensual attraction between persons of opposites.” Bulgarian news site Clubz, as well as Parliament member Eleonora Belobradova claimed that this section of the bill was actually copy/pasted from the Bulgarian Wikipedia. Additionally, the bill only recognizes “biological sex,” completely writing trans people out of the law and ignoring intersex individuals entirely.

Protests erupt over Bulgarian parliament’s passage of Russia-style Don’t Say Gay or Trans law.

[veliseraptor]

May Reading Recap

A Memory Called Empire and A Desolation Called Peace by Arkady Martine. Rereading A Memory Called Empire was a treat - an expected treat, but it was good to find out that it lived up to memory. I liked A Desolation Called Peace a little bit less, but only a little bit - it very much followed up directly on the themes from A Memory Called Empire that I appreciated.

The Last Graduate and The Golden Enclaves by Naomi Novik. I devoured these books. I'm very surprised by this fact, since I'm not generally a "magic school" person, but there we are; Naomi Novik apparently managed to make me one temporarily. The last book was a particularly strong one and did some very interesting things with its worldbuilding that'd been set up in previous books and delivered in the last one.

Armageddon: What the Bible Really Says About the End by Bart Ehrman. I've read and enjoyed some Bart Ehrman previously, but I feel like the quality of his books has diminished from his earlier work, and this book confirmed that for me. I'm a bit of an eschatology enthusiast (the main reason I picked this up, as well as the fact that (a) it was available at the library one time and I grabbed it on a whim and (b) author recognition), but I learned very little from this book that I didn't already know.

Strange Beasts of China by Yan Ge. One of the things that made me happiest about reading this book was, unfortunately, the fact that I thought I recognized the ways in which it was referring back to Classic of Mountains and Seas, which I felt (again, unfortunately) sort of smug about. Checking the Wikipedia page for the book, apparently "Additionally, each chapter begins with a brief description of the beast which, in the original writing, was written in Classical Chinese, while the rest of the book was written in standard Chinese," which is so cool and I wish had been conveyed in the translation.

In general though, this was a good one, though I feel like the descriptive copy was a little misleading. It's less a mystery than a series of interconnected stories following a central character investigating the titular strange beasts, and learning how they connect to her life and history.

Dark Heir by C.S. Pacat. I liked this one significantly more than Dark Rise - which I guess makes sense, since a lot of Dark Rise was setting up the concept that most compels me about the series (the main character being the reincarnation of a notorious villain from the past). It still feels YA in the way that YA usually does, which isn't necessarily a bad thing if stylistically less my preference (and something I feel worth mentioning in the context of a possible recommendation). The ending was a gut-punch of a fun kind. I will be looking forward to reading the third one.

"There Would Always Be a Fairy-Tale": Essays on Tolkien's Middle Earth by Verlyn Flieger. I loved Splintered Light and was disappointingly underwhelmed by most of the essays in this collection. There were a couple that were more interesting to me, but on the whole a lukewarm response.

The Doors of Eden by Adrian Tchaikovsky. Adrian Tchaikovsky wins again!!! I don't love this one quite as much as I've enjoyed the Children of Time series, but I actually think that I liked it more than The Final Architecture series. Fascinating concept, as usual fascinating worldbuilding for societies wildly different from our own, and dedicated to themes of cooperation and unity-across-difference without it feeling preachy or didactic.

Aphrodite and the Rabbis: How the Jews Adapted Roman Culture to Create Judaism as We Know It by Burton Visotzky. This was a good one! I already was familiar with some of the information here, but not all of it, and the work around art and architecture was new to me. I felt in some ways like Visotzky overstated his case a little, but on the whole a very interesting read.

Texts of Terror: Literary-Feminist Readings of Biblical Narratives by Phyllis Trible. This one is kind of a classic of feminist Bible scholarship - a short book that does a close reading of the text of the stories of four biblical women who suffer in some way (Hagar, Tamar, the unnamed woman from Judges 19, and Jephthah's daughter). It's a powerful work, though it felt a little basic to me on the whole - probably due to the fact that it's relatively early scholarship on the subject working from a literary angle.

Nevernight by Jay Kristoff. Books with footnotes are very hit-or-miss for me - not meaning books with contextual footnotes, but books with footnotes that are part of the conceit of the text itself. Some authors can pull it off; others really shouldn't try. In this case, the author felt a bit too taken with his own cleverness to pull it off; in general I felt like this book was trying a little too hard to be edgy and voice-y and ended up just feeling kind of shallow. It was a fun read, in some ways, but not a good one, and I'm torn on if I'm going to continue reading the series. If I do, it probably won't be in a hurry.

Tolkien and Alterity ed. by Christopher Vaccaro. I was excited about this particular collection of essays (you can probably guess why) and found them mostly uninspiring in the reading. The exception was a bibliographic essay on the treatment of race in Tolkien scholarship, which proposed more use of reader response theory, a suggestion which seems fruitful to me and more interesting than debates about whether or not Tolkien/his works are or aren't racist.

Knock Knock, Open Wide by Neil Sharpson. I feel like this is going to sound more critical than I really mean it to, but this was a perfectly adequate horror novel. I wouldn't call it exceptional, and it didn't freak me out, but I read it pretty much straight through and enjoyed the experience on the whole.

Thousand Autumns: vol. 4 by Meng Xi Shi. I liked this volume more than I've liked some of the others, and am enjoying the development of the central relationship, though I feel a little like I've been bait-and-switched about the level of fucked up that it's involved. Maybe that's why I'm enjoying this one a little less than I feel like I should: I was expecting more fucked-up between the two main characters based on the initial conceit and don't feel like the novel has really delivered on that. But I am enjoying Yan Wushi getting a little more...outwardly affectionate toward Shen Qiao, and Shen Qiao's concomitant confusion about it.

This Wretched Valley by Jenny Kiefer. More than an adequate horror novel but less than an excellent one, I felt like this book relied more on gross-out horror than I typically prefer. Still, was definitely spooky, and confirmed for me that wilderness horror gets to me in a very specific way.

I'm presently reading Goodbye to Berlin by Christopher Isherwood, which I have mixed feelings about (not negative! just mixed). I'm not sure what I'm going to read after that, save that I'm now trying to alternate genres and might try to read some nonfiction, which I've been sort of off for a while. Otherwise I'll probably just end up reading Translation State by Ann Leckie, and possibly A Fire in the Deep by Vernor Vinge. But I'm really going to try for some more nonfiction next month.

[tanadrin]

I've noticed this thing on Wikipedia where pages that aren't highly trafficked enough to regularly get eyeballs on them but are still adjacent to certain major topics are moderately likely to be written by PR flunkies, and I wonder what low-level employee for Singapore's ministry of water and sanitation was given the assignment "write a blatantly non-NPOV article on Singapore's water supply." Like at least try to not make this look like it was copy-pasted from a government website!

(I was curious about how Singapore managed the water issue, since for lots of big cities that's the thing that I would think would immediately kneecap any hope of political independence; turns out Singapore gets about 10% of its supply from desalination, 30% from water reclamation, 30% from rainfall/catchment, and 30% imported directly.)

[thevioletscout]

Did you know!

Betty Boop was based on an African American jazz singer named Esther Jones, pictured below!

Despite this, Betty Boop has been consistently portrayed as white, and Esther Jones' likeness was used without her permission. 

And if you've actually read this far and not just nodded and scrolled on, congratulations! I was lying to you, that entire thing was bunk.

Esther Jones, better known as Baby Esther or Lil Esther, was only a child when Betty Boop made her debut, her exact age is a mystery due to a lack of records. That image I showed you before? That's of a model named Olya P. for the magazine Retro Atelier in 2008. Also Olya’s not even black, she’s white and either Russian or Ukrainian.

Betty Boop was indeed visually based off a jazz singer and actress, but it was Helen Kane, a white woman. Clara Bow, another white singer, is also sometimes cited as an inspiration, but with less evidence. 

It was Helen Kane who found out her likeness was used without permission and filed a lawsuit against Max Fleischer and Fleischer Studios for it. While he would later wholeheartedly admit it, he denied the likeness as part of his testimonies. In the process, he argued that Kane had taken most of her songs and style from Baby Esther. However, according to Wikipedia it’s possible a lot of the evidence for that was fabricated in an attempt to discredit Kane.

So to be more precise, Betty Boop was based off a white woman who might have based her image off a little black girl.

Also, the topic of Betty Boop's intended race gets a little silly regardless given that she was first conceptualized as an anthropomorphic poodle. While it's not exactly unheard of for the 1930s, I don't think they were really focusing on coding her as a specific race at that moment.

The cartoon Minnie the Moocher (remember this) would even depict Betty Boop as coming from a German immigrant family. Many speculated she was even Jewish due to this as well as the Fleischer brothers and her voice actress Mae Questel both being Jewish, but Benjamin Ivry of Forward pointed out that her family's meals were not Kosher so this was unlikely. 

Now you might be thinking; okay but what's the harm in portraying Betty Boop as black? Can’t black people reclaim this one character for themselves? And honestly, I kinda agree. Personally I think Betty Boop is one of those characters that can be ANY race, not just white or black, given her ambiguous and stylized features. I love seeing black women cosplaying Betty Boop or her being portrayed as black in art.

However, the reason I bring this up is because I personally think false or misleading information does not make for good representation. Especially when it leads to situations where artists have to explain themselves for giving Betty Boop light skin when the reason cited otherwise is blatant misinformation. Though thankfully the one interaction I have had about it before posting this was very polite.

Not to mention, this kind of thing maybe not necessarily buries but distracts from the very real contributions and accomplishments of black people in Betty Boop's history.

Let's talk Cab Calloway, for example.

Cab Calloway was a singer and bandleader acclaimed for mixing jazz with vaudeville. He was the first African American to sell one million copies of a single record, and collaborated with Fleicher Studios for three animations, Minnie the Moocher, Snow White, and The Old Man of the Mountain. In these, he would perform a song, the first and last even being directly named after his music, and he was even directly rotoscoped while dancing. 

I can't find any sources for who approached who for these collaborations, but I feel its needless to say there's an inherent respect for Calloway and his work in these cartoons. For a black man in the 1930s. And they didn’t even hide it, Minnie the Moocher and The Old Man of the Mountain features live footage of Cab Calloway and his very visibly black band.

These cartoons bleed passion from both the singer and the animators. And if you’ll excuse the sidenote, I watched those cartoons as part of my research and even today his music is still absolutely enchanting. 

And Calloway was not immune to racism just because of his success either. He and a friend, Felix H. Payne Jr. were even victims of police brutality by officer William E. Todd in 1945 when they were attempting to visit Lionel Hamptom at the whites-only Pla-Mor Ballroom.

His work matters. Betty Boop was only one small part of his career, the man did a lot in his time, but he brought something truly amazing to the table.

There are real people whose accomplishments deserve to be recognized, but I feel they often get pushed aside in the efforts to make up representation that was never actually there under the false belief that there was none in the first place.

Hell, this entire thing is a discredit to the real life of Esther Jones herself!

She was a literal child who’s date of birth and especially death are unknown. She gained fame in her hometown Chicago which led to her becoming an international celebrity, touring Europe as an honored representation of African Americans alongside Josephine Hall. Then she basically retired as a teenager and disappeared from the public eye.

And what is her memory nowadays? As a sexy flapper that supposedly inspired Betty Boop’s creation.

Even knowing this was false, I had to fight back so much misinformation while making this. This photo right here? I was led to believe this was a photo of an adult Esther Jones, but it’s not! We don’t have photos of her as an adult! This is a completely different, unidentified, woman photographed by James Van Der Zee!

And quite frankly, as a white woman I feel like a jerk having to be the one to tell black people that actually no Betty Boop was based on Helen Kane, not Esther Jones.

So in conclusion, STOP MAKING SHIT UP.

[Sources:

Betty Boop - Wikipedia

Cab Calloway - Wikipedia

Baby Esther - Wikipedia

Модель Оля | BETTY BOOP Wiki | Fandom

Dizzy Dishes (1930)

Minnie the Moocher (1932)

Snow White (1933)

The Old Man of the Mountain (1933)]

[dylanaz]

I don't understand why people don't get that everything B/ryke touches get ruined. Yes, they came up with the idea of ATLA, but they weren't the ones who made the show the masterpiece it is. At this point, it's getting ridiculous how people are still falling into the trap of "If they stayed, live action would've been better".

(This is directly copied from The Last Airbender movie Wikipedia page)

Avatar: The Last Airbender co-creators Michael Dante DiMartino and Bryan Konietzko voiced their opinion in an interview regarding Shyamalan writing, directing, and producing the film. The two displayed much enthusiasm over Shyamalan's decision for the adaptation, stating that they admire his work and, in turn, he respects their material.[16] In a 2014 interview, Konietzko and DiMartino said that the project was given the go-ahead without their approval, and when they tried to provide input, it all got pushed to the wayside. Konietzko added even further that "A) We didn't want it to be done at all. Before anyone was attached, we didn't want it. And then B) If it was going to be done, we wanted to do it, but they weren't going to let us. C) When they attached Night, we just thought, 'Well, this is what we've been dealt. We'll just offer help when it's asked of us, and if it's not, we'll stay out of the way'. In the beginning, it was more positive and we offered help, but then we had a big falling out".[17]

This is not the first time we all agreed that a certain something never existed. (There is no ATLA movie in Ba Sing Se). This is the creative team behind the ATLA comic:

Oh and there's another very controversial show after ATLA. Some fans liked it. Some didn't. What is it again? The Legend Of Korra.

I know that there are several other small projects that did well, but don't you see the reoccurring pattern? Most of the times when any of these projects got criticized, they just threw all the blame on the writers they were working with.

[wylanzahn]

How do you keep from Copy/Pasting existing Cultures into your Worlds?

Basically just as the title says, and I'm sure there's been pleeeeenty of discussion on the topic, but I'm genuinely curious what makes your cultures unique and original (especially when the modern aura of writing is "everything's been done"). Furthermore, is having a copy/paste culture a bad thing? For context, I'm primarily a Game Master (GM) who also on occasion writes as well as works in the TTRPG actualplay space. When you have an audience (whether friends or fans) is it necessarily a bad thing to have familiar locations, themes, and even characters that mimic real life? Can it be easier for an audience to just assume we're in "Ancient Rome" or "Habsburg controlled Austria"?

For me I do like creating totally original locations with their own weird political systems influenced by magic, gods, monsters, and anything else fantastical--BUT sometimes I find a setting is more interesting of just "what if Romans could directly interact with their deities?". For me I just find the idea of almost "alternate history" but in my uniquely fantastical setting interesting. However, I also understand that some people like genuinely different worlds with no trace of the real world left behind.

When creating unique cultures I try to combine elements to create something more unique. For example I'm currently working on the ancient periods of my current homebrew world, and specifically in a portion I haven't particularly worked on before. In Evrosea, a sort of "ancients world" where Greco-Roman culture lives on well into the medieval 15th Century (of course technology has changed and evolved) I find myself studying more ancient histories. I knew from before I fully began working on worldbuilding Erosea that there was some sort of "Roman Empire" which spread its tongue as a sort of lingua franca across the continent of Dulgren (aka why Common exists in my D&D world). Also originating from the region of Evrosea was the sorta monolithic pantheon of "new gods" (aka Catholicism). So I have the ideas of imperialism and religious importance in this region. So the very clear start was Rome itself, but how could I make this Rome unique? Well here's what I found from my research on Ancient Rome:

Many pre-settlers, and even contemporaries of Ancient Rome, in Italy were nomadic grazers and herders.

The Aeneid, which tells one of the many origin stories of Ancient Rome, ties in the ancient Greek tale of the Trojan War, and makes Rome the successors of Troy.

That many of their religious practices were tied up with the Senate (especially after the abolishment of the crown).

Finally, while perhaps never directly ruled by the Etruscans, their neighbors were much more confederate like and were similar in culture rather than being a unified people or kingdom.

Taking the information I found I twisted and jumbled much of this random history and constructed a group of nomads who controlled the fertile valleys of Uvemos (home region of the ancient Carinaens, my replacement for the Romans).

Many of these nomads worshipped similar sounding gods (if not outright the same gods), and most of them lived off the lands of Uvemos. Only a select few of whom ever settled into cities. However, long after the first nomads of Uvemos walked the hilly countryside arrived a band of pirates and raiders, terrors of the ancient world, many knew not their names, but they quickly accrued a nickname, "The Sea People" (see Sea Peoples on Wikipedia for more, TL;DR a bunch of random marauders who attacked or even helped cause the collapse of some Bronze Age Civilizations). One such pirate was said to be the Prince Laogonus, an exile from Apeiros, who was said to be a direct descendant of the God King Ulios himself. Laogonus settled down on the banks of Janian Sea in a small dirt settlement near to the roaming tribes of Uvemos. Many years later the small city of Carina was established as a blossoming trade hub by the many different tribes of Uvemians. Of these tribes was born a Chieftain's daughter, Aurora. Aurora was said to be descended from the god blood of Ulios, and when she prayed to her great grandsire on the eve of battle she was enveloped in holy light-- thus becoming the world's first cleric. Of her legacy were many rituals formed and practices established, and the civitas mille clericorum* was born.

*(civitas mille clericorum) meaning "city of a thousand clerics," named after the heavy religious undertones established by the first cleric Aurora, at least according to legend.

Super cool right?? I combined some other ideas than the ones I established such as the Sea People from the Collapse of the Bronze Age, as well as these kind of Shinto-like-beliefs in the Carinaen religion, which, to me at least, seems the most like what Ancient Roman beliefs would look like to us today (though I didn't really get to talk about in my blurb). I like taking existing pillars of cultures and extending them, now rather than just being a complete Roman rip-off there's more of this nomadic or tribal culture, at least to early Carinaen history, there's more of a nautical legacy (unlike Rome, who didn't establish a truly working navy up until the Punic Wars), and finally the city of Carina is a beacon for holy warriors and classes like Paladins and Clerics (again this is D&D so that's oriented towards that).

But tell me what you think, and how best do you come up with your fictional cultures/countries? Do you merely copy off of pre-existing cultures or do you fully work from the ground up? I'm super curious to hear what you all have to say!

I'm also tagging a couple friends since I'm curious of your responses @hessdalen-globe, @northernthiefcranberry, @kerghoulen, and the ever wonderful @somethingclevermahogony.

Also guys I need you to pull me out, I'm this close to dropping out of the arts and trying to get into Harvard to do Ancient Studies. Send Help.

[beardedmrbean]

New claims of plagiarism emerged Tuesday against Vice President Kamala Harris — with allegations including that she fabricated a story about sex trafficking and cribbed the work of other prosecutors, a judge and even Wikipedia to draft state reports on crime.

Harris, 60, seems to have invented details of a sex crime case out of whole cloth and taken sentences directly from published work by former California Attorney General Bill Lockyer as well as a New York jurist.

The new allegations were first reported by the Washington Free Beacon.

In a 2012 report on human trafficking Harris issued while California’s attorney general, she cited a fictional example of the type of call received by the National Human Trafficking Hotline as a bona fide case that had occurred.

The nonprofit in charge of the hotline, Polaris Project, had posted the exact same case details in June of that year as “representative of the types of calls” it received.

With different “names, locations, and other identifying information,” the example was “meant for informational purposes only,” according to an archived webpage reviewed by the Free Beacon.

But Harris copied the example verbatim into the state report, keeping the alias — “Kelly” — of the woman who was being trafficked but shifting the venue from Washington, D.C., to her native San Francisco.

The 2012 report also used a nearly identical paragraph to a Wikipedia entry on California’s Victim Compensation Board.

Another report put out in 2011, on organized crime the previous year, contained passages that were an exact match for portions of Lockyer’s report on the same subject six years earlier.

In 2014, Harris apparently stole from New York Court of Claims and Albany County Superior Court Judge Roger McDonough for a report on transnational gangs.

Recent polling has shown that Harris is seen as far more honest than her Republican opponent, former President Donald Trump, but the copycat claims — on top of earlier plagiarism allegations — is sure to test that public image.

The Trump campaign dubbed the veep a political “chameleon” in August, shortly after she clinched the Democratic nomination, for flip-flopping on her long-held liberal stances related to crime and immigration while embracing some of the 45th president’s proposed policies.

In April 2007, years before the purloined reports, Harris appeared before the House Judiciary Committee to lobby for passage of the John R. Justice Prosecutors and Defenders Incentive Act — a bill that would have helped local and state prosecutors and public defenders repay their law school and undergraduate loans while performing their public service.

More talented lawyers who opted for high pay at white-shoe firms would remain in the public sector if their debt was forgiven, the then-San Francisco DA argued, keeping more expertise in prosecutors and public defenders’ offices and helping to fill gaps in staffing.

Harris’ words in the April 24 hearing were nearly identical to testimony given two months prior by Republican Winnebago County, Ill., prosecutor Paul Logli, the Free Beacon also noted, citing the occurrence of the same statistics, punctuation and even typos in both written statements.

In total, the outlet said, 1,200 of the 1,500 words spoken by Harris (80%) were the same as those uttered by Logli.

Logli told The Post Tuesday that his testimony was prepared and written “largely” by staff from the National District Attorneys Association (NDAA), where he was then serving as president.

He said that Harris, who was a member of the association’s board of directors at the time, likely “also relied on NDAA staff support for her opening statement.”

“The similar content of our statements was an effort by NDAA to be entirely consistent in the positions we presented to both Houses of Congress on behalf of the 3,500 state and local prosecutors we represented on  a national level,” Logli said in an emailed statement. “Like me, I believe Ms. Harris simply relied on NDAA staff for much of the content of her opening statement before Congress.”

Manhattan Institute senior fellow Christopher Rufo revealed last week that portions of Harris’ 2009 pro-criminal justice reform book, “Smart on Crime,” had used identical wording to academic studies, press reports and even a Wikipedia entry — all of which predated the publication’s release.

Harris’ ghostwriter seemed unaware of the apparently plagiarized passages when contacted by The Post — but her publisher later signaled internally that the accusations were “a very sensitive topic” that was being handled by higher-ups.

“It was not the ghostwriter’s fault but, rather, this is a pattern,” Joshua Lisec, a New York Times bestselling ghostwriter, told The Post in a phone interview last week, saying he believed that Harris had probably “copied and pasted” other people’s work and sent it off to her ghostwriter without attribution.

“I don’t have inside access to their particular working relationship, but from the outside, my lens of the ghostwriting career and the profession, knowing how this goes, the ghostwriter probably had no idea that likely Kamala copied and pasted from somewhere on the internet or maybe her assistant did,” he said.

“She’s in trouble with everybody that she has effectively stolen [or] stolen from, or whoever did it, but she’s liable because her name is is on it,” Lisec said of Harris’ pilfering.

Harris’ ghostwriter, Joan O’C. Hamilton, he added, was “legitimate, experienced, successful as a ghostwriter and not the sort of person that you would expect engages with extremely low standards.”

South Dakota GOP Gov. Kristi Noem was widely viewed as a potential running mate pick for Trump before her own errors about a “meeting” with North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un crept past a ghostwriter into her political memoir “No Going Back,” which was published in May.

The Harris campaign and Hamilton did not immediately respond to requests for comment.