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vavuska · 4 months ago

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Elon Musk is threatening a Brazilian Supreme Court justice after the court issued a summons to him which threatens the suspension of Twitter if he does not comply within 24 hours.

To combat disinformation, Brazil gave a Supreme Court justice sweeping powers to order social networks to take down content he believed threatened democracy. Here's how the experiment led to a ban on X, the social network owned by Elon Musk.

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/31/world/americas/brazil-x-ban-free-speech.html?smid=threads-nytimes

Elon Musk claims this is a censorship, because previously he was ordered to ban and close a lot of far-rights account that spread fake news and hate online by that same judge. As protest, Musk closed X offices in Brazil - which means people losing their job or their income.

When free speech is interpreted as anything which matches the law (and viceversa). Under Elon Musk's Leadership, Twitter has approved 83% of censorship requests by authoritarian governments globally. The social network has restricted and withdrawn content critical of the ruling parties in Turkey and India, among other countries, including during electoral campaigns.

Since Musk assumed control in October 2022, the platform has received a total of 971 government requests, a significant increase compared to the 338 received between October 2021 and April 2022.

Prior to Musk's takeover, Twitter had agreed to 50 per cent of such requests, as indicated in their last transparency report. However, no transparency reports have been published since October 2022, making it challenging to assess the current situation. Nevertheless, data from the technology information portal Rest of World suggests that the compliance rate has risen to 83 per cent following Musk's leadership, which again contribute to detect what Elon Musk REALLY think about free-speech: this right is granted only if comply to what oppressive governments and far-right politician approves. Discrimination and criminal behavior are allowed and protected under Musk's Leadership, because targets minorities, immigrants and political oppositors. Musk is a conservative and apply censorship, he isn't the victim of a 'woke' complot lead against him. Musk is receiving the payment for his unlawful action.

Source: El Pais English

As far I can understand, without having many clues here, this order of summon says that Elon Musk refused to appoint a legal rapresentative for X Brasil. For some typology of corporates Brazil require a % of residents in management or a legal rapresentative, with power to vote and deliberate in meetings, to operate online in the country. Yeah. Law apparently seems to be applied to everyone except him.

Summons with translation.

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/28/technology/brazil-x-ban-elon-musk.html

Edit: A legal rapresentative is more a managerial position than what do you think of. Yes, it could be an attorney or a lawyer too, but still isn't simply the guy who defend the corporate's interests in court. In Brazil you need a % of residents in management position to operate. This was a problem issued also with WhatsApp and Telegram.

Edit 2 - 31th August 2024: I was curious about the consequences of Musk's decision to close X's offices in Brazil for his employees. Have they been fired? Suspended with or without salary? I didn't find anything. However, I found this article that adds some informations, like Musk declaring he did this to "protect his staff". However, his legal rapresentative is impossible to be found.

Edit 3 - 31th August 2024: Another article of NY Times that analyzes the matter.

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/18/world/americas/elon-musk-x-brazil.html

Update - 31th August 2024: Brazil has turned off Twitter. Musk’s genius is again on glorious display in losing the 7th most populous country in the world. Oh well. At least the Cybertruck is doing awesome.

Another Update - 31th August 2024: Musk is freaking out right now. He knows if he gets blocked in Brazil it is just a matter of time before other countries follow suit.

However, someone forgot to tell Musk that you get fined for using VPNs to access Twitter in Brazil before he posted this.

Also seems that for a tech genius Musk isn't very smart though, doesn't he know using a VPN will worth the same with apps as it does with a browser?

However, The Brazilian Supreme Court has moderated its first rule. First, even the VPN apps were targeted and should be banned from App store and Google Store to prevent people getting access to Twitter exclusively. Now, the Court realized that banning VPNs is too extreme, so they will only apply a 50k (about $8,900) fine for those caught accessing the platform.

Basically, you don't get fined for using VPNs, that would be too 1984. You might get fined if they FIND OUT that you're accessing X via VPNs, and this is exactly the kind of thing VPNs are designed to prevent.

Just a reminder, you can always access better platform than X, even on your phone. No app is needed.

VPNs are great tools to use worldwide to get around authoritarian and abusive government surveillance and blocking. Zero to do with Musk. And they can only catch you if you aren't savvy.

In a perfect world you shouldn't need to download any VPNs to access innocent contents, because democratic countries will never block a platform that gives informations and entertainment to people. In a perfect world you won't be stuck with platforms that are not free from disinformation and neo-nazi posts.

3rd Update - 31th August 2024:

Musk owns more of SpaceX than Zuck owns of Meta or Bezos owns of Amazon, fwiw. For all intents and purposes, Musk is Twitter, SpaceX, Neuralink and X.

I'm gonna add some technicalities here:

In Brazil there is something called "Corporate Personality" that protects the shareholders patrimony from the company's debts.

But... If you hide behind legal shenanigans in a fraudulent manner, "corporate personality" is bypassed and thus the court moves into your personal patrimony.

Elon is, personally and fraudulently, removing X office from Brazil so they don't obey Brazilian laws.

So the judges target him on his other shares: SpaceX and Starlink.

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gerec · 5 months ago

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could you rec the bests space AU?

The X-Men fandom is absolutely a goldmine for amazing aus, and space aus are some of the best on offer! There are so many great ones that I have to split this into 2 parts, Anon - hope you enjoy:

SPACE AUS - PART 1

Space Jam by Pangea (series)

Prince Charles Xavier is Deputy Commander of the TEF Heartsteel and the newest mission they've been assigned starts out less than desirable and quickly goes downhill from there. It's alright, though, he'll cope.

It doesn't help, though, that he's in unrequited love with his best friend and Commander of the Heartsteel, War-Prince Erik Lehnsherr.

The stars incline us, they do not bind us by ikeracity, Pangea

Intergalactic Federation pilot Lieutenant Charles Xavier is assigned last-minute to a high profile mission: transporting over two thousand prison inmates from an old and overfilled prison complex to a newer, higher-capacity prison stronghold located on the outer reaches of the galaxy. Just as he's settling down for a long and uneventful ride, things take a turn for the worse after the inmates riot and stage a hostile takeover of the ship, leaving Charles to find himself at the complete mercy of cold-blooded killers and facing the chilling prospect that he might not ever make it back home alive.

A Curious Carriage of Crystal and Cold by Etharei

Charles, a miner from a poor village in the countryside, saves the life of Erik Lehnsherr, scion of a successful business family and the richest man on the planet Eisen. Charles is a telepath and somewhat anxious about it, while Erik abstains from relationships because the lights flicker and doors open and electronics vibrate when he gets too excited.

Also featuring a long-suffering sister, a foul-mouthed bodyguard, and a best friend with a heart that is definitely not gold.

In which there are princes, spaceships, long journeys, and old secrets uncovered. (An AU sci-fi fairytale)

The Trouble with Telepaths by endingthemes

“Are you shy about me meeting your family?” Erik asks with a huge smile. “Are you kidding me?”

“It’s not funny,” Charles says, his hands firmly planted on his hips, and it’s honestly hilarious so Erik laughs right in his face.

(Or a Star Trek AU in which Captain Erik Lehnsherr pays a visit to First Officer Charles Xavier's home planet and encounters a few surprises.)

To Rattle the Stars by GQD, Pangea

All his life Charles has chafed at the bonds of gravity that hold him bound to tiny and backwater Montressor, more at home in the sky on his solar surfer than on the ground, where he's stuck working at his stepfather's inn. His heart and soul yearn for the stars, and it's his dream to one day be a spacer and sail across the cosmos on adventure.

The opportunity comes sooner than he ever imagined one night when a ship crash-lands on the inn's front doorstep, carrying a dying pirate with a mysterious map and a dire warning: beware the cyborg.

[A Disney's Treasure Planet AU]

From Rim Space With Love by manic_intent

"Captain Logan! Captain Logan!"

The skinny cadet skitters to a halt next to Logan in the rec room, red-faced and a little out of breath. Logan eyes him with a faint frown, sunk deep into a stimm couch, thumbing up the rim of his captain's hat. He's just come off a torturous fifteen-hour shift, and healing factor or not, Logan's starting to feel it. Warp space is hell on his nerves.

"Settle down, bub. What burned your tail... eh..." Logan concentrates briefly. "Cadet McCoy? Hey. Your blue's showing. Settle down."

McCoy takes in several deep breaths, and the blue fur starting to thread out of his skin sinks back in. "Sir, yes sir. Message from X-Command, sir."

Erik Lehnsherr's Guide to Saving the Universe By Meeting Your Soul-Mate and Falling in Love in Less than 72 Hours by madneto, Pangea

Army Pilot Erik Lehnsherr is just trying to enjoy his day off when a mostly naked person crashes through the roof of his car. Even more alarming, the strange falling naked person—who goes by Charles Xavier when he's not speaking an ancient dead language—brings tidings of the apparent potential end of the world, and begs Erik to help him put a stop to it.

Well. His mother has been nagging at him to go out and meet new people.

Programming by TurtleTotem

Erik is not programmed to feel affection. There's no logical reason for Charles's death to affect him like this. ((Inspired by certain elements of Prometheus, but not a direct crossover.))

Fallen from the Stars by madmalina

Erik’s only purpose in life is to find and kill the man who had his parents executed—Sebastian Shaw, Captain of the Emperor’s fleet. When Erik gets assigned to a job under Shaw’s command—on the spaceship supposed to take the Crown Prince across the galaxy—he’s sure he’s closer to fulfilling his destiny than he has ever been before.

Charles is apprehensively awaiting the day of his twenty-fifth birthday, when he’ll be crowned Emperor, because not only does he have high doubts about his own suitability for the job, he fears the crushing responsibilities it will bring, and ultimately wants nothing more than to live a quiet and peaceful life.

However, the trip across the planets of Charles’ future Empire turns out differently than they both expected, shedding light on intrigues reaching back decades into the past, and forcing both men to put their lives into each other’s hands, even though their differences are seemingly infinite.

To Catch a Thief by lachatblanche

Charles Xavier, heir to the Xavier Corp billlions, is a wealthy, carefree socialite by day, and a skilled and renowned catburglar by night.

It was, he supposes, inevitable that someday someone would find this out.

fly me to the moon (To Catch a Thief Remix) by ikeracity

Charles is a wealthy noble who moonlights as notorious intergalactic art thief X in his spare time. Erik is the bounty hunter hot on his tail (who also happens to have a massive crush on him). A fateful encounter on the luxury resort moon Prioria changes things between them forever.

Stardust by JackyJango

When Charles Xavier, Erik's long-suffering-total opposite- best friend gets dumped by his boyfriend, Erik makes a pact with him, that he'll marry Charles if he's still single even after a decade.

I, Charles Francis Xavier, agree to marry Erik Magnus Lehnsherr if I'm not otherwise married or in a committed relationship as of ten years from today, star-dated- 2020:08:007

Nearly a decade later, Erik will do anything to see Charles with a man who's worthy of him.

Some Forgotten Corner of the Universe by Black_Betty

Erik remembers the boy he met on Osiris. Charles is no longer that boy, but that doesn't mean Erik loves him any less...

Ghost in the Shell by MonstrousRegiment

Out in the black of space, where the only creatures whose company you can always count on are violence and death, making a living is a wager. Erik’s crew of mismatched social misfits scrapes by, toeing the line between law and crime. Normally, they prefer to stay out of the Alliance’s way, but when it comes to defending the very freedom they fought for a decade ago, they only follow one principle: when someone tries to kill you, you kill them right back.

The Persistent Traveller by candycandy (telltail_heart)

Erik is the Chief of Engineering aboard the starship Poseidon, where he’s spent the last 10 years of his life dedicated to his job above all other desires. That is until he receives his newest crew member, Lieutenant Commander Charles Xavier, who proves to be more persistent than a black hole at getting what he wants, which to Erik’s utter confusion appears to be him...

SPACE AUS - PART 2

#gerec rambles #cherik #space aus #fic rec #gerec's fic rec #part 1

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justinspoliticalcorner · 8 months ago

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Matthew Taylor at Religion News Service:

(RNS) — This past month, a group of self-styled American Christian prophets released an urgent word from God on YouTube about an impending Islamic uprising in the U.S. Pointing to pro-Palestinian protests on college campuses, they declared that an “insurrection is forming that is like unto the communist takeover in Russia. … This is not only about bringing a Palestinian state to the Middle East but an Islamic state to North America and other nations.”

The good news, according to these prophets, is that God also says, “If the church repents, I will relent. I will protect your nations.” If this God-speaking-through-prophets-and-warning-nations-about-other-religions business sounds fringy and oddball in modern Christianity, it once was. But such prophecies and these prophets are rapidly redefining mainstream American evangelical theology, practice and politics. They are affiliated with a movement called the New Apostolic Reformation, a set of leadership networks whose leaders call themselves modern-day apostles and prophets and believe they are commissioned by God to take over the world.

This NAR movement runs like a golden thread through recent flashpoints of evangelical Christian support for Donald Trump, Christian nationalism and Christian extremism. NAR leaders were central to the mobilization of Christians for the Jan. 6 insurrection, and many apostles, prophets and NAR symbols were present around the U.S. Capitol that day. NAR ideas helped inspire the recent controversy surrounding the Alabama Supreme Court in vitro fertilization ruling. House Speaker Mike Johnson flies a flag outside his office that is closely associated with the NAR’s aggressive prophetic politics. The reasonable objector may argue that all of those things might be true, and yet the NAR could still be a fringe movement. How much influence do NAR ideas have on broader American evangelicalism? It’s true that the NAR networks come from the amorphous nondenominational, charismatic sector of American evangelicalism that seeks to restore the supernatural dimensions of early Christianity. Historically these groups have been outside the evangelical mainstream.

But we have collected data showing just how far these NAR-associated beliefs and practices have spread within American evangelical communities. The present-day reach and influence of these ideas may be shocking to those acquainted with conventional evangelicalism. Charismatic theologies, NAR prophecies and radical politics that once operated on the margins of evangelicalism have moved to the center of the action. Perhaps unsurprisingly, this transformation has a lot to do with Donald Trump.

[...] In the intervening decades, NAR ideas and leaders have become extremely popular in charismatic media, functioning as some of the top-tier thought leaders in the burgeoning nondenominational charismatic world. NAR networks also became increasingly politicized in the late 2000s, especially by a prophecy called the Seven Mountain Mandate, first formulated by NAR apostle (and Wagner mentee) Lance Wallnau. The Seven Mountains prophecy imagines every society as having seven major arenas of influence — religion, family, education, government, media, entertainment and commerce — and the prophecy commands Christians to conquer the tops of each of these mountains so that Christian influence can flow down into broader society. Put simply, the Seven Mountain Mandate is a prophetically derived, systematic program for Christian supremacy. Shortly after Trump declared his candidacy for president in summer of 2015, he enlisted his friend and spiritual adviser, Paula White-Cain, a charismatic apostle and televangelist, “to be the bridge between him and evangelicals.” White-Cain began by inviting many of her fellow charismatic evangelical leaders — Messianic rabbis, televangelists, prophets, NAR apostles and megachurch pastors — to meet with Trump early in the campaign.

These were the first evangelical leaders to begin endorsing Trump, signing on to his policy agenda and offering theological rationales for choosing Trump over other, more conventionally evangelical candidates. The popular idea that Trump was anointed by God (like the ancient Persian emperor Cyrus) to be president and play a special role in protecting Christians was originally championed early in the 2016 campaign by none other than Wallnau, who was involved in the 2015 meetings organized by White-Cain. A few months later Wagner himself endorsed Trump in early 2016, and Wallnau and the other NAR leaders became the chief Christian propagandists surrounding Trump with theology and prophecy. They have written books, created memes, prophetically appropriated symbolic pieces of Americana and launched massive prayer and spiritual warfare campaigns, all to see Trump victorious. Charismatics, including a number of NAR apostles and prophets, have made up more than half of all of Trump’s evangelical advisory boards, including the new one for his 2024 campaign. In fact, these networks of NAR leaders were the central nervous system of Christian organizing and mobilization for Jan. 6, and many core NAR leaders, including Wallnau, were present at the Capitol that day.

Trumpism has fueled the rise of a very different breed of evangelical Christian movement: New Apostolic Reformation (NAR), NAR's tenets feature Seven Mountains Dominionism (7MD) and an aggressively Christian nationalist vision of America with a charismatic tinge.

#Christian Nationalism #Christian Right #Christianity #Religion #Donald Trump #Trumpism #New Apostolic Reformation #NAR #Paula White #Lance Wallnau #C. Peter Wagner

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howlingday · 2 years ago

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Ok now I’ve gotta see what would happened if Mama Harley introduced her son to Cobblepot after that conversation

"Aw, did you have fun with Mr. Penguin, Jaune?"

"Uh huh!" Jaune nodded. "Fishy! Fishy!"

"You saw a fishy? What kinda fishy?"

Jaune opened and shut his mouth, curling his fingers near them for added emphasis.

"Uh huh..." Harley got a little uncomfortable. "And, uh, where did you see this fishy?" Jaune pointed with a grunt, and Harley followed his finger to the news broadcast.

Arkham Aquarium Assaulted:

The Penguin caught after hostile takeover of the Arkham Aquarium.

"Sadly, four police officers lost their lives attempting to apprehend Cobblepot, some of whom were fed to inhabitants of the exhibit."

"Jaune," Harley hissed in in a shaky breath, "what did you feed the fishy?"

Jaune pulled up his nose. Like a pig.

---------------------------------------------------

"Damn." Roman nodded. "That's cold."

"Needless to say, I was not happy." Harley added. "But I feel like we all learned valuable lessons in the coming weeks aftah. Jaune learned about marine life. I learned nevah to trust Penguin with my son evah again. B-Man learned tah keep a closer eye on Penguin."

"I feel like this is leading up to something." Roman gulped.

"And Penguin learned what an umbrella tastes like." She leaned in close to Roman. "Here's a hint; it tastes a lot like a baseball bat."

---------------------------------------------------

"This is so coooooool~!" Ruby's eyes widened and sparkled at the umbrella in her hands. On a table next to her, she looked over the blueprints Jaune's uncle was nice enough to let her borrow. "The fabric is reflective, right?"

"To reflect laser beams, yes." Bruce nodded. "It's also cross-threaded with a flexible metal alloy for increased endurance, while also maintaining it's lightweight function as an umbrella."

"Awesome!" Ruby preened. "How does the grappling chain work?"

"Like this." Bruce took the umbrella carefully, then fired the chain at a nearby pole. The penguin beak hooked around until it was secure.

"Amazing~! And how does it retract? Some kind of chord, or maybe a kind of reeling system?"

"Magnets." Bruce said as he click and reeled in the chain.

"Oh." Ruby replied, unimpressed. "Yeah, magnets are cool, too."

---------------------------------------------------

"Wah wah wah!" Oswald Cobblepot chortled in his lounge. "You come into my home, demand my time, waste it, and you expect to walk out of here alive?" He clapped his hands and his goons drew closer to the figure in the armored hoodie.

"Sounds crazy, right? But that's the thing," the figure dropped his hood, and a young man with a pale-face and red lips greeted him, "I really haven't been feeling like my sane self these days, Uncle Penguin."

The only difference between this madman and the other onr was the mop of blond hair above his head.

#rwby #mama harley au #jaune quinn au #rwby au #jaune arc #harley quinn #harleen quinzel #the penguin #oswald cobblepot #ruby rose #bruce wayne

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leveragehunters · 1 year ago

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Holy shit haha.

[Picture is of two tweets. The first is from T(w)itter Daily News, which reads:

News: Twitter has sued Watchell, the law firm that represented the company in the Delaware case that sought to force Elon to his complete his purchase. "Watchell exploited a corporate client left unprotected by lame duck fiduciaries," Twitter said in a statement.

The second tweet is a reply from Elon Musk, which reads:

Watchell brags about how many former Delaware judges work at their firm. They specialize in institutionalized corruption.]

Text of a paywalled Wall Street Journal article with the details under the cut.

Twitter Sues Wachtell Over $90 Million Payout for Musk’s Buyout Deal

Company alleges it was left unprotected by ‘lame duck’ fiduciaries pending sale to Musk

By Alexa Corse

Updated July 7, 2023 7:28 pm ET

Twitter sued Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz, the law firm it hired under previous management to enforce Elon Musk’s agreement to acquire the company, accusing it of improperly obtaining a $90 million payout as the deal-closing loomed.

Twitter alleged in a complaint filed Wednesday in California Superior Court in San Francisco that Wachtell and its litigation department, led by William Savitt, were at the center of a spending spree by Twitter’s departing executives. Twitter is asking for full restitution of the $90 million paid to Wachtell. Twitter says in the complaint that the amount includes an unspecified “success fee” that it describes as extraordinary and unconscionable.

Savitt, an attorney for Wachtell in the Twitter case, didn’t respond to a request for comment.

Musk completed his takeover in October in a deal valued at $44 billion. Twitter is accusing Wachtell of an 11th-hour adjustment to its fee structure the day of the closing, despite directions from the new ownership to suspend payment to third parties ahead of the imminent merger.

“Fully aware that nobody with an economic interest in Twitter’s financial well-being was minding the store, Wachtell arranged to effectively line its pockets with funds from the company cash register while the keys were being handed over to the Musk parties,” Twitter says in the complaint.

Twitter’s board signed off on the payment with Wachtell the day the deal closed, according to the complaint. Bret Taylor, chairman of Twitter’s board of directors at the time, didn’t respond to a request for comment.

Wachtell spent months defending Twitter’s interests after Musk said he was walking away from the deal. Ultimately, Musk decided to complete his takeover, shortly before a trial scheduled in Delaware, in which a judge would have determined whether he could abandon the acquisition.

Mark Zuckerberg’s Threads launched to compete with Elon Musk’s Twitter. And as WSJ’s Dan Gallagher explains how successful Threads is may come down to timing and scale. Photo: Stefani Reynolds/AFP via Getty Images

Bruce MacEwen, a legal consultant, said a $90 million payment didn’t seem like a lot given that the acquisition deal was valued at $44 billion. “This does not strike me as out of line,” said MacEwen, president of consulting firm Adam Smith, Esq.

If Wachtell was instrumental in getting Twitter the $44 billion price after Musk tried to get out of the deal, he said, that provided value. “Did old Twitter get its money’s worth or what?” he said.

A $90 million payment isn’t unusual for such a consequential case, said law-firm consultant Kent Zimmermann from Zeughauser Group. “I’d be surprised if Wachtell was faulted for the amount they charged, considering the stakes and the outcome,” he said.

Wachtell is known to be a leading law firm for cases like the Twitter one, he added. “There’s a limited supply of firms like Wachtell and a lot of demand for them, which drives the price up,” he said.

The suit also names Vijaya Gadde, Twitter’s chief legal officer at the time. “Immediately following the Twitter board’s rubber-stamp approval, Gadde signed Wachtell’s letter agreement,” the complaint says. Gadde didn’t respond to a request for comment.

Twitter headquarters in downtown San Francisco. Elon Musk completed his takeover of Twitter last October in a deal valued at $44 billion.

Twitter filed the complaint under the corporate name X Corp., which the company adopted after Musk took over. Twitter is being represented by Reid Collins & Tsai in the suit filed this week, the complaint shows.

The complaint includes attachments of emails and memos regarding Wachtell’s representation of Twitter. In one memo by Wachtell that Twitter included as part of the filing, the firm said its fees in other comparable litigation had ranged from approximately $33 million to $134 million.

Musk first agreed to buy Twitter in April 2022 for $44 billion, then threatened to walk away from the deal, before reversing course several months later and committing to see through the acquisition.

Musk’s decision to go through with the deal averted a high-stakes trial in Delaware Chancery Court. Twitter initially sued Musk in Delaware, seeking to enforce the terms of the merger agreement, and Musk later countersued, accusing Twitter of misrepresenting its business.

#twitter #amazing #also: while defamation is generally lupus (and it's never lupus)#I feel like Musk's tweet has some serious lupus symptoms

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lazodiac · 6 months ago

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(sorry for the delay in getting this thread up, but in my defense my internet has been bad and Dawntrail released)

Control is a game by Remedy- the first of theirs I actually played, believe it or not, which made all the stories of "Remedy made one(1) good game and the rest of their catalog sucks) feel very strange. But enough about me and my experiences with the game. All you need to know going into this is that it's one of my favorite games, it's SCP Adjacent but without all the loser edgelord stuff (and only a little bit of the trying too hard) and is really just, genuinely fantastic an experience. I hope you're ready to peer behind the poster…

youtube

Video Length: 3:58:03

We start off with a brief narration from our good friend Jesse Faden, setting up the vibe as we head into the Federal Bureau of Control. The dream-like atmosphere establishes itself immediately as we meet Ahti, the lovely Finnish janitor who is everybody's friend and not suspicious at all, as he welcomes the new hire for janitor's assistant. The way opens up for us to the head office, where Director Trench would be… and instead we find his body, and an ever shifting gun of cubes and thought. The Service Weapon, our bread-and-butter for the game. One might think a simple revolver wouldn't quite fit the aesthetic of a game like this, but the presentation of what this gun IS, like literally IS, helps push that over from simple gun to something a bit more. The fact that it doesn't need ammo helps.

Interfacing with the Service Weapon also introduces us to the Board, which I constantly call the Board of Directors because even though they aren't Directors (we're the Director) they are the Board, and in business terms the Board has to be of something and ergo they are the board OF directors. Not that they are directors on the board, but they are the board in charge of Directors. It makes sense if you think about it sideways enough. They advise us that the FBC is currently undergoing a minor hostile takeover attempt and it is up to us to put an end to this deal and politely ask the deal-maker to leave. Thanks to something unique about Jesse (or the presence she talks to) she's able to do just that, when her Service Weapon proves insufficient at negotiations at any rate.

Jesse has many tasks to do as director/janitor's assistant, and we accomplish a number of them this stream. We engage with some of our employees, we figure out how to navigate the Hotel to get to our special phone-line, we find an old floppy disc that gives us the single most satisfying telekinetic throw I have ever experience in any video game ever oh my god the sheer joy of YEETING something with such extreme speeds is to die for, and we find a funny carousel horse that lets us air dash. We also make sure to read all the documents that pass our desk, listen to voice-mails from our predecessor, and watch a few episodes of our in-house children's programming, for better or worse. All in a days work for Jesse.

So yeah. Control. Hope you enjoy, I look forward to subjecting you all to more of it. Thank you for watching and take care, we will continue this journey every Thursday… within reason, I may or may not be getting a job soon which would by necessity change my schedule. We'll see.

#Zodi #Zodi Plays #Let's Play #LP #Zodi Streams #Ccontrol #the video game #Youtube

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theprurientside · 9 months ago

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Thursday afternoon

I shut down my Twitter account back in April of 2022. My stated reason at the time involved Elon's initial announcement of the takeover - I wanted nothing to do with anything of his even back then - but past that I was deeply tired of it anyway. That sort of short-form text-based social media service was and is dissonant, shallow, and above all mentally exhausting.

It was with this in mind that I momentarily hesitated to sign up for Threads when it was introduced last year, but I eventually said Why Not This Might Be Fun Again, and so I'm account number three million and something. And an invite to Bluesky from some fellow ex-Twitter FVSMs (Friends Via Social Media, a term I just invented but which really should exist) eventually followed.

If either is not quite as bad as Twitter, even in its pre-X pre-right-wing-horrorsphere incarnation, neither is still healthy.

The human mind is not built for social media, certainly not that kind. We prefer a certain logical flow, or at least a series of concepts within defined parameters. (This place still works pretty well in that respect. So does Instagram, although my Black friend down in Atlanta reports a far more dispiriting experience lately.) But the kind of chaos that Threads and Bluesky deliver serves only to absolutely drain life and energy in an attempt to follow and respond appropriately.

So I wonder if those aren't a fair part of what's been wrong for the past near-year, if not for a near year before that. That part is a little easier to understand.

Word to anyone who doesn't live to make their LinkedIn profile look as shiny as possible (and dear God is that a whole different pit of despair as far as social media is concerned): there are certain things that you will take on in your professional life that will not work. This unfortunate situation is as unforeseeable as it is unpreventable. It just turns out that way.

Like this: Summer of 2022 I'm called into the Provost's office and asked to take over a smallish but well-regarded program on campus. Sure, I said cheerfully, I'd be happy to do it and wow thanks for the raise and all that and this will be a perfect way to build my admin credentials and this should be great because (and I distinctly remember saying this out loud) that program pretty much runs itself.

The program does not run itself, and my attempt to run it since that day has been an ongoing fiasco. It's too much, I have other very important things happening, life is a mess, and so on until I'm walking around looking utterly dazed.

To all you: It doesn't have to be like that! Herewith, five rules of program management:

Know your people. Maybe don't pick the introverted and very obviously (if undiagnosed) ADHDish guy to run a program that requires plenty of outreach and contact and day-to-day organization, on top of that person running the biggest academic department on campus.

Smooth program handover is important! Don't pick your new program leader two weeks before the current leader takes an admittedly well-earned two-month vacation back to her homeland halfway around the world and goes completely dark.

Change one thing at a time. Don't add too many new administrative complexities at once, like formal program agreements between participating institutions (many) and individual consent forms for each participant (hundreds). Process implementation is important.

Manage growth. It's not easy or healthy to have your program double in size within a year especially if your program leader still feels like he's two months behind with the old group and those extra administrative processes.

Be flexible in staffing. If your program leader visibly looks both crushed and bewildered and keeps dropping hints about wanting to disappear, it may be useful to have discussions about what is best. You'd be surprised at how agreeable this person may be!

So yeah.

Plus the mental processing in the aftermath of the second motorcycle theft (and this one has totally disappeared from the face of the Earth), plus the new baby and a toddler on an exponential learning track, plus [waving arms around at the insane state of the world]. Sigh.

It hasn't been a fun year and a half or so. My audacious success at getting in shape has backslid pretty much to point zero, a matter not helped by knee surgery last September. (Can I say this sincerely?: I miss running. Badly.) I can barely stay awake through the three-year-old's evening dose of Mickey Mouse cartoons. Trying to get regular and gratifying physical relations going with a post-baby A has been a fraught process for both of us with no guarantee of reliable anything and almost accidental cases where it's been good.

There are answers out there. Getting out from underneath that insane program is one, and that's in process; getting back into everything I want to do for the department is another. Someone somewhere was asking about a plan for staying in shape after 50 and I still think I totally nailed it when I said "bicycles, moderate dumbbells, Mediterranean diet, and lots of sex", and that actually is the current outline. Oh, and on that note if I don't ditch those two accounts then I should at least mostly forget they exist. (I really do have to check Facebook for the first time in a few years someday soon, though.)

It'll be better. It was before. It's just getting back there again - and then past it.

#diary #life #academia #wellness #social media

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influencermagazineuk · 1 year ago

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Evolution of Twitter under Elon Musk: A Shift to 'X' and the Changing Landscape

Late Saturday night, Elon Musk dropped a hint about an upcoming transformative change for Twitter - bidding farewell to its iconic blue bird logo, which has been synonymous with the word "tweet" since its inception. Ever since Musk took over the reins of Twitter, the platform has undergone several significant alterations, and his latest move is set to redefine Twitter like never before, rebranding it as 'X'. Let's take a closer look at the notable changes that have occurred under Musk's leadership. One of the most conspicuous changes Musk introduced was Twitter Blue, a paid verification system that replaced the previous blue badge of legacy verification. This move generated considerable outcry, as some raised security concerns and others bemoaned the loss of their coveted blue badge. Moreover, Twitter underwent further modification with the introduction of gold and silver ticks for brands and government figures, respectively. Notably, the platform performed a U-turn by reinstating blue ticks for celebrities to signify their authenticity. Elon Musk's decision to reinstate several high-profile accounts that were previously suspended by the former Twitter leadership caused significant controversy. Among them were figures like rapper Kanye West, who faced accusations of sharing antisemitic posts; influencer Andrew Tate, now serving a prison sentence in Romania on human trafficking charges, and former US president Donald Trump, accused of instigating the Capitol Hill riots. The takeover also saw Musk initiate mass layoffs at Twitter, resulting in nearly half of the workforce being let go as a cost-cutting measure. He further issued an ultimatum to employees, stressing the need for exceptional performance and hardcore dedication. In the wake of these substantial changes both on the platform and within its offices, Twitter's advertising business suffered a significant blow, with ad revenue plunging by nearly 50%. Musk acknowledged the company's existing financial struggles, including negative cash flow and a heavy debt burden. To address the revenue generation challenge, Musk introduced payments and commerce features, envisioning Twitter as an "everything app" that facilitates peer-to-peer transactions alongside its social media functions. While Twitter boasts an estimated daily active user count of nearly 200 million, it has faced technical snags since Musk's takeover, resulting in various platform adjustments, including the "For You" and "Following" tabs. Facing increased competition, Twitter now contends with Meta's newly launched text-based platform, Threads, linked to Instagram. Despite attracting approximately 150 million users, the time spent by users on Threads has plummeted since its launch, according to market analysis firm Sensor Tower. As Musk gears up to change Twitter's name and logo, numerous influencers have declared their intention to leave the platform, adding to the exodus that followed Musk's initial takeover. Already, Musk has renamed Twitter's parent company as the X Corporation, and he is on the hunt for a suitable Art Deco-style emblem for the rebranded platform. Under the new identity, a post will be referred to as "an X." Elon Musk's tenure at Twitter has been marked by significant changes, from the introduction of Twitter Blue and revised verification systems to mass layoffs and a shift towards revenue-generating features. The upcoming rebranding to 'X' is poised to shape the future of the platform, as Twitter continues to navigate the ever-evolving landscape of social media. X (Formerly Twitter) Logo Read the full article

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noisynutcrusade · 1 year ago

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Twitter Africa Workers Reportedly ‘Ghosted’ After Musk Fired Them

Twitter Africa Workers Reportedly ‘Ghosted’ After Musk Fired Them Topline Former employees of Twitter’s only office in Africa have reportedly been “ghosted” by the company and have still not received severance pay months after being laid off, CNN reported on Monday, adding to the platform’s growing personnel problem following Elon Musk’s takeover as competition with Meta’s Threads heats…

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sheischerrybomb · 5 months ago

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The Nightmare Before Christmas is in Kingdom Hearts, which is a Disney property owned outright. If we're talking what rights Touchstone, or more specifically, Tim Burton have over the characters he had to have been fine with the inclusion of NMBC being in KH multiple times along with two separate stand alone games, those being The Pumpkin King and Oogie's Revenge which released AFTER the first KH game came out. Jack Skellington is also a character in Disney Dreamlight Valley which is literally Animal Crossing with Disney characters. There's also Mirrorverse which has Jack, Sally, and Oogie as playable character. Jack Skellington is also a skin in Fortnite. Along with other games like Sorcerer's Arena and so on. Jack, Sally, and Oogie Boogie show up in the parks during the Halloween through Christmas months, being meet and greet characters as well as participating in plenty of Halloween events, parades, and performances. They also have an entire takeover of the Haunted Mansion with Haunted Mansion Holiday in both Disneyland and Tokyo Disneyland and have plenty of merch beyond that. It's a pretty enjoyed and well known movie by today's standards where the likes of Atlantis and Treasure Planet do not have that same type of exposure from Disney proper in the way of merch or rereleases of the movies etc. Atlantis is shown to be a bigger thread in Dreamlight Valley but no characters have properly shown up as of right now, it's just the architecture and some clothing items, and Treasure Planet has even less than that with Lorcana and a Twisted Tales Anthology being only current rep of the movie and characters. (I legit didn't even know Treasure Planet was IN the Anthology until I was skimming through the pages.) Also keeping in mind that Lorcana is Disney Magic the Gathering, which on it's own sounds like a wild concept I doubt most people would think would not only exist but work. If we can have 'critical box office failures' like Treasure Planet and Atlantis be in Lorcana then it makes sense that The Nightmare Before Christmas can make an appearance sooner or later if they so chose because there is absolutely no way, with all that, that it would set a bad precedent.

I’m genuinely curious as to why Nightmare Before Christmas characters AREN’T in Lorcana, like at all.

There’s a lot of ‘lesser known/popular’ movies/characters included in Lorcana like Treasure Planet, Atlantis, The Rescuers, Great Mouse Detective, and TV shows like TailSpin

So…Do we think Jack Skellington and crew will be featured in Lorcana sometime in the future? Because that would be awesome!

#disney #lorcana #nightmare before christmas

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greyfrey3 · 2 years ago

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Alright… pinned post. My bkdk 🔁 dkbk fics/threads

Ongoing Long Fics

Rhapsody (rating M for now): Reworking into an original novel

I’m not boring!! (rated a hard E): College AU, professor Midoriya, baseball coach Bakugou, bkdk dynamic, this one is pure smut that is slowly developing a plot. Sex comedy. Tissue-use is not because anyone is crying. Two idiots banging their way into a relationship. AO3 link

Six months to make you love me (rated M): Hiatus Precision (rated T for now): Reworking into an original novel

Complete Long Fics

The Servant (rated E): Reworking into an original novel

Undercover (rated E): canon-verse, Izuku takes on an undercover assignment right after graduation that’s supposed to only last three months. He’s gone for a year. When he returns, he’s not the same and it’s up to Katsuki to get to the bottom of things. Angst, hurt/comfort. I really poured my heart into this one. (They are only apart for a few chapters, I’ve had some people tell me that’s why they won’t read it). ~260k AO3 link

Complete One Shots/Threads

Under the bright lights (rated T): actor AU, omegaverse, Alpha Katsuki, Omega Izuku; an exchange fic, Izuku is a C-list actor on his first major film set. He runs into an old rival who triggers some old memories among other things. AO3 link

Takeover (rated T): mafia AU, they’re rival gang leaders and one of them decides it’s time to take the other one out. AO3 link

Of all the bars in all the world (rated M): sex worker AU, angst, Izuku is a sex worker who tries to make a pass at pro hero Katsuki. It does not go well. AO3 link

Don’t piss off the yakuza (rated E): Pro-hero Katsuki has a run-in with his dangerous yakuza boyfriend (Izuku) at work. A smutty dkbk exchange gift for BakuDeku Secret Santa 2022! AO3 link

Winter AU collection (rated T): various winter AU threads (bkdkbk) that I wrote for an event week on twitter. AO3 link

Deep Space Mine (rated T): Toga Himiko x Uraraka Ochako. Ochako is a starfleet officer and pilot of the starship Yuei. Toga is Q (for those not familiar with Star Trek— basically an unpredictable, all powerful being). Toga harasses Ochako, who’s just trying to do her job. One shot. AO3 link Horo-Sha Bridge (rated E): Set in ancient Japan. Izuku Midoriya is on his way home and takes a detour that causes him to cross paths with a mysterious, dangerous stranger. Horror story with a heavy splash of romance. AO3 link

Threads (all G or T): I’ll link them here as I repost them on tumblr.

#bakudoriya #bkdk fanfic #bkdk #bkdkbk #bkdk ao3 #bkdk smut #bkdk angst

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time-forum · 3 years ago

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TIME's UP!

Why does Doctor Who completely suck? I’ll try to keep this brief. It seems to have begun with Moffat’s takeover as show runner. While there were good stories and bad alike, and while he tended to keep within the realm of the Doctor’s general narrative, he left loose threads all over the place and gaps with the size and strength of black holes everywhere.

For instance, bringing in John Hurt to be the canonical 9th Doctor because Russell T. Davies wouldn’t bring 8th Doctor Paul McGann in for at LEAST a regeneration cameo back on ’05… SO unnecessary. McGann was never called in for the 50th anniversary until near post production as a sort of after-thought to cement Hurt’s incarnation into place. WHY didn’t Moffat simply put McGann back in the TARDIS for the 50th? Answer- because he’s a narcissistic bastard who thinks he’s clever.

To be fair, the move WAS very clever. However, it was also stupid, insufferable, and has proven that much of the fan base if filled with morons, psychopaths and mental defectives. Not counting Hurt as the 9th Doctor??? Seriously? Tough shit, kids; it’s canon. You SAW the show, right? You DID listen when he did, in fact, call himself “The Doctor”, didn’t you? Capaldi was called “The Doctor of War”, but that’s not an isolating moniker, now is it? Seriously, kids; get a grip!

Despite this infuriating shit-fuckery, fans have also neglected the fact that David Tenant portrayed two, YES TWO incarnations of the Doctor. In “School Reunion” he did tell Sarah Jane Smith that he’d regenerated ‘half a dozen times’ since last they met.

They last time they canonically met was in ‘The Five Doctors’ with Peter Davison as the 5th Doctor. Add six more- Colin Baker, Sylvester McCoy, Paul McGann, and at the time, Eccleston… that’s only 5, right? Well, Hurt makes 6, baby. That’s just basic math. Need more? Alright, let’s include Matt Smith’s explanation to Clara while he was on Trenzalore. He told her that he was done and couldn’t regenerate anymore and that he was the last of “THIRTEEN SILLY DOCTORS”. Point and set. Done. Canon. Etched in dwarf star alloy. There’s no debate here, children. It’s fact, not your perception, your “truth” or skewed point of view. Fact.

Regeneration, for you novices out there who can’t be bothered with canon material, is when a Time Lord’s body is repaired to cheat death by replacing every single cell with a fresh, new one. Often, this also creates a change of appearance but it is not mandatory or conducive to the process. Anyone who is ‘old school’ and recalls former companion and Time Lady ‘Romana’ already knows that form change can be controlled at will, at least when it isn’t during a time of duress.

Perhaps the Doctor was never good at controlling his regeneration process. Perhaps it’s because he’s half human, according to canon from the 1996 movie. Perhaps his faces were from memories of random people that leapt to mind during the near-fatal instance that triggered the regeneration. Colin Baker played a Time Lord before he was the Doctor and he shot then-Doctor Peter Davison on Gallifrey. Right after, the Doctor wore that face. Perhaps Pertwee’s 3rdDoctor had met the young Curator of the Undergallery, hence changing into Tom Baker’s face as inferred in “Day of the Doctor”. Even Capaldi acknowledged his Doctor’s facial origin.

What we do know for sure and beyond doubt is that when you have something like a coffee mug and it breaks and you follow up by buying a new mug that looks exactly like it, you simply cannot claim that they’re both the same mug and in the case of the Doctor, this simple, cognitive avenue of thought applies as well. All new body- same shape- new incarnation. Period.

While we may live in the Era of Anti-Intellectualism, what with the Americans having elected Trump and the Brits putting that ass-scab Johnson into top political offices, it’s no wonder that the Doctor Who fan base cannot accept these things. They’re still crying like infants; screaming at those of us with working brain cells that Jodie Whittaker is the 13th Doctor.

So while the show may have had its issues, part of the problem is that “Newvians” think they’re oh-so-smart-and-facts-be-damned attitude is somehow valid. It isn’t even a pleasure talking ‘Who’ with others. Too often there’s the resounding risk of being attacked or ostracized as a heretic for calling them out on their bullshit. This isn’t to let the BBC, marketing divisions and “bling” makers that don’t want to change their packaging off the hook. They’re very much part of this problem and it’s an issue that wouldn’t BE an issue had Davies clarified to the unwashed masses that Tennant was two incarnations and had Moffat simply hired Paul McGann to be the Doctor for the Time War in the goddamn first place.

Moving on, this brings us to the post-Smith era with the 14th Doctor, Peter Capaldi. I had very much looked forward to his time as the Doctor as he was a long-time fan of the show and he knew his stuff. That seems a little trivial to some, but if you’re going to play a role, you should KNOW the character you’re going to portray. I really have no complaints about Capaldi’s era; his Doctor was a bit like earlier incarnations and it was Capaldi’s interpretation of how the character should be, but thinking back, not too many of the stories from his time were… memorable. Part of what made Davies’ time as show runner was that most, not all but most of the stories done during his tenure as show runner were not only memorable but worth revisiting.

I’ve binged Eccleston and Tennant’s stories, starting with “Rose” straight through until “End of Time” with a lot of enthusiasm. During that stretch, I found that one of the best; nay THE best one-off writer was Moffat. I was looking forward to his legacy when it was announced that he was taking the helm when Davies stepped down. However, he initially turned the show into “The Amy Pond Show featuring Rory and some guy called The Doctor with special guest star River Song”. The lead character, the one the show is named after, seriously took a back seat for the first few seasons. The “Suck Factor” came into play, not just on a story by story basis but for a whole season where Moffat couldn’t hold a story arc together if his life depended upon it while Davies was a total master of it. Moffat refused to listen to suggestion on criticism, and that egotism make the suck factor worse.

During Capaldi’s time it only got worse. Add to that the same horrific fuck-ups that were done during the show’s original run began bubbling up like they did back then. Egos began to run the show. The “PC” police started poking at it, chipping away and changing it so that it took a lot of the fun out of things. The writing got bad. The filming schedules were sporadic and there were large gaps of time between shows. It was a death spiral for Doctor Who back in the 1980’s, and we’re seeing it again. At least Capaldi’s time as the Doctor ended will and introducing ‘Missy’ was a welcome surprise which was obviously a warm-up for the introduction of a female Doctor (which was a concept that had been around since 4th Doctor Tom Baker left the show and before they’d cast Peter Davison as his successor).

With that said, I get asked “Why a woman? What’s wrong with having a decent male role model that doesn’t carry a gun?” Well, the answer is- nothing. I rather prefer a male in the role, but have never, EVER been adverse to a female actor in the lead. This is a science fiction show, after all, and if it is to grow, new ideas and concepts will come around for better or worse and there’s never been an issue for me having a female lead. I just wish it wasn’t Jodie Whittaker. Holy. Shit.

She’s an alright actor, but she’s clearly out of her bailiwick when it came to Doctor Who. She’d barely heard of it and new NOTHING of the character or the show’s history. She went into this with ZERO research and it shows. She’s NOT Doctor material on any level and cannot act the part for shit. This era already began in the crapper and of course, having Chibnall as show runner made the show’s inevitable demise more concrete.

To begin with, let’s just start with some basics, shall we? I’ve made it clear that I loathe Whittaker in the role, especially when there’s someone like Phoebe Waller-Bridge out there who’d simply and totally own the role and make it so much better. However, the show kicked off trying to run like an Olympic sprinter and it ended up staggering like a drunk on meth attempting to navigate a dark, foggy back alley in a heavy snow on icy tarmac covered in wet leaves.

The outfit. Holy mother of god, what the fuck? If you thought Colin Baker’s ‘technicolour dreamcoat’ was a disaster, what the unholy hell did the wardrobe department put Whittaker in? It looks like something from a “Mork and Mindy” reject bin. The first female incarnation and THAT was the best they could come up with??? Seriously?

Then came the crystal-tipped dildo of a sonic screwdriver. Need I say more on this? Your first woman Doctor and you give her a sonic screwdriver that’s sure to hit the ol’ G-spot every time? What the hell were they thinking?

And the TARDIS. Sweet Jesus, who the hell let props DO that to the TARDIS???? A biscuit dispenser? I thought Smith’s initial ‘brassworks’ console room was horrible at first but it did grow on me after a while but Whittaker’s “Crystal Fuckery On Ice” console room is simply the singular, worst of all the TARDIS sets ever made since the show’s inception.

To compliment the already uninteresting new Doctor, let’s talk about the companions. Not much to say, really. Not interesting. Not exciting. Not memorable in any way other than the fact that they cast everyone from ‘the north’ and if it wasn’t for captioning, most Americans can’t understand most of what any of the main cast is saying. Hell, I’m an American and my family mostly British and my kid has to keep asking me what the hell is being said most of the time and I can’t even tell half the time.

First season… What can I say? I’ve got nothing, mostly because I can’t really recall it without looking it up or watching it again. It was totally unmemorable until the very end when it perked up a tick with the desperate yet irrelevant stunt of bring Captain Jack Harkness in for a cameo out of sheer desperation for rating because things were just THAT boring and unmemorable. Add to that a ‘mystery Doctor’, or ‘Doctor Ruth’ as she’s sometimes called, dressed FAR better than Jodi and man, could Jo Martin command the role, upstaging Jodie on every level. She was more The Doctor in her few and short scenes than Jodie was in her entire time in the role. There’s no solid explanation as to who Jo’s character really was at time or writing. Then again, no solid anything is Chibnall’s signature in Doctor Who. Nothing is consistent or sacred to this fop. This brings us to…

Whittaker’s final season- thank fuck.

While I was all for a more inclusive and diverse cast for DW, and having a woman in the lead, putting a twat like Chibnall in charge became a real deal breaker. I knew his type back in school. He tipped his hand as one of those angry little jerks who say the 4th Doctor’s story “The Brain of Morbius” back in the summer of 1977 and lost his mind in the process.

In this particular story, the Doctor visits Karn, meets the Sisterhood, and discovers that a villainous renegade and war criminal Time Lord named Morbius, who’d been executed on Karn long ago, lived on in the lab of a ‘mad scientist’. Only Morbius’ brain survived and was kept in a jar to be placed in an amalgamation of alien body parts found in different crash sites on the barren plains of Karn. The scientist even has an ‘Igor’ sidekick to help him. Eventually (spoiler alert) the brain of Morbius gets put inside the “Frankenstein’s Monster” of a body and the Doctor faces off with him in a game Time Lords call “Mind Bending” which is, as the Doctor explained to Sarah Jane Smith, a sort of Time Lord wrestling, mind-to-mind.

With the Doctor and Morbius at the controls of a mind scanning machine, the two duke it out, trying to push each other back into their own memories, risking death if pushed too far. We saw the faces of Jon Pertwee, Patrick Troughton and William Hartnell appear on the monitor as well as eight others. No actual, solid declaration was initially made at the time but behind the scenes, writers and producers inferred that the Doctor could be older than we thought and his story having begun far before Hartnell came along… BUT!

THEN came “The Deadly Assassin” which flushed that notion down the shitter. It was two stories after when the 4th Doctor had to return to Gallifrey (first time on screen) and he’d left Sarah Jane back on Earth (apparently nowhere near her home in Croydon). In this story, it is plainly and definitively cast out there: The Rule of Twelve. A Time Lord could regenerate twelve times for a total of thirteen incarnations. This meant that given that there were already eight “Morbius Doctors” revealed on top of the four we knew of from the show already, that put Tom Baker at incarnation number twelve and that his successor would be the last one.

Given that this would complicate matters and/or kill one of the BBC’s biggest cash-cow, they amended the prior narrative that inferred that the other faces were the Doctor and changed it to those of Morbius before he was executed. It wasn’t a detrimental fix, but one that was needed to clarify things. Thus it was clarified, settled, and that was that, right?

Wrong. There were and are still fans who will tear your face off like a maddened monkey if you tell them otherwise; they are firm that those faces were of the Doctor. “Take your facts and get fucked! It’s the Doctor!” Wild, right? You’d think that people who persisted with it would be considered the bloody village idiot and ignored, ostracized and put into a mental health facility before they hurt themselves of others or do irreparable damage to something… Something like Doctor Who… by making one of these deranged arseholes show runner someday… like Chibnall. Yeah, he was one of the village idiots. You can tell because he specifically and intentionally showed a very brief flash of the Mind Bending scene when “Doctor Karen” was having flashback as the whole “Timeless Child” horse shit was being shoveled around.

Speaking of “Doctor Karen” and Whittaker’s Doctor is known in some circles… While I had no complaints of grief over a woman actor taking the role… I thought the point of feminism was to being all people to a respectful, common level of existence. People who fear feminism because of misinterpretation just had their fears affirmed when Doctor Karen told Stephen Fry’s character that she’s “had an upgrade”… UPGRADE???? Really? Now Doctor Who is pitching that women are an upgrade from being a man? Moffat did the same thing after The General regenerated into a woman and she complained about how men cope with all the testosterone. Jesus Horatio Christ. What a defeat for Doctor Who right there. So much for the assertion that women aren’t trying to make themselves out to be better than men and the really shit thing is that it was MEN that put that out there in the Whoniverse. Yeah; fuck you, Moffat and ESPECIALLY Chibnall, you ball-less wonders.

As this whole “Timeless Child” shit-fuckery rolled out, I could see that Chibnall was trying to push his own views out into the show with no regard to established canon or respect for all those who worked so hard on the show for over fifty years. He was going to burn it all down and try to remake it in his own image. Unfortunately, that image is akin to an angry monkey throwing its own shit around the zoo and he clearly thinks he’s clever and even funny. Hell, he seems to be having a grand old time while the Whoniverse burns to the ground irreparably.

So what hope does Russell T. Davies have as he returns as show runner in charge of all the creative powers while the BBC is left sitting in a damp puddle of it’s own shart-fest?

Part of the magic of Doctor Who was the lead character being a good-guy shrouded in a bit of mystery. We weren’t meant to know exactly who he was in his past before leaving Gallifrey. Having a little slice of his past come to light on rare occasion was gravitas; a bit of sweet delight added to an already delightful meal for the mind that was as subtle as a chocolate covered cherry. Davies knew this when he re-imagined the Doctor as a sort of PTSD stricken, post war veteran of the Time War and he left that time a mystery to slowly be unfurled over the course of years that led up to the 50thanniversary story eight years later. During that time, the Doctor revealed a bit about his origins but not really a lot. It was more of a revelation into the people of Gallifrey, really.

During the Classics, Hartnell never specified why he and his granddaughter Susan were exiled. Troughton revealed that the Doctor’s family was “gone” and that he’d still think of them but we don’t actually know if he meant that they were dead or lost somewhere or if they were the ones that sent the Doctor away and didn’t want him around anymore. Much later, during McCoy’s story “Remembrance of the Daleks” it is revealed that when the Doctor first stole the TARDIS and ran away with Susan that he’d brought with him a relic of the Ancients of Gallifrey; the Hand of Omega. Still, he wasn’t totally clear on how he got this relic or specifically WHY he made off with it. All we know is that when the Doctor first arrived at Totter’s Lane, he hid the Hand on Earth and that McCoy came back to just after that time in order to reclaim it so that the Daleks wouldn’t get their plungers on it.

The Doctor is, or at least WAS a character with a mostly untold, mysterious past and that defined the character immensely. It was a common consistency from the first episode right up until the show died with Peter Capaldi’s incarnation. The entire “Whittaker Era” destroyed any semblance of Doctor Who. While everyone was once free to imagine what the Doctor’s past was all about, that’s now been utterly annihilated by Chibnall’s maniacal, childish and outright desperation to be loved as he crammed a nonsensical, boorish, and very forced storyline out of his arse in order to make his own fantasies and dreams the final, end-all-be-all of Whovian Canon. There is no longer really a “Who” in “Doctor Who” anymore. It’s now Chibnall’s wet dream; a foul-tasting scheme for revenge for all the times he was told to sod off over the Morbius Doctors and all the times he’d been beaten up by bullies for being such an argumentative, geeky asshole. Well, that’s what I’d wager this all is, at any rate.

There’s only one real fix to this problem and sadly, it sucks and yet it’s the only path to redemption for my beloved Doctor Who. Davies has two solid paths to take from here on out and either choice is going to piss off a lot of people. To restore Doctor Who to its former greatness, he’s going to essentially have to do a major retcon job and start over with Capaldi’s regeneration. Maybe getting Jo Martin to return as the REAL post-Capaldi Doctor and making Jodi a stray bit of regeneration energy that went astray or something would do it… Perhaps Phoebe Waller-Bridge… Helen Mirren, anyone?

The other path Davies could take is literally to do nothing. He could try to soldier on and hope ignoring the issue like he did in clarifying Tennant’s two incarnations and push by it in hope we’ll ignore or forget about it as well. That seems to be the 21stcentury way of dealing with things in “polite society”; turning things into “alternative facts”.

In closing, I can only say this- this sort of thing is EXACTLY what the 4thDoctor was driving at when he said:

"You know the very powerful and the very stupid have one thing in common. They don't alter their views to fit the facts. They alter the facts to fit the views. Which can be uncomfortable if you happen to be one of the facts that needs altering."

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ladyrynofsunnydale · 3 years ago

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Bo Katan Week Day 5/ Satine Lives AU

Title: How Do You Pick Up the Threads of an Old Life?

Rating: Teen And Up Audiences Relationships: Bo-Katan Kryze & Satine Kryze Summary: Post-Lawless, but Satine lives. Bo-Katan and Obi-Wan were able to save Satine, and with the Republic’s help Satine was once again ruler of Mandalore. Everything should be happy and back to normal, right? After being apart for almost twenty years, two sisters, once on opposite sides of the same conflict, have to learn how to work together again.

Author’s Note: Day 5 of Bo-Katan Week! I am having so much fun this week and am so enjoying writing, editing, and also reading and seeing other’s work! So this is part of a novel length AU fic I’m working on, so I took a snapshot to post for this week. I would recommend reading ‘End of One Era, Beginning of Another’ first as there are some references, but it’s not necessarily mandatory. Credit for the chapter title to Lord of the Rings: Return of the King.

Tagging: @bokatanweek

Click on the link up top to read or continue reading below

Satine sat in her sitting room, her head in her hands. After helping retake Mandalore from Maul’s Death Watch, Obi-Wan and the rest of the Republic troops had left that afternoon. She had just barely kept herself from asking him to stay, instead just hugging him then letting him walk out of her life once again. She’d just have to worry about him being a General in the Grand Army of the Republic alone.

Her door whooshed open and armored boots came into view.

“Orange tea still your favorite?” Bo-Katan’s voice asked, reaching out a steaming cup. Satine stared at it for a moment before sitting up and reaching for it.

“Most days,” she responded, taking a sip before looking back up at Bo. She sighed resignedly. “Bo we’re going to need to have a talk.” Bo sank into the chair next to her.

“I figured.”

Satine watched her as she stared into the fireplace. Suddenly, looking at her there, she looked so young. The big sister in her wanted to reach out and shield her, tell her everything was going to be ok. But in reality, she didn’t know if that was true. Mandalore, Satine, Bo-Katan, her commandos, they had a long road ahead of them. Yes Bo-Katan and her fighters had come in at a clutch moment, rescuing both Satine and Obi-Wan before Maul could get them in his grasp, but that didn’t negate all the rest they had done prior to Maul’s takeover.

“Tomorrow?” Satine asked. Bo looked over at her, then back to the fire, nodding.

“Tomorrow.”

Satine finished her tea and they sat in silence, the only sound the popping of the fire.

“I have something for you,” Satine said and got up to move to her desk. Bo followed her with her eyes while she opened up one of the locked drawers and removed a small wooden box. Returning, she handed it to Bo. Bo gingerly accepted it, her eyes wary, and opened the lid to look inside. The wary look quickly changed to surprise as she lifted the beskar leaf brooch out.

“How?” she asked, turning the leaf over and running her finger along the edge.

“Fenn Rau. After...he thought I’d want it. To have something of yours.”

“You kept it? All these years? Even after…?” she trailed off.

“You were, are, my sister Bo. I love you, and I wanted to be able to remember our good days.”

Bo stared at the box, then handed it back to Satine.

“Keep it. As a promise from me. That that Bo-Katan is not dead.”

Satine took the box back and the two of them just stared at each other until there was a knock on the door and it slid open. One of her aides walked in with a tray of food.

“I knew you hadn’t eaten so…” she paused, glimpsing Bo-Katan.

“Thank you, Leanna,” Satine said, standing to accept the food. Leanna looked from her to Bo.

“I can…”

“It’s fine, I was leaving anyways,” Bo said, standing, but Satine reached forward and grasped her arm, releasing her when she flinched.

“Please stay. Leanna if you wouldn’t mind?”

“Of course not,” she said and bustled out of the room. She returned a few minutes later with another tray and Bo sighed as she took it and sat beside Satine. They ate in silence until Satine stifled a laugh.

“What’s so funny?” Bo asked, looking up from her tray.

“You still eat like an anooba,” she answered, smiling behind her hand. Bo’s eyebrows pinched together, wrinkling her brow.

“Yeah, well, no real eating etiquette in Death Watch.”

“I would say no fashion sense either, but your hair is quite fashionable.”

“It’s utilitarian. Keeps it out of my face.”

“Hmmm,” Satine hummed, amusement filling her voice. “Keep telling yourself that ner vod.”

“Your hairpieces are the worst.”

Satine made a face.

“I must agree.”

“Then why do you wear them?!”

“Because it’s expected.”

Bo shook her head, shoveling more food into her mouth.

“Yeah, you can keep that whole Duchess title thing,” she said after she swallowed. “I’m good.”

Bo walked into Satine’s office the next day. Despite the sense of normalcy they’d had the night before, tension was in the air once again.

“Please, sit,” Satine said, gesturing to the chair across her desk. Bo took a seat but perched on the edge, staring at her sister. “I meant what I said when I told the populace we’d be reevaluating the protection of Mandalore. But Bo-Katan, I can’t just forget everything that happened.”

“I don’t need you to tell me I’ve made mistakes. I’m quite aware of them. But the people are right. Mandalore needs to be able to protect itself. Me. My people. We’re loyal to Mandalore.”

“But are you loyal to me? I don’t want to have to worry about an insurrection every few months.”

“Satine, I meant what I said last night. The Bo-Katan you grew up with, she’s not wholly dead. But our people are warriors. It’s in our blood. Mine and even yours. It’s been a while, but I know you have some fire too.”

“But I won’t let it…”

“Destroy Mandalore, I know.” She looked down at her hands. “I, and most of those who follow me, want to see Mandalore prosper. Thrive. If you do right by our people, we will stand by you.”

“I need to know if I can trust you.”

Bo felt a stab of hurt, but also shame, in her gut.

“I will stand by you, ner vod. I still do not quite understand you, but I do understand that you are trying to do right by our people. And I meant what I said to that Chancellor. I have no interest in ruling.”

“And your people? Do you trust them?”

Bo thought of her commandos. Those who’d followed her. She’d lost a fair amount of her Nite Owls to Maul’s allegiance, but many still remained. And a good many ex-Death Watch remained with her as well. She knew a passable amount of them personally and many more through their superiors.

“Ursa, who was my second in command of the Nite Owls, I trust unconditionally,” Bo responded. “A few others I trust as well. We are going to need to go through the remaining and confirm their loyalty. It will take some time.”

Satine nodded her head.

“Take all the time you need. And a new name. You’ll need a new name.”

A few days passed and Bo was sitting in her office using a stylus to write up reports on one of her datapads. There had been an incident already between a few of her commandos when Bo had declared that they were going to continue to stay under Satine’s rule and were not going to overthrow her government. Luckily no one was seriously hurt, but she did have a few commandos in the medcenter and also a few now in the brig. She knew this was just the tip of the iceberg and it was going to be a long process of weeding through her commandos.

She felt a stab of guilt at the thought and paused in writing the commandos names she had locked up. She would have to do something about those who refused to bow to Satine’s rule, even though they had been loyal to Bo. Loyal to Death Watch and Mandalore. They had stayed with her and hadn’t hesitated to fight bravely against Maul and their brothers and sisters who’d thrown their lot in with him. And now she was asking them to throw their lot in with a government Death Watch had sworn to overthrow from Day 1? She was sure there had been grumblings when she’d made the decision to break Satine out of prison and to use her to get Mandalore back. And her commandos had trusted her then. Trusted that she knew what she was doing. But using Satine to take back their planet from a Sith and permanently allying themselves to her were two different things. Granted yes, it was the right thing to do; she’d rationalized that and understood that. Mandalore couldn’t keep on the trajectory that Death Watch had stood for. It would only lead to ruin and destruction, and her people deserved more. She hoped to be able to convey this and help her commandos understand. Her people respected her, she knew that. They wouldn’t have followed her if they hadn’t. But she had never quite made herself approachable. She’d have to do that over the next few weeks to hopefully allow those who had reservations to approach her and talk about it instead of dealing with it with blasters. How much the ex-Death Watch members would actually be willing to talk instead of fighting is another question, but she wanted to give her people as much of a shot as possible.

She continued on writing up her report when there was a knock on her door. She startled and dropped the stylus to reach for her blaster, but calmed herself. From what she knew and remembered of the palace, this was a small office. But to Bo, it felt lavish and gaudy. Sure Vizsla had been governor of Concordia and she had become familiar with his large office, but she herself had never had an office, despite being Lieutenant and leader of the Night Owls. This probably had a lot to do with Death Watch being offplanet and in one system or another for most of the time she had been Lieutenant. When they had still been on Concordia she’d used Vizsla's office in the mines when she’d needed it. But that office was spartan. A table with a few chairs. This office was bringing back memories of her childhood and was more richly decorated than even the Concordian governor’s office. The chairs were thickly padded with some type of leather and the desk was large and metallic with multiple holoscreens she could pull up and all the drawers she would ever need. If she closed her eyes, she could hear the flowing water in the gardens outside and could smell the leather, and in a way she could pretend she was nine years old and watching her Buir work, her small legs swinging while Satine, with her long blonde hair done up in a braid, sat beside her, discussing one thing or another about Sundari and governance.

The knock on her door sounded again and she released her blaster to reach for her stylus again and continued writing.

“Come in,” she called, and the door hissed open. She looked up and quirked an eyebrow in surprise. “Sati... your grace. This is a surprise.” Satine waved a hand at her and walked forward to grasp the back of one of the chairs.

“Please, Bo-Katan, you are still my sister. You’re allowed to call me Satine.” Bo closely watched her sister, and she noticed she seemed nervous. Some tells remained, despite how many years had passed. She glanced down at Bo’s hands and the stylus she was still holding. “You write your notes out with a stylus?” she asked, curiosity filling her voice. Bo glanced down at her own hands and with Satine standing in front of her she couldn’t help the memories that flooded her. Of all those nights those first few months with Death Watch. The flimsies and charcoal she’d stolen and all the letters she’d written to Satine. Of how she’d planned to find a way to send them to her sister. And how her big sister would swoop in and save her from these people. Those days were long gone, but even after, she’d preferred writing over typing or dictating. It gave her a sense of calm.

Gods she needed to stop this sentimental crap.

“Old habit I suppose.”

Satine nodded, her hands gripping the chair tightly.

“I’ve come to see if you would like to take dinner with me tonight.” Bo shifted uncomfortably and Satine quickly spoke again. “It would just be me, I promise. No advisors, no dignitaries.”

Bo twiddled with the stylus in her hand, flitting it between each of her fingers, and stared at the woman in front of her. She was dressed formally, her hair done up with lilies woven in it. She paused, looking at the lilies. She’d forgotten how much Satine had loved lilies. She almost always had a bowl in her room, until they’d had to flee to Concordia. The compound had always felt very sterile. Dinner, did she want to do dinner? Sure, she’d spent some time alone with her sister the past few days, but those times were few and far between. And looking at her now she felt like she was agreeing to have dinner with the Duchess, not her sister. The face looking at her was the face she’d learned to hate for so long.

But she needed to try. She’d loved her sister once. And if she was really honest with herself she’d missed her. She could try.

“Yes, I could do that,” she responded, clearing her throat, and she watched Satine relax. “What time?”

“In two hours if that works for you?”

Bo glanced at the chronometer on her desk.

“Yes, that should work. In your private rooms?” Satine nodded, a smile slipping over her face.

“Yes. Thank you, Bo. I’ll see you then.”

Bo gave up doing any work after thirty minutes of staring at her datapads and trying to write. She was able to finish up her report and then returned to her rooms, deciding to take a quick shower and wash her hair. Her rooms were close to the Protector barracks and though close to the royal wing, were not in it. There had been some discussion, very brief, about whether she should move into the royal wing, but objections both from Bo and the Protectors had silenced that debate quite quickly. The bedroom and sitting room were average sized and sparse, but they fit Bo fine.

After drying her hair, Bo stared at her wardrobe, or rather lack of it. She had been able to snag an extra flightsuit, and had a loose tunic and pants that she slept in. Flightsuit and armor would have to do.

Walking to Satine’s rooms, many of the people in the hallway gave her a wide berth, dropping their eyes and hurrying past, but Bo kept her head up and paid them no mind. The Protectors stationed in the royal wing and outside Satine’s doors glared at her but let her pass, and faster than Bo would have liked she was knocking on the door to the royal private dining room and was being told to enter.

Satine, to her surprise, was dressed casually in a simple dress and her hair was loose around her shoulders. The table was set simply, two place settings at the end of the table across from each other. Perfect distance for casual conversation without them being right on top of each other. Satine already had a glass of wine in her hand and she gestured for Bo to take the place setting across from her where there were two empty wine glasses.

“White or red?” she asked, placing her wine glass down.

“Um, red,” Bo answered, feeling out of her depth as she took a seat and Satine poured some of the red wine into her red wine glass. Bo ran her fingers through her hair and stared at the place setting. Of course there was a white and a red wine glass, and why were there so many forks?

“I tried to get them to allow me to set the table myself,” Satine said, and Bo looked up and met her eyes, “but you know how protocol is. You can use whatever fork you like.” Bo felt a small smile slip over her face. “I remember how much you disliked etiquette lessons.”

“That’s a nice way of putting it. I think our Governess would have strangled me if she could have.”

“Her screeching does still ring in my ears.”

Bo felt herself relax a little and reached for her wine and downed a little more than was proper. She’d had dinner with Satine before, just the other night in Satine’s office, so she didn't know why she was so nervous. She stared down at her place setting again.

“Which fork do I use first again? The outside and work my way in?”

Satine actually chuckled.

“See, you learned some things.”

“Do you remember that one time I showed up for my lessons covered in mud?” Satine smirked, setting her glass down.

“I don’t think her face could have gotten any redder. I had never seen her so angry. You know, I never asked. Where did you get so covered in mud?”

“Mom’s rose garden.” Satine actually laughed at that and Bo cracked a smile. “J’onn said that trickster nymphs grew at their roots, and that is why they had thorns but also had such beautiful flowers. I told him he was a liar, and uprooted one of mom’s bushes to prove it. They’d just been watered, so uprooting and then replanting it left me less than clean.” At that point Satine was laughing so hard she was crying and Bo was chuckling.

“I can see why you never offered up that information before,” Satine said, wiping some tears from her eyes and getting herself under control. Their mom loved her roses and protected them quite fiercely. “You were quite the wild child Bo.”

“Someone had to keep Mom and Buir on their toes. They’d become quite complacent with you.”

Bo felt herself relaxing even more as one of the chefs placed a salad on the plate in front of her. This felt...normal. Familiar. Before their parents had died, Bo had never failed to get Satine to crack a smile. That look that Satine had given her when she’d seen her that day in the marketplace ten years after she’d disappeared, when Bo’d just about said she hated her, had haunted her for years, despite lying to herself that it hadn’t. She knew Death Watch, Vizsla, would have hailed her a hero if she’d been able to kill Satine then. But she couldn’t do it. Couldn’t pull the trigger. The lies Death Watch and she herself told herself each day had kept her from breaking down at seeing her sister again, but she couldn’t kill her. And now here she was, making her laugh again. Eating dinner with her again like nothing had happened.

The silence was comfortable as they ate, and when their main meal finally came they moved on to discussing plans at the docks and how they were dealing with food shipments in from the Republic. Once their mostly empty plates were taken away, Bo leaned up against her chair back, her wine glass in hand as she swirled the red liquid around. The alcohol had loosened some of her inhibitions and she actually relaxed her spine to slouch, though she did have to shift so that her armor didn’t dig into her hips.

Satine was the one to finally break the silence.

“I know you probably don’t want to talk about it, but I have to know. What happened, at the compound all those years ago and…after.”

Bo stared at the swirling liquid in her glass before she set it back down on the table and pushed it away.

“You don’t want to know Satine.”

“I do. Please. I need to know.”

She felt Satine’s eyes on her and stood up and began pacing the room and running her hands through her hair. She finally came to a stop, her hands on the back of her chair.

“Carlson and I were about halfway to the hangar when I remembered Buir’s beskar’gam. He wouldn’t let me go, so I kicked him and ran. I couldn’t leave it for them to take. It was ours. Our family’s.” She paused. “Did...did Carlson make it?” she asked, and Satine shook her head sadly. Bo dropped her eyes and went on. “By the time I’d made it back to the right side of the compound, there were attackers between me and the hangar. So I headed for the garden. After the compound exploded, Vizsla found me. He said you’d left me, and he took me back to his camp. I was so angry. They kept me under guard at all times, forced me to eat, drink. I was constantly plotting on how to escape, get revenge. But then I started meeting other foundlings they’d taken in. All of us had been left behind or had our families killed. And then they brought me to the range and tested my shooting skills. The praise I got, it,” she paused, a nostalgic though melancholic smile on her face, “I finally felt nu'amyc. They taught me how to fight, how to defend myself, and eventually I stopped fighting back. Death Watch gave me a sense of belonging. There was finally this stability in the world of chaos we’d been living in for so long. They became my family. A very violent and often angry family, but a family nonetheless. And you remember me back then, I was relentless when I put my mind to something, and I was determined now that I was given the chance to be the best warrior I could be. I quickly moved up the ranks and they used my knowledge of the inner government workings on Sundari to help recruit people.”

“That’s what you were doing, that day at the Marketplace, weren’t you?” Satine interjected softly and Bo nodded, seeing the look that Satine had given her that day again in her mind’s eye.

“I was recruiting Senator Merrik.”

Bo didn’t miss the grief in Satine’s eyes so she dropped her head again. “I eventually started my own unit, the Nite Owls. We were so efficient that I eventually made my way to Lieutenant. I didn’t realize until it was too late, but my safety and security and my quick rise to the top came with a cost. I sacrificed a lot of myself to become the person I was.”

“No one could blame you for assimilating,” Satine said, but Bo shook her head.

“Mom and Buir raised us better than that. I just wanted to belong.”

She felt Satine’s eyes on her and glanced at her to see her looking intensely at her armor.

“So your beskar, that’s...?”

“Buir’s. They reforged it for me.”

“At least it’s still in the family,” Satine said sadly, but Bo didn’t respond.

Mando’a Translations Anooba – carnivorous desert animals native to Tatooine Ner vod- my sister Nu'amyc - normal

#bo katan week #bo katan kryze #satine kryze #satine lives #fanfiction #star wars au

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xtruss · 3 years ago

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Afghanistan’s ‘Misinformation Surge’

An avalanche of misinformation has followed the Taliban takeover of Afghanistan. Some of it is sloppiness: people sharing information and not knowing it’s wrong. But intentional efforts appear to be at play, seeking to shape the images of the Taliban, the resistance, U.S. officials, and the Pakistani military. The identities and motivations of those sharing this misinformation are often not clear, but they could be part of organized propaganda campaigns.

Misinformation about Afghanistan has been posted in many languages, including Urdu, Hindi, English, and Korean. The Poynter Institute, the Associated Press, and Agence France-Presse have compiled many examples, including a Twitter thread from AFP fact-checker Uzair Rizvi.

U.S. actions in Afghanistan have so far been a frequent target of misinformation. Some social media posts include photoshopped images of Afghan evacuees bearing heavy weaponry, suggesting Washington has helped terrorists leave Afghanistan; these were posted by Russian media outlets. Others falsely accuse U.S. President Joe Biden of gifting $80 billion in arms to the Taliban and abandoning U.S. military dogs.

Additionally, much of the misinformation spreading in Afghanistan relates to Taliban brutalities and is easily debunked. An image of the Taliban purportedly auctioning off women actually depicts a protest against the Islamic State in London in 2016, and a photo of a man leading women in chains is digitally edited from an image taken in Iraq in 2003, for example. Other posts mention a nonexistent Al Jazeera investigation on women abducted by the Taliban and their nonexistent plans to execute Christian missionaries.

The battles between the Taliban and resistance fighters in Panjshir—the only province not seized by the group last month—have become a bonanza for fake news. The lack of credible on-the-ground reporting in the province has led to an information shortage that could be easily exploited. Photos of supposed Taliban fighters in Panjshir actually depicted French soldiers. Several Indian TV channels broadcast video purporting to show Pakistani aircraft attacking Panjshir. (In reality, the video was depicting American jets flying in Wales.)

What explains this surge in misinformation? The sudden attention rush of a major news story, the power of social media, and information shortages all play a role. Moreover, actors with axes to grind use misinformation as ammunition. Fake news about Biden’s policies in Afghanistan has been propagated by his rivals, from the U.S. Republican Party to Russian state media. Nationalist Indian outlets seek to paint Pakistan as an aggressor.

The information vacuum is critical. In recent years, Afghan and U.S. officials stopped providing information about military casualties and the amount of territory under Taliban control. As the security situation worsened in the last few years, media coverage outside of Kabul became more difficult. It’s now hard to know what’s happening in far-flung areas. In Panjshir, for example, the lack of on-the-ground reporting results in competing narratives, fueling rumors and propaganda wars.

The spread of misinformation in Afghanistan has troubling implications. For one, fake stories about the Taliban could change the group’s image among those outside of Afghanistan. While its brutality is apparent from its actions in Kabul, where citizen journalists recently filmed the Taliban beating female protesters, it’s harder to see this elsewhere. Without independent reporting, accounts of beatings, arrests, and intimidation outside the capital can’t be confirmed—giving the group space to project itself as softer and more moderate.

Furthermore, with so much fake news, true accounts run the risk of being dismissed as false. Social media posts have already suggested the images of U.S. aircraft taking off with Afghans clinging on that began circulating on Aug. 16 are fake. And with foreign bureaus evacuating their Afghan employees and local journalists facing Taliban threats, information shortages are only likely to worsen.

Unfortunately, the spread of misinformation all works to the Taliban’s advantage. It could prompt the militants to ramp up repressive activities in areas with little media presence, knowing that many of them will go unreported or unconfirmed.

Misinformation About the End of the War in Afghanistan, Debunked

These claims were among the recurring themes of misinformation that we fact-checked as the two-decade war came to a chaotic close.

— By: Samantha Putterman

— September 7, 2021 | Poynter.Org

President Joe Biden speaks about the end of the war in Afghanistan from the State Dining Room of the White House, Tuesday, Aug. 31, 2021, in Washington. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci)

As President Joe Biden stuck to a deadline for pulling U.S. forces out of Afghanistan, he was criticized for leaving some Americans and thousands of Afghan allies behind and for not responding fast enough to the Taliban’s takeover.

Biden was also lashed over several things he didn’t do or that just didn’t happen.

Influential GOP senators and Fox News promoted false and misleading claims about the scale of U.S. weaponry now in the Taliban’s hands, the abandonment of military K-9s, and Biden’s treatment of the families of 13 U.S. soldiers who died in the Aug. 26 Kabul airport attack, which killed more than 200 people.

These claims were among the recurring themes of misinformation that we fact-checked as the two-decade war came to a chaotic close.

Claim: The Biden administration gifted the Taliban with an $80 billion “arsenal.”

Claims about the U.S. giving Taliban weapons surfaced following reports about Taliban fighters seizing some U.S. attack planes, Black Hawk helicopters and other vehicles and equipment. But trending posts about the Taliban’s new “arsenal” relied on outdated spending and purported to cite precise accounting where there is none yet.

Early on, widely shared Facebook posts inaccurately stated that the Biden administration gifted the Taliban with “$80+ billion” in military weapons.

That estimate is False. The U.S. spent about $88.6 billion on security in Afghanistan over the course of two decades, but just a fraction of it went toward military hardware. Defense expert John Pike, director of GlobalSecurity.org, told us that aircraft and other military equipment remaining are likely worth less than $10 billion.

Another misleading post about weapons in the Taliban’s hands listed 19 categories of military equipment, including 358,530 assault rifles, 22,174 Humvees and 33 UH-60 Black Hawk helicopters.

This is also exaggerated. There has been no accounting of how much military equipment was left in Afghanistan. The figures cited are inflated and outdated, with most of the equipment being provided over many years to the Afghan forces.

The “358,530 assault rifles” figure, for example, appears to be from a 2017 report from the U.S. Government Accountability Office that counted the number of rifles, including AK-47s and sniper rifles, provided from 2004 to 2016.

And none of the figures show how many items remained in Afghanistan and were usable when the Taliban took control in mid-August.

Overall, most of the weaponry and equipment were provided over many years to the Afghan forces that opposed the Taliban, while some remained in control of the U.S. military.

Claim: Biden didn’t attend the ceremony for the 13 U.S. service members killed in Kabul.

We rated this Pants on Fire.

The baseless allegation was made by various conservatives — notably Republican political adviser Blair Brandt, and Buzz Patterson, a GOP candidate for Congress in California. They said in now-deleted tweets that Biden skipped the dignified transfer ceremony at Dover Air Force Base for the remains of the 13 U.S. military service members who died in the Aug. 26 attack.

But the plane carrying the remains of the service members hadn’t yet arrived at the base when the tweets were posted. The ceremony took place the next day, on Aug. 29. Biden attended. He and first lady Jill Biden met with the families of the service members at Dover’s Center for Families of the Fallen.

Claim: The U.S. military left its working dogs in Afghanistan.

A viral photo of dog crates in front of a battered and empty U.S. helicopter sparked outrage among fans of dogs and the military. Prominent Republicans like Sen. Rick Scott, R-Fla., said that they were military dogs abandoned at the Kabul airport during the U.S. evacuation.

But that isn’t right. The federal government said the dogs pictured do not work for the military and that its working dogs were evacuated from the country in mid-August.

“The U.S. military did not leave any dogs in cages at Hamid Karzai International Airport, including the reported military working dogs,” Pentagon spokesman John Kirby tweeted on Aug. 31. “Photos circulating online were animals under the care of the Kabul Small Animal Rescue, not dogs under our care.”

Some of the animals in the images likely belonged to independent defense contractors and could be characterized as “contract working dogs.”

Some animal welfare groups like American Humane dismissed any distinction between the dogs’ contract or military status and called on Congress to start classifying contract dogs the same way it does military dogs.

Multiple groups involved in evacuating the dogs cited a series of setbacks, including chartered flights falling through, unrest at the airport and stringent U.S. safety regulations. Advocates said the dogs are safe, but what happens to them now is uncertain.

Claim: Video shows the Taliban executed someone by hanging them from a helicopter.

Conservative bloggers, pundits and politicians like Texas Sen. Ted Cruz shared a short, blurry video of a helicopter flying with a person dangling from a rope.

“This horrifying image encapsulates Joe Biden’s Afghanistan catastrophe: The Taliban hanging a man from an American Blackhawk helicopter,” Cruz tweeted.

That explanation is False. Various other images and videos reviewed by PolitiFact show that the person dangling from the chopper was alive, moving and waving his arms. The person was suspended by a harness that wrapped under his arms, not a noose around the neck.

Several news outlets and fact-checkers reached the same conclusion, determining that the video did not depict an execution, and that the person had been tasked with trying to fix a flag on a public building.

Aśvaka News Agency, an Afghan news outlet, later confirmed to PolitiFact that the person was controlled and was hanging from the helicopter to fix the flag at the governor’s building in Kandahar, Afghanistan’s second-largest city.

Cruz later acknowledged that his tweet “may be inaccurate” and deleted it. But others, like Fox News host Sean Hannity, continued to give the false story air after it was widely debunked.

NOT REAL NEWS: A Look at What Didn’t Happen this Week

— By The Associated Press | August 20, 2021

— Tom Kertscher, Gabrielle Settles and Bill McCarthy contributed reporting.

This February 2003 photo provided by photographer Murat Düzyol shows three women walking behind a man in Erbil, Iraq. A version of this original image was manipulated to digitally add chains on the women's ankles, with a caption erroneously claiming it was made in Afghanistan after the Taliban took control of the country in August 2021. (Murat Düzyol via AP)

A roundup of some of the most popular but completely untrue stories and visuals of the week. None of these are legit, even though they were shared widely on social media. The Associated Press checked them out. Here are the facts:

Photo from Iraq altered to create fake image of chained Afghan women

CLAIM: A photo shows three Afghan women chained to one another, walking behind a man who holds the end of the chain.

THE FACTS: The photo is fake. It was based on an old photo, and the chains were digitally added. Photographer Murat Düzyol told The Associated Press he took the original photo in Erbil, Iraq, in February 2003. Tweets sharing the altered photo were among several misleading social media posts that began to emerge after the Taliban seized power in Afghanistan on Sunday. Twitter users posted the manipulated photo and suggested that it showed women in Afghanistan walking behind a man. In the edited photo, chains were digitally added onto the ankles of the women, with the man holding the chain. There was no chain in the original photo. Also, it was taken in Iraq, not Afghanistan. “#AfghanWomen. God protect women and children because an institution like the United Nations has become impotent,” said a Twitter user who tweeted the altered photo. Over the years, the photo has been misrepresented and posted multiple times. One blog falsely stated the photo was taken in Afghanistan and said it showed an example of women walking about five paces behind their husbands. Düzyol, who lives in Istanbul, told AP he took the photo in 2003. Around that time, he often visited Iraq and took photos. The day the photo was taken, there was a ceremony commemorating Iraqi civilians who were killed in the city of Erbil, he said. “As people were returning to their homes after the ceremony, such a composition randomly appeared on the street. It’s a completely instant snapshot and completely natural,” Düzyol explained in an email. “The women obviously knew each other, but I’m not sure they knew the man.” Many fear the Taliban will reimpose a strict interpretation of Islamic law that was practiced when they ran Afghanistan from 1996 to 2001. At the time, women were barred from attending school and having jobs outside the home. They had to wear burqas and be accompanied by a male relative when they were in public. After taking over, the Taliban said they promise to honor women’s rights within the norms of Islamic law, but many Afghans are skeptical. — Associated Press writer Arijeta Lajka in New York contributed this report.

Afghan citizens pack inside a U.S. Air Force C-17 Globemaster III, as they are transported from Hamid Karzai International Airport in Afghanistan, Sunday, Aug. 15, 2021. On Friday, Aug. 20, 2021, The Associated Press reported on stories circulating online incorrectly claiming another photo showed a plane full of Afghan refugees being evacuated from the country this week, with not a single woman or child among them. In fact, that photo, which appeared online as early as 2018, shows Afghan refugees being sent back to their country from Turkey, according to a story at the time from Turkey’s state-run news agency, the Anadolu Agency. Photos captured this week show that hundreds of Afghan men, women and children have been evacuated from Afghanistan since the Taliban takeover. (Capt. Chris Herbert/U.S. Air Force via AP)

Photo of Afghan men on plane is from 2018

CLAIM: A photo shows a plane full of Afghan refugees being evacuated from the country this week, with not a single woman or child among them.

THE FACTS: In fact, this photo appeared online as early as 2018. It shows Afghan refugees being sent back to their country from Turkey, according to a story at the time from Turkey’s state-run news agency, the Anadolu Agency. The photo looks down the aisle of an airplane filled with men, some of them waving at the camera. Social media users are sharing it as new this week with claims it shows only men, with no women and children, being evacuated from Kabul after the Taliban seized power in Afghanistan. “And not a single woman or child among them!” one Facebook user wrote alongside the picture. “As if the invasion of our southern border weren’t enough of a challenge. Now the biden Administration is flying in hardened, fighting-aged men from Afghanistan.” Another Facebook user wrote, “Another wave of ‘refugees’ is already heading to Europe, this time from Afghanistan.” But a reverse-image search reveals the picture does not show recent evacuation efforts from Afghanistan. The photo showed some 324 Afghan refugees who had entered Turkish territory illegally and were detained and sent back to Afghanistan in April 2018, according to an article on the Spanish-language version of the Anadolu Agency’s website. Photos captured this week show that hundreds of Afghan men, women and children have been evacuated from Afghanistan since the Taliban takeover. — Associated Press writer Ali Swenson in New York contributed this report.

FILE - The Afghan flag flies atop the presidential palace in Kabul, Afghanistan, Tuesday, Aug. 17, 2021. On Friday, Aug. 20, 2021, The Associated Press reported on a photo circulating online that was digitally altered to make it appear that the Taliban flag was flying on the tower of the palace in Kabul on Sunday, Aug. 15, 2021. (AP Photo/Rahmat Gul, File)

Photo digitally altered to show Taliban flag on Afghan presidential palace

CLAIM: A photo shows the Taliban flag flying on the tower of the Afghanistan presidential palace in Kabul on Sunday night.

THE FACTS: The photo is fake — an old photo was digitally altered to make it appear that the Taliban flag was flying above the palace. On Sunday, Taliban forces seized the presidential palace. The Associated Press took photos and video Tuesday showing that the Afghan flag was still flying from the building. The photo that was manipulated was first shared in 2020 and originally showed the palace adorned with Afghan flags. In the manipulated version, the Taliban flag replaces the Afghan flag. It looks clearly altered -- the flag appears too rectilinear and the script too flat to be on a moving flag. The edited photo was shared across social media and by some media outlets, with captions saying it showed the fall of Afghanistan. The Taliban took over Afghanistan two weeks before the U.S. was supposed to fully withdraw its troops from the country. President Ashraf Ghani has fled the country. AP photos showed the Taliban inside the presidential palace on Sunday.

Video claiming to show Taliban fighters on trampoline is more than a year old

CLAIM: A video shows Taliban fighters jumping on a trampoline this week as they celebrate their return to power in Afghanistan.

THE FACTS: This video is not current and has circulated online for more than a year. In the days since the Taliban seized power across Afghanistan, capturing all major cities in less than a week, social media users have shared videos of the insurgents allegedly celebrating their victory in gyms, amusement parks and presidential suites. One such video, which social media users claim shows Taliban fighters rejoicing on a trampoline, has circulated since at least March 2020. The video of four men jumping on an expansive trampoline and one standing to the side was shared with captions like “Taliban’s terrorists right now” and “Taliban fighters celebrating their takeover of Kabul by Jumping on a Trampoline.” But it appeared on Facebook as early as March 31, 2020. It was also shared on YouTube on Aug. 28, 2020, with the caption, “Taliban first time trampoline.” It wasn’t clear who captured the original video or who was featured in it. — Ali Swenson

Video showing shaking house is from Alaska, not Haiti

CLAIM: Video from a camera inside a home shows the house shaking from a 7.2-magnitude earthquake that struck Haiti on Saturday.

THE FACTS: The video being shared online shows an earthquake that struck nearly three years ago in Alaska, not Haiti. As images and videos emerged from Haiti following Saturday’s earthquake, social media users began misrepresenting the Alaska video from 2018 to suggest it showed the earthquake rumbling through a home in Haiti. More than 2,000 people have been reported dead in Haiti following the earthquake that struck the southwestern part of the Island. In 2010, an earthquake of similar magnitude left more than 300,000 dead in the country. Posts online Saturday shared the video showing the Alaska earthquake, with wording that suggested it showed the power of the earthquake in Haiti. The posts sharing the video said to pray for Haiti. The original video was shared to Twitter by James Easton on Nov. 30, 2018, when Alaska was hit with a 7.0-magnitude earthquake. At the time, The Associated Press reported that the earthquake left thousands without power and buckled roadways in some places. Easton told the AP via email that the video showed his home in Alaska. Easton tweeted the video, saying that he was “just a little bit shaken” by the earthquake. The video showed the house violently shaking and the camera footage soon being cut off by the quake. “It’s amusing to see the video pop up every so often, but the focus should really be on the actual damage in Haiti,” he said. — Associated Press writer Beatrice Dupuy in New York contributed this report.

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