#like I know technically legally if it’s hosted in their site they probably don’t have to….but that’s still messed up

[hellsite-hall-of-fame]

ahh see that is very very very true

nvm scratch that idea lol

do color of the sky phone cases exist yet

hmmm I don’t know….but they ABSOLUTELY SHOULD?!??

[the-art-of-animated-gifs]

Hexeosis:  Why I sell my gifs as Crypto Art

Hexeosis is one of the success stories of Tumblr’s golden age.  The psychedelic gifs created under the Hexeosis name became so popular that the person know as Hexeosis quit their day job and never looked back.  Now Hexeosis sells gifs as Crypto Art, something I have been mystified by.  Hexeosis was generous enough to answer my questions at length below.

Why did you decide to put your art on SuperRare and KnowOrigin?

I like SuperRare and KnownOrigin because they both feature clean interfaces and nice designs that I think complement the work being posted. And, they are some of the leaders in the cryptoart space which means they have traffic from many collectors and many artists. Both of the sites do a lot to promote the artists and the art works as well, which is a great feature.

Once a piece is sold, does that mean no one but the purchaser can see it?  Can it ever be posted online again?

This is one of the things that makes crypto art a unique way to buy and sell art. For the most part, the sites selling crypto art do not prevent others from seeing it once it's sold. It's actually more of the opposite, in that the sites will host the images for all to see whenever they want to. Also, posting on-line is a bit controversial, but most feel that posting on-line is a good way to promote the work and to get a larger audience. There's not much of a real world equivalent to how that aspect works. There's a popular saying in the crypto art world "everyone sees it, only one owns it" said by artist Hackatao. They even made and sold a gif about it:

https://superrare.co/artwork-v2/only-one-owns-it-4489

Some artists and collectors don't completely agree with this idea. Some artists argue that posting the same artwork on social media devalues the crypto art version. Some also would like it to be set up in a way that the collector could decide whether to keep the image private or share more widely with the world. I think this is one of the issues that will continue to be explored as the space grows.

What do the collectors do with the art?

There's a wide range of collector behavior after they purchase a piece of crypto art. Some collectors will create galleries in various decentralized 3d / VR worlds to display the art. This is one of the best things about the ETH NFT art now in my opinion. There's a huge degree of interoperability between many decentralized apps right now. I have a museum and a gallery set up inside of CryptoVoxels, which is a 3d / VR world accessible via web browser. The parcels are sold as tokens on the Ethereum network and the world allows users to embed gifs, video, etc.... A lot of crypto artists have been attracted to the space and are building a really interesting world. Here's two of my locations you can check out:

https://www.cryptovoxels.com/play?coords=NE@1E,261N

and  

https://www.cryptovoxels.com/parcels/929

 You can move around with arrow keys and use mouse to look.

Some people are also buying crypto art as investments. There have been notable re-sales of digital crypto art that have traded for many times the original purchase price. Some collectors are interested in curating collections and some have set up museums for this purpose. There are also 2d web sites that work like portfolios / display pages where collectors can show off their collections. I've also seen people promoting and selling physical display panels for the home, that you can send crypto art that you own to display.

Since you have the original source files you are legally obligated to never create a copy again?  Even for portfolio purposes?

Artists agree to not reupload the same thing to multiple sites for sale, but it's ok to have in your portfolio or twitter feed. The terms of SuperRare state that the artist retains the copyright to the image, so the buyer doesn't even get the rights to re-purpose or publish the art without the permission of the artist. Some artists have decided to also include the copyright when selling the NFT.

Have you sold any pieces?  How is the price relative to real world commercial work?

Yes! I started in December of 2019 on SuperRare and have sold 34 gifs so far for an average price of 1.5 ETH  Here's a list of the artists on SuperRare

https://superrare.co/crypto-artists

where you can see number of items sold / created / average price etc......

Can the artwork be resold?

Yes, this is a big factor actually. A number of collectors do look at this as an investment and do re-sell the works. Many of the platforms even have built-in royalty payments to the original creator. SuperRare and others currently include a 10% royalty payment to the original artist on re-sales. I've already had two works resold and have received a percentage of that sale. It's a pretty cool idea, especially since many artists have seen their early creations rise in value as more people enter the space and want to collect rare items.

Do know of other artists doing this?

I've followed both XCOPY (twitter @XCOPYART) and Yura Miron (twitter @YuraMironArt) for years on Tumblr and Twitter. I noticed that they both were posting more about crypto art and their involvement in it and that's what led me to investigate the space further. XCOPY is now one of the top selling artists, if not the very top at SuperRare. Since I've gotten involved, I've met probably close to 100 other artists now through the discussions groups, metaverse meetups, discord servers and twitter messages.

Do you get the sense that this is growing?

It is growing, there are more artists coming on board all the time and the developers of the dapps keep coming up with new ideas, features and integrations. Two years ago, the early artists were selling pieces for very low prices, under $100 and lately there have been digital crypto artworks that have sold for thousands of dollars.

How do you see the future of crypto art?

It seems like it's still in the really early stages. Most people don't really understand what cryptocurrency is all about and so crypto art is still largely unknown. But I do see it growing and gaining more mainstream acceptance all the time. I think in the future, the interfaces will be more user friendly and the backend will become a bit more transparent. I really like the idea of interoperable, ownable and tradable digital assets and people are coming up with new uses all the time.

Do you feel that the idea of 'owning' digital artwork is antithetical to the open idea of the internet?

I like this question.  When I started the hexeosis project back in 2013 on Tumblr, I was making and posting art "for free" as in, anyone could look at what I was making and enjoy it and download it, etc.... If I could live in a world where money somehow didn't matter, I would be completely ok with that format. I really enjoy making and sharing art with people. The social media platforms have monetized all of the free content that we all have been providing them. They sell ads, etc... but don't share with the creators. I can't pay rent with social media likes or buy food with retweets, so I see cryptoart as a good way for creators to have direct control of the monetization of their work. Since most creators and collectors are ok with the idea of sharing the work, it doesn't really interfere with the open internet concept.

Let me know if you have additional questions! This was fun to think about and try to explain from my point of view. A lot of people in the crypto art space have come from various backgrounds, a lot of them are coders and developers and tend to explain things in a very technical manner. I am approaching it as an artist and looking at the crypto art space as a way to earn money from my digital creations. My explanations above probably gloss over some of the technical aspects and I probably even summarize some things wrong, but it's an evolving space and I am learning all the time. Thanks!

[softboywriting]

Hitched | Shawn Mendes

Summary: After a wild night in Vegas you and Shawn end up married according to the tabloids. Will these rumors change your dynamic and be the push the two of you need to finally admit your feelings for each other, or will it be the end of your relationship both professionally and personally? [personal assistant reader] [fake married] [accidentally married] [non au theme] 

Word Count: 8.5k 

|Masterlist In Bio|

Early morning sun blinds you through the windows of your hotel suite. Your head pounds, body feeling like it's been hit with a sack of bricks. Your mouth is dry like sandpaper as you reach for a bottle on the nightstand. There's a heavy weight across your stomach and you look down. An arm. A bulky thick arm with the tattoo of an orchid in a light bulb. Shawn.  

You push back the blankets to reveal the sleeping giant. He is sprawled out beside you on his stomach, arm across your waist, face pressed into the pillows. This wasn't the first time the two of you ended up in bed together, and it wouldn't be the last. At least he went home with you last night. As soon as the tequila shots had come out, you started to worry. Shawn and tequila don't mix well and he gets a little crazy.  

A pang of sickness washes over you and you need to get up. It's not like you to drink when Shawn drinks. It's sort of your job to keep him out of trouble and on task. But shit happens. At least he's with you, like you said. You did your job well enough. You push at his arm and instead of removing it, he curls it tighter around you, pressing on your stomach.

“Shawn, I have to get up. I feel sick.”

“Mmm.” He groans and rubs his face into his pillow. “No, stay with me.”

“Shawn. Now.”

“Stop talking.” He rolls over, toward you, and tugs you closer to him. “My head hurts.”

“You're hungover.”

“Probably.”

You run your hand over his hair and glitter falls out. You have no idea where that came from but it isn't what you're really focusing on. No. The ring on your finger is what catches your eye. It's Shawn's, his pinky ring, the rose gold one. Why were you wearing it on your wedding ring finger? Why were you wearing it at all? Oh no. A portion of the night comes flooding back to you. Brian had been joking with Shawn that since he lost his passport yesterday morning, he was illegal in the USA. Oh God Shawn no. You love Shawn, hell, you know him better than most at this point. It's hard not to fall in love with someone like him, but those feelings were counterproductive to your job and he could never know. Though you suppose he already does, the two of you couldn't deny looks and familiar touches. It was complicated.

“Shawn get up,” you push him off of you and he sits up quickly. “What happened last night?”

He holds his head and groans loudly. He'd had far more to drink than you did. “I don't remember.”

You put your hand out for him. “Did we get married?”

“What?!” Shawn grabs your hand and studies the ring on your finger. “No! Why would we do that?! I know we got smashed but fucking christ.”

“I don't know! Call Brian. Maybe he remembers?”

Shawn pats around under the pillows and produces his phone. “Fuck,” he turns the screen toward you and there's a bunch of missed calls and texts. You can't help but notice his background is the two of you backstage at the capital summertime ball last year. He picked you up on his shoulders to see the stage and Brian snapped a photo. He calls Andrew instead of Brian since the missed calls were all from him.

“Morning newlyweds,” Andrews voice crackles over the speakerphone between you and Shawn. “Hungover?”

“Andrew what happened last night?”

“You guys must have been seriously messed up. You wouldn't believe me if I told you.”

You sigh. “Andrew what happened?”

“Well Brian convinced Shawn that because we can't find his passport, he had to marry a US citizen to stay in the country. Which is ridiculous, because I just had to go get a temp until we can get back to Toronto and get a new one. Anyway, you and Shawn ditched everyone and went to get hitched in the basement chapel of the hotel by some Elvis impersonator who was on site for a gimmick wedding being hosted last night.”

“It's probably not even legal then. We didn't sign anything, it's just a ceremony right?”

“No, not technically, he was a justice of the peace though. Registered and everything. Brian and Zubin were your witnesses.” Andrew sighs and you roll your eyes. “Luckily it was just you four idiots and no one but us knows about this.”

Shawn holds his head. “Okay well, it's fine then.”

“Perfect. Thank Andrew.” You click to hang up and stare at Shawn. “You're so dumb y'know that?”

“Oh shut up. You obviously agreed to go along with it, so you're pretty dumb too.”

You shove him and he shoves you back, pinning you to the bed. “Shawn I swear to God if you-”

He leans down and gets close to your face. His breath ghosts over your cheek and jawline. He's going to threaten to lick you. Somehow he found out that spit grosses you out; the wet feeling, the knowing it came from someone else's mouth, all of it just squicks you out. He found out and now every chance he gets he uses it against you when he doesn't get his way or wants something. He was a damn man child sometimes. “Take it back or I'll do it.”

“Never.”

“Last chance.”

You close your eyes and wait for the worst. You'll never admit defeat. He was dumb, the whole marriage thing had to be his idea. How he convinced you in your drunken state to marry him you will never know. Obviously your brain had decided to put feelings for Shawn over work, rational thinking and common sense last night, but it's still definitely his fault.

He opens his mouth and you can feel his breath hotter than ever. You struggle against his hold and then go still when his mouth connects with your cheek. It's not spit, it's not his tongue. It's his lips, warm and soft against your skin.

“What're you doing?”

“What?”

You peek one eye open and look down at him. “Aren't you going to lick me?”

“Nah. You're my wife now.” He grins and kisses your cheek again. “I guess I gotta be sweet on you.”

“Oh shut up! I'm not actually your wife!” You shove him as he releases your arms and falls over laughing. “Get dressed chuckles. We have to be at the airport soon.”

____________________

“So are you taking my last name then?” Shawn asks with a smirk from the seat beside you. “Because I think it suits you.”

“I'm not talking to you anymore.”

“You have to! You're my assistant and my best friend.” He slides his hand over yours on the arm rest between the two of you. “Please talk to me?”

You let his fingers curl around yours as you close your eyes. He always held your hand when the plane was taking off. It's just how it was. You needed something real to hold on to until you were in the air and he was always that something. “What am I supposed to say?”

“Just answer my question. Are you taking my last name?”

“Why does it matter? We're not actually married so who cares?”

“I care.”

You cut him and glare and he isn't even smiling like he was joking. “Why?”

“I just do. Hypothetically, would you take my name?”

“Yeah. Sure.”

Shawn looks satisfied with himself. You have no idea why that mattered. It wasn't like you were actually married. Well you were officiated but, y'know, whatever.

____________________

All hell breaks loose when you and Shawn walk into the central concourse of the airport you've landed at. The screams are deafening and louder than you've ever heard before. Jake tries to keep a minimum distance as you and Shawn make your way to the front doors with Andrew and the rest of the crew in tow.

“What is going on?!” You yell and Shawn falls back to put his arm around you and lean down to hear you. “I said what's going on?”

“No clue. People must be just extra excited to see me today.”

“Shawn! Shawn! Is it true?! Have you been in a secret relationship with your assistant for years?!”

Shawn looks over to the well dressed woman who's running alongside the group. She's asking all sorts of questions about you and Shawn. Obviously a reporter.

“Keep going!” Andrew yells over the crowd and comes up close behind you. “Don't answer any questions! Me and Brian will take your bags, just go!”

Shawn passes his suitcase to Brian and you give yours to Andrew. Shawn's hand finds yours and it's sweaty as he pulls you closer to Jake. He's nervous, anxious as his eyes start darting around to what you can only assume to be over a hundred people in the concourse. The two of you were used to crowds, it came with the job, but this was a swarm.

Jake pulls the two of you into a security office with help from some of the local airport security personnel. One moment you're in deafening loudness and the next it's muffled silence. Your ears are ringing and you feel like you've just survived an apocalypse. Shawn's hand is gripping yours so tight his knuckles are white and he's shaking.

“Shawn, hey,” you say softly and he looks down at you.

“Pull the blinds please,” Jake instructs to an officer by the door. She turns and pulls the blinds on the two floor to ceiling windows looking out to the hoard.  

You sit Shawn down in a rolling chair behind a desk covered in paperwork. “Hey, look at me bud.”

The two officers and Jake move to the farthest corner from the two of you and talk among each other about how to clear up the situation outside the door.

Shawn looks at you and you run your hand over his hair. “Sorry, I just got overwhelmed.”

“It's cool. You know you just have to tell me and we'll fix it.”

“That woman knew. She knew about us.”

Us. As if there was really something going on between the two of you.

“She doesn't know anything. People have speculated for years about us. She probably just saw us talking when we got through the gate.” You scratch his scalp gently as he leans his forehead against your stomach. “Relax, deep breaths. Wanna do a vocal warm up to let it out?”

“No, it's fine. I just want to get to the hotel as soon as possible.”

“Jake,” you look over and he looks at you. “What's the plan to get out of here?”

“Security is going to escort us out. They've got more people coming down here to help. Just a few minutes. I've let Andrew know we're alright.”

“Thank you.”

Shawn stands up and pulls you into a hug. He presses his nose into the top of your hair and sighs. “Sorry I keep making today so stressful for you.”

“No, Shawn, it's not your fault.” You rub up his back and down again. “Things happen. We'll be okay. We always are.”

_____________________

Turns out the news has broken and the world knows that you and Shawn allegedly got married. TMZ was first to announce so you're sure that the Elvis impersonator spilled his guts for a couple hundred dollars. That son of a bitch. As if Shawn wasn't already having a hell of a time with stress on tour, this had to happen.

You don't even want to go out of the hotel now. The comments on every social media platform are enough to make you want to peel your skin off. There's two types of people it seems. Ones that think you're amazing and ones that hate your guts. For the most part it's people hating you.

“We're going to get dinner, are you coming?” Shawn asks, poking his head into your room.

“I'm gonna stay in. I don't want to go out.”

“Is it because of the gossip?”

“Yeah. I'm tired of being called ugly, fat and worthless. Why give people more fodder to keep the fire burning?”

Shawn steps in and closes the door behind him. “Why are you reading that crap?”

“I can't avoid it. Everywhere I go it's all people are talking about.” You flip through your Twitter feed and hold it up for Shawn. “Oh this is my favorite, gold digging whore.”

Shawn stalks across the room and snatches the phone from your hand. He throws it into your suitcase and squats down in front of you. “They're jealous. Angry jealous people who have no idea who you are.” He takes your hands and kisses over your knuckles. “They have no idea how beautiful and smart and funny you are.”

“Shawn...you're just saying that.”

“I'm not.” He looks at you over your hands. “I'm honored to call you my wife, real or fake, it's an honor. Any man who marries you is lucky.”

Tears sting the corners of your eyes and you look down, lip trembling.

“Let's stay in. We can rent a movie on the TV and order something to be delivered.”

“No, you go with the guys.” You pull one hand out of his and wipe your wet cheeks. “I'm fine.”

“I won't go.” He stands and crawls on to the bed, sitting behind you and dragging you between his legs. “I'd rather spend my night with you then watch Brian try to pick up the bartender for three hours straight.”

"Can we get Chinese?"

"Of course." Shawn pulls his phone out and scrolls through Google to find a local place to deliver. "You want your usual?"

"Yeah. Extra dumplings if they have them."

He brings the phone up to his ear and smiles. "Anything you want."

____________________

Two days later. Heading to the venue where Shawn is playing isn't usually a stressful thing. You've done it countless times. But you've never done it with everyone thinking you're his wife. The back of the transit van is silent, uncomfortably so. Shawn is on his phone, Andrew and Brian are staring out the windows and Connor is messing with something on his camera.

You hold your bag tight against your lap and sigh. Shawn opens his his legs and bumps your thigh. You look up and he's smiling. “What are you doing?”

“Can you hand me my notebook?”

“Yeah sure.” You dig around in your little black backpack and produce his tattered leather bound journal. It's his writing notebook and if anyone besides you ever had it he would probably explode. “Got an idea?”

“Yeah, just something that's stuck in my head.” He takes it and slides the little pen out from the side and starts writing. He looks so focused as he scribbles away, striking things out and looking annoyed. His brain never stopped.

“Hey.”

You look away from Shawn to Connor who is across from the two of you and has his camera up right. “Yeah? Need something?”

“No, nevermind.”

“We're here,” Andrew says as the van comes to a halt.

Shawn closes the notebook and hands it over. “Are you nervous?”

“Are you?”

“Yeah but I have you, so it'll be okay.” He grabs your hand and squeezes. “Everyone ready?”

Everyone mumbles in unison and Jake pulls open the side door to the sound of fans yelling beyond the barriers a few yards away. No questions. No photos. Just straight into the venue.

The second you're inside the venue there are coordinators ushering you to the question and answer area that's set up in a meeting room. Usually sound check would come first but you had arrived a little later than planned due to traffic and now everything was off schedule.

Shawn goes out and the fans in the q&a scream and greet him. You take a seat behind curtain that is put up as a backdrop in the front area where Shawn sits. You open up your laptop and start working on the checklist for the show tonight while also looking up local gyms for Shawn while he's in town.

Twenty minutes pass and you hear Shawn say your name. You pull out your headphones and listen to what he's saying, wondering what the question was. He just wants a bottle of water and you grab one off a cart nearby.

You don't think anything of it when you walk out in front of everyone to hand him his water. You've done it a hundred times. You don't realize that you've really messed up until the fans are awwing and suddenly asking questions over each other.

“Did you guys get married for real?”

“How long have you been together?”

“Are you really his assistant?”  

Shawn sighs and you can see Jake who is off to the side next to you just shake his head. “I'm sorry, I didn't even think about it when I asked for water.”

“It's fine. Just act like everything is normal.” You grab his empty bottle and he pops open the top of the new one. “And don't answer any questions about me.”

“I promise I won't.”

You turn and walk away, giving a little wave to the fans as you go around the back again to take your place at your laptop on an amp box.

____________________

The next night you, Shawn and a couple of the guys go out to a bar near the hotel. It's a really upscale place, private too. It's nice being able to relax and just let loose the stress from the last few days and not have anyone recognize you for a few hours.

Drinks are flowing, music is playing, you are dancing with a couple people. It feels good. Someone's hands find your waist from behind and they pull you against their solid warm body. You stiffen up, not comfortable with the sudden contact.

“You smell really good.” Shawn murmurs against your hair. “Like really good.”

You relax, trusting him and no longer worrying about it being some stranger making a move. “I just washed my hair with my usual stuff.” You turn in his hold to face him and he drops his forehead against yours. His eyes are focused on you, a little glassy from alcohol and you wonder how many drinks he's had.

“You are so beautiful.” He smiles and closes his eyes. “You just...wow.”

“Shawn, you've had way too much.” You reach up and play with the curls at the back of his neck. You've had a few yourself. “I thought you weren't going to drink much because your next show is in three days.”

“I'll be fine.”

“It's not like you.”

“I just wanted to relax.” He leads you over to a lounge area with some couches and falls back on his ass, pulling you down on top of him.

You sit on his lap and he smiles at you like a cat who caught a canary. “What are you grinning about?”

“You.” He runs his hand up your back and you loop your arm around the back of his neck. “I wanna kiss you.” He leans up so he's face to face with you. “I want to kiss you all over.”

“Why?”

“Because I want to kiss my wife.” He grins.

You roll your eyes. “I'm not your wife doofus.”

He leans in closer and bumps his nose with yours, breath ghosting over your lips. You're too drunk to handle this right now. Everything in you wants him and it's so hard to say no. You've kissed before but it wasn't like this, well, it was. You were drunk then too but it wasn't in public and with speculation of being married hanging in the air.

“This is a bad idea,” you whisper, eyes going to his pink lips and he shakes his head slightly. “Yes it is.”

“Stop talking.” He leans in and kisses you, hands going to your hair as he licks into your mouth. You take a deep breath and re-position yourself so you're straddling his thighs. He drops one hand to your waist and you feel like you just can't get enough. You can't seem to break away from him as he kisses you better than anyone you've ever been with. You know the two of you will end up going back to the hotel together, there was absolutely no doubt about that at this point. It's just a matter of how far this was going to go.

____________________

The next morning you wake up and it's like deja vu. Shawn's arm is across your stomach and your head hurts. Only this time you remember the night before. You remember walking with Shawn back to the hotel and making out in the elevator. Fumbling with his key card to get his room open. And then watching him literally collapse on the bed and pass out. You knew he'd had way too much.

“Morning,” you says softly, running your hand through his hair. He rubs his face into his pillow and groans at the morning light. “Hungover?”

“Very. My head is throbbing.”

“Let me help.” You sit up and guide him to lay his head on a pillow you pull over onto your lap. You massage your fingers into his temples and he groans softly.

“You're the best.”

“Mmhmm.” You massage over his eyes and cheeks and he just let's his jaw go slack. He's so soft like this, trusting in you completely. The last few days have been a wild ride and gone farther than your professional relationship with him should go. It's like since finding out you got hitched by the Elvis impersonator, all inhibitions were gone. The line between coworker and relationship was getting blurrier by the second and you have to redraw it before it is too late.

“You're a really good kisser.” Shawn mumbles, smiling to himself.

“So you remember some of last night?”

“Mmm yeah.” He opens his eyes and you stop rubbing his temples. “You can't deny that there's something more between us.”

“I can't, but there shouldn't be.” You return to rubbing and go down around the back of his neck eliciting a soft moan from him. “I'm your assistant first and foremost. We need to remember that.”

“Yeah.” He says softly, closing his eyes again. You know he isn't going to cave that easily. It's not like him to drop a subject just like that but you know he doesn't want to argue or anything with his head killing him. And that's just fine.

____________________

Shawn wraps his arms around you from behind and walks with his head on your shoulder. "What're you going to get?"

"I don't know, we came for you to get stuff."

"Yeah, but...I know you want something."

The two of you round the corner to the health care isle in the little 24 hour convenience store. The two of you had come down for snacks after Shawn said he needed some jerky and a Snickers. The funny thing is that those two things were your usual period cravings, and you happen to be on your period.

"Shawn, did you want to come here because of me?"

"What do you mean?" He pulls away and grabs a box of Tylenol off the shelf to toss into the bag you're carrying.

"Come on. Snickers and jerky? That's my craving snack."

Shawn grins sheepishly and rubs the back of his neck. "Am I that obvious?"

You roll your eyes. "You're transparent."

He walks over and puts his arm around your shoulders. "I just wanted to help. I saw you were having bad cramps earlier during rehearsal."

"Is that why you brought me tea from the catering cart?"

"Yeah."

You lean your head on his chest. "Thank you."

"You're welcome." He kisses your head. "Lets get those snacks and head back."

____________________

“You're still wearing the ring,” Shawn says, pointing to your hand curled around the clipboard you're holding. The second show this week is about to start and he's getting his in ears put in.

“So?”

“So? Why didn't you take it off? It's been like five days.”

You shrug and touch the little rose gold band. “It's pretty. I guess I didn't notice.” You point at his hand and he has one of his gold bands around his ring finger still too. “What's your excuse?”

Shawn shrugs. “I guess I didn't notice.”

You narrow your eyes at him and he grins. “Maybe you want to be married to me.”

“Maybe you do too.”

“In your dreams.”

“I've had a lot of dreams come true y'know.” Shawn laughs and goes to the side stage to get ready to go on. You follow him over and touch his arm gently. “Hmm?”

“I forgot to tell you to have a good show.”

He leans over and kisses your cheek, making your heart race. “Always do.”

“Pinkies for luck?”

Shawn hooks his pinky with yours and the rings click together, making him grin. You pull away and run your hand over his hair to fluff it up as the band starts playing his intro. He keeps smiling at you and walks out on to stage, bringing his mic up to greet everyone in the arena. You twist the ring around on your finger and it sends an ache through your chest. Why hadn't you taken it off?

____________________

The show is going great and you are beaming at him the whole time. He keeps doing this thing where he looks over at you and you try to keep out of view so people don't know what he's looking at. Connor asks if you'll follow him during Bad Reputation because he doesn't want to hit anything while he watches the camera screen. You've done it several times and you know all you have to do is literally walk behind him and tell him if he's going to hit an amp or something.

Zubin and Shawn are going to town on the guitar when it happens. You're following Connor but he's walking too quick, your eyes are on Shawn as he does a little grabby hand wave at you and you trip on a set of cables sticking out off the light box at the base of the stage. You go sprawling, scraping your knees on the hard concrete floor of the arena.

“Fucking shit!” you yell as you turn over and dust yourself off. Your jeans are torn in the knees and there's blood starting to stain on the left one.

Suddenly Shawn is by your side, guitar on his back as he kneels down beside you. “Are you okay? I saw you go down behind Connor.”

“What're you doing!? Get back up there!”

“It's fine Zubin is doing his thing.” Shawn puts an arm behind your back and the other under knees, lifting you up bridal style. “Ah shit your knee is bleeding.”

“Put me down. I'm fine.”

“No you're not! Look at your knee!”

You glance down and yeah your jeans were pretty much destroyed by the big bloody patch. It was starting to ache too, a dull throb right over your knee cap. “You're really not helping with the rumors right now y'know.”

“I really don't care.” Shawn places you gently on an equipment box backstage as Jake and one of the stage hands come over with a first aid kit.

“I'll be fine. Go back out there.” He starts to protest and you grab his face and force him to look at you. “Leave me and go do the show.”

Shawn leans in and kisses your lips quickly before turning and running back out on stage. Your heart stops and you are left in a stunned state, just gawking off at the stage. Did he really just kiss you? What the hell? He...you weren't...fuck.

“Hey, hello!” The stage hand, Nick, waves his hand in your face. “I can't clean it with your jeans on. Can we go to the catering room or something and have you take them off?”

“Yeah....yeah sure.” You bring your focus back to your knee and as you try to stand up on it, you wobble. Nick supports you as you head for the inner concourse and Jake stays behind.

“I'll tell him where you are when he gets done, don't worry,” Jake says with a smile. You know he seen the kiss, hell, anyone in the vicinity saw it. Shawn was not making this easy.  

As soon as the show ends Shawn is in the catering room with you. He's pretty sweaty when he comes in but you don't really care because he's got eyes for no one but you. He kneels down beside you and cradles your knee in his big hands, fingers ghosting over the gauze wrapped skin.

“You had to cut your jeans?” He asks, sliding his hand over your thigh where your jeans are cut off just over the wound.

“Yeah. I couldn't get my jeans off and they were already ruined.”

“Let me carry you to the car.”

“Shawn I can walk. It's not that bad now.”

He gives you a hard look. “You're hurt.”

“It's just a scraped knee.”

“Please, let me carry you. You're my w- it's my fault. If you hadn't been watching me wave at you, you wouldn't have tripped.”

You sigh, defeated. “I'm not going to change your mind am I?”

“Nope.” Shawn gets up and picks you up bridal style again, holding you close to his chest. You can smell his shampoo from his damp hair, curls falling in his face. “Let's go, I'll have one of the guys bring my stuff.”

“I need my bag.”

Shawn leans down and you grab your backpack off the couch you were sitting on. With that he carries you alongside Jake as he heads for the cars out back.

The second you get to the doors you see a bunch of fans waiting around to hopefully get a picture with Shawn beyond the security fence. The fans start screaming as soon as he walks out in the open carrying you toward the car. They’re waving and calling out both of your names as camera flashes go off.

“You can go ahead and take pictures.” You say to Shawn and he shakes his head. “Seriously, just drop me off in the car. I'll wait.”

“No. I want to go back to the hotel and shower and relax with you. Besides they've got their pictures.” He grins.

“Shawn.” You touch his cheek and he leans into your hand. “Please. I know you want to go say hi.”

“I do, but I really want to relax too.” Jake opens the door for Shawn and he lowers you to your feet and helps you into the car. “And relaxing comes first today.”

____________________

“Hey, are you feeling up to going out?”

You raise your eyebrows and he smiles sheepishly, knowing that you're not supposed to be seen together alone until the whole marriage thing blows over, but you're still his friend and assistant and honestly that concept of hiding it had gone out the window days ago. “Like...where?”

“Ed's in town. He texted me and asked if I want to hang out and see the show tonight.”

“Sure. Anyone else going?”

“I think Brian is gonna go.”

“What time?”

“Around seven.”

“I'll see you then.”

The concert is loud as hell, just like Shawn's are. You're stood in a private section with a few other people from Ed's crew and it's just you and Shawn. Brian didn't ever show up, and honestly you think Shawn didn't actually invite him.

Nearly forty minutes pass and Ed ends castle on the hill and starts up the chords to Perfect, his final song on the set list. Shawn wraps his arms around you from behind and you look up at him.

“I found a love, for me...” Shawn sings along softly with Ed.

“You planned this didn't you?”

“Planned what?”

“Being here together and without Brian. This is a date, isn't it?”

Shawn rolls his eyes. “A date? Really? We're just seeing Ed.”

“A concert can be a date y'know.”

“Shh.” Shawn lays his chin on your head and starts humming along to the song. The arena is dark and everyone has their phones out, swaying along to the song. It's beautiful. “Dancing in the dark, with you between my arms.” He sings softly against your head and you hold onto his arms now wrapped around your shoulders.

You take his hand and he turns you around, stepping back and grinning at you. He keeps singing as he slow dances with you, swinging you out and bringing you close in time with the music. “You're ridiculous,” you laugh and he just holds you against him.

“You love it,” he says quietly, turning you around once more and pulls you back against his chest. “And you look perfect...tonight.”

The song comes to an end and you hold Shawn's hands in yours. He kisses the side of your head and you're absolutely gone for him. He's knows it. You know it. The whole damn world probably knows it by now. ____________________

“Where's my notebook?”

“In the suitcase.” You point to his bulky black bag. “Outer pocket.”

Shawn digs into the bag and brings it out, taking a seat on the edge of the bed and writing furiously. You learned ages ago not to bother asking what was in that little journal. You know usually it's lyrics or little bits or inspiration. You never read it, no matter how many times he has you carry it in your bag, you never ever open that book.

“We've got to get going Shawn. Can you write in the car?”

“No.”

You drag his bag off the bed and over to the door. Yours is already there waiting, you had brought it over to save you from grabbing it later after helping Shawn get everything together.

“The plane won't wait.”

Shawn looks up and rolls his eyes. “Just a moment.”

“Alright.” You lean against the door and close your eyes. You're exhausted, the concert with Ed had ended up going until around nine and then visiting lasted until well after midnight. Every time Shawn and Ed got together it was like a recording session. The two were definitely of the same bunch. Now you had a six hour flight to get on back to Toronto.

“I’m ready.” Shawn whispers in your ear and your eyes fly open and you jump, making him laugh. “Let's go home.”

You swat at his chest and he grabs his bag handle. “You're such a turd.”

“I just like teasing you. Come on.”

The two of you head down to the lobby to meet Andrew and Brian and the rest of the crew. “So, what're you writing in that book?”

“Curious?”

“Well yeah, that's why I'm asking. I know usually you don't tell anyone. You've just seemed very engrossed in it lately.”

“I've been writing lyrics. I want to meet up with Teddy and see if we can't get something together. I've just...got this feeling and I want to put it into words.”

You round the corner to the lobby and Andrew looks up from his phone. “About time you two.”

“Leave the love birds alone, don't you know, they're newlyweds.” Brian teases, dragging his suitcase around behind the two of you toward the doors.

“Fuck off Brian!” Shawn yells and you elbow him for yelling in the lobby.

The rest of the trip home goes smoothly, you sleep on the plane with Shawn leaning against you and it's possibly the best sleep you've had in a few days. Landing back in Toronto is a bit annoying, as fans have come to meet you and Shawn at the airport like usual. Only now they're rowdier than ever due to the news about your alleged marriage.

"Don't pay attention to any of it." Shawn says, wrapping his arms around your shoulders and staring down at your phone. You've just arrived at his apartment and you'll be leaving tomorrow to go to your own place in New York. "We'll just lay low and then in a few weeks it'll all be over."

"Yeah I guess. How exactly do we convince fans we aren't hitched?"

"Probably should take off the rings."

You pocket your phone and hold your hand out in front of you. Honestly you've grown accustomed to the little ring on your finger. It fits so comfortably.

“Maybe being married isn't such a bad thing.”

You look up from your hand to where Shawn is now across the bedroom lying on the bed on his stomach. “What?”

“I mean, aren't we already kind of married?”

“No?”

“Think about it. You know more about me than anyone. You can read me like an open book. We're always together, I trust you more than anyone and we definitely have chemistry. We have such a connection, it's insane. Maybe it's not such a bad idea.”

You close your eyes and sigh softly. “You cannot be serious. We can't be married. We just can't. I'm your assistant, not your wife.”

“Technically you're both right now.”

“Shawn. It wasn't a legal binding ceremony.”

He gets up and walks over to you, taking your hands in his. “Come on. You'd get so many benefits as my wife. You could come to awards shows with me, walk red carpets, be on my health care plan. I can also avoid the “when are you going to have a girlfriend?” conversations. I really don't see any downsides.”

“Really? No downsides? What about dating? What about falling in love and wanting to marry someone for real? I can do pretty much all that other stuff as your assistant if you want me to. None of it has to do with me being your wife or not. And why don't you have a girlfriend? You're like the most eligible bachelor in history. Rich, gorgeous, young and talented. What's the deal?”

“You know why I don't. Besides I don't want to marry someone else.”

“What? Are you kidding me? Why the hell would you want to marry me in the first place? And on that note, no, I don't know why you don't have a girlfriend, besides being on tour and stuff.”

“You really don't get it do you?”

“For the love of God, why can't you stop talking in riddles for like five minutes?”

“It’s because I'm in love with you.”

Your heart stops. He doesn't mean it like that. He can't. He isn't allowed to. No. He can't. You didn't want to hear those actual words, it made it all too real.

“Shawn, I think you really need to think about that. You can't just say that lightly.”

“I have thought about it.” He walks you over to the couch just past the doorway into the living room. “It's all I think about all the time. I've wanted to tell you for the last three years but how do you tell your assistant that sort of thing? And I wanted to be sure you felt the same, or you at least had an interest in me. You're hard to read though. I could never figure out what you were thinking until this last year, hell, the last few weeks when I realized you've been holding back.”

“Shawn... I-I don't know.”

He takes your hand and threads his fingers between yours. “Don't hold back. Do you want to be with me?”

“I mean, yeah, of course. More than anything Shawn, but...we can't.”

“We can. We absolutely can.”

"But my job and the fans...it's a lot to handle."

"And yet we've been doing it for the last week basically."

“I...I should go.” You pull your hand away and stand. You grab your bag and head for the door. There isn't really anywhere to go besides your place. The second you get out the front doors you call a cab. It wasn't as if you didn't feel the same way about him, because you did. It's just...it would never work. If you mixed your job with your relationship it could end badly. That's what you've been telling yourself anyway. There's a line, a very clear line, and you can't bring yourself to cross it...though you've definitely been bending over it a bit. Well, maybe a lot.

____________________

The sun is just starting to set as you take your seat on a plane flying to New York. You're alone, carry-on bag in the compartment over your seat. You called and talked to Andrew about what happened. He was fine with it, in fact he'd rather Shawn be with you then deal with bringing a whole new person into the picture, but you still don't think it's for the best. Four years, four long amazing years and just like that you find yourself out of a job and heading back to your hometown.

You didn't say goodbye to Shawn. You couldn't. The next time you see him will be...well, no, you don't know when that might be. You lean your head back and fight the tears welling up in the corners of your eyes. You want to stay, you do, but you can't hurt Shawn if things go bad or just don't work out. The stress and tension that would put on your professional relationship would be too much. You won't break his heart, you just won't.

You put on your headphones, lean your head back and put on a sleep mask. If you just tuned it out you would be fine. Minutes pass and you feel the plane start to move, taxiing to the runway for take off. You feel your nerves getting the best of you, hand curled around the end of the arm rest. You never flew alone, you always flew with Shawn.

A hand covers yours and you jump, jerking away. You pull your sleep mask off to see who the hell thought it was okay to touch you. Your heart drops when you see Shawn in the seat beside you.

“What the hell are you doing?” He asks, irritation evident in his voice.  

“I'm going home.”

“You're running away.”

“I'm not. It's for the best.”

“The best for who?.”

You look away and clench your jaw. “You don't get it Shawn.”

He reaches over and turns your head to look at him. “No, you don't get it. You are running away because you're scared. You're scared to admit that we have something special because you're afraid it won't work out. But let me tell you what, you've seen me at my worst and my best and I've seen you in both lights as well. I think you know just as well as I do that we're meant to be together.”

“But what if it doesn't work out?”

“And what if it does? You can't try and take the safe route every time. There is nothing about our relationship that says it won't work. Please, do you know how hard it was to be told that you quit all of a sudden? That after spending a good part of four years together, you were just going to walk out of my life? Do you know how bad that hurt?”

“I just thought it'd be easier. I didn't want to hurt you.”

Shawn pushes up the arm rest and scoots closer to you. “Nothing is going to be easy. It never is.” He grabs your hand and threads his fingers between yours. “Please don't leave. You're my best friend. You don't want to hurt me but this, leaving, is going to kill me.”

“How'd you find me?"

"You always fly Delta when you go home. I just checked for a flight to New York and got a ticket. It doesn't matter."

You sigh and lean your head on his shoulder. "You really want to do this?"

"Yes. And we don't have to be married, we can just date. I just want you in my life, please."

"I want you in mine too." You hold his face and he tilts your head up to kiss you gently. "I suppose we're just a little backwards on all this, getting married and then dating."

"I guess this is where we start then."

You smile and he kisses you again, and again and again.

_____________________

Three months later

"Babe, did you get the email from Teddy about the song?" Shawn asks as he pulls on a suit jacket.

You glance over at his stylist who's holding up two shirts to the jacket. Shawn is standing there with his arms out like a dork while she works her magic. "I haven't gotten any emails from her. I have one from Connor though?"

"What's Connor sent? It must be a big file if he can't text it."

"Let me open it." You click the link and it opens a video in the media player on your laptop. The playback opens with you sitting on Shawn's shoulders at capital summertime ball, the moment Shawn had on his lock screen photo. From there it cuts to you and Shawn backstage playing slaps before a show and him squealing every time you faked him out. Then it's the two of you sharing a strawberry shake from McDonald's. You remember that day, he said he didn't want anything and ended up stealing half of your order.  

"What is it?" Shawn asks, sliding off the suit jacket and walking over to lean on the back of the couch.

On the screen you and Shawn pose like goofballs in his new merch for the tour. The two of you sleeping on a couch backstage at some event. Shawn putting his jacket over your shoulders during a late night video shoot. Then there is recently, the two of you in the back of the car when he asked for his notebook. You can see that Shawn is stealing glances as he writes, something you hadn't noticed at the time. There's footage of Shawn at the concert jumping off stage to pick you up after you tripped. And finally, the last little bit is when the two of you were boarding the plane home and you grab Shawn's hand as you walk through the boarding tunnel.

"Wow..." You laugh softly, covering your mouth. "We're so transparent."

"Connor...he really did that." Shawn leans over and kisses your cheek. "I guess everyone knew we were together before we did."

"Yeah. Obviously."

"I'm going to have Teddy send you a copy of the new song." He turns back to his stylist and she holds out his shirt she's chosen. "I want you to listen to it tonight and tell me what you think."

"This is the song you've been keeping top secret for the last month?"

He grins sheepishly. "Yes, I promise it's worth it."

"Your songs are always worth it. I'm pretty sure you've never written a bad song."

"You're so sweet."

"Only to you."

_____________________

Shawn goes out to sit at some awards show and you stay behind in the green room. You've had enough with award shows in the last few years. They're usually too loud and full of cringey dialogue. You put in your head phones and press play on the file that Teddy sent to you. She didn't send any explanation other than a little winking smiley face and honestly you're suspicious. Shawn has never kept a song from you before.

"Put my heart on the line so many times, but when I'm with you I know I'll be fine. I'm falling, falling in love with you. Can't stop this feeling I know it's true."

Your eyes go wide as you realize this song is definitely about you. "Oh my God. Shawn..." You laugh to yourself as you begin to tear up. It's catchy and touching and...how dare he.

You finish the song and go to find him out in the crowded ballroom. You make your way through the room full of people and find his spot empty near the front next to Ed and his wife.

"Where is Shawn?" You ask Ed and he points toward the doors you came through saying he got up a few minutes ago.

You turn and double back to see if he's in the bathroom but there is absolutely no one in the halls.

"Honey, what're you doing?" Shawn laughs, and you turn to see him walking out of the green room. "I thought you wanted to chill in the back, I came to see how you were doing."

You walk up to him and he puts his arms around you. "You wrote a song about me."

"Yes I did."

"Everyone is going to know."

Shawn grins and runs his hand up your back. "Yes they will."

"A song!"

"Yes. You inspire me, I couldn't not write something about how I've felt for ages. Teddy helped me make it into something amazing. I'm really excited to release it."

You lay your hand on his cheek and he leans into it. "You're lucky I love you."

He kisses you softly and smiles. "What're you doing later?"

"Going to the after party with you?"

"Yeah, well I heard there's a wedding going on here tomorrow. Maybe the officiator will be around."

"Shawn."

"Maybe I should make you a legal Canadian citizen this time around." He grins and you narrow your eyes at him. "What do you think?"

"I think you're soft."

He slides his hand into yours and brings it up to kiss your joined hands. "It's been almost three and a half months and you haven't taken off my ring."

You flush and look away. "Yeah well...it's nice."

"Mmhmm."

"Okay, yeah...I want to be more than your girlfriend." You smile and look up at him. "I've wanted it for ages, but isn't it a little fast?"

"I don't think building up to this for three years is fast."

"You're right...I've just been thinking about it as the last few months but it has been years hasn't it?" You chuckle and shake your head. "Are you proposing to me then?"

"Yes." He drops down on one knee and reaches into his jacket pocket. "Will you be my wife, my assistant and my best friend?"

"You...have a ring on you?"

"Yeah I...I got it a while back." He looks at the ring and up at you. "I've just been carrying it around and waiting for the right moment to give it to you."

"You're such a sap."

"Yeah but, you already knew that. So, tell me, will you be my everything?"

You slide off Shawn's ring and pick up the ring from its box and slide it over your ring finger. "Yes. Yes I will."

Shawn stands and cups your face, kissing you softly. "I love you."

"I love you too."

The end.

__________________

Thank you so much for reading! Please reblog if you read and if you enjoyed it. 

Shout out to @shawnm521 for help and inspiration with this one, you are seriously the ultimate muse and I couldn’t be more grateful. 

Please let me know what you think, what your favorite parts are and more via ask, reblog, reply or message. Thank you again!

-A

[scripttorture]

I was wondering, is there a drug that can be injected into someone that can hurt them physically? Maybe cause a burning sensation or something? If not then I just won't get that specific during that part of the story, but I try to be as accurate as possible.

Yes but as a general rule drugs are rarely used to torture people and an injected drug is particularly unlikely to be used. (For those who don’t know, part of the reason I can answer this question confidentially is because my day job is in medical drug testing. I work at a place specialising in lung diseases, we are very busy right now.)

 There have been cases, I won’t say this impossible. But I would caution against suggesting that anything this rare is ‘typical’ torture and I feel like this particular idea skirts pretty close to apologist ideas about ‘advanced’ ‘scientific’ torture. And torture can not be advanced or scientific by its nature.

 Here are a couple of factors that might explain why the use of drugs is rare in torture:

Expense

Difficulty forcible administering drugs to a struggling victim, especially without training

Detectability of drugs, ie they leave evidence in the victim’s body

Difficulty obtaining or justifying the presence of drugs on site, ie it makes sense for a specialist hospital to have chemotherapy agents, it does not make sense for a police station to have them

The risk posed to torturers by having drugs in a setting that doesn’t make sense: it makes abuse obvious to inspectors.

The necessity of calculating dosage for each victim or risking obvious injury and death

 If you’re writing a story that’s set in the modern day and more-or-less in our world then drugs are probably not a good pick. At least not unless this particular method adds something worthwhile to your story.

 I feel like you’d need to explain why torturers are putting themselves at risk of detection and going to so much extra effort for this one victim. Torturers are pretty lazy, if there’s a lower energy or simpler way of hurting someone then that is what they’re likely to do. So why would they use this compared to say, a stress position?

 I could see this working in an alternate world, but I still think it wouldn’t be a common form of abuse. If torture is legal and the torturers don’t have to worry about being discovered, then perhaps this would be more likely. But that doesn’t get over the fact it would still be more difficult from the torturer’s perspective. It also doesn’t get over the fact it would be more expensive then a stick or a bucket of water.

 For more typical tortures by country I have a masterpost on National Styles over here.

 I’m telling you all of this to give you some background. If you feel like there are good plot reasons for using drugs/injections in your story then feel free to do so. Just be aware of the issues surrounding this particular trope and, well the reality.

 If you’re dead set on using this there are some additional problems to do with- basically how difficult it is for someone with no training to safely inject a struggling person.

 Injections of even small amounts of air can be lethal. Needles can break, blunt or bend.

 Based on the standard disposable needles we use at work (which are also used in hospitals) I’d suggest breakages are less likely now then they were in the past, but those things can definitely bend, get blocked or come off the syringe if they’re not attached properly.

 All of which can make injections of air, injections of the wrong dose or big spillages more likely.

 I think overdoses would be quite likely because I don’t think torturers would bother to calculate dosage levels properly. I don’t think they’d account for changes in body weight, health or the victim being on a starvation diet.

 Overdoses are not necessarily lethal, depending on the amount and the drug in question. But they can be extremely damaging. And the exact form of that damage depends on the drug.

 Torturers might actually try to give victims overdoses because the effect they’re after is an unwanted side effect of the medication, not its purpose. And side effects are generally more likely with increasing doses (incidentally this is part of why drug developers are so interested in systems that deliver the drug only to a specific part of the body, it means a reduction of dose and side effects).

 There’s also the uh- issue that the drug will continue to do what it’s designed to do as well as cause pain. And in a person who doesn’t have the disease the drug is meant to treat that can be a long term problem.

 All of this adds up to a high chance of random death, scarring around injection sites, bruises, bleeding and damage to blood vessels. It can mean long term health problems, possibly development of disease, as a result of being given a drug.

 Having said all of that, if you’re dead set on the idea and convinced it adds something useful to the story- then I think the class of drugs you’re looking for are chemotherapy agents.

 I’ve not worked on cancer drugs. My knowledge of them comes from my university courses and colleagues. And errr not to get technical but they’re really fucking scary.

 A lot of chemotherapy agents are designed along the principal that they will probably kill the disease before the patient.

 Most of them work by attacking and destroying dividing cells. Because cancer cells divide quickly. But so do a lot of healthy cells. They destroy the gut lining, hair follicles, the inside of the mouth and a lot of cells generally involved in immune response.

 The result is that this entire class of drugs often causes pain, as well as nausea, vomiting and a host of other nasty things.

 The first chemotherapy agent? Mustard gas. Dissolved in a solvent and injected. It causes burns at the site of injection and a lot of pain.

 It also works. It’s an awful treatment but it is still used against some forms of blood cancer.

 Repeated exposure causes cancer. I don’t just mean for the victim character.

 Any regular exposure to these drugs is potentially dangerous. Including for people administering them badly and without protective gear. They may also start to experience some of the side effects.

 Wrapping this up, I think it’s best to weigh up the risks this scenario poses in your story and think about whether the characters would take those risks. Consider whether there’s a way you could use those risks later in the story. Perhaps this torture case is really easy to prove in court because there’s medical evidence of the damage the drugs did. Perhaps one of the heroes finds the villain’s lair because that was a really weird place to be getting shipments of these drugs.

 I hope that helps. :)

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Disclaimer

[wrongfullythinking]

Twitter and the “Public Forum”

There is a very large looming legal question about whether or not social media sites, such as Twitter, are “Public Forums.”  Most would agree that they are not... at least... not yet.  But the question is... should they be?

First, a look into why it matters.

In a public forum, all First Amendment protections apply.  So you can say any number of very objectionable things (https://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=12634874511090553174) and be protected.  In a private forum, this is not so.  I can kick you out of my house for wearing an Abercrombie shirt, and you have no Free Speech/Expression reason to contest my staggeringly good decision-making.

Second, the public forum cannot be policed for any content that may be stated.  This is why if you go to reserve time at a public park, you don’t have to tell the Parks and Rec department what your event is for.  Just things like how many people, how long the event will last, etc.  This is well-established and well-backed by many years of precedent.

Finally, there is the very serious matter of personal liability.  In certain circumstances, officials can be held personally liable if their policies deliberately and knowingly infringe upon Bill of Rights protections (most often First Amendment protections).  This means that you could literally sue for the property and assets of a person.  (Also, this is why those of us who own either physical property [like a house] or intellectual property [like a book] buy “Umbrella Coverage” from insurances... I recommend State Farm, but that’s totally irrelevant and I’m not getting any kickbacks for that shill =P.)

But hang on... so if the government owns a billboard and rents it out to whomever can pay, can I rent it and post a naked lady?

You could try, and you might win!  What you can’t do is post something obscene.  And yes, whether or not a naked person is obscene is staggeringly controversial.  There’s a 3-part test from the Burger court, a host of vague terms like “average person” and “contemporary community standards,” and “lacks serious artistic/literary/political/scientific value.”  And then there are protections for children, a whole separate piece, as well as child pornography, which is always classified as obscene... except when it is not, like in the cases of naked cherubs in church windows.  So, confused yet?  We’re off topic, but I make this point to explain that even in public forums, where First Amendment rights are fiercely protected, there are still outstanding issues of content censorship.

So, is Twitter / Facebook / Tumblr a public forum?

At this point, the answer is no.  They are privately controlled by companies, not owned by the feds or states or local municipalities, and thus can make almost any policy they want.  The idea here is that the free market dictates the life or death of these platforms... and that idea tends to hold true!  Tumblr itself is a good case-in-point, because it has lost millions of dollars in value due to bad leadership decisions, and at least partially because of censorship.  There are countless examples of others... I remember when Yahoo! was the primary search engine of the internet and Xanga was the biggest blogging platform.  While you can still Yahoo, I’m not sure there are more than a few hundred people on Xanga, if it still exists in any useful format.  So, since places like this are subject to the free market, and thus can die... they should be allowed to make all the good or bad decisions they want about their content.  Or at least, that is how the theory runs.

But really... ARE they subject to the market?  Now we’re getting into the really interesting territory.  If Facebook shut down tomorrow, would it be a problem?  Maybe, but life would continue.  But if Google shut down tomorrow?  Well, millions of schoolchildren are in GoogleClassrooms right now, so that would certainly be a problem.  It would at least cause massive disruption... and Facebook shutting down would cause some disruption.  Likewise, Twitter controls so much speech that instead of publishing headlines from Newspapers, newspapers publish headlines from Twitter!  The 14-year-old looks at that line like “well, duh” and the 44-year old reads that line like “wow, we’ve come a long way,” and the 84-year-old reads that line with just a sad headshake.

So, now we’ve joined one of the most controversial points of the last 20 years... the Fannie Mae “Too Big to Fail” problem.  Basically, a set of banks and big mortgage companies (Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac) made a bunch of bad decisions in about 1995 - 2008.  [As an aside, whether or not Fannie Mae {technically, the “Federal National Mortgage Association”} is actually a company comes up as an issue... it originated as a government program, but is today a publicly-traded company and has been since the late 60s, though it was delisted from NYSE and is only traded off-exchange].  And the government had to step in.  You can read all about that issue at another time, the bottom line is that actually Fannie Mae has paid back more than it borrowed, but there was a ballooning of the debt ceiling by over 800 billion.  Some people care about the national debt, some don’t, and again, not the subject of this commentary.  The point is that it set a very odd precedent, whereas a company could make extremely bad decisions and then the burden would be placed on the taxpayers to fix their decision, because the company itself was a part of so many people’s lives.  Would social media fall under this guidance?  Unlikely, and I think we would all run from state-sponsored social media... but hey, what do I know.

So... get to the point.  Should they be public forums, or not?

My two cents always comes down against censorship, especially censorship by entities that don’t have my best interests at heart... so basically, everybody else.  I think that it is so easy to self-censor the internet at the personal end (for example, by installing filters and blocking services for objectionable content), that companies should not be unilaterally making these decisions, especially if those companies want to be venues for mass public communication.

Let’s go with another example... let’s say you wanted to call up your buddy and have a nice long phonesex session.  Good for you.  Or just chat with them about the latest Dr. Doe video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QXgT8WXaPUY), because enthusiasm is important.  Would you be okay with Verizon telling a robot to monitor your call, and then automatically hang up if you said “penis” too much?  Or “Trump”?  Or “Black Lives Matter?”  What about “Nazi,” “Rohypnol,” “Mary Jane,” “negritos” [I’ve got your back, Mr. Cavani], “snowbunny,” or “Insane Clown Posse”?  I think most people would be upset about any of those, and they would rightfully tell Verizon that they will find another provider.  So Verizon doesn’t do that, although it could.  But Twitter does do that.  And the availability of another Twitter is in question.  Will something succeed Twitter?  Absolutely.  But right now, Twitter is under no market pressure, so it is succeeding at taking off its platform any number of conversations that it probably should not be policing.

There’s also a social-justice side of this.  So, let’s say that we all decide Twitter is a bad platform and move to something else.  And that something else costs us 10$ a month.  I wouldn’t notice this fee.  Others would.  So that’s an access issue.  Or, let’s say that some people start migrating to a new platform, and they only tell their friends about it.  That’s okay, right?  Absolutely... but imagine that college student who is trapped at home in a pandemic right now who cannot get any viewpoints outside of what her parents approved of, and previously used Twitter to explore and challenge her upbringing.  If she doesn’t get an invite to the new platform, is she just lost?

And that brings up the Pandemic.  Many, many common public forums have been shut down due to the pandemic.  This alone has caused serious controversy (see: BLM protests on crowded streets where state governors participated, while those same governors implemented executive orders enforcing 6-foot distancing in churches and stores), so the argument for Twitter censorship “but you have many other public forums!” is tough to substantiate during the COVID-era.  And this is a HUGE problem.  Historically, taking away public forums is always an early move of totalitarian regimes.  Taking away rights to assembly and speech follows soon after.  We’re now in Phase 2 there... and our governors keep assuring us it is temporary... while at the same time, encouraging Twitter to take off any viewpoints they don’t like, under the guise of “false or misleading information.”  Soon, they start moving into the schools, and that leads to...

SCIENCE!!!

So, to talk about what rigorous debate means, we need to understand a bit about Science.  And specifically, the philosophy of science, what scientific discourse looks like, and why review and critique are parts of the scientific process.

Point 1: “Scientific consensus” is hogwash.  Yes, we all agree that the Earth orbits the Sun, and the Sun itself moves, but beyond that, there isn’t much scientific consensus.  If you see an article that starts with the phrase “Expert say,” you can go ahead and close your browser window right there.  The rest is bull****.

Point 2: The limits of science are boundless.  Any specific scientific paper is, by necessity and the peer review process, very strictly bounded.  “Whether or not a vaccine is efficient” is an entirely different paper than one titled “Whether or not 80-year-olds with lung cancer should get the vaccine,” and both of those are different than “How the US should achieve herd immunity, and if it is even possible for COVID-19 before significant mutations cause current immunizations to be ineffective,” and all three of those are different from “Do we need to vaccinate our cats from COVID in order to reach herd immunity?”

Point 3: There is no “finalized” science.  The answers are never finished.  What is “cutting edge” science today is out-of-date tomorrow, barbaric and backwards by the end of the year, and grounds for an abuse lawsuit by the end of the decade.  The best examples of this are from Psych treatments.

Point 4: I get very worried when anybody starts to censor scientific content... especially those without any qualifications.  Okay, so this one is a personal sentence (note the “I”), but I’m going to go ahead and guess that Twitter robots and interns flagging posts don’t have any idea the difference between sensitivity and specificity, the background as to why the FDA has never approved an mRNA vaccine previously, the difference between statistical and clinical significance, and how to read a limitations section.  The people who are qualified to do so are peer reviewers... and in the case where those fail (which happens!), the rest of the writer’s peers.  And we do that.  Anything published is open to critique, which leads to the final point, that...

Point 5: Critique and Review are THE MOST IMPORTANT PARTS of scientific publishing.  If a piece is published without review, it is called an “opinion” and not science.  Even more worrisome than the censoring of unpopular papers is the censoring of the opinions of scientists on the papers of their peers.  Should someone publish a paper where I believe they overstretched their claims, it is a HUGE part of my job to call that out.  For an agency like Twitter to be able to say “you don’t have the right to say that they overstated their claim, because expressing a concern about a vaccine is against our Terms of Use” is a very big problem for science.

The flipside is that you get into the part where now a company can, through its policy, dictate what science gets done.  For example, lets say I wanted to examine an unpopular question... and I’m a social scientist, so there are plenty of those, but say I wanted to do something semi-controversial but apolitical.  I’ll say my research question is “How do the happiness of those in committed multi-year polyamorous relationships compare to the happiness of people in similar economic and social situations but in closed marriages where additional intimate partnerships would be viewed as grounds for relationship termination?”  There are plenty of ways I could conduct this study and I’ll spare you my methodological musings, but safe to say there are platforms who would not want me to publish my results.  And that’s fine. 

But let’s say that I did publish my results, and a commenter took to Twitter.  And their response was “I read your paper, and I see your conclusion that those in committed multi-year polyamorous relationships score no differently on a happiness scale than those in the closed marriages.  However, I disagree with your use of this scale, because it was tested on populations of retirees, and most of the people in your sample are in their late 20s or early 30s.”

That is an EXCELLENT and VALID critique.  And let’s say that Twitter was heavily into the social justice and had a policy that said “you can’t say negative things about polyamory.”  And they deleted this person’s comment.  Now, Twitter has interfered with the scientific process.  That comment IS PART of the dialogue and that dialogue is part of Science.  Yes, there are other places that those comments could be made, and not be censored... but we should not be encouraging that censorship ANYWHERE.  And Twitter has vastly overstepped the line on this point.  Random Twitter employees have no business removing professional critiques about a study, even if there are other platforms for those critiques.

Other Thoughts

1) Generally, you can’t prohibit meetings in a public forum based on prior behavior.  Thus, “X group was violent in the past” is not a reason to prohibit X group from accessing a public forum for speech.  So there’s no saying “Proud Boys were violent once, so no Proud Boys on Twitter” if it were to be declared a public forum.

2) I’m really not aware of any large precedents for taking a private company and declaring it a public forum.  That may seem redundant (obviously, if there was precedent, this wouldn’t be such a hot-button issue), but it bears specific mention.

[rubberduckyrye]

dreamingkatfish replied to your post “dreamingkatfish replied to your video ...”

God yeah the fear about what's going happen with private and unlisted videos. I'm also very tempted to take down my entire youtube. This is all very fucked. And yeah what makes me fear for DR is the blood is pink, so what are they going to say it's for kids because of that? And yeah it really is a slippery slope. Thankfully fanfic is probably fine and ao3 has a team of lawyers and they've been fighting for fanfic for a long while now. So they'll probably be able to help protect fanfic. But other content, especially on commercial sites? It's a very real possibility that its next. And man I hate idea of us having to make everything paywall. I legally cant and a lot of people I know technically cant either since most of those websites you have to be 18+ or else for. Which is screwing over younger creators badly. But also killing creation with the force of having to paywall our stuff so it can even exist. Best case scenario is we end up with ao3 like website but for videos. But I'm not sure. Hosting videos is a lot different than hosting writing. Plus then all the creators are still probably going to be without revenue. Which again kills the industry and such.

Same--I might just. Take everything down. I definitely have some private videos of me and Celest at an aquarium and a video of my cat. Also, while Kokichi is from DR, the video I have showcasing my remixes for his execution??? That would be a disaster to figure out. Because it’s just a static image of a “cartoon/anime” character. If they’re going by “if the thumbnail is child friendly it’s kid content” shit, then--then despite the fact Kokichi is a character from a mature franchise, will it count as kid content?

That is so terrifying and bad. What if a child discovers my “kid content” video and thinks that Danganronpa is content safe for them? I would not want to promote the idea of a five year old scrolling through youtube, finding that particular video, and looking up “Kokichi Ouma” or “Danganronpa” or “Executions”. Pink blood or not, executions from DR are fucking brutal and terrifying. I don’t think minors younger than 16 should even have access to DR.

And don’t get me started on Miu. Miu alone should be rated M or higher. Can you imagine a child repeating any of her dialogue?

This is 100% more dangerous to kids than some stupid ads that make kids want more toys.

This does royally screw over minors in the creative field, because you can’t create or access “adult content” which might not even be all that adult.

If it wasn’t for how vague everything about COPPA was, I wouldn’t be so panicked over it. I’d post my content for free on youtube--I don’t need ad revenue. I never got it before. But with my Danganronpa content, I can’t make that content available to children, even if it’s just a character from the franchise holding a kitten. No matter how sweet or innocent the art, it will put a child more at risk to seeing something not made for them if they go ahead and get curious about it. That means any potential theory videos is 100% out of the question.

Fuck, I don’t even know if having a paywall is enough. How young is too young? If all minors count as “children,” then do I have to flag my patreon as “adult content”?

Fucking hell.

At least Ao3 would be safe, probably. Ao3 is strict about having no advertisements--even content creators can’t advertise things like commissions. That should, at least, keep fanfics there safe. Idk about anywhere else.

[bebizboss]

how to choose a domain name ? (11 Tips)

How to choose a domain name for your WordPress/Blogger site? No matter how big or small, you need a good domain name for your site. It’s a gateway to the online world. Still trouble with How to choose the perfect domain for your site? let discuss,

How To Choose A Domain Name? (11 Tips)

How To Choose a Perfect Domain Name?

Looking for buying a top-level domain for your new created/hosting web or blog site or interested to buy a customized domain behalf of your subdomain in blogger. Also, you are looking for how to choose a perfect domain and how to purchase it. , and How to choose the best domain register you buy it? My Most recommended best domain register is Namecheap. Most of the people became confused when choosing a domain name for their blog or web. yes, that process can be quite complex. But you do not need to so serious, you can get a better idea about how to choose a perfect domain for your blog/web site after reading this post. There are a lot of web sites that provide domain registration and hosting facilities including commercial as well as without any charges. We can buy a domain from them, but the most difficult thing is choosing the best domain and choice the best domain register.

What is the domain name?

Domain names serve to identify Internet resources, such as computers, networks, and services, with a text-based label that is easier to memorize than the numerical addresses used in the Internet protocols. A domain may represent entire collections of such resources or individual instances. Individual Internet host computers use domain names as host identifiers, also called hostnames. -Wikipedia-                                                                                                                                            Domain names are also used as simple identification labels to indicate ownership or control of resources. Also, it used to establish a unique identity for your web/blog or company. Organizations or persons can choose a domain name that corresponds to their name, helping Internet users to reach them easily. Before the advent of today’s commercial internet, in the ARPANET era, each computer on the network retrieved the hosts file (host.txt) from a computer at SRI which mapped computer host names to numerical addresses. At previous days, they used a host’s numerical address on a computer network behalf of the domain. With the rapid growth of the internet, it made impossible to maintain a centrally organized hostname numerical addresses. That became more complicated. In 1983, on behalf of that numerical address, the Domain Name System (DNS) was introduced. Today, the ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers) which is a non-profit organization who has been delegated the responsibility to manage the DNS System has managed top-level development and architecture of the Internet domain names. ICANN authorizes domain registrars, through which domain may be registered and reassigned. Most of the bloggers buy a domain quickly without thinking more. But you should keep in mind that, if your Domain isn’t good, you will get negative feedback, also you will change your mind after a while. Also, you should keep that in your mind, your blogger’s or web site’s address will be online business card and identity for you, as long as you work on it. So try to choose a perfect domain. If you have an easy and simple domain, It will help you to be a popular and successful blogger. Not all that also I suggest you stick to go on with a .com domain. Also you can buy a .net, .org, .info, .us. But .com is the best.

How to choose the best domain name for your Web or Blog site?

Before you go to buy a domain that domain should be in order to come up with some qualities such as below,

What should you consider when choosing a domain name?

1.Short and sweet

If the domain name is too long and complex, you risk readers or customers mistyping or misspelling it. If you have fewer characters a website domain has, the easier it is to type, say, share and the less it gets shortened on social media sharing platform and that is also friendly for search result and SEO. So, short and sweet is the best way to go.

2. Make it brandable

Creative and brandable are always better than going generic. Your domain name is how your visitors will find, remember, share your web or blogger and how readers know you So it’s like a foundation of your web or blogger. So your domain should be a unique, memorable and stands out from your competitors, also it should have a good sound.

3. Easy to type and pronounce

That domain should be simple and easy to spell like Google, Facebook, and Yahoo. Your readers should be able to type your domain without a problem. Also, it should be easy to pronounce. If visitors can pronounce without any difficulties they will easier to share your domain by word of mouth, then easily they can share your site among their friends and other readers.

 4. Use keyword

Try to use some keywords that describe your content, business and the services you offer. It helps to improve your rank on search engine and just make more sense to your readers. But don’t go over the top with the domain. for that, you can use a domain name generator tools.

5. Avoid number and hyphens

 That numbers and hyphens can be made misunderstood the people who hear your web site address. Also, it can be difficult to friendly with search engines. Numbers and hyphens can be made difficult to remember and familiar with index robots.

6. Memorable

There are more than 1500,000,000 domains, so try to create a memorable domain. After you decide a best domain you can get the help of your family members, friends and your staff to review about your domain. Ask them if they can easy to remember those names.

7.Research it

After you decide a domain make sure the name that you decided isn’t trademarked, copyrighted or being used by another company. If another one is already using that name it can be a huge legal mess & could cost, you a fortune. So after you create a domain do domain search in google and check domain availability. For that, you can use domain name checker tool.

8. Use an appropriate domain extension.

Domain extensions are .com, .net, .org, .info, .co, biz, .me. That also called TLD (top-level domain) which is the part that comes after your domain name and before your subpages.     .com: an abbreviation for company, commerce or community.     .info : informational sites.     .net : technical, Internet infrastructure sites.     .org : non-commercial organizations and nonprofits.     .biz: business or commercial use     .me: resumes or personal sites. Also, there are a lot of new domain extensions and most of the domain registrars offer a low price offers for that. If you are targeting the global market, then try to go with .com extensions. Most successful sites using that .com extension. But if you are using target market or country then choose a TLD for that country you are targeting like .us, In, co.UK,

9. be Unique

Make sure no one using your domain. Also, try to buy many other domain extensions like .net, .org. with your domain. Then you can stop other people getting your name with another domain extension. That domain should completely unique.

10. Short term or long term

You should think about how many long terms are you going to work with your domain. Is it long term or short term? If you are going to short-term (one year) then you can buy a domain for low prices because many domain registrars offering very low prices for the first year. But if you are going to log-term you must more consider about your domain. Because you have done a lot of cost for your web site like web design, daily updates in the content or blog posts, money, time SEO. If your domain will fail to succeed, then you have to losses. It can be a waste of your all investments.

11. Get support from the domain name generators

Still, Don't know which domain to choose? By using the Domain Name Generator tools you can choose a perfect domain for your site. However, you should be careful here. Most Domain Name Generator tools have the already registered domains. Those are for reselling purpose so this can be costly for you. Also, as soon as you find a perfect domain you should need to buy it as soon as possible. If not those tools or domain agents will be purchase those domains before you buy it.

What should need more to consider When Choosing a Domain?

Buying a domain is easy, but choosing a domain can be the most difficult thing. Because the best possible domains are already taken. That is the most probably happening. When you are going to search your dreamy name, maybe it owned by another person. Yes, that can be happening. Because there are currently more than 150,000,000 active domains. If already your dreamy domain is owned by another person or company. Then Don't worry, forget it, try to similar words and be more creative. However, don’t overthink about your domain name.

Conclusion

If you become a success full to choose the best name, you will win the internet and there are a lot of chances to earn more money from your web or blog site. Also after getting a high rank in the search engines, your domain will become a valuable one. Then you can sell your domain for high value. I hope the above 10 tips help you to solve the problem of How To Choose A Domain Name for your blogger or web site. And if you have any problem or know more on How To Choose A Domain Name? Please share with us in the comments section below. Read the full article

[timeclonemike]

Just In Case.

So the CRA is coming down to the wire. While I don’t think it’s impossible that somebody will cross the aisle at this point, I wouldn’t put money on it. Of course, after the CRA come the lawsuits, and of course all the states trying to pass legislation to protect net neutrality. The battle is far from over.

But we could still be looking at some unsavory stuff in the future, if not outright Bad Shit Going Down.

So I’ve compiled a list of resources here. I would advise everyone who sees this post to go to the links, if they still work at the time of reading, and save the content locally. Bookmarks might not be enough at some point, you want to have this information on a drive or USB stick somewhere. Maybe even print it out, just have it some place where somebody else can’t keep you from seeing it or hold it hostage.

1. IP Addresses

It’s possible that an ISP censoring content might only think to mess with the Domain Name stuff and not actually block IP Addresses, or there may be technical or legal problems with blocking IPs themselves, so it might be a good idea to know what address a particular site or service uses. You can find some advice on how to do that here.

In case the links no longer work, for whatever reason, there are several methods that get listed. The online version involves this website:

https://ipinfo.info/html/ip_checker.php.

The windows OS version involves using the Command Prompt to send a ping command to a given website. A lot of people who do computer and network troubleshooting will be familiar with this already, because pinging google is a quick benchmark for connectivity and speed issues. Macs use the same ping command, inside of an app called Network Utility, which can be found using the Spotlight. iPhones an Android phones have a specific app for this kind of thing called, surprise surprise, Ping and PingTools respectively, but if you can’t access the app store anymore than you probably have bigger problems than simply navigating a censored and divided internet.

2. VPN Software

Virtual Private Networks have previously been used as a means of staying anonymous online, among other things, but they may be useful as a way to bypass content restrictions imposed by ISPs, acting as a middleman and allowing access to sites and services that the ISP itself may have blocked outright. Of course, whether or not they will work depends on exactly how the ISP is monitoring and restricting content, and whether the VPN itself is hosted in a region where an ISP is blocking and throttling with abandon. Some information on the subject can be found here. There are some obvious concerns about free versus paid VPN services, though I imagine if ISP censoring becomes common enough they’re going to basically “grow” a market of companies and software designed specifically to get around restrictions. Whether or not you can trust a particular type of software, well, if I could predict the future I’d be picking lottery numbers and using the winnings to start funding municipal broadband all over the country like some sort of Guerilla Philanthropist. Keep your antivirus software as up to date as possible, go with your gut, and do not write anybody a blank check.

3. Mesh Networks

This is both a hardware and last mile issue that is not directly connected to the problems of ISP censorship and throttling, but worth mentioning. Simply put, a mesh network is a more redundant system than a single line line of cable. Transmitters and receivers connect to each other on an ad-hoc basis in order to hand off information requests from one device to another to another until they reach a portal to the internet at large, and the process works in reverse to deliver that information to the person who requested it. These have been built in a lot of regions where investment in broadband has not happened, and they have their drawbacks such as requiring a critical size threshold to stay healthy and functional. But the advantage is that no one person can control what goes on over the network, and it can survive a loss of some of the transceivers as long as the minimum size is maintained. A community based organization could use a mesh network to get around restriction on landline communications that are filtered by an ISP, and such an organization might plant the seeds of an actual cooperative broadband arrangement in the future. An article that goes into more technical details can be found here, although it is not entirely technical and there’s more complete sources out there. Keep in mind that this article was written back in 2013, so not only has the technology improved, but the conditions that resulted in it becoming necessary back then pretty much knocks the legs out from under the claims that the internet was doing absolutely fine before the 2015 Open Internet Order.

4. Cut The Cable

I mentioned this in my last big net neutrality post about what to do if push came to shove, but I think it’s worth repeating. The essential idea behind paying for internet is that you get information and communication resources in exchange for money. If your local company is not providing you with the videos and fanfic and news and games and chatting with friends that you want, then do not provide them with your money. Cancel your account, and make sure that they know why, and then use that money on anything else. They did all of this so they could make more money, so starve them out of necessity and / or spite. Being separated from friends, well, that’s going to be traumatic, but if your company won’t let you communicate with them anyway then you might as well spend that money on something else, even if it’s just a box of envelopes and a book of stamps. (On that note, consider exchanging mailing addresses, or rented PO boxes / General Delivery in a nearby municipality, with people you absolutely want or need to keep in contact with, and do that while you can still talk online. Not over open channels, obviously.) As for the rest of it... heck. Maybe a lack of constant bad news from various websites will put us all in a better mood and frame of mind so we can actually come up with plans of action to fix this mess, without struggling under a constant psychological drain.

5. Get Your Voting Stuff In Order

Come November of this year, we all need to go into the polls and kick out all the cowardly, craven shills that sold our world, our futures, and everything that makes our lives tolerable to a bunch of greedy corporations. Make sure you are registered, make sure you have everything you need to bring to the polls if your state has a voter ID requirement like mine (thanks for nothing, Kobach) and mark the date on your calendar. And when the day comes, vote. Find the time to get away from whatever you’re doing, be it classes or work or whatever. If you know, or just suspect, that you won’t be able to vote on the appointed day, look into getting an advance ballot and use that instead.

Good luck, everybody.

[the-kdrama-llama]

Illegal streaming is wrong, and we should stop

Honestly, I'm super ticked DramaFever shut down, on a number of levels. And let me preface this rant with I am most upset at AT&T in the DramaFever case for treating people in a really shitty way. But it also made me think about illegal streaming.

1. AT&T Warner did this in the worst, shadiest way possible - didn't give anyone warning, still took money out of people's accounts *the day it closed*, didn't stop new accounts from signing up. I still don't 100% believe they'll refund us. All in the name of capitalism and making more money by bundling whatever licensed properties they have into their own service which people will have to pay more for.

Which leads me to

2. THIS is why I absolutely dislike illegal torrenting and streaming sites. This may be a hard pill to swallow, and I know I speak from a position of privilege in having money I can comfortably pay for subscription streaming sites. But even outside those who are greedy for profit and try to squeeze the consumer's last penny doing awful things and jacking up prices, the thing is, we are not entitled to any particular form of entertainment.

We're not. We're just not. People are not required to make things like this publicly available. It's not even so much a matter of legality as moral justice - in freely streaming a product you're legally required to pay for, you are stealing from a whole host of different people. All because, "I want it." Cool, I want a Ferrari, shall I go steal one? And expect not to be punished for it?

But what, you ask, does this have to do with DramaFever shutting down? Perhaps nothing directly, but certainly use of illegal streaming sites probably affected how much money DramaFever made, which in turn affected which and how many dramas they could license (I mean you don't just get bought out by larger conglomerates if you're doing well competitively).

If you live in a region where drama content is unavailable that absolutely sucks and I truly sympathize. But you're still not entitled to it just because you want it, and you shouldn't resort to illegal methods of watching.

I realize there are people who can't afford the prices of streaming sites, and while I don't think illegal streaming is right as I mentioned above, I understand your case and think that we need to help make things reasonably priced, and help re raise people's standard of living so they can, you know, eat, live, all those good and necessary things and yes, enjoy entertainment as well.

But in general for everyone, and especially for those who CAN afford to shell out the cash if they really want to and just don't - we need to be less entitled.

DramaFever was extremely cheaply priced. Less than $10 a month. The average middle-class American can usually afford $4.99 a month. Heck even if they technically can't people pay for services like Netflix and such anyway and make it work.

But with everyone streaming illegally, companies make less money. The less money they make, the fewer licenses they're able to purchase and maintain, especially on more popular properties. This leads to fewer subscriptions and less traffic - people will go where the popular products are.

Yes plenty of companies are greedy but often they do honestly need a good portion of the money they charge you to bring you the product you want. It's how they go about doing that and using the money that can pose a problem.

So please, if you stream illegally, stop. I know the internet has developed and made legal things murky, and have made societies more global and accessible which is great! But we need to think not just about legal but also moral ramifications, and remember we don't deserve access to something just because we want it (and that stealing is wrong and can negatively affect access for us and others).

[ultragaydeer]

Kids.

(tw: pedophilia, sexual abuse/assault) Hi. If you follow me on Twitter or elsewhere you probably know that I've been pretty outspoken on a specific topic recently, that being kids/cubs being drawn in fetish situations (specifically vore). While this as a discourse has been mostly replaced with the zoosadism ring, I felt like making a journal to outline my thoughts as I seem to be attacked by both sides on this. I want to preface all of this by saying that this is an issue very close to me. Several of my friends are CSA survivors. My mother was sexually abused as a teenager. I have had a few traumatic experiences myself. Suffice it to say, pedophilia and sexual abuse affects a good portion of my family. But I am speaking for no one but myself when I talk about this. To see a community that I cherish and enjoy to the point of making it a full-time profession fail to recognize the danger of what it is allowing hurts me in a way I cannot describe. In this country, child pornography and child sexual abuse are at very high levels currently. Multiple studies and federal officials have corroborated this. You can see it in our own community; the amount of people admiting that they have been sexually assaulted (such as in the twitter thread which curated stories of peoples' experiences with being groomed) is ludicrous. A quick click through WikiFur reveals a startling amount of furries have been charged with grooming minors in the past and present. Recent developments like with Zaush show that it is still a very real problem in this community. Many have pledged to fight against this gross aberration; but I still see a shocking amount of cub and otherwise underage content being posted. Obviously, outright cub porn is banned on FurAffinity. And, again, obviously, fetish content of underage characters getting eaten is kind of difficult to use to groom people. But, first of all, it is still sexual; even if the artist doesn't gain sexual satisfaction from producing something like that, they are still putting it out in a place where people who DO feel arousal from those types of situations can access and proliferate it. I see the argument that "it's not sexual to me" used to justify creation of underage content, and while it's great if you don't enjoy it that way, it's still sexual to some. Vore is a fetish, and you can't cut it any other way. Just because you don't get arousal out of it doesn't mean that a majority of people won't either. The problem with "fictional" kids is that this sort of art still normalizes the concepts of sexual abuse and pedophilia. Although it's a lot more difficult to groom someone with drawn underage content rather than straight up photographic CP, it's still doable; and outside of it, that kind of drawn content still contributes to an overall normalization that these kinds of things are okay, that they don't harm anyone, when in fact they are actively working towards breaking down the taboo against children being involved in any sort of sexual situation, whether "traditional" or not. Normally breaking down taboos is good, but in this case, breaking down that taboo will only lead to more people being hurt, traumatized, and changed forever, in the worst possible way. Which brings me to Eka's Portal. A site that I begrudgingly post to despite the fact that nearly every unsavory person I've had to work with has come from there. Most people know that it's not the greatest site on the internet; and although I've tried to help improve the site in the past, I can only do so much. The site has an underage forum in the first place, which should have been a complete red flag that everything I would say would fall on deaf ears. But I'm becoming more and more convinced that the site's administration actively knows what they are doing is wrong, and refuses to do anything about it. Hosting content from people like Odinboy666, who freely admits that "Ever since I was a small boy I've always got a fun tingle deep inside when imagining what would happen if the monsters under the bed caught me. Now I'm all grown up, and I still get that tingle :-P", and who posts some of the worst content on the entire site (shota gore...), is simply indefensible. Although the thing that makes me the most frustrated is HOW they defend the indefensible. Eka offers only one argument for them hosting these types of things: it's not TECHNICALLY illegal. And that abuse of loopholes and the slow progression of the legal system is the greatest admission of guilt I have seen in a while. Crying that what you're doing is not technically wrong is like somebody pulling the "i'm not touching you" game in sixth grade. You know what you're doing is wrong, and you're hiding behind the archaic legal system to avoid having to do anything about it. Sickening. I hope we as a community can come together and realize that any type of underage sexual content, fictional or not, human or not, will only serve to continue the normalization of underage sexual conduct, and will only lead to more people being hurt and traumatized. I see the tides shifting every day, as more and more young people in the fandom who have these awful experiences in their past speak out against those that perpetrated them and those that helped, inadvertently or otherwise, trick them into thinking that underage contact is okay. Thank you.

[douchebagbrainwaves]

JUST AS HOUSES ALL OVER AMERICA ARE FULL OF CHAIRS THAT ARE, WITHOUT THE OWNERS EVEN KNOWING IT, NTH-DEGREE IMITATIONS OF THE ATTITUDES OF PEOPLE WHO'VE DONE GREAT THINGS

One of the most powerful of those was the existence of channels. Is there some test you can use is: always produce. If there's something people still won't do, it stops being a self-indulgent choice, like buying expensive office furniture.1 But I tried living in Florence when I was talking about how investors are reluctant to put money into startups in bad markets, even though that's the time they happen, using the state of the economy doesn't matter much either way.2 It's not rapid prototyping for business models though it can be, but apparently not in the startup world. Is the existence of English majors, and therefore jobs teaching them, that calls into being all those thousands of dreary papers about gender and identity in the novels of Conrad. But it would require a great moral effort; it would mean staring failure in the eye every day for years. We're starting to move from social lies to real lies.

I don't think the bank manager really did. It's also more dangerous. Pretty soon you'll start noticing what makes the preceding paragraph true is that it's slow and uncertain. When Microsoft and Apple were founded.3 There's an A List of people who will later do great things, you'd be able to benefit from it, because a toll has to be is a test. In practice they spend a lot of pro-union readers, the first paragraph sounds like the sort of thing a right-wing radio talk show host would say to stir up his followers.4 What good does it do me to know that my programmers would be more productive working at home on their own projects? But it doesn't matter much either way. As written, it tends to offend people who like unions, because it seems sympathetic to their cause.

If employees have to be made to work on. What matters in Silicon Valley is how much effect you have on the world. At best you may have a couple internships, but not, probably, to music. The better you understand them the better the odds of doing that. If the world had a single, autocratic government, the labels and studios could buy laws making the definition of property be whatever they wanted. It happens naturally to anyone who does good work.5 It's an exciting place. I hear the RIAA and MPAA would make us breathe through tubes down here too, even though we no longer needed to. You have two choices: give it away and make money from it indirectly, or find ways to embody it in things people will pay for.

It has always mattered for women, but in the late 90s said the worst thing about living there was the low quality of the eavesdropping.6 That's what all publishing used to be like. Plenty of things we now consider prestigious were anything but at first. But I have a legitimate reason for doing this. Customers are used to being maltreated. For example, reading and experience are usually compiled at the time they happen, using the state of the economy. That's a separate question. At the moment, even the smartest students leave school thinking they have to get a job.7 Initially you have to show off with your body instead.8 The message Berkeley sends is: you should make more money. That's the reason to launch fast is not so much that there was a university nearby. Unproductive pleasures pall eventually.

Nor is there anything new, except the names and places, in most news about things going wrong. It would have been on the list 100 years ago. Whoever controls the device sets the terms. If they accepted it, it wouldn't be read by anyone for months, and in the meantime I'd have to fight word-by-word to save it from being mangled by some twenty five year old copy editor.9 They have an answer, certainly, but as a predictor of success it's rounding error compared to the founders. You can't blame kids for thinking I am not like these people; I am not suited to this world.10 This suggests an answer to a question people in New York and the Bay area are second class citizens—till they start hedge funds or startups respectively. Most people who did great things were clumped together in a few places where that sort of thing a right-wing radio talk show host would say to stir up his followers. On the blunderometer, this episode ranks with IBM accepting a non-exclusive license for DOS. But those are usually free. Ten years ago there seemed a real danger Microsoft would extend its monopoly to servers. They work odd hours, wearing the most casual of clothing.

Technology trains leave the station at regular intervals. The organic route is more common. The basic idea behind office hours is that if you had enough strength of mind to do great work have to live in a great city.11 The problem is the same they face in operating systems: they can't pay people enough to build something better than a group of inspired hackers will build for free. Everyone knows that these little social lies aren't meant to be taken literally, just as, occasionally, playing wasn't—for example, set prices based on the qualities of the founders. How lucky that someone so powerful is so benevolent. Most people fail.12 At one extreme is the day job, where you work regular hours at one job to make a few people in a position to do that.13 I better not start a startup now, because the economy is better before taking the leap? I'm not going to try. The reason these conventions are more dangerous is that they interact with the ideas.

If I had a copy of the New York Times. Teachers in particular all seemed to believe implicitly that work was not fun. Everyone knows that these little social lies aren't meant to be taken literally, just as we were designed to eat a certain amount of fiber, and we feel bad if you haven't succeeded yet. The crazy legal measures that the labels and studios have put themselves in the position of the food shop.14 But this time something new happened. And so the average person expressing his opinions in a bar sounds like an idiot compared to a journalist writing about the subject.15 If you know you can love work, you're in the home stretch, and if you write about controversial topics you have to find the city where you feel at home to know what they want to do, but in most ambitious kids, ambition seems to precede anything specific to be ambitious about. The owner wanted the student to pay for the smells he was enjoying.16 But this is certainly not so with work.

Maybe I'm excessively attached to conciseness. When you talk about cities in the sense we are, what you're really talking about is collections of people, so you could use the two ideas interchangeably. Offer surprisingly good customer service. You should be hipper. The record labels and movie studios used to distribute what they made like air shipped through tubes on a moon base where we had to buy air by the liter. You have to like what you do? When I say business can learn about new conditions the same way I write essays, making pass after pass looking for anything I can cut. This is easy advice to give.17 When an investor maltreats a founder now, it gets out. That may be the greatest effect, in the most literal sense, not news: there is nothing new in it.

Notes

You're too early if it's dismissed, it's probably a bad deal.

Without visual cues e. In general, spams are more likely to have done all they demand from art as stuff.

Geoff Ralston reports that one of them. College English 28 1966-67, pp. Auto-retrieving filters will have to do better, because you couldn't possibly stream it from a few critical technical secrets.

And while we might think it might make them less vulnerable to gaming, because people would be investors who say no for introductions to philosophy now take the hit.

But let someone else. When an investor makes you much more analytical style of thinking. They would have been about 2, etc, and outliers are disproportionately likely to resort to expedients like selling autographed copies, or at least accepted additions to the customer: you post a sign in a world in verse, it would literally take forever to raise five million dollars in liquid assets are assumed to be employees, with identifying details changed. On their job listing page, they still probably won't invest.

The Harmless People and The CRM114 Discriminator.

After a while to avoid sticking. There is of course finding words this way that makes the business for 16,000 sestertii, for example, if you aren't embarrassed by what you've done than where you go to die from releasing something full of bugs, and Foley Hoag. Even the desire to do that.

99, and each night to make the police treat people more equitably. That wouldn't work for us to Steve Huffman and Alexis Ohanian, both of which he can be and still provide a better user experience. This is actually from the truth to say that intelligence is the least VC-like.

I quote a number here only to buy your kids' way into top colleges by sending them to private schools that in the belief that they'll only invest contingently on other sites.

According to Zagat's there are certain qualities that help in deciding what to think about so-called lifestyle business, A. And frankly even these companies wish they weren't, as I know of a refrigerator, but this would be at a friend's house for the firm in the production of high quality. This is almost always bullshit.

5 to 2 seconds. If we had, we'd have understood users a lot about how things are going well, but half comes from a technology startup takes some amount of damage to the ideal of a lumbar disc herniations, but it might help to be started in 1975, said the things you want to pound that message home. The markets seem to be a predictor of high quality. Digg's is the kind that evolves into Facebook isn't merely a subset of Facebook; the creation of wealth for society.

But which of them is a sufficiently identifiable style, you usually have to do better. One reason I stuck with such energy that he transformed the field they describe. Or you make something hackers use. He had such a baleful stare as they are themselves typical users.

Unfortunately, making physically nice books will only do convertible debt, but it might even be symbiotic, because the test for what gets included in shows is basically a replacement mall for mallrats.

I think lack of movement between companies was as late as 1984. Greek philosophers before Plato wrote in order to win. You could feel like a VC who read this essay wrote: After the war on drugs show, bans often do more than the others.

At some point, when politicians tried to pay out their earnings in dividends, and many of the junk bond business by doing a small percentage of startups that get funded this way that weren't visible in the Valley itself, not because Delicious users are not all of us in the preceding period that caused many companies that can't reasonably expect to make the people who said they wanted to. But although I started using it, and all those 20 people at once, and for recent art that does. But it isn't critical to do it all yourself. My first job was scooping ice cream in the mid 1980s.

Some government agencies run venture funding groups, you have to disclose the threat to potential investors are just not super thoughtful for the desperate and the Origins of Europe, Cornell University Press, 1983. 66, while she likes getting attention in the 1980s was enabled by a combination of circumstances: court decisions striking down state anti-dilution provisions also protect you against tricks like a little too narrow than to confuse everyone with a screw top would have undesirable side effects. Living on instant ramen would be unfortunate.

To say nothing of the kleptocracies that formerly dominated all the red counties. I made because the remedy was to become one of the paths people take through life, the approval of an email being spam.

Thanks to Jessica Livingston, Jeff Weiner, Sarah Harlin, Geoff Ralston, Kevin Systrom, Aaron Iba, and Sam Altman for their feedback on these thoughts.

[neptunecreek]

Podcast Episode: The Secret Court Approving Secret Surveillance

Episode 001 of EFF’s How to Fix the Internet

Julian Sanchez joins EFF hosts Cindy Cohn and Danny O’Brien as they delve into the problems with the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, also known as the FISC or the FISA Court. Sanchez explains how the FISA Court signs off on surveillance of huge swaths of our digital lives, and how the format and structure of the FISA Court is inherently flawed.

In this episode, you’ll learn about:

How the FISA Court impacts your digital privacy.

The makeup of the FISA Court and how judges are chosen;

How almost all of the key decisions about the legality of America's mass Internet spying projects have been made by the FISC;

How the current system promotes ideological hegemony within the FISA court;

How the FISC’s endless-secrecy-by-default system insulates it from the ecosystem of jurisprudence that could act as a guardrail against poor decisions as well as accountability for them;

How the FISC’s remit has ballooned from approving individual surveillance orders to signing off on broad programmatic types of surveillance;

Why we need a stronger amicus role in the FISC, and especially a bigger role for technical experts to advise the court;

Specific reforms that could be enacted to address these systemic issues and ensure a more fair review of surveillance systems.

Julian is a senior fellow at the Cato Institute and studies issues at the intersection of technology, privacy, and civil liberties, with a particular focus on national security and intelligence surveillance. Before joining Cato, Julian served as the Washington editor for the technology news site Ars Technica, where he covered surveillance, intellectual property, and telecom policy. He has also worked as a writer for The Economist’s blog Democracy in America and as an editor for Reason magazine, where he remains a contributing editor. Sanchez has written on privacy and technology for a wide array of national publications, ranging from the National Review to The Nation, and is a founding editor of the policy blog Just Security. He studied philosophy and political science at New York University. Find him on Twitter at @Normative.

Below, you’ll find legal resources – including links to important cases, books, and briefs discussed in the podcast – as well a full transcript of the audio.

 Please subscribe to How to Fix the Internet using Stitcher, TuneIn, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your podcast player of choice. You can also find this episode on the Internet Archive. If you have any feedback on this episode, please email podcast@eff.org

Resources

NSA & FBI

Stellar wind

NSA Collected US Email Records in Bulk for More than Two Years Under Obama (The Guardian)

NSA's Stellar Wind Program Was Almost Completely Useless, Hidden From FISA Court by NSA and FBI (Techdirt)

FAQ on NSA surveillance, including FAQs about EFF’s litigation to stop the mass surveillance (EFF)

Pen trap and trace authority and wiretap authority and other electronic surveillance, including Title 3 (relevant to wiretaps)

Crossfire Hurricane

Crossfire Hurricane (Wikipedia)

Read the Inspector General's Report on the Russia Investigation (New York Times)

Carter Page: Justice Department Says Facts Did Not Justify Continued Wiretap of Trump Aide (New York Times) 

Court Cases

Smith v Maryland (Wikipedia)

Smith v Maryland Turns 35, But Its Health is Declining (EFF) 

US v. Miller (Wikipedia) 

U.S. v. Maolin Ninth Circuit Opinion (ACLU) 

United States v. Maolin case page and brief (Brennan Center) 

United States v. Maolin case page (EPIC)

Jewel v. NSA case page (EFF)

About Federal Judges - Article III Judges (US Courts) 

Section 215 & FISA

What You Need to Know about the FISA Court- and How it Needs to Change (EFF) 

FISA Court Docket

Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act

Reform or Expire (Section 215 of the Patriot Act) (EFF)

Enhancing Civil Liberties Protections in Surveillance Law (2015 USA Freedom Act and the introduction of amici) (Brennan Center) 

Classified Information Procedures Act (CIPA) (Wikipedia)

The Classified Information Procedures Act: What It Means and How It's Applied (Lawfare) 

Books

Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace 2.0 by Lawrence Lessig

National Security Investigations and Prosecutions by Douglas Wilson and David Kris  

Transcript of Episode 001: The Secret Court Approving Secret Surveillance

Danny O'Brien: Welcome to How to Fix the Internet with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a podcast that explores some of the biggest problems with face online right now. Problems whose source and solution is often buried in the obscure twists of technological development, societal change, and subtle details of Internet law.

Cindy Cohn: Hi everyone, I'm Cindy Cohn, the Executive Director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and I'm also a lawyer.

Danny O'Brien: And I'm Danny O'Brien, and they let me work at EFF too—even though I'm not a lawyer. Welcome to How to Fix the Internet, a podcast that explores some of the more pressing problems facing the net today and then solves them. You're welcome, Internet.

Cindy Cohn: It's easy to see everything that's wrong with the Internet and the policies that govern it. It's a lot harder to start naming the solutions to those problems, and even harder sometimes to imagine what the world would look like if we got it right. But frankly, that's the most important thing. We can only build a better Internet if we can envision it.

Danny O'Brien: So with an ambitious name like 'How to Fix the Internet', you might think we're going to tackle just about everything. But we're not, and we're doing that on purpose. Instead, we've chosen to go deep on just a few specific issues in this podcast.

Cindy Cohn: And sometimes we know the right answer—we're EFF after all. But other times, we don't. And like all complex things, the right answer might be a mix of different ideas or there may be many solutions that could work or many roads to get us there. There is also some bad ideas some times and we have to watch for the blow back from those. But what we hope to create here is a place where experts can both tell us what's wrong, but give us hope in their view of what it's going to look like if we get it right.

Danny O'Brien: I do feel that some parts of the digital world are a little bit more obviously broken than others. Mass surveillance seems like one of those really blatant flaws at EFF we've spent years fighting pervasive US government surveillance online and our biggest fights have been in what seem to us the most obvious place to fight it, which is in the public US courts. But there is one court where our lawyers will likely never get a chance to stand up and argue their case. Even though it's got surveillance in its name.

Cindy Cohn: Our topic today is the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which is also called the FISC or the FISA Court. The judges who sit on this court are hand picked by the chief justice of the United States Supreme Court, that's currently Justice Roberts. The FISA Court meets in secret and has a limited public docket and until recently it had almost no public records of its decisions. In fact, the very first case on the FISC docket was an EFF transparency case that ended up getting referred to the FISC. But this where almost all of the key decisions about the legality about America's mass Internet spying projects have been made and what that means is pretty much everybody in the United States is affected by the secret court's decisions despite having no influence over it and no input into it and no way to hold the court accountable if it gets things wrong.

Danny O'Brien: Joining us now to discuss just what an anomaly an American and global injustice the secret FISA Court is, and how we could do better is Julian Sanchez, the Cato Institute's specialist in surveillance legal policy. Before joining Cato, Julian served as the Washington editor for Ars Technica where he covered surveillance, intellectual property and telecom policy. He has also worked as a writer for the Economist blog, Democracy in America and is an editor for Reason Magazine where he remains a contributing editor. He's also on Twitter as Normative and that's one of my favorite follow there.

Danny O'Brien: Julian, welcome to the podcast. We are so happy to have you hear today.

Julian Sanchez: Thanks for having me on.

Cindy Cohn: Julian, you have been incredibly passionate about reining in mass surveillance for as long as almost anyone, perhaps even me. Where does that passion come from for you?

Julian Sanchez: I don't know if I have an origin story. I was bitten by a radioactive J. Edgar Hoover or something, but as an adolescent I was in a way much more technical than I am now. I ran a dial-up BBS when that was still a thing before everyone was on the Internet and I remember watching people dial in and I think it was something people sensed was a private activity as they were writing messages to each other and tooling around looking for things to download. Sometimes I would just be sitting there watching them and thinking, gosh, the person who operates the platform really has visibility on a lot of things that we don't instinctively think of as observed. Probably just as a result of being online, for some values of online from a pretty young age, I was interested in a lot of the puzzles of how you apply rules that we expect to govern our conduct in the physical space to this novel regime.

Julian Sanchez: I remember in college jumping ahead and reading Lawrence Lessig code and discussing the puzzle of the idea of a perfect search. That is to say, if you had a piece of software, a virus let's say, that could go out and look only for contraband, it would only ever report back to the server if it found known child pornography or known stolen documents. Would that constitute a search? Is that the kind of conduct that essentially, because it would never reveal anything but contraband, could be done universally without a warrant or should we think differently about it than, for example, the Supreme Court thinks about dog sniffs. If it only ever reveals what is criminal, that is, the presence of narcotics or bombs, then it doesn't technically count as a search even though it is a way of peering into a protected space.

Julian Sanchez: more recently, whimsically, the Risen and Lichtblau story back in 2005 'Bush Lets US Spy on Callers Without Courts,' which was the first public hint of what we later came to know was a mass program of warrantless surveillance called, Stellar Wind. I was just dissatisfied with the quality of the coverage and ended up buying the one book you could get about FISA, 'National Security Investigations and Prosecutions' by David Kris and Douglas Wilson, and burning through it like Harry Potter. I just found it inherently fascinating. This was at a time when, and I was still a journalist at the time, it was a time when most of the reporters writing about this did not understand FISA very well. They certainly had not read this rather thick, and to normal human beings, boring treatise and so I found myself, because I now have this rather strange knowledge base, writing quite a lot about it, partly just because the quality of a lot of the coverage of the issue was not very well informed.

Cindy Cohn: We had a similar experience here at EFF, which was, at that time it was my colleague, Lee Tien and I, and we had read Kris and so we ended up becoming the only people around who knew about the secret court before everybody suddenly became aware of it. But let's back up a second. Why do we have a FISA Court? Where is it? I've talked a little about who is on it, but where does this idea come from?

Julian Sanchez: This grows out of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 that was passed in response to disclosures of a dizzying array of abuses of surveillance authority and their power more generally by the FBI especially, but the American intelligence community in general. For decades, oversimplifying a bit, effectively wire tapping had been initially just illegal period and then very tightly constrained and the FBI had essentially decided those rules can't possibly really apply to us and so FISA, for the first time, created an intelligence specific framework for doing electronic surveillance. The idea of having a separate court for this, I think, grew out of a number of factors.

Julian Sanchez: One is the sense that there was this need for extreme secrecy where you were dealing with potentially people with foreign state backing who were not necessarily going to be sticking around for criminal prosecution. And when you're talking about intelligence gathering, criminal prosecution isn't necessarily the point. And so this is an activity that is not really designed to yield criminal cases. You don't really want the methods ever disclosed. You're dealing with adversaries who have the capability to potentially plant people in ordinary courts, that's where you're discussing interests, sources, and methods in your intelligence so there was a sense that it would be better to have a separate, extra secure court. And also that you might not want to have to explain all this both highly sensitive and potentially quite complicated intelligence practices and information to whatever random magistrate judge happened to be on the roster in the jurisdiction where you were looking.

Julian Sanchez: And also that the nature of intelligence surveillance is quite different in so far as, again, you're not necessarily looking at someone who has committed a crime, you think someone is working on behalf of a foreign power and trying to gather intelligence for them or engage in clandestine intelligence activities. But you don't necessarily have a specific crime you think has been committed. Your purpose in gathering intelligence is not to prosecute crimes. These are the cluster of reasons around the formation of a separate court for that purpose and it originally consisted of seven federal circuit judges, now it's 11 after the USA Patriot Act increased the number and so they continue serving on their regular courts and then, in effect, take turns in rotation sitting for a week and hearing applications from the Justice Department and the FBI to conduct electronic surveillance.

Cindy Cohn: The court started out as one thing, this idea of individual secret warrants for spies basically, but it's really changed in the past decade. Can you walk us through how those shifts happened and why?

Julian Sanchez: And of course to the extent that older FISA Court opinions are not available. The first ever published opinion of FISA Court was in 2002 and it was quite a few years before we got a second. Now quite a number of more recent ones are public, but we still have to speculate about the earlier history of the court, but veterans of the court, that is retired FISC judges have effectively confirmed that, in its early years the FISA Court was primarily about assessing the adequacy of individual warrant applications. It was just a bread and butter magistrate judge usually almost scut work. Okay, have you made the showing that there is probable cause to believe that the target of the surveillance is an agent of a foreign power. You have, you haven't. In 99.9% of cases, it was, you have and they took a pass on that individual warrant and as we get to the, in particular, the post-9/11 era and you're dealing with questions of trying to, one, often figure out who an unknown target is. You might have someone whose using a particular email address or other account that you don't otherwise necessarily have an identity.

Julian Sanchez: You're potentially trying to sift through a lot of data to figure out who your target is or which data pertains to the people you're interested in. There is a shift toward more programmatic sorts of surveillance and so the court increasingly is not passing on the question of have you established a probable cause showing with respect to "bad guy X" but rather does the law, does a statute written to deal with pre-Internet communications technology permit you to do the surveillance you're contemplating and in particular, might it allow you to gather information in ways that go beyond just targeting a particular facility, a particular phone line, that is the home phone of a particular known target. And so it ended up building this kind of secret body of precedent around what kinds of programs for Internet type network surveillance were permissible under a statute that was not written with that in mind.

Cindy Cohn: They really did shift from individual warrants to approving whole programs and whole programs that really went beyond, is this person a spy to let's look at this whole network and see maybe if there is something that indicates that a spy might be there. It really flips the kind of basis way that we think about investigations. From my perspective, obviously, I've been litigating this in the courts for a long time so it kind of flipped the whole thing on its head.

Julian Sanchez: And so we know, for example, maybe I should give some maybe more concrete examples. We know there was a bulk telephony metadata program under one FISA authority that actually was sort of the second case of this kind the FISA Court had to consider. There was an earlier question presented by a program that used what was called the pen trap authority, pen register trap and trace authority, which is, in the traditional phone context, this is about essentially real-time metadata surveillance. Meaning let's say there's a particular phone number that we think is up to no good, maybe we don't have a full blown probable cause wiretap order for that number yet, but we want to know who this target is calling and whose calling that target.

Julian Sanchez: A pen register trap and trace order lets you get realtime data about what calls are happening to and from that number and who they are from and how long the call lasts and in the Internet era the question is, what kind of realtime metadata does that let you get and when the statute talks about a facility at which this information collection is directed, traditionally that meant a phone number is the facility, but in the Internet era, you had questions like, because the standard for this kind of trap is because you're not getting full blown, in theory, you're getting the full content, the full email, the full phone conversation. You can get one of these pen trap orders under Section 214 of the USA Patriot Act with a lot less than probable cause.

Julian Sanchez: The question is, we're talking about regular phones anymore, we're talking about Internet accounts and IP addresses and server. What can a facility be? Can we say, we want all the metadata and the realtime transactional information for a particular server and all the traffic coming to and from that? So we're not just talking about one individual phone line or maybe even a corporate phone line used by a number of people, but facilities that may be handling millions of peoples traffic, or at least tens of thousands of peoples traffic. The court, I don't think that is an opinion that is public in full at this point, but essentially said, at least with respect to international communications, we're going to be pretty permissive about what you can collect.

Danny O'Brien: This is the other shift that I see, which is that not only is FISA not dealing with regular phones anymore, but it's dealing with these big servers with millions of people, but also the sort of target has changed too, partly because we're not really talking about agents of a foreign power, we're not talking about spy versus spy. It became much more dissolved than that. It's like we're talking about random stochastic terrorists who you don't necessarily know who they are. But also, this switch between "we can do foreign surveillance because we're targeting foreign powers and their spies",to "we're just surveilling foreigners", like they don't have rights under this court. So the question is, how do we scoop out this data and separate the stuff that legally we are concerned about, which is US citizens communications, but everything else is kind of fair game. And then we have a secret court that doesn't even have any kind of representation of US citizens interests, but also making this kind of human rights and foreign policy decision too.

Julian Sanchez: The debate around the authorities that the FISA Court oversees has been very, US citizens-centric, so you can watch tapes from CSPAN where a lot of defenders are saying, "look, as long as they are targeting foreigners, who cares if they don't have constitutional rights". Some of us think, people are human and have human rights even if they had the poor taste to be born somewhere other than the United States and so this is perhaps not something we should entirely shrug off. But also that there's this interesting shift from the idea that you should be concerned if the communications of an American with Fourth Amendment rights are surveilled too. The idea that really what's significant in terms of encroaching on peoples' rights is who is targeted. And for practical reasons, of course, you understand why this would be the focus because you cannot in advance know whose communications you will intercept when you target somebody. You know who you're going to target, but you have no idea who they might talk to. That's the point in part of doing the surveillance.

Julian Sanchez: But if you look at the text of the Fourth Amendment, it doesn't say the "right of the people against being targeted shall not be violated". It says "the right of the people to be secure in their persons and houses" and papers or the digital equivalent thereof. And in a sense, the fundamental Fourth Amendment concern was, at the time, were the general warrants, with the idea of these sort of open-ended authorizations to search, that did not target anyone. From the perspective of the people who signed off on the Fourth Amendment, it was not a mitigating consideration to say, don't worry if your communications are collected, you weren't the target. The thing they found most egregious, the thing they thought was the most defensive abuse was surveillance that did not have a particular target that made it open to anyone to be swept into the dragnet.

Danny O'Brien: Right. And just to spell this out, general warrants and this is a British invention so I apologize, was this idea that you could just get a warrant for everybody in a town or everybody who might be associated with it so this early mass surveillance warrant.

Julian Sanchez: And it's intimately connected with political, essentially political dissent and suppression. Some of the most controversial early cases that the American framers looked to involved a publication called the 'North Britain 45', was the one that really annoyed the King and so there was an authorization given to the King's messengers to make diligent search for these unknown anonymous writers and publishers of this seditious publication. The whole problem was it was published in the United States so they didn't know in advance who was responsible so they thought we need the authority to be able to riffle through the possessions of all the folks we suspect of maybe not being as loyal as they ought to be and give them cart blanche to decide who the appropriate targets are so the British courts ultimately said was destructive of liberty in a pretty toxic way. Chief Justice Pratt, later Lord Camden wrote some pretty inspirational prose about why that kind of authority was fundamentally incompatible with a free society and that was a great influence on the defenders of the Fourth Amendment who had the same objection to general warrants or a general search authorizations that empowered customs officials to essentially look for contraband without particularized judicial authorization.

Danny O'Brien: And there's this subtle thing here where you only get to make that kind of discrimination, that kind of difference particularly when you're separating what is terrorism and what is political action, if there is someone in the court testifying on behalf of the person that might be being targeted and that's what a secret court like the FISA Court just didn't have for a very long time, barely has now.

Julian Sanchez: Regular courts don't have that either, of course. When you were going to apply for a wiretap, even if it's in a criminal case, you don't call up the lawyer of the person you're wiretapping and say, would you come in and do an adversarial proceeding in court about whether we can wiretap you. You tend not to get very much useful information that way. But there is the back end, which is to say, yeah, ex parte proceeding on the front end, you don't notify the target in advance that you're going to do a wiretap, but that process is conditioned by the knowledge that the point of a criminal wiretap, a so-called title three wiretap, is to gather evidence for a criminal prosecution that when that prosecution occurs, you're going to have discovery obligations to defense counsel. They are going to have an incentive to kick the tires pretty hard and poke everything with a stick and make sure everything was executed properly and the warrant was obtained properly and if it wasn't, get the case thrown out.

Julian Sanchez: That knowledge that you've got to expect that kind of wire brush when it comes time to go to court, means that really from the outset, you talk to people who work on getting criminal wiretap orders that they are in consultation with their lawyers and they are talking about how are we going to do this in a way that is going to stand up in court, because if this gets thrown out, you've just wasted your time and probably a fair amount of money in the process. The fact that that doesn't exist on the FISA side, that essentially 99% of FISA orders are not intended to ever result in a criminal prosecution are never going to result in disclosure to target, are effectively, permanently covert means you really don't have to worry about that. You are presenting to the FISA Court your version of "why I think there's evidence that this person is a foreign agent" and if you've cherry picked the facts as seems to have happened in the case of former Trump campaign advisor, Carter Page, if you decided to include the inculpatory information but leave out the information that might call into doubt your theory of the case or make it look like perhaps there's another explanation for some of these things that look incriminating on face.

Julian Sanchez: You're probably never going to be called into account for that because the FISA Court is relying on your representation and they are probably never going to hear from the target. They put together a very misleading argument for why I was a foreign agent.

Cindy Cohn: I feel like a part of the problem here is that judges, they really do only get one side of the story. This is one of the reasons that EFF helped get past some changes to the law as part of the USA Freedom Act to create another entity that could at least weigh in and help the court hear from the other side, make it a little more adversarial. But I do think the judges get captured and also one of the things we've learned now is that thanks to the US Supreme Court catching the Department of Justice not even telling criminal defendants when FISA information was used. They are supposed to be telling criminal defendants when FISA information was used and to date, nobody whose been prosecuted even in the public courts on the basis of secret FISA information has ever had access to be able to figure out whether what they were told was true.

Cindy Cohn: The Carter Page situation is really an anomaly compared to so many others-

Julian Sanchez: Literally unique. The only case of a FISA Court application being even partly public.

Cindy Cohn: And that didn't happen because there was a legal system to do it. That happened because of political decisions and so nobody else is going to get that, is the point I think. People should say, "Carter Page found out that there were lies underneath his". I think that it's good to get that input but I think it's unreasonable to expect that that's the only time that's ever happened. It's just the only time we've ever found out about it.

Danny O'Brien: As a non-lawyer and someone who tries to avoid looking at politics almost all the time these days, could you just explain what Carter Page was and why that was different?

Julian Sanchez: Carter Page was a foreign policy advisor to the Trump campaign who had all sorts of incredibly sketchy ties to Russia. He was actually someone who was on the FBI, the New York office of the FBI's radar before he had any association with the Trump campaign. They were essentially preparing to open an investigation of him before he was announced as a Trump advisor. When he tried to campaign, this was passed on to FBI headquarters and he, in a sense, they were generally trying to figure out to what extent the Trump campaign was aware of and potentially complicit in the electoral interference operation that Russia was running on Trump's behalf or at least against the interests of Secretary Clinton and because of the panoply of shady connections, Carter Page became the person they thought, this is the one we can most easily target or get a warrant for. We don't want to go after the candidate himself, but and at this point Page had actually left the campaign, but he was the one who seemed to be the most likely, to actually be directly connecting Russian intelligence with the campaign. The most plausible link.

Julian Sanchez: There was a really disturbing exchange between, I think it was, Marsha Blackburn and Inspector General Horowitz from DOJ, put out this IG report on Crossfire Hurricane that focused pretty centrally on the surveillance of Carter Page and I was very critical of the many errors and omissions and that process, in particular when it came to the renewals of the surveillance of Page. And Blackburn, I think she asked this with the aim that he would say this is incredibly unusual and therefore the only explanation for it is some sort of agenda to get Trump or political bias against Trump. But she asked, how common is it for there to be this many errors and this much sloppiness in the FISA process? Is this out of the ordinary? Horowitz had to, quite candidly, say, "I just don't know. I hope not, but we've just never done this kind of individualized deep dive on a FISA application before.

Julian Sanchez: We've done audits, but this kind of we're digging into the case file, not just looking at whether the facts in the application matched what was in the case file, but whether there are important facts that were left out and painted a misleading picture. We just haven't done that before so frankly, we don't know how unusual this is". And that ought to be disturbing.

Cindy Cohn: We do know though, even the programmatic looks at, the Inspector Generals have looked or when the FISA Court themselves has caught the Department of Justice in lies, which they have a lot, that this is really an ongoing problem. It's one of the big frustrations for us in terms of trying to bring some accountability to the mass spying is that the FISA Court ... the part where the FISA Court approves a lot of things that come before it doesn't really bother me as much as the fact that the FISA Court itself continually finds out that the Department of Justice has been lying to them and doing things very differently than they've represented and having a lot of problems and they always just kind of continue to say, "go and sin no more", rather than actually creating an accountability or changes and I think that that message gets received.

Danny O'Brien: And that's sort of the point where a court like this becomes a rubber stamp because the FBI or whoever is coming to them saying, "we just want to extend this investigation. It's just the same as it normally was." Do you think that the FISA judges get captured in this way, that they just end up spending so much time listening to the intelligence services and the FBI and not hearing the other side of the story, that they just end up being overly reliant on that point of view?

Julian Sanchez: Absolutely. That's just necessarily the case. I've heard from retired FISA judges that they would hear from government lawyers things like, "you will have blood on your hands if you don't approve this surveillance." And again, because most of the stuff is never going to be public, you have on one side, look, if you are too precious about protecting civil liberties, you have people saying there could be an attack that would kill dozens or hundreds or thousands of people and on the other side, you're never going to be accountable for authorizing too much surveillance because this is not designed to end in a trial. You're never going to be really grilled about why you approved this dubious electronic surveillance.

Julian Sanchez: I would add that there is a defense intelligence folks and former FISC judges themselves sometimes make of the very high approval rate, which is quite high or you certainly, for most of the court's history, it's been extremely high, 99% plus, though not that much higher, frankly, than ordinary title three applications. And one of the ways that they would defend this and say "we're not a rubber stamp despite this 99% approval rate" is, they would say look, you need to understand how this process really works in practice. Which is, it's not that they just come in blind with an application that we decide. There is this back and forth where they will have a read application, a first draft, and they will go to, not the judges directly, but FISA Court staff, who may be in contact with the judges and say, this is the application we were thinking of submitting and they'll hear back.

Julian Sanchez: Maybe you should narrow this a little bit, maybe we would approve it for a shorter period of time or for these people, but not those people or we would approve this if you had better support for this claim. And so there is this sort of exchange that then essentially results in applications only being submitted when the FBI and DOJ know it's in a state the FISC is going to approve it. Maybe they don't submit it at all if the court says, "no, this is not something we would sign off on." And just to finish this point of, which is, and you would think, okay, that would explain it, but the problem is, you've created a process that is guaranteed to result in a FISA docket history that consists only of approvals. So when you get a proposed application and the court says, well, this doesn't quite meet the standard, that application doesn't actually ultimately get submitted.

Julian Sanchez: It only gets submitted when they know the court is going to say yes, when they've refined it in such a way that the court is willing to sign off on it. The problem is then you've created a body of precedent that consists exclusively of approvals. A particular set of facts where the balance of considerations is such that the court is going to say yes and so then you thus have no record of where the boundaries are of these are the conditions and the fact patterns under which the court will say no so that years down the line, a judge who is looking at applications can say, "okay, here is our record of yeses and nos. Here's our record of what's within bounds and here's our record of what's out of bounds." You only have a history of yes and that is very problematic. You don't have a documentary record of what previous judges have said, no, under these facts that's a bridge too far.

Cindy Cohn: And so that's why some of the former judges have said, look, this isn't really a court anymore. It's more like some kind of administrative agency. This is what you do if you want the FCC to approve a license. You can have this back and forth and then you finally submit something that works. There's lots of other kinds of bodies that work that way, but courts don't. And courts don't for some good reasons.

Danny O'Brien: All right, you've said that this court doesn't really have much oversight, but I have heard spoke that there's another institution around the FISC called the FISCR. Is that just like the superlative of the FISC or how do those relate?

Julian Sanchez: What we really is need is a FISCR. The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court of Review is where appeals from the Foreign Intelligence Court go. They've sat, that we know of, maybe a half a dozen times, all in the 21st century. It's possible they sat previously and we don't know about it, but five or six times that the public is aware of and the interesting thing structurally about the FISCR is that effectively the only time they are going to hear a case is on the rare occasions when the government didn't get what they want.

Cindy Cohn: I have to agree. This isn't really a way that holds the FISC accountable when it makes errors and certainly not when it makes errors that hurt you, the people who are the subjects of surveillance. You know, we managed however, to get some reforms over the years. EFF played a pretty big role in getting some changes to the FISA Court as part of the USA Freedom Act. What's your view on those changes and the impact of them, Julian?

Julian Sanchez: I think they've been pretty significant. I think we already have cases that we know about where the amicus of the USA Freedom Act created a panel of amici or friends of the court who at least in cases involving novel questions of law or technology can be invited by the court to provide their expertise, provide perhaps a contrary view to the government's argument inevitably why they should have more power to surveil, more broadly. And we already have cases where amici have successfully opposed/proposed surveillance that we know about or identified problems with practices by the FBI. There is, I think, a release made about a year and change ago that was essentially initiated by one of the amici that involved discovery that the FBI agents were searching this bulk foreign surveillance database. It's called the 702 database in a variety of improper ways and essentially taking this supposedly foreign intelligence database and routinely looking for US person information without any real connection to any national security or foreign intelligence case.

Julian Sanchez: We were probably catching more problems than we were before. It doesn't fundamentally change the structural problems with the court, but it does, I think, make it a little bit better. It has already paid off in ways that are public and perhaps in others that we don't know about.

Cindy Cohn: I think so too. Honestly, we felt like the first thing we have to do is get more information out about it so that we can make our case that Congress ought to step in and change it because those kinds of changes take a pretty strong lift on our side if we want to try to change things especially because the other side gets to do secret briefings to the intelligence communities.

Cindy Cohn: The theme of this podcast is how do fix these things. Julian, what would it look like if we got this right. We need to do national security investigations. I don't think anybody would say that we're never going to do those. What would it look like if we got the role of the FISA Court right?

Julian Sanchez: I mentioned this, I'm not sure this is the right idea, but it's worth putting out the possibility which is just we don't necessarily need a FISA Court. There are other countries that just have all surveillance governed by a uniform set of rules that regular judges are handling. And you could say, applications will go to the whatever jurisdiction is appropriate with the extent that you know one. You'll use the same procedures you use any time a court that is not a special secret court has to handle classified information, which can happen in a variety of circumstances like for example, when you need to prosecute someone for a crime that involves using classified information. But assuming the FISA Court is going to stick around, I think the most important thing that can be done is just remove the presumption of permanent covert.

Julian Sanchez: The amici, I think, have been very useful, but they are fundamentally a kind of clutch. They are a way of trying to partially reintroduce the kind of back end accountability that is the norm for criminal searches and criminal electronic surveillance in criminal investigations, surveillance that is criminal. One way you could do that more directly is just by ending the presumption of permanent covertness. I think the idea that electronic surveillance is going ultimately to be disclosed to the target eventually. It's something the Supreme Court has effectively said is an essential constitutional requirement, that one of the things that makes a search reasonable in Fourth Amendment terms is, if not at the time it's conducted then at least after the fact the target of that surveillance or that search needs to become aware of it and have an opportunity to challenge it and have an opportunity to seek remedies if they believe that they've been targeted inappropriately.

Julian Sanchez: The idea that you can just systematically make a judgment that that's not appropriate, that that's not necessary for this entire category of surveillance targets, even in cases where they do the surveillance and they say "we were wrong, this person was not a foreign agent, we didn't find what we expected", just seems totally misguided. You can't that frivolously dispense with an essential constitutional requirement. There may be cases where you don't want to reveal the surveillance after the fact, especially if we're talking about a foreign person, someone who does not actually have Fourth Amendment rights, but there may be cases where there are some powerful considerations that you should maybe for quite a while not disclose that the surveillance happened, but this shouldn't be the presumption.

Julian Sanchez: This is something they should have to argue for in the individual case. That, okay, the surveillance is done, why should you not have to tell this US person, and maybe in very many cases, there will be good reasons not to, but it shouldn't be taken for granted. It should be something that eventually they should assume we will in fact have to disclose or certainly if it turns out we were wrong, it's very likely the court is going to make us disclose and therefore, one, introduce the actual check on the back end of people kicking the tires and having the opportunity to challenge surveillance they believe is improper. But also on the front end, creating the understanding on the part of the people who are submitting these applications that you cannot assume this will be secret. You cannot assume that you will be accountable if you've targeted, especially an American, either on weak evidence or a selective arrangement of the evidence. I think that would go a long way toward aligning incentives in a much healthier way.

Cindy Cohn: I totally agree. I certainly, from your mouth to the Ninth Circuit's ears, because we have that very question up in EFFs case concerning national security letters, which do empower the government to request information from service providers and then carry what is essentially turning out to be an eternal gag on those companies. I completely agree with you that having something, the public having a little sunshine, be the disinfectant for some of the problems that we've seen can be very helpful.

Cindy Cohn: I also think that I'm not quite sure why we need a secret court hand selected by the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court to do this. Our Article three judges do handle cases involving classified information. We have a very special law called the Classified Information Protection Act that governs that and people are not regularly leaking classified information out of the federal courts. So I feel like it might have been reasonable in 1978 to think that that could be a problem. I think now in 2020 we have a lot of experience with regular courts handling classified information and we don't see a problem there. We might be able to help a little bit by broadening the scope of the judges involved from the hand picked ones.

Danny O'Brien: Isn't this also part and parcel of fixing all the problems around the FISA Court, reforming the classification process because I think that something you've identified, Julian, is this dark black ops world of government where the default is to classify information and then just the rest of government which has this presumption that it should be exposed to public review and we've got this creeping movement particularly around surveillance where the presumption is classification. And there's no external way of challenging that. The same people who want to conduct these programs are also the people that determine whether they are secret or not.

Julian Sanchez: I think that's absolutely right and it's one of the reasons I think the FISA Court has the appearance of a regular court. You always hear when people criticize the FISA Court, they say, "these are regular Article three judges." But in a lot of ways, it is sort of potemkin court because it is a court with a lot of the trappings but divorced from the larger context that gives us some reason to have confidence in the output, I guess, of the legal process which is to say, these Article three judges, but normally Article three judges do not exist in a vacuum, they exist in a context of higher courts who will be reviewing their decisions and hearing arguments from whoever lost the case that you ruled on and may issue a bench slap, may overturn your ruling in a perhaps gentle and perhaps somewhat scathing way.

Julian Sanchez: You have the knowledge that this is something that advocacy groups are going to look at write about, that the legal community is going to write law review articles about that you may find your peers and colleagues in the legal community not making fun of you, but the gentile law journal version of a kick me sign on your back if you write something that's not very well thought out. So you remove all of that context, you remove the review from above, the review, in a sense by a larger community and you remove a lot of the incentives for decisions to be effectively high quality.

Danny O'Brien: Can I just quickly ask, what's an Article three judge? What does that mean?

Julian Sanchez: Article three of the Constitution establishes the judicial branch so these are judges who are part of the judicial branch of the American government as laid out in Article three of the Constitution.

Danny O'Brien: Right. As opposed to FISA, which is really part of the executive almost?

Cindy Cohn: Article three judges, as Julian said, are judges who are appointed and approved by Congress in accordance with the way the Constitution creates the judiciary. There's lots of other people who are judges in our world who get called judge, but aren't Article three judges. So the magistrate judges who are judges who handle a lot of stuff for judges. Immigration judges. Lots of people.

Danny O'Brien: Judge Judy.

Cindy Cohn: Judge Judy. Well, she's a state court judge. But TV judges. Lots of people get called judges and so when people like Julian and I say Article three judges, we mean judges who were selected by the President and approved by the Congress in accordance with the processes that have developed out of Article three. Article three of the Constitution doesn't actually lay all of that out, but that's the process. It's to distinguish from other kinds of judges and the FISA Court is made up of judges who have been approved under Article three. It's just a subset of those that are handpicked by the Chief Justice of the US Supreme Court to serve on it. And for a long, long time, the Chief Justice would generally only pick judges who lived in the eastern side of the country. There were very, very few judges from the 9th circuit, which is where we are out here in California. And the theory was, what if they have to get on their horse and drive to DC to look at secret things. And we made fun of them and so did a lot of other people point out that there are ways that you don't physically have to be in DC and that you can still review classified information because the FBI does it all the time. We finally have one judge from the Ninth Circuit who is on the FISA Court.

Julian Sanchez: Although by statute, I think there is a kind of minimum number of FISA Court who have to live within, I forget the distance, but it's 30 miles of DC or something like that. But it is a very unusual structure. That's to say, I think it's pretty basically unique. This is a court with 11 judges, all of whom were chosen by one person, John Roberts. And you can say, "they are all people who have been at least approved by the Senate and confirmed to their regular posts", but the composition of the panel is important. They don't usually sit as a panel. They usually, individually, take turns hearing cases. But there is a lot of social science research showing that essentially your peer group matters. If you have a bench that is composed of lets say, democratic appointees and republican appointees that if the majority of judges are conservative, liberal judges on that panel, on that bench, will tend to vote more like conservatives and vise versa.

Julian Sanchez: Conservatives, or at least someone who started as a conservative, with a bunch of democratic appointees as their peers will come to vote more and more like a liberal and in deed may vote more liberally than the initially conservative judge with a majority peer group of liberals. So the fact that you have people chosen essentially by one person probably not particularly ideologically diverse or diverse in perspective. I know there's a lot more former prosecutors and former defense attorneys who get picked for the FISC. That's probably true for the judiciary in general, it does mean you have not just all the structural reasons that the court is going to be disposed to be deferential to the government, but also a selection bias in the composition of the court to the extent that John Roberts is favorably disposed toward granting the government this kind of authority and chooses people whose perspectives he finds congenial]. You're going to have a body that probably does not have a lot of very staunch civil libertarians on it.

Cindy Cohn: One of the things that we did as part of helping push for this amicus rule is to include in the kind of people who can help the judges, technical people, because one of the things we saw after Mr. Snowden revealed a lot of the spying and the government unilaterally made some of these decisions public is that they were not nearly as well reasoned as we had hoped. And some of that may be because the judges don't have the kind of help that they need to do this because of the secrecy and the limitations on access to classified information.

Cindy Cohn: We were able to get the amicus to include not just lawyers, but also technical people. But I feel like at that point it's kind of too late. One of the things that I think would make, frankly, and this just isn't FISA Court, but I think all courts do a better job with technical issues is if they had more resources to explain how the tech works for them. I think that especially in the kinds of situations around mass spying, which is where we started and where we spend a lot of EFFs energy anyway. These are complex systems and if you're turning a legal analysis about whether how our people are targeted and how target information is collected, you have to understand how the technology works.

Julian Sanchez: There's some specific rulings related to the bulk metadata collection, both the telephone records collection under 215 and then that prior Internet metadata ruling where looking back on some of these that eventually have became public, the court is effectively saying well, there's a ruling from the late 70s, supposedly Maryland that says telephone records are not protected by the fourth amendment, you don't have a fourth amendment right against your telephone records being obtained by the government because you've essentially turned over this information voluntarily and this is information the company keeps as a matter of course in its own business records. The FISA Court effectively reads that as, communications metadata is not protected. Again, the opinions that have been released are fairly heavily redacted but it doesn't appear to be anywhere where in okaying this kind of very broad collection that doesn't require particularized warrants based on probable cause, anyone who spoke up and said, well, Internet communication does not work like the old phone system.

Julian Sanchez: All this traffic that is occurring over the network, when you send an email, Comcast does not keep a business record of what emails you sent. Maybe your employer or your email provider has a record like that, but Comcast, as a backbone provider, doesn't have that as a business record you can routinely obtain. You are collecting information that is, as far as the backbone provider is concerned, just content as much as the content of the email itself or the content of a phone conversation would be content. So there is this way in which this technological difference between how the phone network works and how packet switch networks like the Internet work, that is pretty clearly directly material to whether this important precedent applies and if this precedent doesn't apply, it makes a huge difference because it means what you're doing is essentially collection of content that is protected by the fourth amendment as opposed to collection of some kind of business record that, under this unfortunate precedent, is not protected by the fourth amendment.

Julian Sanchez: And it's not that you can't imagine some kind of potential argument they would make about this, but what's disturbing is that it didn't even look like the court had considered this. The court had not even factored in, there's actually this technological difference that calls into question whether this is the appropriate precedent. And it's one thing to say, they made a decision about that, that I don't approve of, but it's another thing to say, they have not even factored this in. They are not even questioning whether this technological difference makes an important legal difference because they don't seem to be even cognizant that these two networks operate in very different ways.

Cindy Cohn: I'm a huge fan of metaphors, but sometimes you read these decisions and you realize that the court actually didn't go beyond the metaphor level to figure out whether that's actually what's going on and just because there are similarities between phone networks and the way emails work doesn't mean that they are actually the same. I wanted to just summarize some of the ideas we've had because, again, we're trying to fix things here and I think that the fixes that we have talked through are perhaps get rid of the secret court all together and let the regular courts handle these cases is definitely worth thinking about.

Cindy Cohn: Certainly that all of the court's decisions and the material presented to the court would eventually be made public and that the burden is on the government to say why they shouldn't be made public. There is certainly stuff that can be redacted if you need to protect people's personal privacy but the government needs to demonstrate why these things should be private and I would argue they need to do that periodically, that it's just not one and done and then it stays secret forever.

Cindy Cohn: I think we've talked a little bit about making sure that the judges are chosen differently. That the choice by the chief justice causes real dangers and hazards in the ability of the court over time to really be ... to hold the government to its word and make the government do its work. I certainly think that the, personally, I don't put words in yours, but that the rule of the amici is small but mighty and needs to get bigger so that the court really does have something, especially in cases ... one of the things that we've lost is the adversarial process at the end that we have in the case of regular warrants. If we're not going to have that adversarial process at the end when we decide whether the evidence is admissible, we need to have more of an adversarial process in the beginning so that there is more of a shake out of what they get to do at the beginning since there isn't going to be one at the end.

Danny O'Brien: We have this to-do list of what to fix and taking notes. We also wanted to try and imagine what this better world would look like if we did manage to fix the Internet. But I want to narrow this down a bit. Julian, as somebody who's a journalist who writes about a secret court and has to do the research to try and map out what's going on there. If we did fix this process, how would your job change? What could you imagine writing about now and presenting to the public that maybe you can't or struggle to explain in the current situation?

Julian Sanchez: It's already changed significantly. Again, for decades there were basically no FISA Court opinions that were public. And then there were a very tiny handful and now there are dozens of public FISC opinions since the passage of USA Freedom. It's possible to talk concretely about what the FISA Court says on a range of complicated questions as opposed to just merely speculating about the different ways a court might interpret a statute that is, again, often not super clear because it was written before the technologies that now applies to existed. But certainly to have a more adversarial back end would open up, I think, the possibility of evaluating how often essentially they get it right. We just have no sense currently of how often electronic surveillance approved by the FISC is actually generating intelligence useful enough to justify the intrusion.

Julian Sanchez: We don't authorize wiretaps to catch jay walkers, as a rule. There is a list of fairly serious crimes that are eligible for wiretaps. But in the FISA case, you have a number of definitions of foreign intelligence. FISA orders have to be geared toward collecting foreign intelligence information and a lot of the definitions of that is rather complex multi-part definition are the kind of things you would think. Threats to the national security of the United States, but one of the rather broader ones is information that is relevant to the conduct of foreign affairs of the United States. And so when you're looking back and saying, did we get anything worthwhile out of this, there's a whole lot of communications between people who are not terrorists or spies or criminals that, if they are business people or government officials, or talking to business people or government officials might well in some sense be relevant to the conduct of foreign affairs of the United States, and because you don't have as you do on the, it's a different title three, the Omnibus Crime Control Act of 1969, ordinary criminal wiretaps are sometimes called title three orders.

Julian Sanchez: In that case, at least, you can say, you did the wiretap, what percentage of these wiretap orders you got resulted in a prosecution, how many of those resulted in convictions and to the extent that you did a wiretap and then you convicted someone of a fairly serious crime you have at least a sense that it was not completely frivolous, that you didn't just invade people's privacy for no reason. We don't have anything like that on the FISA side really. Surveillance ends and then 99% of the time there is no prosecution. That's not the point of FISA or a foreign intelligence surveillance. But okay, they stopped at some point wiretapping someone. Did they get it right? Did they get it wrong? Was the information in the application a fair representation of the facts available? Were they diligent about trying to present a complete picture to the court or did they only present what supported their desired results? That's all a perspective that we'd be much more likely to have if effectively people who were surveilled but ultimately weren't doing anything wrong had the ability to drag that into the light.

Cindy Cohn: Julian's point is really well taken. One of the things we've seen when we've lifted up the cover a little bit on some of these FISA Court investigations is how little they get out of some of them. Certainly, in the context of Section 215, which is the mass telephone records collection that, at the end of the day, there was one prosecution against a Somali guy who was sending money home. That was the only one where the FISA evidence was used. And then the Ninth Circuit just ruled in this case, which is called Maolin, a couple of weeks ago that frankly, the government was overstating how much the FISA Court information was being used and essentially was misleading Congress and the American people about the usefulness of it even in the very one case left standing.

Julian Sanchez: There is absolutely a pattern we see when, whether it was foreign wiretapping, the one component of Stellar Wind was first disclosed. It turned out this had saved thousands of lives, absolutely essential in preventing terrorist attacks and then years later the inspectors general of the various intelligence agencies put out a report that says, actually we dug into this and we talked to the officials and they really could not come up with a concrete case of an intelligence success that depended on this warrantless surveillance that was part of Stellar Wind. With the metadata program after the Snowden disclosures, we heard "no, no, there are so many cases where terrorist plans have been disrupted as a result of this sort of surveillance." And then again a little bit later, not quite as long after the fact and that case happily, we get two different independent panels, the 'Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board' and a handpicked presidential committee looking at this and concluding fairly quickly, no, that wasn't true. In fact, we just couldn't identify any cases where unique intelligence of operational value was derived from this frankly enormous intrusion on the communications privacy of American citizens that, in the rare cases where there was some useful information that was passed on, it was effectively duplicative of information that the FBI already had under traditional lawful targeted orders for a particular person's records.

Cindy Cohn: That takes me to the last one on our list of things that would be great if we fixed the FISA Court, which is some real accountability for the people who are affected by what happens in the FISA Court. And I appreciate the inspectors general, they have done some good work uncovering the problems, but that's just not the same as really empowering the people affected to be able to have standing, whether it's in a secret court or a regular court and be able to say this information has come out that I was spied on and I want to have some recompense and there's a whole set of legal doctrines that are currently boulders on our way to getting that kind of relief in our NSA spying cases that I think that some more clarity in the FISA Court and some more reforms of the FISA Court would really help get out of the way.

Danny O'Brien: So this is: "see you in court,in a court that I can see."

Cindy Cohn: Exactly.

Julian Sanchez: Exactly.

Danny O'Brien: Julian, thank you so much for taking us through all of this. I look forward to your weekly column explaining exactly what happened every day in a new reformed FISA Court and look forward to seeing you on the Internet too.

Julian Sanchez: I am always there.

Cindy Cohn: Thank you so much, Julian. We really appreciate you joining us and your willingness to get as wonky as we do is greatly, greatly appreciated over here at EFF, not just on this podcast, but all the time.

Julian Sanchez: Thank you so much for having me. I look forward to catching up with you guys when we can get on planes again.

Cindy Cohn: Wow, that was really a fun interview. And boy, we went deep in that one.

Danny O'Brien: I like it. I like it when you folks get nerdy on the laws.

Cindy Cohn: The thing about the secret court is, even though you can get pretty wonky about it, everyone is impacted by what this court does. This court approved tapping into the Internet backbone. It approved the mass collection of phone records. And it approved the mass collection of Internet metadata. Two of those three programs have been stopped now, but they weren't stopped by the court, they were stopped Congress or by the government itself deciding that it didn't want to go forward with them.

Danny O'Brien: After those things were made public, even though this whole system was designed to keep them secret.

Cindy Cohn: Right. It took them going public before we were even able to get to the place where we saw that the court had approved a bunch of things that I think most Americans didn't want. And clearly Congress stopped two of the three of them and we're working on the third.

Danny O'Brien: I do feel like I'm honing a talking point here and I feel that it is this contradiction with foreign intelligence surveillance court. It's not really a court because there aren't two parties discussing. It's just one effectively. It's not really about foreign data because it's brief has expanded for these programs that are taking place on US soil and can scoop up US persons' information. And I'm not going to say it's not intelligent, but it doesn't have the technical insider advise and intelligence that allows it to make the really right decisions about changing technology. I think that really just leaves surveillance out of its title. That's the only thing that's true about this name.

Cindy Cohn: It is the surveillance court. I think that's certainly true, and I agree with you about the intelligence, that basically this court really isn't equipped to be doing the kinds of evaluations that it needs to be able to do in order to protect our rights.

Danny O'Brien: Not without help. I mean, I think getting an amicus role into this and getting assistance and getting what Julian described as this ecosystem, this infrastructure of justice around it, super structure is the important thing.

Cindy Cohn: And that's the thing that became so clear in the conversation with Julian, is just how fixable this is. The list is not very long and it's pretty straight forward about what we might need to be able to bring this into something that has accountability and it fixes some of the problems and that's really great since that's the whole thing we're trying to do with this podcast is we're trying to figure out how you fix things. And I think it's pretty clear that if we really do need to fix the Internet, we also need to fix, as a piece of that, we need to fix the FISA Court.

Danny O'Brien: We'll both, after we finish recording here, go off and do that. And if you'd like to know more about that particular work that we do when we're not in the studio, you can go to EFF.org/podcast where we have links to EFF blog posts and work, but we also have full transcripts, links to the relevant court cases and other background info on this podcast. Bios on our amazing guests and also ways to subscribe to fix the Internet so you won't miss our next exciting episode.

Danny O'Brien: Thanks for listening in and we'll see you next time.

Danny O'Brien: Thanks again for joining us. If you'd like to support the Electronic Frontier Foundation, here are three things you can do today. One, you can hit subscribe in your podcast player of choice and if you have time, please leave a review, it helps more people find us. Two, please share on social media and with your friends and family. Three, please visit EFF.org/podcast where you will find more episodes, learn about these issues and donate to become a member and lots more.

Danny O'Brien: Members are the only reason we can do this work. Plus you can get cool stuff like an EFF hat or an EFF hoodie or even a camera cover for your laptop. Thanks once again for joining us and if you have any feedback on this episode, please email podcast@eff.org. We do read every email. This podcast was produced by the Electronic Frontier Foundation with help from Stuga Studios. Music by Nat Keefe of Beat Mower.

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Joe McCall – Wholesaling Lease Options 2019

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What Is A Lease Option?

In a lease option, you lease a property for a period of time with an option to buy it in the future at a predetermined price. In other words, you control a property without owning it. This is an incredibly powerful strategy.

When you "wholesale" lease options, you assign the contract to a tenant-buyer instead of assigning your contract to an investor. The average profits in this kind of deal are between $5,000 - $10,000 per deal. When I discovered "wholesaling" lease options, I was making more money within 3 months of part-time work than I was in my full-time job. Join WLO and I'll show you how you can do the same.

What Is Wholesaling Lease Options?

When you "wholesale" lease options, you assign the contract to a tenant-buyer instead of assigning your contract to an investor. The average profits in this kind of deal are between $5,000 - $10,000 per deal.

Another alternative is what I call a “Sandwich Lease Option” where you stay in the middle. You make a lot more money this way because you earn cash now, create cash flow, and position yourself to get cash later. The average profits on this kind of deal are $30,000.

When I discovered "wholesaling" lease options, I was making more money within 3 months of part-time work than I was in my full-time job. Join WLO and I'll show you how you can do the same.

But I've Never Done A Deal Before. Will This Work For Me?

Absolutely. It's actually quite simple if you know the three things you need to close these kinds of deals: marketing, automation, and delegation. The powerful thing about wholesaling lease options is that you can automate the entire process. Here's why this works:

Reason #1 – You can get more leads than you can handle (for free) from other wholesalers and from just two websites, Craigslist and Zillow. You don’t have to spend any more money on seller marketing.

Reason #2 – You can offer sellers any price they want, and all you need is a simple one page contract. You'll never have to negotiate with a seller.

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Will This Work In My Area?

Yes, it works very well in all markets, both hot and cold (and anywhere in between), and is perfectly legal in all 50 United States, Canada, Australia, the UK and any other country which has a free-market economy where lease agreements and option agreements are legal.

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Technically, a buck will get you started. Most experienced investors make a healthy upfront profit on every deal they do, therefore, you probably won't need any money to get started. However, if you're a beginner and you don't have any collateral for the option deposit, it would be to your benefit to have $500 - $2,000 in the bank. This money can be used for your option deposit, to cover late payments from your tenant/buyer or unexpected maintenance.

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There are several ways to protect your option. First, you can record it in the public real estate records (usually done at the county courthouse). Second, you can create an escrow up front in which a title company or attorney holds the executed deed. Third, you can record a mortgage to secure the performance of the option agreement. A good Lease 2 Purchase course will explain these in greater detail.

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[recentanimenews]

Anime in America Podcast: Full Episode 8 Transcript

  It's time to bid farewell to Crunchyroll's Anime in America podcast, but not before it goes out with a banger of a final episode. Join host Yedoye Travis and special guest Kun Gao as they tackle the streaming wars, and read on for the full episode 8 transcript. 

  The Anime in America series is available on crunchyroll.com, animeinamerica.com, and wherever you listen to podcasts. 

  EPISODE 8: THE STREAMING WARS

Guest: Kun Gao

  Disclaimer: The following program contains language not suitable for all ages. Discretion advised.

  [Lofi music]

  Last we checked in, the anime industry was struggling. Rising competition matched with the economic crisis of ‘07 and ’08 caused half the industry to shutter its doors within the next five years. And even without economic obstacles, the physical media and broadcast focused industry was still facing the looming threat of piracy.

  I’m Yedoye Travis and this is the final episode of Anime in America. 

  [Lofi music]

  By this point anime was already available to stream legally, and had been as early as 2002 with Valkyrie Media Partner’s video on demand service Anime Network. It had been a mainstay on Netflix since back when the company was still mailing out DVDs, which it technically still is, but if you already knew that, chances are your internet connection isn’t strong enough to listen to this podcast. Funimation and VIZ had already made the jump to digital with major streaming services Hulu and...uh… Joost?

  Do you remember Joost? Cause I do not. What the fuck is “Joost?”

  Both inked deals along with the now defunct U.K. anime distributor Gong in 2008 to stream select anime series from their catalogs. More on that in Anime in the U.K.! Ha ha, just kidding… unless… maybe?

  Video hosting websites were presenting a major problem to anime distributors, however. The internet had entered the age of YouTube and new sites and services where literally anyone could upload a video without any kind of quality control were rising and falling daily and with them fell the final remaining barrier between consumers and pirates, technological literacy [Pirate “Arr!”]. The online ecology was primed for pirates to step out of IRC and torrenting sites and start putting their work on streaming video pages that literally anyone could use.

  Unburdened by approvals and quality assurance, piracy had been beating official releases in terms of speed for decades and now suddenly was standing shoulder to shoulder with official services in availability. 

  But already the seed of a new era had been planted. And among the thousands of video hosting sites was an anime-focused page run by a group of young Bay Area techies.

  Gao: We started to just tinker around on nights and weekends. We were watching Starcraft replays, we were watching anime content, and every week it was like “well, let’s load up this torrent and let’s wait for the Naruto to come out, and now we have to seed to a bunch of people before we can watch and let’s hope we don’t get a virus, or whatever.” And it was like, you know it was like a lot of work. And then we’re like “well, why don’t we just make a website that people can just click, just like YouTube, and just start watching?” And coincidentally, YouTube took off in… I’ll say ‘05-’06, when it was really starting to hockey stick, so we kinda said “well, that’s kinda the model.” YouTube, there was many other sites, at the time, now it’s just YouTube, but Veoh, MetaCafe, like Stage6, like all these sites we were like, what if we just did one where people would upload content they normally just can’t watch? And anime just made a lot of sense to us because we couldn’t find how to watch it… anywhere. Except for torrent sites. That’s kinda the chronology up until we founded the company in the middle of ‘06. 

  That is Kun Gao, founder and former CEO of Crunchyroll. It wasn’t always the biggest catalog of anime in the world, back then it was a small website he and his friend designed to host anime and Starcraft videos which quickly turned from a passion project into an ever-increasing logistical and financial struggle as site traffic began to balloon.

  Gao: We ran out of bandwidth [dialup sounds] though pretty quickly, because bandwidth was really expensive. Especially back then [dialup sounds end] it was like 20 times more  expensive than it is now. And I remember we were just maxing all our credit cards, because we didn’t, we weren’t really making money, there wasn’t a way to monetize with video ads, there wasn’t video ads to begin with. So yeah, that was the situation in early ‘07. So we, first it was raising with some angels. We said, we approached some angels, they were angels for our first company, my first company, and they had gotten a return from that investment. And I asked them if they wanted to invest into the new company, and they were very supportive and they were right behind us. And then within about a month or two after the angels invested, the site just continued to grow. And it was showing up on Alexa, which was not the Amazon speaking thingamajig, it was a website where you could look at other peoples’ traffic, and how they were trending over time. And I think that’s when VCs started knocking on our doors, they saw that the website was just hockey sticking and blowing up and they approached us and said they wanted to invest. And so from about… August-September through December of 2017, we started talking to a lot of VCs and then we found the right VC to invest into our business, and then we raised about $4 million bucks into the company, and that was when we started paying off all our credit card bills, and then we started to you know, get more servers, starting to hire full time employees, because we weren’t paying anyone or ourselves at that time, so that everyone could work on this full time. 

  That’s Angel Investors, of course, not actual… angels, which, uh… in some circles, you might believe are fake. Depends. We’ll leave that up to God. Who is real! [angelic choir].

  Gao: In 2008, after we raised VC funding, we said “well, we need to figure out how to, like, license this content. We need to figure out how to compensate creators, and then we need to figure out how to make money for this content.” And so at that time, I think the company was like six, maybe seven, people? And everyone was an engineer, and so I drew the lucky or unlucky straw of having to figure out how to like, figure out Japan. The first thing I had to do was, you know, was like figure out “who do I talk to?” And I didn’t know who to talk to. And so fortunately, one of our advisors was a guy who was, at the time, the CEO of a company called BitTorrent, and he, along with Bram, who created the BitTorrent protocol, had setup a office in Tokyo where BitTorrent was a thing you can license to put on to like, a NAS drive, or a router, where you could do BitTorrenting on your NAS or your router so you don’t have to turn on your computer to do that. And so they had a business out there, and so I talked to him about who to talk to. And he said “well, you should talk to this guy called Vince Totino, he works for the BitTorrent in Japan.” And so in March of 2008, I went to Japan, met up with Vince, and then the more we talked, the more it was like “well, this guy’s awesome. Like, he knows everything about Japan, because he’s been there for 20 years. He speaks fluent Japanese. Maybe he can help us to navigate Japan.” And so he joined full time, and then we then set about going to all the major Japanese anime companies. And he didn’t have all the connections, either, so it was just we found someone who knew someone who knew someone, and then we contacted him and just kept going down the chain until we were able to get to, we were able to get to the key folks at all the major companies. And then, as relates to subtitling, outputting content, once we figured out the business side and we were able to get a deal with TV Tokyo, we had to figure out how to legitimately subtitle the content. Because we were getting the files before TV broadcast, we can’t just put it out there for fansub groups to fansub, because we wouldn’t know or be able to trust that. And so we started to hire people to help us to subtitle. And it ended up being that a lot of the people who used to participate in the fansub community were the best people to subtitle. And so they were able to receive some compensation and credit for their work doing it officially, legitimately, through the Crunchyroll business.

  So, Kun just went to Tokyo, linked up with Vince and got all the major anime publishers on board. Pretty simple, right? Wrong! Absolutely wrong. You’re stupid for thinking otherwise. Turns out it was pretty difficult not only to sell them the whole idea of streaming media, but also to convince those publishers to license out their valuable IP to a pirate site.

  Gao: Interesting side story is, if you remember when we previously talked about VHS that was pirated and distributed by fans, for fans, very analogous to what we were doing, that started a company called AD Vision, by John Ledford, who I would say is probably the pioneer of anime home video distribution. And today the company’s called Sentai. But he helped us to introduce us to TV Tokyo, in like the Fall of 2008. And then, when we got to TV Tokyo, they were, you know, they were very pragmatic about the situation. I would say not everyone was pragmatic. We would have conversations, a lot of conversations, were something to the tune of “Hey! We’ve got a website, there’s a lot of fansubbed content on there, we know it’s not legal, we want to get the license to legally do it.” And then they would just… not try to make eye contact, they would like act visibly angry, they would be shaking and they would say “you’re stealing from us, you’re pirating our content.” And we said “well, we want to make it legitimate. And if you want us to take all of your content down, today, we will. But that’s going to send all the fans to dark corners, to get access to your content, because they really want to watch it. And we want to make a bright lit place for you and your content to be distributed worldwide.” And so I think TV Tokyo really got that, and so we were able to work with them to figure out how to license Naruto legitimately. And at the end of ‘08, we announced together with TV Tokyo that they would be, we would be simulcasting Naruto, for the first time [Naruto opening 2 “Haruka Kanata” plays], within like an hour of TV broadcast starting Jan…. uh, Jan 7th, or something, 2009. So that’s kinda how that arc started.

  [Lofi music]

  On New Year’s Eve 2008, Crunchyroll deleted all of its illegal videos and fan contributed content, converting to an official streaming service that began simulcasting Naruto Shippuden in January 2009. On the Japan side it would remain an uphill battle over the years as Crunchyroll continued to shop itself out and prove itself to other publishers, but in America it was a deal that shook the entire industry. Streaming anime was just beginning to creep onto platforms like Netflix and Hulu in 2008 but NO ONE was simulcasting. At the time, Naruto was the single most popular anime in the world and suddenly it was on a brand new service that was putting it up to stream within an hour of its Japanese broadcast.

  For anyone who doesn’t know, simulcasting is a portmanteau of the words “simultaneous” and “broadcasting,” and I think based on those two words you can guess that it means “simultaneous broadcasting.” 

  This was a foundational shift both for the established industry and for pirates. Where before pirates had speed on their side, they couldn’t hope to turn around episodes of Naruto within an hour. Crunchyroll’s agreement with TV Tokyo got them all the materials in advance of the broadcast to allow them to do the legwork pre-release, which would eventually shrink down the window to be near simultaneous with the Japanese TV broadcast. Suddenly the fastest and easiest way to watch new anime was once again an official source.

  Along with their new offering, Crunchyroll also established a new framework for the streaming business. Although Crunchyroll’s original catalogue was small, many fans considered it a win-win.Crunchyroll had a large pre-existing community that trusted the brand and now it was beating the pirates in speed and had a clear financial throughline from your wallet to the people making the product. 

  So Crunchyroll started to grow. And it started to grow FAST.

  Suddenly industry titans like Funimation, VIZ, and the recently established Aniplex of America found themselves having to play catch-up. This started the Simulcast Wars, a nearly 10 year long race for each of these companies to launch its own branded streaming services and get their products out alongside the official Japanese broadcast, and of course, everyone tried to get in.

  And I mean everyone. Every single person. 

  But quick aside before I get into that… This pivot to simulcasting is a huge moment for anime itself, but that moment had another lasting effect on licensing that’s definitely worth mentioning. Anime itself got more opportunities. Licensing companies always have to be strategic to make money, but the shift toward streaming as the primary vehicle changed the economics of anime. You might say it… disrupted… the industry.

  Gao: I think when you start off as… when you start off and become so successful like Funimation in home video, sometimes it’s tough to switch gears and disrupt your own business. And so we were disruptors. We were definitely way smaller, but we had to be nimble. And there were a lot of content that Funimation just doesn’t license, because for them it doesn’t make sense to go get Haikyu!! [Haikyu!! opening “Imagination” plays]. It wouldn’t ever sell on home video, and that was the only way they made money. So that wasn’t interesting for them. But it was interesting for us. Through the internet, there’s a lot of sports anime fans who love that genre, who love the fact that sports is just a vehicle for telling stories, and they’re willing to subscribe, they’re willing to watch online. And so we had an advantage in that regard. 

  Before our modern era where there’s just about 100 percent licensing rate every season, tons of titles would get skipped over because anime distributors in the U.S. had to judge new titles through the lens of a physical release and decide if a production looked like it would sell enough units to make up for their investment. A streaming model meant it was not only easier for each anime to find its audience online, but a lower price tag since you didn’t necessarily have to add the costs of designing, manufacturing, and distributing DVDs and a title’s performance online could act as a testing ground to inform your later decisions regarding a physical release.

  You could make the argument that this also hurts anime’s longevity since physical releases are often all that is left of a title if the license enters limbo and that’s certainly legitimate but, as a counterpoint... We might notta gotten Haikyu!!... so there’s that. That’s enough of an argument, right?

  Okay! Back to the thing that I was talking about.

  EVERYBODY. In all caps.

  Funimation was the quickest to follow, streaming a near simulcast of Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood the very next season, four days behind the Japanese broadcast, which was fast by industry standards, but still gave pirates plenty of wiggle room for one of the biggest shonen releases of the 2010s [Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood opening “Again” plays]. 

  VIZ followed next with Inuyasha: The Final Act in the Fall season which they simulcast on Hulu.

  This was the pattern for about two years as other companies experimented with simulcasts of top priority titles and Crunchyroll continued to grow not only in subscribers but their number of their simulcast titles each season.

  Then Anime News Network tried to get in on the action.

  Y’know, the news site. The one with “News” in its name? One of the most trafficked anime sites in the world at the time, Anime News Network wanted in on the game, and after picking up some catalog titles from the likes of Aniplex, Bandai, and Sentai, they made their simulcasting debut starting with Oreimo in Fall 2010 [Oreimo opening plays]. Oreimo is… uh… I will say the definitive title in a genre of anime known as “Siscon,” upon which I refuse to elaborate but you can google at your own risk.

  Unfortunately ANN pulled a Funimation, and someone took advantage of an exploit in their system and managed to get ahold of the second episode of Oreimo pre-release, and ANN was also forced to suspend its simulcasts because siscon dudes mean business. At this point though they were probably already on their way out of the streaming business. Despite the large amount of traffic ANN commanded on its editorial side, it was unable to leverage that into streaming views and it quietly wound down its catalog over the years to once again focus exclusively on news. Because they’re a news site. They do news.

  The Fall 2010 season also saw the launch of Toonzaki, a creation of none other than the now-failing 4Kids’. It started with a catalogue of 72 mostly non-exclusive titles, and honestly the streaming site may have been one of the best things 4Kids’ ever created, a community focused platform that attracted even longtime critics of the anime licensor. Unfortunately the site couldn’t survive 4Kids’s financial woes and it was ultimately killed, likely as a result of the 2012 lawsuit we mentioned in the previous episode. In 2012 Toonzaki suffered the 1-2 punch of losing its entire Yu-Gi-Oh! catalog and having its site mysteriously going down for three whole months. I dunno about you but I would cancel my subscription after uh, probably a couple of hours, actually. Ultimately the site’s ownership was passed to Konami and it was later shut down in 2013.

  In 2012 VIZ announced its own online streaming channel called Neon Alley which was kinda like a TV channel but VIZ anime and on the internet. That uh, ya know the whole concept of streaming? That’s what we’re talking about this episode. Unfortunately it didn’t fly and by early 2014, VIZ cut a deal with Hulu that added Neon Alley as a content channel to the larger streaming service’s menu. Within just a few months the Neon Alley name was dropped altogether as VIZ’s content was fully incorporated into Hulu’s service.

  2013 saw the introduction of a brand new face in American anime streaming which, if I were a company like Crunchyroll or Funimation at the time, I probably would have greeted with hostility. Daisuki was founded by a Japanese consortium led by Asatsu-DK whose investors included major studios like Toei Animation, Aniplex, Sunrise, and TMS with the intention of streaming their anime globally. If that wasn’t scary enough, they were later joined by another $3 million in investments from a who’s who of Japanese publishers like Kodansha, Shueisha, Shogakukan, and Kadokawa.

  Included in their starting catalog were Aniplex hits like Puella Magi Madoka Magica and Sword Art Online as well as a large number of Sunrise mecha anime. And I can not emphasize enough the vibe at the time was that this was the apocalypse for international licensing. Japan’s gonna hold onto all their titles, choke everybody else out, and run their own one-stop shop for anime.

  But obviously that didn’t happen, so… what went wrong?

  Well nobody’s entirely sure but probably a number of things. By 2013 America’s short romance with mecha anime like Gundam Wing, Escaflowne, and Evangelion had long since come to an end and it was Gundam titles courtesy of Sunrise that made up most of Daisuki’s initial offering of exclusives. Look, Gundam fans, I see you. I’m one of you. I don’t know why kids these days can’t appreciate giant robots, either, but that’s just how it is. The rest of Daiksuki’s starting catalog was pretty sparse since they’d already shopped out the licenses to many of their major titles in the largest international markets. By now, I’m sure this episode feels like a thinly veiled Crunchyroll ad, but the fact is, Crunchyroll had the good fortune of launching with Naruto the single most popular anime of its era, while Daisuki had two major Aniplex hits that were already showing their age. That, along with some endemic technical issues on their platform, seem to have made an environment not even One Punch Man and Dragon Ball Super could save. Also, it seems, splitting up anime streaming rights by region and selling them piecemeal to major streaming services may have been more profitable for some of Daisuki’s investors.

  In March of 2017 Bandai Namco purchased Daisuki’s owner Anime Consortium in Japan and by October of the same year the service shut down completely.

  Anime was already a popular subsection of Netflix’s sprawling catalog in 2014, but that year the company started to make public moves to invest in the medium and secure their own exclusives, teaming up with Polygon Pictures to secure many of their future seinen releases such as Knights of Sidonia and Ajin: Demi-human [Ajin trailer clip], likely establishing the relationship that would later lead to a number of 3D anime produced by Netflix itself like the upcoming Pacific Rim and recently released Altered Carbon and Ghost in the Shell.

  Early 2016 saw Funimation launch their own streaming platform dubbed FunimationNow. But that wasn’t the only major announcement they planned that year. 2016 was also the beginning of what was probably the biggest news for Anime in America since the start of simulcasting: the big Crunchyroll/Funimation alliance.

  Under the tagline “better together” Crunchyroll and Funimation, now two of the biggest names in anime not only in the U.S., but worldwide, announced a strategic partnership in which they’d be sharing their libraries with one another.

      [Lofi music]

  As it turned out, 2017 was the year that two media juggernauts would turn their eyes on anime and I just gotta discuss the most unfortunate one first. I’m talking, of course, about Amazon’s Anime Strike. And I say “of course,” but you might not’ve known about it until I just said it, so... Amazon announced its entry into the anime industry January 17th with a great deal of fanfare. 

  [IGN News: Amazon has just launched its own anime focused streaming channel, called Anime Strike]

  Anime Strike was the first of what would be several branded add-on channels for Amazon Prime Video, which were essentially ways of compartmentalizing content that they could charge extra money for. So, in addition to your Prime subscription, you’d have to shell out an additional $4.99 to watch the exclusive anime Amazon was planning to load on the service.

  Amazon wasn’t fuckin’ around, either. Among their first exclusives was the seinen sex drama Scum’s Wish, which would be the first of Amazon’s new exclusive streaming deal with the lauded Noitamina animation block on Fuji TV which, down the line, would land them Inuyashiki, After the Rain, and Banana Fish. They also entered a strategic deal with Sentai Filmworks that would give Anime Strike an exclusivity window for certain new Sentai titles. After about four months they even rolled out the ability to download episodes for offline viewing. So even up against Netflix and the new alliance between Crunchyroll and Funimation, Anime Strike was shaping up to be the next major competitor in anime streaming.

  Or… it seemed that way.

  Let’s just say anime fans didn’t like Anime Strike very much. You could forgive them for charging another $60 a year for a very limited library of anime ($160 if you didn’t already have Prime). But also, Anime Strike just didn’t seem to “get” anime fans and didn’t seem very intent on trying to figure us out.

  And despite Amazon’s massive and sophisticated streaming video infrastructure, they just couldn’t seem to get anime episodes up on time. They would show up days late, often without subtitles. And discoverability was a problem, with many complaining they were unable to find Anime Strike anime on Amazon even after searching for its exact title. Amazon publicly blamed late deliverables from Sentai for the frequent episode delays which Sentai very publicly stated was an outright lie.

  It was a bad look that just got worse with their PR. Anime Strike “no commented” several journalists looking for interviews and the ones they did get like ANN’s interview with VP of Digital Video Michael Paul were… uh, awkward? Forbes and IGN each released articles panning Anime Strike, citing its prohibitive cost and that it just didn’t seem to understand anime fans. Despite acquiring many major titles in 2017 including the Anime Award Winning Made in Abyss, Anime Strike was circling the drain.

  Just seven days shy of its first year, the channel was finished. Amazon announced they were canning Anime Strike and putting their content back in general population on the rest of Prime Video. Their deal with Sentai ended with Sentai slowly retrieving their titles off Amazon and eventually losing their exclusive deal with Noitamina as of 2019, which you can probably thank for The Promised Neverland, Given, and Sarazanmai showing up on Crunchyroll. But Amazon hasn’t gotten out of the anime game entirely. Their acquisitions have been more low key and selective but they’ve kept things going with dark fantasy and science fiction anime over the past year such as Dororo, Blade of the Immortal, Psycho-Pass 3, and PET. So some good shows to check out if you still have your mom’s login or your college forgot to delete your .edu email. Otherwise, you know, I don’t know what to tell you. 

  Later in July, Sentai would announce its own streaming service HIDIVE to stream Sentai and Section23 anime which at first looked like any of the services I’ve already talked about that had good catalogs but not much new anime because of Anime Strike’s exclusivity window, but in hindsight this may have been some next level maneuvering from Sentai to prepare for Anime Strike’s fallout. However you look at it, Strike is dead and HIDIVE lives, having picked up many of Strike’s most acclaimed titles like Made in Abyss and Land of the Lustrous since their exclusivity window ended on Amazon. So thanks for the signal boost, Bezos. And congrats on your… unnecessary amount of money.

  [Bezos clip: Thanks, it’s great to be here.]

  In October of still 2017, a year that felt never-ending until 2020 came along, Netflix announced a big $8 billion dollar spend on original content, a considerable portion of which was earmarked to produce 30 anime titles in the coming years. On the heels of the Neo Yokio announcement some fans with zero taste thought this was pretty terrible news, considering Netflix had also rubbed those same fans the wrong way earlier in the year by purchasing TRIGGER’s much-anticipated Little Witch Academia set to premiere in January then just not releasing it. So, until its eventual release six months later, no one knew why it wasn’t already out or when they could expect it to be released. 

  It turns out this would become Netflix’s strategy in the coming years, eschewing simulcast schedules for batch releases often months after their conclusion to compete with international dubs… unless you’re in Japan where they broadcast on time. This supports the binge culture that has only become more important as we all stew in our own smells at home. It’s hard to tell if that system is working out for them or not because Netflix only recently hinted at maybe releasing viewership numbers and because they’re so big they could honestly just buy all that anime and set it on fire and still not hurt their bottom line.

  Anyway, Little Witch Academia was the first of a sudden Netflix shopping spree. In addition to streaming titles from other anime distributors, Netflix has been pretty reliably picking up exclusive rights to about two to three anime per season, even securing a big (although temporary you’ll soon discover) exclusive streaming deal for the Fate franchise with Aniplex, and slapping a “Netflix Original” sticker on it, driving anime aggregator websites crazy every quarter when they try to build seasonal launch lists.

  Regardless, Netflix’s interest in anime is undeniable. They would follow up their 2017 announcement with another in early 2018 claiming they had partnered with Production IG and Bones to produce new anime and ANOTHER announcement including Anima, Sublimation, and David Production in 2019. And context should tell you those are VERY BIG anime studios. But If it doesn’t, I will tell you. They are VERY BIG anime studios.

  Meanwhile their list of air quotes “original” exclusive seasonal anime is growing and Netflix has begun announcing a number of new original anime now based on successful live action Netflix series such as Altered Carbon, and also licensing all the live action anime from Japan that nobody has ever seen, unless you live in Japan. Basically what I’m trying to say here is Netflix is very into anime.

  Another smaller announcement in 2017 was that Funimation had been acquired by Sony, which was notable but not unusual, since the company had changed hands multiple times.

  And that’s where I’m ending my history. That’s it.

  [Lofi music]

  Now, in case you’ve been trapped under a rock for the past 10 years, you should know that media companies in the U.S. have been slowly consolidating, with Disney leading the charge on their mission to own all 100 of the Top 100 blockbuster Hollywood movies every year. And if you didn’t know before, I’m sure you’ve learned in quarantine, that Disney has started its own streaming service.

  2020 was the starting line for what’s already been a free for all between Netflix, Hulu, Amazon Video, Disney+, and HBO Max for the eyeballs of every human being on planet Earth and, of course, anime is a big part of that. If Amazon and Netflix suddenly investing in the medium doesn’t convince you then here are some numbers.

  A report estimated the total revenue generated by the anime industry at about $19 billion USD in 2017. Another report estimated the total revenue generated by the U.S. film industry as a whole at about $43 billion USD, with anime on average being considerably cheaper than inflated Hollywood and premiere TV budgets like Avengers Endgame’s $356 million purse or Game of Thrones’s $90 million final season budget, which covered a mere 6 episodes.

  It’s also worth noting that under quarantine a lot of anime is on hold, but overall animation is the easiest television production to produce, with Netflix going back into production on shows like Big Mouth and things of that sort. 

  Ironically, despite technical advances we’ve just about come full circle with the largest media conglomerates in the U.S. once again being in charge of anime localization. We’ve also seen the reappearance of anime as a relatively cheap addition to content portfolios, the major differences being the dramatically shrinking distance between Japan and America, an almost 100 percent rate of title acquisition by Western companies, and anime having transformed from something to fill time or disguise as American cartoons into its own mainstream force in the media alongside the MCU and whatever HBO is doing since Game of Thrones ended.

  There are definite concerns with the way the industry is headed but the benefits are undeniable. Save for maybe China, Americans are the most privileged group of anime fans, even more so than those in Japan itself. A perfect storm of being one of the largest anime markets in the world paired with this decades long consolidation of media is that all the anime gets licensed but spread across less platforms than even in Japan. So, even if it seems like you’re forking over subscription fees to an unreasonable number of services to catch all the big shows, realize you’ve got it better than international fans whose countries don’t even get every seasonal title.

  When you think about it, anime is even easier to keep up with than American TV. Amazon Prime, Netflix, Crunchyroll, Funimation, and HIDIVE gets you well over 99 percent of everything out there. Meanwhile in the sprawling American media landscape you’ll also need a subscription to Disney+, HBOMax, Peacock, and not only Hulu but make sure to grab Starz, Cinemax, and Entertainment add-ons… maybe even Hallmark if you, if you’re into stuff your grandma watches. And this is to say nothing of specialty and classic services like Shudder and Criterion. And of course Quibi. How could we possibly forget Quibi? Point is, each of these services probably has a few titles that were formative to your childhood and has some upcoming release that you’re interested in. And compared to that, anime has been cordoned off into what appears to be a reasonably small number of subscriptions.

  Now the face of competition has changed entirely. Co-productions are nothing new in anime, dating back to the beginnings of anime in America in the 60s and definitely providing a deep enough topic to warrant its own episode if Crunchyroll greenlights a season two…?

  But co-productions had previously been a way to get a particular project created, one of the most famous examples being the 1995 Ghost in the Shell film, a joint production between Kodansha, Bandai Visual, and the U.K.-based Manga Entertainment. Once again, Anime in the U.K.?

  Maybe? 

  As previously discussed in our manga episode, up until that film Ghost in the Shell, along with many Masamune Shirow works, had a considerable following in the West, greater even than in Japan. Investing in the film made sense and the deal gave Manga Entertainment exclusive rights to a cult classic that’s still being both emulated and outright ripped off by American directors to this day. At the time it was what you’d call a smart investment in a specific title with crossover appeal to Western audiences.

  And… yeah that’s still what co-productions are, but also they’re a way of getting your foot in the door early on titles you wanna license by investing in them years in advance rather than bidding on rights in the lead-up to the release. It also goes a long way in developing good relationships with studios and production committees. 

  And Netflix has been loudest on the co-production front, proudly announcing their strategic partnerships since as early as 2014, licensing content from studios directly to dodge the committee system, and just slapping “Netflix Original” on titles after they purchase exclusive rights whether they were actually involved in production or not, partly because that’s just how TV works in America.  

  Looking back you can find at least one example of a co-production from most of the major American anime companies that rose and fell in the 90s and 2000s. Crunchyroll itself has been quietly producing anime since early in its existence, counting over 60 co-pros before announcing their Originals Slate in 2020. Funimation first dipped their toes in back in 2016 with Dimension W and have slowly started to accrue their own roster of co-productions since late last year. If you’re a proper anime fan that never skips the OP, you may have noticed a growing number of American names and companies in the production credits since 2010.

  [Lofi music]

  Which brings me to my final point. What even is anime anymore?

  Japan has been outsourcing work to Korea for about 20 years now even as foreign animators have been traveling to Japan to work in Japanese studios. International entities are becoming increasingly involved in production and now foreign creators and source material are more prominently featured in new titles. As the number of foreign names increases in anime credits that inevitably means the number of Japanese names proportionally decreases.

  Korean webcomics are getting anime, Daft Punk and Porter Robinson had music videos made by anime studios, Studio 4C produced an anime film adaptation of the manga Tekkonkinkreet directed by an American animator. A manga by a french Canadian has been adapted into an anime. Marvel comics have gotten anime. Batman is a ninja now. Well, he has been for a while but this time animated by the studio that does the JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure openings. 

  At what point does a production lose the essential Japanese-ness that the term anime implies?

  Scratch that, what does “anime” even mean?

  The very definition of anime is now being tested, used as a marketing term to evoke a popular conceit about the medium rather than an identifier of its point of origin. Nowadays if you ask Netflix what an anime is, they’ll tell you it’s a cartoon written by the lyricist of Vampire Weekend starring Jaden Smith or an animated series made by a studio in Texas based on a 1983 American kids show, and written by the director of MallRats.

  So where are we headed with all this? Can anime survive its exposure to the American media ecosystem keeping its identity intact, or will anime soon just mean “cartoons but with blood in them?”

  I can’t answer these questions, I don’t know. Gonna have to get back to you in a sequel podcast in 2030. Anime in Space. Or in The Parallel Dimension That Apparently Exists. All I can do for now is provide you with the wise words of the individual who has provided me with the answers to most of life’s questions up until now. My mom…

  Grace: I don’t- I tried to do research, and I have no clue what this thing is.

  Yedoye: Yeah? Like, nothing at all? You didn’t find anything?

  Grace: They’re just cartoons! That’s all I know, you trying to test me?

  Yedoye: [laugh] A little bit, yeah.

  Grace: Why?

  Yedoye: Because- 

  Grace: I never watched cartoons. 

  Yedoye: But WE watched cartoons!

  Grace: It was never my thing.

  Yedoye: It was our thing, though.

  Grace: Pinky and the Brain, that’s it. 

  Yedoye: I mean, yeah, but that’s what we did on Sundays. But there was other stuff, after that. 

  Grace: [skeptical] Okay. I have no clue. I wish I did the research, I was too busy.

  Yedoye: You didn’t listen to any of the podcast? 

  Grace: I listened to one, it’s all about Japanese something, right? 

  Yedoye: Yeah,

  Grace: I know ??? used to draw them. He loved Japanese cartoons. 

  Yedoye: Yeah.

  Grace: But I can not make out- I may have been sitting there, but I never paid attention. 

  Yedoye: No? There’s, I mean, there’s like… Pokemon is anime. That counts. 

  Grace: Oh, really? Pokemon is anime?

  Yedoye: Yeah!

  Grace: Oh my God! I thought the name of the cartoon is “anime.” 

  Yedoye: Oh, no, no. 

  Grace: [realization] Ahhh, Pokemon is anime, which means... There’s several versions, right?

  Yedoye: Yeah, there’s a lot. There’s like, there’s Pokemon, there’s Dragon Ball Z, umm-

  Grace: Dragon Ball Z! I just recently [Notification sound] heard that.

  Yedoye: Yeah. And there’s um… did you ever watch Speed Racer?

  Grace: In the car? 

  Yedoye: Yeah.

  Grace: They like to drive?

  Yedoye: Yeah.

  Grace: Yeah, I’ve seen that.

  Yedoye: Yeah. That’s anime, too.

  Grace: I watched you guys ?? , but I just- you know, all that stuff was for you guys, babysitting activities. 

  [Both laugh]

  Yedoye: There’s shows-

  Grace: It was for babysitting, it was all for babysitting.

  Yedoye: They're not even-

  Grace: Did you know that?

  Yedoye: They’re not even for kids, though! 

  Grace: Eh?

  Yedoye: Those shows are not for kids though!

  Grace: Yeah, that’s why I’m trying to tell ??. Yeah, so the general name is “anime.”

  Yedoye: Yeah. 

  Grace: Then under anime is like, you have all these different versions of cartoons.

  Yedoye: Yeah, yeah.

  Grace: Okay.

  Yedoye: You thought it was one show?

  Grace: I thought it was just one.

  Yedoye: Oh G- Okay. 

  Grace: And I just heard of them.

  Yedoye: I definitely could’ve uh…

  Grace: And the name is anime.

  Yedoye: I definitely could’ve clarified that a few weeks ago. 

  Grace: Yep, I didn’t even know. 

  Yedoye: Okay, maybe that’s my fault. 

  Grace: So Pinky and the Brain, Pinky wasn’t one of them?

  Yedoye: Uh, no, no, he was not.

  Grace: Oh, okay. You guys confuse me. What else you wanna know?

  Yedoye: Umm, I think maybe that’s it? I don’t know-

  Grace: What do you mean “that’s it?!”

  Yedoye: There’s not that much, I just wanted to know if you knew what anime was. 

  Grace: I wasted all this time just to tell you in five seconds that anime, something is under anime is just a broad name for all the cartoons.

  Yedoye: Yeah!

  Grace: Jeeze.

  Yedoye: [laugh]

  Grace: And I be here, all excited, thinking that something else is coming up.

  Yedoye: Oh, no, no, I just was gonna- I just wanted to ask if you knew...

  [Lofi music]

  Thanks for listening to Anime in America presented by Crunchyroll. If you enjoyed this, please go to Crunchyroll.com/AnimeInAmerica to see the site I’ve talked non-stop about for most of this episode. 

  Special Thanks to Kun Gao. 

  This episode is hosted by me, Yedoye Travis and you can find me on Instagram at ProfessorDoye, or Twitter @YedoyeOT. This episode is researched and written by Peter Fobian, edited by Chris Lightbody, and produced by me, Braith Miller, Peter Fobian, and Jesse Gouldsbury. 

  [Lofi music]

[Beep]

  Yedoye: But you can just- you can like, you can start watching them now, if you want.

  Grace: [skeptical] Seriously?

  Yedoye: Yeah, anime’s not just for kids, you know. There’s like, there’s adult stuff.

  Grace: [continued skepticism] Really? Like, one example.

  Yedoye: There’s… Cowboy Bebop is a good one, it’s like a… it’s like a drama sort of like...

  Grace: Okay, tell me what do they do?

  Yedoye: They’re uh… so the main characters are like they’re bounty hunters, and so they fly through space just like, tracking down criminals. It’s kinda like a, it’s like a crime thing. 

  Grace: You know I don’t like Star Wars. 

  Yedoye: [sigh] I know you don’t like Star Wars. [Chuckle] But I know you like crime stuff. 

  Grace: So now you think I’ll gonna like-

  Yedoye: But I know you like crime stuff, though!

  Grace: Ah-ha! Now you’re talking!

  Yedoye: Yeah! It’s like a crime show. 

  Grace: Which one? I have to watch it! Which one?

  Yedoye: It’s called “Cowboy Bebop,” they like, track down criminals and they take them in for a bounty. 

  Grace: They like, all those stick people do, right? It’s all cartoon folks, it’s not real? It’s not realistic? 

  Yedoye: I mean, it’s not real, it IS realistic, it’s drawn really well. 

  Grace: Yeah… see that’s still fake to me, I like more realistic stuff. 

  Yedoye: I think you would like it. 

  Grace: Name it again?

  Yedoye: Cowboy Bebop.

  Grace: Cowboy what?

  Yedoye: Bebop.

  Grace: Bebop? Cowboy Bebop, okay. 

  Yedoye: Yeah.

  Grace: Cowboy Bebop. 

  Yedoye: I’ll send you a link.

  [Lofi music]

  Thanks! Bye.

  By: news+feed@crunchyroll.com

[drewsukulele]

Home Business Ideas For Just About Anyone!

Are you considering working at home and want some home business ideas? Here's a list of ideas that will assist you start your thought process.

Creative home business ideas need an artistic mind with an eye for detail. The majority of these ideas can be learned through training and more information can be obtained on the internet, library or local vocational schools.

Although local laws do change, so you should check with the community secretary of state, the majority of these home business ideas do not require licensing.

PROFESSIONAL: CPA/Tax adviser - massage therapy - counselling - doula - childcare - bed and breakfast Professional home business ideas for the most part will need a unique education and local licensing from state agencies. These business opportunities will often be more lucrative though due to the education necessary to perform them. It's advised that you seek out legal counsel to make certain that you have all the appropriate permissions to restrict liability.

LABOR: automobile repair - antique repair and sales - small engine repair - personal assistant /shopper - flea market stalls - taking online surveys - online trading - housekeeping - professional services - data entry - catering Labor home business ideas are the occupations that need a bit more work than ability, although ability is required of any valuable support. Some of those ideas require technical knowledge or expertise. Most people cannot straightforward pick up a wrench and start repairing an engine without previous experience doing this. Some may require a license or certificate from the state. A number of them a person can just put forth a while and take away doing.

No matter what home business idea you decide upon, you want to come up with a strategy, invest some money for some equipment, to meet state requirements, get an education, and likely some simple advertising material (i.e. business cards and fliers). All the aforementioned home business ideas will require effort. To develop business you'll have to speak with all your family and friends to let them know you're in business and request referrals. When you've done that, you will probably need to advertise and promote your service or merchandise to the general public if you would like to keep income coming in. You will want to be certain that you keep detailed records of all income and expenses for tax reporting purposes. And ensure you check to find out if you will need special insurance for liability coverage.

There's yet another home business idea that's worth mentioning. It's been saved for the past as it's different than the afore mentioned chances. Network marketing, also called multi-level marketing, affiliate marketing and online marketing are exceptional home business opportunities that could provide a few additional benefits.

Very similar to'conventional' home based businesses, a person beginning one of those marketing businesses will have to have a strategy, get a little bit of education, put forth a little or a great deal of effort based on how successful you need to be, invest some money to begin, sell and market your product or service to your loved ones, friends and the general public. However where affiliate and network marketing differ from a'conventional' home business idea because over time as you build a base of customers and build a group of other people needing to work from their houses, your income gets less dependent on your efforts and can actually begin growing exponentially without a lot of work on your part. The key, with any MLM kind of business, would be to understand, follow and teach a duplicable system and you will begin to make a percentage from the efforts of the ones which you teach how to earn money from home.

There's a good deal of benefits to working from home. Tax benefits, lower overhead expenses, freedom of time (to some extent) and flexibility. Whatever home business idea you opt to choose, ensure to take the time to check into what you will need to need to do it correctly. Lots of people rush into starting a business and wind up costing them more than they could ever dream of earning from fines, penalties and lawsuits. Legal fees and court costs from lawsuits or even criminal charges should you not know what laws apply to your specific home business can bankrupt most home business owners.

I hope that this report has helped you in your search of fulfilling your dream of working at home and building the success and freedom that you're dreaming of. Great luck and much success!

4 Online Business Ideas With Low Start-Up Cost

Are you interested in starting your own business, but you need a very small budget to begin with? The concept of starting a business has long been seen as a very costly enterprise and is only a frequent practice among a tiny group of individuals. Luckily, the technology age has leveled the playing field for starting a business. It's now possible to begin with very little money. And by gaining the ideal knowledge and skills, you can have an extremely lucrative business. In this guide, I have put together a list of 4 lucrative online business ideas which you can begin, with only a laptop and internet access.

1. Become A Website Developer.

Website development has created many business opportunities within the last couple of decades. Now there are open source programs such as WordPress, it's fairly possible for anybody using a computer/laptop and an internet connection can become a site developer, even in the event that you've got basic technical skills. If you're uncertain of whether you have the ability to begin a business, creating sites for customers, then a brief, casual online course in WordPress can fill in the blanks and give you the assurance to provide your service to prospective clients.

Along with, website development, it is possible to provide hosting services to your customers. And no, you do not need to get a server. You can get hosting providers for very little cash. You can then give the service as part of your bundle for website development. This cost is usually set a little higher than what you pay for hosting.

Online business ideas like site development, do not require that you have a business space, so if you're strapped for cash and do not need to incur the monthly price. You can take your laptop to your favourite cafe shop, and use their free internet services. Ensure that you get something from the store, as this will keep you and the business owner happy.

2. Start An Online Store.

You can start a business online, selling your own products, or selling other people's goods. The clear benefit of this business model is that you're not limited by ingenuity, or location. If you don't have a product, and do not have the slightest idea how to come up with you, then you can earn big commissions from selling other people's merchandise. This is one of the few online business ideas which you can begin with no money.

If you do not have an online store, it would cost very little that you set one up for yourself, or have someone put one up for you. As stated earlier, open source platforms such as WordPress and Joomla makes it possible for anyone to create a web site. WordPress has great support together with free plugins that could make it very easy for you to create an online store with a shopping cart and an automatic checkout system.

However, if the monthly cost of hosting remains above your budget, then it is possible to use free e-Commerce platforms such as eBay, Etsy and Amazon. There's absolutely no monthly fee to market your merchandise, and you simply pay a small fee for listing your goods.

3. Become a Social Media Manager.

New social networking platforms are springing up around the internet. This makes it important for businesses to create and maintain a social presence on these social networking platforms if they need to be visible to prospective customers.

This demand for a social networking presence has created a new and exceptional business opportunity. It's extremely tedious to spend time creating content to increase the social networking platforms. And with all these platforms to need to keep tabs on, it can be a fulltime job.

Many companies are in need of a social networking supervisor, and you can help. This is one of those online business ideas which won't become saturated. New companies are emerging daily and will need to maintain a social networking presence. So you'll never run short of a possible client list.

It's very easy to make content and keep a several social networking accounts. It is possible to use platforms like Hootsuite to handle several social media accounts simultaneously.

You may schedule articles and content for many weeks ahead of time. You may then charge customers a monthly fee for handling these accounts, which will be a good deal less than having to hire a worker to offer this service full-time.

4. Become a Mobile App Developer.

Before deciding that mobile program development is only for those people who have spent years or longer chasing a formal education in coding, you may want to read this.

It's possible for non-techs to create mobile apps for customers with no programming skills. You may use mobile content management platforms such as MAPS - Mobile Apps Productions Software.

These platforms let you create mobile apps and release them to the Google Play and Apple app shops. Besides publishing the programs on the program shops, the content management programs let you provide back-end accessibility to customers so that they can manage and upgrade their mobile apps. You may even maintain the programs on the client's behalf and charge an extra monthly fee for hosting and management of the mobile program.

More than 91 percent of the planet's population have a mobile phone or mobile device. And as customers become more connected to their mobile devices and more demanding of what it can provide and supply fast, the demand for mobile programs will probably be even greater. More than 95 percent of businesses don't have a mobile app for their business. You may make a mobile program for these businesses at a cost they can afford. This is one of those online business ideas that has very little competition and enormous earning potentials.

Searching for More Online Business Ideas?

While you may find a great deal of online business ideas on the internet, it's important to remember that being successful in any business requires you to acquire the skills and knowledge of producing the business or service.

[bebizboss]

How To Choose A Domain Name For Yours Blog? (11 Tips)

Are you looking for How to choose a domain name for your WordPress/Blogger site? No matter how big or small, you need a good domain name for your site. It’s a gateway to the online world. Still trouble with How to choose the perfect domain for your site? let discuss,

How To Choose A Domain Name? (11 Tips)

How To Choose a Perfect Domain Name?

Looking for buying a top-level domain for your newly created/hosting web or blog site or interested to buy a customized domain behalf of your subdomain in blogger. Also, you are looking for how to choose a perfect domain and how to purchase it, and How to choose the best domain register you buy it? My Most recommended best domain register is Namecheap. Most of the people became confused when choosing a domain name for their blog or web. yes, that process can be quite complex. But you do not need to so serious, you can get a better idea about how to choose a perfect domain for your blog/web site after reading this post. There are a lot of web sites that provide domain registration and hosting facilities including commercial as well as without any charges. We can buy a domain from them, but the most difficult thing is choosing the best domain and choosing the best domain register.

What is the domain name?

Domain names serve to identify Internet resources, such as computers, networks, and services, with a text-based label that is easier to memorize than the numerical addresses used in the Internet protocols. A domain may represent entire collections of such resources or individual instances. Individual Internet host computers use domain names as host identifiers, also called hostnames. -Wikipedia-                                                                                                                                Domain names are also used as simple identification labels to indicate ownership or control of resources. Also, it used to establish a unique identity for your web/blog or company. Organizations or persons can choose a domain name that corresponds to their name, helping Internet users to reach them easily. Before the advent of today’s commercial internet, in the ARPANET era, each computer on the network retrieved the hosts file (host.txt) from a computer at SRI which mapped computer host names to numerical addresses. At previous days, they used a host’s numerical address on a computer network behalf of the domain. With the rapid growth of the internet, it made impossible to maintain a centrally organized hostname numerical addresses. That became more complicated. In 1983, on behalf of that numerical address, the Domain Name System (DNS) was introduced. Today, the ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers) which is a non-profit organization who has been delegated the responsibility to manage the DNS System has managed top-level development and architecture of the Internet domain names. ICANN authorizes domain registrars, through which domain may be registered and reassigned. Most of the bloggers buy a domain quickly without thinking more. But you should keep in mind that, if your Domain isn’t good, you will get negative feedback, also you will change your mind after a while. Also, you should keep that in your mind, your blogger’s or web site’s address will be online business card and identity for you, as long as you work on it. So try to choose a perfect domain. If you have an easy and simple domain, It will help you to be a popular and successful blogger. Not all that also I suggest you stick to go on with a .com domain. Also you can buy a .net, .org, .info, .us. But .com is the best.

How to choose the best domain name for your Web or Blog site?

Before you go to buy a domain that domain should be in order to come up with some qualities such as below,

What should you consider when choosing a domain name?

1.Short and sweet

If the domain name is too long and complex, you risk readers or customers mistyping or misspelling it. If you have fewer characters a website domain has, the easier it is to type, say, share and the less it gets shortened on social media sharing platform and that is also friendly for search result and SEO. So, short and sweet is the best way to go.

2. Make it brandable

Creative and brandable are always better than going generic. Your domain name is how your visitors will find, remember, share your web or blogger and how readers know you So it’s like a foundation of your web or blogger. So your domain should be a unique, memorable and stands out from your competitors, also it should have a good sound.

3. Easy to type and pronounce

That domain should be simple and easy to spell like Google, Facebook, and Yahoo. Your readers should be able to type your domain without a problem. Also, it should be easy to pronounce. If visitors can pronounce without any difficulties they will easier to share your domain by word of mouth, then easily they can share your site among their friends and other readers.

 4. Use keyword

Try to use some keywords that describe your content, business and the services you offer. It helps to improve your rank on search engine and just make more sense to your readers. But don’t go over the top with the domain. for that, you can use a domain name generator tools.

5. Avoid number and hyphens

That numbers and hyphens can be made misunderstood the people who hear your web site address. Also, it can be difficult to friendly with search engines. Numbers and hyphens can be made difficult to remember and familiar with index robots. But numbers and hyphens ok with using your blog title and write blog content.

6.Memorable

There are more than 1500,000,000 domains, so try to create a memorable domain. After you decide a best domain you can get the help of your family members, friends and your staff to review about your domain. Ask them if they can easy to remember those names.

7.Research it

After you decide a domain make sure the name that you decided isn’t trademarked, copyrighted or being used by another company. If another one is already using that name it can be a huge legal mess & could cost, you a fortune. So after you create a domain do domain search in google and check domain availability. For that, you can use domain name checker tool.

8. Use an appropriate domain extension.

Domain extensions are .com, .net, .org, .info, .co, biz, .me. That also called TLD (top-level domain) which is the part that comes after your domain name and before your subpages.     .com: an abbreviation for company, commerce or community.     .info : informational sites.     .net : technical, Internet infrastructure sites.     .org : non-commercial organizations and nonprofits.     .biz: business or commercial use     .me: resumes or personal sites. Also, there are a lot of new domain extensions and most of the domain registrars offer a low price offers for that. If you are targeting the global market, then try to go with .com extensions. Most successful sites using that .com extension. But if you are using target market or country then choose a TLD for that country you are targeting like .us, In, co.UK,

9. be Unique

Make sure no one using your domain. Also, try to buy many other domain extensions like .net, .org. with your domain. Then you can stop other people getting your name with another domain extension. That domain should completely unique.

10. Short term or long term

You should think about how many long terms are you going to work with your domain. Is it long term or short term? If you are going to short-term (one year) then you can buy a domain for low prices because many domain registrars offering very low prices for the first year. But if you are going to log-term you must more consider about your domain. Because you have done a lot of cost for your web site like web design, daily updates in the content or blog posts, money, time SEO. If your domain will fail to succeed, then you have to losses. It can be a waste of your all investments.

11. Get support from the domain name generators

Still, Don't know which domain to choose? By using the Domain Name Generator tools you can choose a perfect domain for your site. However, you should be careful here. Most Domain Name Generator tools have the already registered domains. Those are for reselling purpose so this can be costly for you. Also, as soon as you find a perfect domain you should need to buy it as soon as possible. If not those tools or domain agents will be purchase those domains before you buy it.

What should need more to consider When Choosing a Domain?

Buying a domain is easy, but choosing a domain can be the most difficult thing. Because the best possible domains are already taken. That is the most probably happening. When you are going to search your dreamy name, maybe it owned by another person. Yes, that can be happening. Because there are currently more than 150,000,000 active domains. If already your dreamy domain is owned by another person or company. Then Don't worry, forget it, try to similar words and be more creative. However, don’t overthink about your domain name.

Conclusion

If you become a success full to choose the best name, you will win the internet and there are a lot of chances to earn more money from your web or blog site. Also after getting a high rank in the search engines, your domain will become a valuable one. Then you can sell your domain for high value. I hope the above 10 tips help you to solve the problem of How To Choose A Domain Name for your blogger or web site. And if you have any problem or know more on How To Choose A Domain Name? Please share with us in the comments section below. Read the full article