Okay I Know That Nick Cage Is The Internet’s Favorite Movie Lunatic But We Really Need To Talk About

*releases pack of dads into home depot* go……be free

Source

Of course, you call Biden the old guy who needs a nap, and there's Trump sleeping through his court trials and through the RNC and through his own son's speech

Me, too! And you can't convince me otherwise.

Register to Vote Online in Georgia - Vote.org

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The runoff for Georgia’s two U.S. Senate seats is January 5th. This will decide who will control the Senate, and if Georgians deliver for Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock the same way they delivered for Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, they will deliver control of the Senate to the Democrats. Why does that matter? Well, if Republicans and Mitch McConnell retain control of the Senate, they will be able to effectively suffocate anything and everything that the Biden Administration is planning to do in order to heal this nation from four years of Donald Trump. Republican control of the Senate will immediately kill any hopes we have of progressive policies getting through Congress and to President Biden’s desk and will prevent the confirmation of Biden’s appointees. It means that Mitch McConnell will be rewarded for the brazen hypocrisy of filling Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s seat on the Supreme Court just days before the November election.

Georgia, we need you again. And we know that we can count on you. If you were part of the remarkable voters that flipped Georgia from red to blue and elected Joe BIden and Kamala Harris, don’t forget to vote on January 5th. If you didn’t vote because you didn’t think it would make a difference, it did. And you can still make a difference. If you live in Georgia, you have until DECEMBER 7th to register to vote in the runoff election. But don’t wait…do it now! You can do it online, right here, and it only takes two minutes. If you weren’t old enough to vote Donald Trump out of office on November 3rd but turn 18 before January 5th, you also have until DECEMBER 7th to register to vote! 

Georgia was instrumental in electing Joe Biden and Kamala Harris and, more importantly, evicting Donald Trump from the White House. On January 5th, America needs you one more time. Take the power of Senate control from the hands of Mitch McConnell. It will make Mitch McConnell sad. Don’t you want to make Mitch McConnell sad? VOTE on January 5th. You can still register in Georgia until DECEMBER 7th. 

We’re sorry that you have to put up with two extra months of campaign ads, but we appreciate you and we know we can count on you, Georgia. Register until December 7th. VOTE ON JANUARY 5th!

Man, Clara is a terrible liar.

Paizo, AI Art, and Copyright

So you may have seen that Paizo, the (unionized) tabletop roleplaying company behind Pathfinder, has decided to ban AI art and writing from both its own products and its community-created marketplaces. As you might expect, this has caused a certain amount of righteous indignation among pro-AI tech bro types. 

I think one thing that the tech bros who are screaming about Luddites and the inevitability of market forces and blah blah are completely ignoring is that we’re not talking about personal use of AI art and text - we’re talking about commercial uses of AI art and text. That means what really matters here is contracts and copyrights.

In case you haven’t heard, it is very well-settled law that art produced by non-humans cannot be copyrighted. More specifically, the U.S Copyright Office has repeatedly ruled that AI-generated pictures and comic book art cannot be copyrighted.

No matter how much you say that you “created” something by typing into a search bar and hit a button over and over again, if you don’t own the copyright to a piece of art, you can’t sell it because you don’t actually own it. Which means that Paizo isn’t going to buy it, because they can’t purchase the copyright to it as part of the contract, which means they can’t sell any products that use it.

If every word of this is true, it has nothing to do with whether or not she’s a victim. She was falsely accused of fraudulently soliciting good reviews through sex (something that was so easily disproven it’s insane the accusation lasted more than a hot minute), and has spent years facing an endless barrage of rape and murder assaults, in ways that are quite public and easy to verify... but which are also infuriatingly anonymous and in a legally murky situation where the perpetrators can’t be punished. Not only she, but her family members have been harassed and persecuted for years on end. And this was insidiously camouflaged under cries for “ethics in video game journalism” and similar malarkey to draw in a massive crowd of those ignorant of the true context to unknowingly perpetuate these horrors. This is an organized mob torturing a woman (and other women) largely because she’s a woman. There’s no way to look at the evidence and not come to that conclusion.

It doesn’t matter if all the above is completely true, and she was a ridiculously unprofessional model when she was 20ish, and even if she spun some wild stories to excuse that. If true, it doesn’t reflect well on her, but that is completely irrelevant to the torturous hell that’s been rained down on her for the last several years. A victim is a victim, regardless of their human flaws.

Still think Zoe Quinn is an innocent victim?

The following was writen by Mallorie Nasrallah. Please take the time to read it-

“Alright, story time. I’ve been basically silent on this issue, I am not sure my contributions are relevant, and I have feared being ostracized and ridiculed. I can accept the latter, but I really hate to waste people’s time. In 2007 I lived in New Hampshire, and was working as a photographer with a number of soft core "alt” erotica / porn sites. I traveled frequently to work with models affiliated with the websites I was affiliated with. A model working under the name Locke Valentine - this is the woman currently known as Zoe Quinn - modeled for two websites I was affiliated with - she as a model, I as a photographer. One of those websites is still in business, the other - unfortunately the one we communicated via - is no more. Locke / Zoe was living in Albany, NY at the time. We expressed a desire to collaborate, and set a date for three photoshoots. In fall of 2007 (according to my EXIF data 10/25/2007) I packed up my equipment and drove the 220 miles to Albany, for a weekend of work with Zoe. By time I arrived in Albany, Zoe had cancelled one of the three shoots we had planned. She lived in a tiny apartment with her boyfriend / spouse / lover (I did not ask personal questions) and her roommate. I had been assured I could over night with them, and that they had room to accommodate a guest, and room to shoot in. They had neither. We ended up doing an impromptu shoot in the extremely crowded apartment, in the middle of the night, to try to save the shoot. I was not proud of it, but I knew with a bit of editing, it had potential. While we tried to plan a shoot for the next day Zoe, and Co. chatted with me. She claimed to have stabbed a man - attempted rapist - in the face, who had grabbed her. She relayed to me no less than three other accounts of alleged violent assault. I will not share the details here, I feel that would be fundamentally indecent. I was alarmed at this, and I admit, by the time she made the claim that she stabbed a man in the face with a knife* and ran away, I was skeptical as well. Two claims involved alleged workplace incidents, and were her prime explanation for why she could not hold a job. I was mildly disconcerted, because true or false, these stories have good cause to make one uneasy. She also claimed to have reported nothing to police, or management at her work. That was not all we discussed, we talked about modeling, the websites, and erotica/porn in general. It was what we both did for a living, and candid conversation on the subject was not unusual. The next day I had to drive everyone to the location of our shoot, which was her roommate’s place of employment. An arcade. This is the location where the photo shown here was taken. I was irritated that after driving 220 miles, and having to carry all my equipment to a shoot, I was also deliberately given the false impression that Zoe, and Co. would have their own transport. I was also irritated that Zoe could provide neither her own wardrobe for the shoot - it is normal for the model to use her personal items in these sorts of shoots - nor her own food while on site. Keep in mind, we both are paid by a site, once the photos are sold, everything I spent came out of my own pocket. Otherwise the shoot was unremarkable, it went far better than the one the night before, and we all had a basically good time. We tried for some more photos that afternoon in a forested area Zoe directed me to, but we had neither enough light, or privacy to shoot anything substantial or of value. I returned home, spent countless hours editing hundreds of photos. It was a terrible experience, but so be it. When I was ready to send the photos off to Deviant Nation - the site we worked for - I wrote to her to let her know. It was only a few days, a week at most, since I had left Albany, but I ALWAYS get a model’s final approval before I send photos off. As far as I know I am the only photographer working in that specific industry who had that strict policy. Zoe informed me that her roommate, who had been involved in the shoots, either by being in the apartment, or smuggling us in to her place of work turned out to be a, “ mentally unbalanced cunt,” (her words not mine) among other things, and that it was unacceptable to use ANY of the photos we had taken that weekend. I was pretty upset about this, and sent her several messages asking if perhaps I could talk to the roommate, have her sign a waiver, or something, despite the fact that neither Zoe, nor I, had any legal obligation to ask the roommate’s permission for ANYTHING. Zoe insisted that she was a crazy, evil bitch, and refused to provide me with any sort of contact information. Finally, weeks later, a handful of other models I had worked with on the site messaged me to inform me that Zoe had written them and told them that I forced her to look at, “mutilated vagina,” pictures, which she said, had horrified her, and she had basically sent me away then and there. The models she told this to knew me, and thankfully came to me with these nonsense claims. We had in fact discussed cosmetic surgery, while talking about modeling, and she had looked up Before/After Breast Implant images. The conversation moved on to Labiaplasty, and we looked at a few of those images as well. So, there is an inch of truth, in the really awful lie she told about me. There was never any force involved, and she was the one controlling the computer the whole time. This took place in her home, on her computer, with her boyfriend and roommate both in the room. I decided it wasn’t worth the fight. I was eventually contacted by the roommate, who told me a very different story to the one Zoe had, and I let the issue drop. I was never paid for the images, because I respected her wishes and never published them. I still have the images in archive on my computer, because I archive everything. I was never reimbursed for the gas, wardrobe, or food I purchased on the trip. To someone starting their career, that was quite a dig to my wallet. 7 years later, Zoe is still BY FAR the worst client I have ever had. What does this story have to do with GamerGate? When I realized Locke was Zoe, I was disgusted to see she was still playing the same games. Stealing, cheating, lying and claiming to be victimized by anyone and everyone. Maybe she did stab some guy in the face, and maybe in the first week at every new job she had, some guy tried to extort sex from her. Maybe that doesn’t establish an MO on her part. But I know, I did nothing wrong to that woman, and I did not deserve to be lied about. I did not deserve to have my time and my money wasted, and even now, I wonder if opening my mouth about this means she will think of some new horse shit to spread about me to try to ruin my career. And that does seem to be her modus operandi. If this were a courtroom, I would call myself some sort of character witness, and I’ll let you all make of this what you will. Share it if you feel like it, I couldn’t keep my mouth shut and watch her try to stomp out all the fires she has started by shitting on any more people’s careers. ‪#‎gamergate‬ ‪#‎zoequinn‬ *Edit Upon reading though archived emails, I discovered I can confirm and prove that she claimed to have killed the man she stabbed. (screenshot of email, irrelevant details redacted. https://scontent-a-sjc.xx.fbcdn.net/…/10714582_101522745870…)“

You can see the original post here- https://www.facebook.com/mallorie.nasrallah/posts/10152274324055882:0

I have been thinking a lot about what a cancer diagnosis used to mean. How in the ‘80s and ‘90s, when someone was diagnosed, my parents would gently prepare me for their death. That chemo and radiation and surgery just bought time, and over the age of fifty people would sometimes just. Skip it. For cost reasons, and for quality of life reasons. My grandmother was diagnosed in her early seventies and went directly into hospice for just under a year — palliative care only. And often, after diagnosis people and their families would go away — they’d cash out retirement or sell the house and go live on a beach for six months. Or they’d pay a charlatan all their savings to buy hope. People would get diagnosed, get very sick, leave, and then we’d hear that they died.

And then, at some point, the people who left started coming back.

It was the children first. The March of Dimes and Saint Jude set up programs and my town would do spaghetti fundraisers and raffles and meal trains to support the family and send the child and one parent to a hospital in the city — and the children came home. Their hair grew back. They went back to school. We were all trained to think of them as the angelic lost and they were turning into asshole teens right in front of our eyes. What a miracle, what a gift, how lucky we are that the odds for several children are in our favor!

Adults started leaving for a specific program to treat their specific cancer at a specific hospital or a specific research group. They’d stay in that city for 6-12 months and then they’d come home. We fully expected that they were still dying — or they’d gotten one of the good cancers. What a gift this year is for them, we’d think. How lucky they are to be strong enough to ski and swim and run. And then they didn’t stop — two decades later they haven’t stopped. Not all of them, but most of them.

We bought those extra hours and months and years. We paid for time with our taxes. Scientists found ways for treatment to be less terrible, less poisonous, and a thousand times more effective.

And now, when a friend was diagnosed, the five year survival odds were 95%. My friend is alive, nearly five years later. Those kids who miraculously survived are alive. The adults who beat the odds are still alive. I grew up in a place small enough that you can see the losses. And now, the hospital in my tiny hometown can effectively treat many cancers. Most people don’t have to go away for treatment. They said we could never cure cancer, as it were, but we can cure a lot of cancers. We can diagnose a lot of cancers early enough to treat them with minor interventions. We can prevent a lot of cancers.

We could keep doing that. We could continue to fund research into other heartbreaks — into Long Covid and MCAS and psych meds with fewer side effects and dementia treatments. We could buy months and years, alleviate the suffering of our neighbors. That is what funding health research buys: time and ease.

Anyway, I’m preaching to the choir here. But it is a quiet miracle what’s happened in my lifetime.

why the fuck does english have a word for

but not for “the day after tomorrow”

???

12. If I acknowledge that Ark is a brilliant masterpiece that massively advances what the series is capable of, can I prefer Genesis anyway?

16. Better than Morbius? Best solo one, sure, but...

22. Revelation? Not as good as Vengeance and flops at the end, but not embarrassing.

6-2. Can I agree that it technically accomplishes that but still prefer Let's Kill Hitler and Wedding of River Song for actually being fun?

8-2. What if I liked the idea of Kill the Moon but not the execution?

Just seeing if there are mitigating factors to at least reduce the sentencing down from eternity.

Edge of Destruction is better than The Daleks

The Rescue is better than The Dalek Invasion of Earth

The Gunfighters is better than The Celestial Toymaker

Power of the Daleks is better than everything, ever.

Enemy of the World is better than Web of Fear

The Mind Robber is better than The...