@candy-kappa / candy-kappa.tumblr.com
15 billion miles away and NASA was able to tweak code packages on one of the onboard computers and it worked and Voyager 1 is sending signals back to earth for the first time since November.
Incredible!
-- Former President Jimmy Carter, on losing the 1980 election and the transition leading to the inauguration of Ronald Reagan, interview with TIME Magazine, October 11, 1982.
he aint dead yet op
he may be 99, but let the man live for christs sake!
also, he needs to live to at least see trump lose one more time
This comes up over and over again: an outgoing Democrat tries to share deeply important information with their Republican successor, who can't be bothered and couldn't care less. They just want to know how they can abuse their new power to hurt people.
It's such a clear pattern, going back almost 45 years, and it's had disastrous consequences for America and the world.
And yet, here we are, again.
The latest comic by @_pocketss was so absolutely adorable I just have to make this little guy.
He may not be a Goblin, but he sure is a cutie pie!
Created using felting wool, he was a absolute pleasure to make.
"Ah, but you can't prove that it's not a fetish thing" well, yes, but so what? You can't prove that anything isn't a fetish thing. When a dude in an action movie gets kicked in the face, sure, that might be fetishising violence – but it might also be fetishising feet, or acts of dominance, or the style of trousers the person doing the kicking is wearing, or any of about a dozen other things. This post might be fetishising argumentation, or verbosity, or the sound of the word "fetish", and if you think those are ridiculous examples because no real person derives sexual gratification from the sounds of specific words, that's adorable. If you wanna have a conversation about fetishisation in media, you've gotta bring more to the table than "well, you can't prove that it isn't".
Art by u/reachling
#Pride may be over but the gays are winning and Disney is getting their shit rocked
The little bird told me that Disney+ is busy tanking because the value of the streaming platform isn't higher than revenue from other places streaming their stuff.
Not to mention Netflix, for instance, does indeed have a ton of self produced content, but it also streams a TON of content from various other companies. However, Disney+ is locked into only streaming first party content. And although that DOES include some content from 20th Century Fox, the majority of their streaming content is purely Disney, Pixar, Marvel, Star Wars and NatGeo content (most likely newer content produced after Disney acquired them in 2015).
Compare to somewhere like Netflix where right now I can stream both Godfather movies, RRR, an insane amount of Bollywood films, East Asian tv shows and movies from a vast variety of countries (from China to Singapore to Japan etc etc), documentaries, anime, LITERALLY ALL OF ONE PIECE, as well as Norwegian content, UK content, US content, and I even saw a show made in Luxembourg.
This means Disney can't just license something to put on Disney+ but has to either make something in-house or completely acquire streaming rights to something they already have under their umbrella.
All this while ALSO managing the technicalities of actually running a streaming platform in a digital sense. So now they can only stream 1st party content, AND they have to pay to keep the place they're streaming their content up and running smoothly as well as the various other ways you have to put money into a streaming platform (like marketing it for instance).
Turns out... all this costs a lot more money and Disney+ isn't getting much money from subscriptions to really give them any profit worth talking about. And the content Disney IS streaming on other platforms, is outmatching the value of their ENTIRE streaming platform.
No-fault divorce is actually very recent. That is, a divorce just because you wanted to get divorced and not because they were guilty of some provable transgression. California’s no-fault divorce law was 1966; the latest US state, it was 2010. When I was in Catholic school, we were taught to believe in and promote anti-no-fault-divorce positions. This is very recent history, and you cannot take even this for granted. Stop being “edgy” about feminism and its flaws. Every movement will have some flaws. But do you not think that this, and the risk it represents, is significant to women as a class of all backgrounds?
it’s literally as simple as “if you are against no-fault divorce, you believe that men should be able to own women like property”.
after this passes: “Why are marriage rates plummeting?”
After this passes: “What is with America’s young husbands and why are they dying so young?”
Sorry to everyone who’s enjoyed the last 130 years of science and culture journalism, but Disney needs the money to fund Toy Story 9
Liars! Terrorists! Christo-fascist puppets! Corporate-fascist puppets! Traitors to democracy!
Insane how supernatural is 15 seasons long and everything is under explored. What were they doing for 15 years?
Lots of correct opinions in the notes.
Why Tumblr? Why do you, an actual celebrity, a famous writer, use Tumblr of all websites?
(The actual celebrity and famous writer sits back in his rocking chair, surveys the world of Tumblr, from his porch. He chews meditatively on a straw, and then he says:)
Last week, Gizmodo’s Linda Codega caught a fantastic scoop — a leaked report of Hasbro’s plan to revoke the decades-old Open Gaming License, which subsidiary Wizards Of the Coast promulgated as an allegedly open sandbox for people seeking to extend, remix or improve Dungeons and Dragons:
The report set off a shitstorm among D&D fans and the broader TTRPG community — not just because it was evidence of yet more enshittification of D&D by a faceless corporate monopolist, but because Hasbro was seemingly poised to take back the commons that RPG players and designers had built over decades, having taken WOTC and the OGL at their word.
Gamers were right to be worried. Giant companies love to rugpull their fans, tempting them into a commons with lofty promises of a system that we will all have a stake in, using the fans for unpaid creative labor, then enclosing the fans’ work and selling it back to them. It’s a tale as old as CDDB and Disgracenote:
(Disclosure: I am a long-serving volunteer board-member for MetaBrainz, which maintains MusicBrainz, a free, open, community-managed and transparent alternative to Gracenote, explicitly designed to resist the kind of commons-stealing enclosure that led to the CDDB debacle.)
Free/open licenses were invented specifically to prevent this kind of fuckery. First there was the GPL and its successor software licenses, then Creative Commons and its own successors. One important factor in these licenses: they contain the word “irrevocable.” That means that if you build on licensed content, you don’t have to worry about having the license yanked out from under you later. It’s rugproof.
Now, the OGL does not contain the word “irrevocable.” Rather, the OGL is “perpetual.” To a layperson, these two terms may seem interchangeable, but this is one of those fine lawerly distinctions that trip up normies all the time. In lawyerspeak, a “perpetual” license is one whose revocation doesn’t come automatically after a certain time (unlike, say, a one-year car-lease, which automatically terminates at the end of the year). Unless a license is “irrevocable,” the licensor can terminate it whenever they want to.
This is exactly the kind of thing that trips up people who roll their own licenses, and people who trust those licenses. The OGL predates the Creative Commons licenses, but it neatly illustrates the problem with letting corporate lawyers — rather than public-interest nonprofits — unleash “open” licenses on an unsuspecting, legally unsophisticated audience.
The perpetual/irrevocable switcheroo is the least of the problems with the OGL. As Rob Bodine— an actual lawyer, as well as a dice lawyer — wrote back in 2019, the OGL is a grossly defective instrument that is significantly worse than useless.
The issue lies with what the OGL actually licenses. Decades of copyright maximalism has convinced millions of people that anything you can imagine is “intellectual property,” and that this is indistinguishable from real property, which means that no one can use it without your permission.
The copyrightpilling of the world sets people up for all kinds of scams, because copyright just doesn’t work like that. This wholly erroneous view of copyright grooms normies to be suckers for every sharp grifter who comes along promising that everything imaginable is property-in-waiting (remember SpiceDAO?):
Copyright is a lot more complex than “anything you can imagine is your property and that means no one else can use it.” For starters, copyright draws a fundamental distinction between ideas and expression. Copyright does not apply to ideas — the idea, say, of elves and dwarves and such running around a dungeon, killing monsters. That is emphatically not copyrightable.
Copyright also doesn’t cover abstract systems or methods — like, say, a game whose dice-tables follow well-established mathematical formulae to create a “balanced” system for combat and adventuring. Anyone can make one of these, including by copying, improving or modifying an existing one that someone else made. That’s what “uncopyrightable” means.
Finally, there are the exceptions and limitations to copyright — things that you are allowed to do with copyrighted work, without first seeking permission from the creator or copyright’s proprietor. The best-known exception is US law is fair use, a complex doctrine that is often incorrectly characterized as turning on “four factors” that determine whether a use is fair or not.
In reality, the four factors are a starting point that courts are allowed and encouraged to consider when determining the fairness of a use, but some of the most consequential fair use cases in Supreme Court history flunk one, several, or even all of the four factors (for example, the Betamax decision that legalized VCRs in 1984, which fails all four).
Beyond fair use, there are other exceptions and limitations, like the di minimis exemption that allows for incidental uses of tiny fragments of copyrighted work without permission, even if those uses are not fair use. Copyright, in other words, is “fact-intensive,” and there are many ways you can legally use a copyrighted work without a license.
Which brings me back to the OGL, and what, specifically, it licenses. The OGL is a license that only grants you permission to use the things that WOTC can’t copyright — “the game mechanic [including] the methods, procedures, processes and routines.” In other words, the OGL gives you permission to use things you don’t need permission to use.
But maybe the OGL grants you permission to use more things, beyond those things you’re allowed to use anyway? Nope. The OGL specifically exempts:
Product and product line names, logos and identifying marks including trade dress; artifacts; creatures characters; stories, storylines, plots, thematic elements, dialogue, incidents, language, artwork, symbols, designs, depictions, likenesses, formats, poses, concepts, themes and graphic, photographic and other visual or audio representations; names and descriptions of characters, spells, enchantments, personalities, teams, personas, likenesses and special abilities; places, locations, environments, creatures, equipment, magical or supernatural abilities or effects, logos, symbols, or graphic designs; and any other trademark or registered trademark…
Now, there are places where the uncopyrightable parts of D&D mingle with the copyrightable parts, and there’s a legal term for this: merger. Merger came up for gamers in 2018, when the provocateur Robert Hovden got the US Copyright Office to certify copyright in a Magic: The Gathering deck:
If you want to learn more about merger, you need to study up on Kregos and Eckes, which are beautifully explained in the “Open Intellectual Property Casebook,” a free resource created by Jennifer Jenkins and James Boyle:
Jenkins and Boyle explicitly created their open casebook as an answer to another act of enclosure: a greedy textbook publisher cornered the market on IP textbook and charged every law student — and everyone curious about the law — $200 to learn about merger and other doctrines.
As EFF Senior Staff Attorney Kit Walsh writes in her must-read analysis of the OGL, this means “the only benefit that OGL offers, legally, is that you can copy verbatim some descriptions of some elements that otherwise might arguably rise to the level of copyrightability.”
But like I said, it’s not just that the OGL fails to give you rights — it actually takes away rights you already have to D&D. That’s because — as Walsh points out — fair use and the other copyright limitations and exceptions give you rights to use D&D content, but the OGL is a contract whereby you surrender those rights, promising only to use D&D stuff according to WOTC’s explicit wishes.
“For example, absent this agreement, you have a legal right to create a work using noncopyrightable elements of D&D or making fair use of copyrightable elements and to say that that work is compatible with Dungeons and Dragons. In many contexts you also have the right to use the logo to name the game (something called “nominative fair use” in trademark law). You can certainly use some of the language, concepts, themes, descriptions, and so forth. Accepting this license almost certainly means signing away rights to use these elements. Like Sauron’s rings of power, the gift of the OGL came with strings attached.”
And here’s where it starts to get interesting. Since the OGL launched in 2000, a huge proportion of game designers have agreed to its terms, tricked into signing away their rights. If Hasbro does go through with canceling the OGL, it will release those game designers from the shitty, deceptive OGL.
According to the leaks, the new OGL is even worse than the original versions — but you don’t have to take those terms! Notwithstanding the fact that the OGL says that “using…Open Game Content” means that you accede to the license terms, that is just not how contracts work.
Walsh: “Contracts require an offer, acceptance, and some kind of value in exchange, called ‘consideration.’ If you sell a game, you are inviting the reader to play it, full stop. Any additional obligations require more than a rote assertion.”
“For someone who wants to make a game that is similar mechanically to Dungeons and Dragons, and even announce that the game is compatible with Dungeons and Dragons, it has always been more advantageous as a matter of law to ignore the OGL.”
Walsh finishes her analysis by pointing to some good licenses, like the GPL and Creative Commons, “written to serve the interests of creative communities, rather than a corporation.” Many open communities — like the programmers who created GNU/Linux, or the music fans who created Musicbrainz, were formed after outrageous acts of enclosure by greedy corporations.
If you’re a game designer who was pissed off because the OGL was getting ganked — and if you’re even more pissed off now that you’ve discovered that the OGL was a piece of shit all along — there’s a lesson there. The OGL tricked a generation of designers into thinking they were building on a commons. They weren’t — but they could.
This is a great moment to start — or contribute to — real open gaming content, licensed under standard, universal licenses like Creative Commons. Rolling your own license has always been a bad idea, comparable to rolling your own encryption in the annals of ways-to-fuck-up-your-own-life-and-the-lives-of-many-others. There is an opportunity here — Hasbro unintentionally proved that gamers want to collaborate on shared gaming systems.
That’s the true lesson here: if you want a commons, you’re not alone. You’ve got company, like Kit Walsh herself, who happens to be a brilliant game-designer who won a Nebula Award for her game “Thirsty Sword Lesbians”:
[Image ID: A remixed version of David Trampier’s ‘Eye of Moloch,’ the cover of the first edition of the AD&D Player’s Handbook. It has been altered so the title reads ‘Advanced Copyright Fuckery. Unclear on the Concept. That’s Just Not How Licenses Work. No, Seriously.’ The eyes of the idol have been replaced by D20s displaying a critical fail ‘1.’ Its chest bears another D20 whose showing face is a copyright symbol.]
they want me to feed him to my crabs like the cow being fed to the velociraptors in jurassic park
snopp give me your knowledge what is bionicles about
in the time before time, there were two dudes: mata nui, and the makuta. they were brothers, and makuta was the shithead one. mata nui was really nice and shit, so he made life and all of the matoran (regular people) and the toa (superheroes) to live in peace. makuta was like “fuck that shit” and knocked mata nui in to a coma and turned all of the animals evil.
then six heroes with amnesia showed up. these were the toa. they had all of the elements from avatar, plus one dude that specialized in rocks and one dude that specialized in ice. they had magic masks that gave them extra powers n shit. they arrived on the island of mata nui (named after the sleeping god) and collected more magic masks so they could defeat the makuta and save all of the matoran.
then they did that, and after that happened some evil bugs showed up called the bohrok and they started burning everything on the island. like, imagine if bulldozers were robot bugs and they were all just kinda bulldozing the earth clean. the toa stopped the bohrok by piloting sick-ass mecha and beating up the bohrok’s queens, who were two godzillas.
after they beat up the two godzillas the toa got dunked in this funky shit called energized protodermis. that mutated them and gave them sick-ass silver armor and made their elemental powers stronger. once that happened, some fuckers called the Bohrok-Kal showed up and tried to revive the bohrok queens. the bohrok kal were basically generals in the bohrok army and they managed to steal the toa’s (now called Toa Nuva because of their sweet armor) elemental powers. the toa had to go on a quest to find the legendary mask of time which lets the wearer have Dio powers. they found it, used the time stop powers to cheat and beat the bohrok kal, and got their elemental powers back
knock knock, who’s there, it’s makuta, turns out he’s not dead and he made six horrible lizard sons called the rahkshi. the rahkshi have the ability to turn good guys evil, and that happened for a while, but then he got better. meanwhile, this matoran named takua who basically Sucked Dick and was extremely shitty and his mask always fell off (masks are kinda a thing in bionicle) went on an adventure to find a way to beat the rahkshi since the toa kept getting their asses kicked by them. takua found the Legendary Mask of Light, put it on, and became the seventh toa, Takanuva, the Toa of Light. takanuva went down on his sick flying motorcycle and fused with Makuta, becoming Takutanuva, and stopped the rahkshi an opened the Thousand-Year Door that was nestled under the island of Mata Nui.
oh, also, takanuva’s best friend jaller died. takutanuva used makuta’s life force to bring jaller back and they unfused. happy ending.
behind the thousand-year door was another island under the island of mata nui: Metru Nui. the Turaga (the matoran’s village elders) showed up and said “ok so… we may have been lying about a lot of stuff because we never figured you guys would open that door. bombshell time, dudes: you seven aren’t the first toa. not by a long shot”
mind fucking blown
the next story arc is a flashback telling the tale of the Turaga, and how the Turaga used to be Toa. turns out, back in the past, Makuta tried to take over the super-advanced city of Metru Nui by impersonating the island’s mayor. the toa that would become the Turaga beat him up, but Makuta managed to wipe the memories of every Matoran and he severely weakened all of them.
No big, the Toa Metru (thats what the turaga called themselves when they were toa) thought. we’ll just wake them up OH WAIT. Makuta called his evil buddies, Roodaka and Sidorak, to come take over the island and let them breed their giant spiders all over it. Roodaka, who was a gigantic lizard dominatrix, and Sidorak, who was basically a Baron of Hell except also a gigantic pussy, were like “uh naw dudes this shit is ours” and mutated the Toa Metru in to quasi-modo lookin motherfuckers called the Toa Hordika. the Toa Horidka were half animal, half dude, and not in the sexy way either. some stuff happened, angst took place, they beat the Dominatrix and the Hell Baron, regained their original forms, and loaded all of the Matoran on to a boat to go find a new place to live that wasn’t covered in spiders.
turns out, they found the island of Mata Nui, conveniently located directly above Metru Nui. they were like “wait what we were underground the whole time” but this didn’t bother them that much. the toa metru sacrificed their elemental powers to fix the matoran, which turned them in to scrawny old people, and they started up a civilization on this weird tropical island with a bunch of amnesiacs.
so now with the flashback over, all of the matoran and the toa nuva and takanuva all move back in to metru nui. uh oh, bad news, shit here’s broken. you wanna know why shit’s broken? mata nui, the god, is dying. uh oh. god’s dying. that’s not good.
fortunately they find a solution: go find the mask of life, stupid. the turaga assemble a team of matoran (who were all relatively important characters that i neglected to mention) and shoot them out of a cannon to the place where the mask of life is.
whoops though. this dude, Karzahni, who’s an absolutely insane butcher who runs the bionicle equivalent of hell, catches the cannonball they were all riding on and decided to fuck with them a little bit. he gives them all new masks (which was a really awkward allegory for stripping them of their identity) and forces them to be his slaves. they escape though, hop back in to their cannonball, and go off to find the mask of life.
they make it to the island of voya nui, which is on the “real surface,” which is inhabited by these weird emaciated matoran that live pretty shitty lives. they’re being subjugated by a group of lizard gangster rappers called the Piraka. the matoran get struck by a bolt of red lightning and are transformed in to toa. they defeat the piraka, and free the matoran of voya nui. one of the piraka had the mask of life, but he dropped it, so the toa ignika (the toa from the last sentence, try to keep up), have to go down to the bottom of the ocean to get it.
down there they find a city called Mahri Nui, inhabited by fucked up fish matoran. turns out mahri nui used to be a coastal city on voya nui, but it broke off and sank. the matoran survived somehow and became weird atlantis people. down there there’s also these shitburgers called the baraki who were evil warlords before they got shipped off to the Bionicle Illuminati’s secret underwater prison. Mahri Nui crashed in to the prison, everyone got out, and now the barraki are terrorzing mahri nui. The Toa Ignika turn in to weird fish people too by a process that I completely forgot, they beat up the Barraki, and they find the mask of life.
uh oh. Mata Nui died. they were too late. unless one of them sacrifices themselves to revive mata nui, everyone’s fucked. Matoro, the toa of ice, sacrifices his life to bring back God. Mata Nui’s alive, dudes! he’s still in a coma, though
the toa nuva decide that it’s time to wake up Mata Nui, so they all hop in to the cannon and get fired off to this place called Artakha. at Artakha, they get outfitted with some guns and armor and they all fuck off to the center of the universe, Karda Nui, to go jump-start Mata Nui. at Karda Nui, they meat a team of dudes that are Makuta. Not THE Makuta, but just Makuta. Turns out “Makuta” is a species name and the guy we’ve been calling Makuta the whole time was just their leader. His real name is Teridax and we all wish we never learned what his real name was.
The Toa Nuva use their guns to shoot the Makuta for a bit, they all ride around on flying motorcycles, some shit happens that didn’t really make sense. Takanuva went on an adventure through parallel universes that didn’t really accomplish anything, and then the Toa Nuva manage to awaken Mata Nui.
Mata Nui, who is actually a giant planet-sized robot made by these guys called the Great Beings who is designed to explore the universe, stands up. Turns out everyone was living inside of Mata Nui’s body which is weird.
Uh oh, it’s Makuta again. Makuta Teridax. I’m just gonna call him Makuta. Makuta takes over the giant Mata Nui robot, revealing that this was all part of his grand keikaku. he ejects Mata Nui’s consciousness in to space and is like “see you later fucker!”
Mata Nui lands on a different planet, called Bara Magna. Here on Bara Magna, everyone is a fucked up mad max gladiator. Turns out Bara Magna was a dumping ground for the Great Beings who just kinda threw their trash there. Mata Nui teams up with the planets natives (who are all suspiciously similar to the inhabitants of the Matoran Universe) to find a prototype giant planet sized robot. Mata Nui hops in its cockpit, punches Makuta’s giant robot dick, and uses his magic god powers to bring Bara Magna back to life and make it all green and beautiful. All of the peoples of the Matoran Universe climb out of the giant robot and decide to live on the Paradise Planet. Everything comes to a sudden and unsatisfying end, because Bionicle toys weren’t selling well.
or is it???
A few real-life years later, Bionicle gets a hard reboot. All of the original Toa get new toys, the story takes place in a completely new universe, and a new story unfolds. The toa must find their masks of power again on the island of Okoto. They have to fight Makuta (a different one)’s evil Skull Spiders and save all of the Okotans. The story is significantly simplified, so there’s not much to talk about here. They get the masks, beat Makuta, they bring this guy called Ekimu the Mask Maker back to life, and then things get fuzzy after that.
Some skeletons show up, the Toa get new armor, and then…
the story ends.
Again.
The Bionicle Reboot toys didn’t sell well, so lego pulled the plug on them.
AND THAT IS THE LEGEND… OF BIONICLE.
Whoa, there’s a bit more after the skeletons. I know the Netflix series isn’t exactly a big hit, but it does some interesting stuff. The battle with Makuta, though undercooked on explanations and in dire need of a slightly slower pace, has excellent ideas with Gali in the shadow realm, and the return to the stars makes for a surprisingly graceful rushed ending. But yeah. Plug was pulled very abruptly. Hope one day I can give it a reboot.
The way that the toa ignika get the underwater gear is by going through the literal chain connecting voya nui and the atlantis place together. There were little fish that changed out their gear like nascar mechanics.
the Bionicle fandom is like Christianity.
No one could agree on what it meant to be a real christian so they split off and formed a bunch of sects.
We have Roman Catholics (fans of 2001-2003 only), Russian Orthodox (Rusbionicle), Anglicans (sexy MOCers), Jehovah’s Witnesses (Lime), Mormons (people who prefer fanmade AUs over canon), the Knights Templar (people who email Lego demanding them to bring Bionicle back) and the people that only go to church on Christmas (facebook Bionicle memes).
