#can i even post this or is there some problem with copyright | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

not-terezi-pyrope · 3 months

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Ok. It's pretty clear you are more welcoming of AI, and it does have enough merits to not be given a knee jerk reaction outright.

And how the current anti-ai stealing programs could be misused.

But isn't so much of the models built on stolen art? That is one of the big thing keeping me from freely enjoying it.

The stolen art is a thing that needs to be addressed.

Though i agree that the ways that such addressing are being done in are not ideal. Counterproductive even.

I could make a quip here and be like "stolen art??? But the art is all still there, and it looks fine to me!" And that would be a salient point about the silliness of digital theft as a concept, but I know that wouldn't actually address your point because what you're actually talking about is art appropriation by generative AI models.

But the thing is that generative AI models don't really do that, either. They train on publicly posted images and derive a sort of metadata - more specifically, they build a feature space mapping out different visual concepts together with text that refers to them. This is then used at the generative stage in order to produce new images based on the denoising predictions of that abstract feature model. No output is created that hasn't gone through that multi-stage level of abstraction from the training data, and none of the original training images are directly used at all.

Due to various flaws in the process, you can sometimes get a model to output images extremely similar to particular training images, and it is also possible to get a model to pastiche a particular artist's work or style, but this is something that humans can also do and is a problem with the individual image that has been created, rather than the process in general.

Training an AI model is pretty clearly fair use, because you're not even really re-using the training images - you're deriving metadata that describes them, and using them to build new images. This is far more comparable to the process by which human artists learn concepts than the weird sort of "theft collage" that people seem to be convinced is going on. In many cases, the much larger training corpus of generative AI models means that an output will be far more abstracted from any identifiable source data (source data in fact is usually not identifiable) than a human being drawing from a reference, something we all agree is perfectly fine!

The only difference is that the AI process is happening in a computer with tangible data, and is therefore quantifiable. This seems to convince people that it is in some way more ontologically derivative than any other artistic process, because computers are assumed to be copying whereas the human brain can impart its own mystical juju of originality.

I'm a materialist and think this is very silly. The valid concerns around AI are to do with how society is unprepared for increased automation, but that's an entirely different conversation from the art theft one, and the latter actively distracts from the former. The complete refusal from some people to even engage with AI's existence out of disgust also makes it harder to solve the real problem around its implementation.

This sucks, because for a lot of people it's not really about copyright or intellectual property anyway. It's about that automation threat, and a sort of human condition anxiety about being supplanted and replaced by automation. That's a whole mess of emotions and genuine labour concerns that we need to work through and break down and resolve, but reactionary egg-throwing at all things related to machine learning is counterproductive to that, as is reading out legal mantras paraphrasing megacorps looking to expand copyright law to over shit like "art style".

I've spoken about this more elsewhere if you look at my blog's AI tag.

#not-terezi-speaks #asks #anonymous #ai

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mostlysignssomeportents · 1 year

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The media spectacle of generative AI (in which AI companies’ breathless claims of their software’s sorcerous powers are endlessly repeated) has understandably alarmed many creative workers, a group that’s already traumatized by extractive abuse by media and tech companies.

If you’d like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here’s a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/09/ai-monkeys-paw/#bullied-schoolkids

Even though the claims about “AI” are overblown and overhyped, creators are right to be alarmed. Their bosses would like nothing more than to fire them and replace them with pliable software. The “creative” industries talk a lot about how audiences should be paying for creative works, but the companies that bring creators’ works to market treat their own payments to creators as a cost to be minimized.

Creative labor markets are primarily regulated through copyright: the exclusive rights that accrue to creators at the moment that their works are “fixated.” Media and tech companies then bargain to buy or license those rights. The theory goes that the more expansive those rights are, the more they’ll be worth to corporations, and the more they’ll pay creators for them.

That’s the theory. In practice, we’ve spent 40 years expanding copyright. We’ve made it last longer; expanded it to cover more works, hiked the statutory damages for infringements and made it easier to prove violations. This has made the entertainment industry larger and more profitable — but the share of those profits going to creators has declined, both in real terms and proportionately.

In other words, today creators have more copyright, the companies that buy creators’ copyrights have more profits, but creators are poorer than they were 40 years ago. How can this be so?

As Rebecca Giblin and I explain in our book Chokepoint Capitalism, the sums creators get from media and tech companies aren’t determined by how durable or far-reaching copyright is — rather, they’re determined by the structure of the creative market.

https://chokepointcapitalism.com/

The market is concentrated into monopolies. We have five big publishers, four big studios, three big labels, two big ad-tech companies, and one gargantuan ebook/audiobook company. The internet has been degraded into “five giant websites, each filled with screenshots from the other four”:

https://twitter.com/tveastman/status/1069674780826071040

Under these conditions, giving a creator more copyright is like giving a bullied schoolkid extra lunch money. It doesn’t matter how much lunch money you give that kid — the bullies will take it all, and the kid will still go hungry (that’s still true even if the bullies spend some of that stolen lunch money on a PR campaign urging us all to think of the hungry children and give them even more lunch money):

https://doctorow.medium.com/what-is-chokepoint-capitalism-b885c4cb2719

But creative workers have been conditioned — by big media and tech companies — to reflexively turn to copyright as the cure-all for every pathology, and, predictably, there are loud, insistent calls (and a growing list of high-profile lawsuits) arguing that training a machine-learning system is a copyright infringement.

This is a bad theory. First, it’s bad as a matter of copyright law. Fundamentally, machine learning systems ingest a lot of works, analyze them, find statistical correlations between them, and then use those to make new works. It’s a math-heavy version of what every creator does: analyze how the works they admire are made, so they can make their own new works.

If you go through the pages of an art-book analyzing the color schemes or ratios of noses to foreheads in paintings you like, you are not infringing copyright. We should not create a new right to decide who is allowed to think hard about your creative works and learn from them — such a right would make it impossible for the next generation of creators to (lawfully) learn their craft:

https://www.oblomovka.com/wp/2022/12/12/on-stable-diffusion/

(Sometimes, ML systems will plagiarize their own training data; that could be copyright infringement; but a) ML systems will doubtless get guardrails that block this plagiarism; and, b) even after that happens, creators will still worry about being displaced by ML systems trained on their works.)

We should learn from our recent history here. When sampling became a part of commercial hiphop music, some creators clamored for the right to control who could sample their work and to get paid when that happened. The musicians who sampled argued that inserting a few bars from a recording was akin to a jazz trumpeter who works a few bars of a popular song into a solo. They lost that argument, and today, anyone who wants to release a song commercially will be required — by radio stations, labels, and distributors — the clear that sample.

This change didn’t make musicians better off. The Big Three labels — Sony, Warners, and Universal, who control 70% of the world’s recorded music — now require musicians to sign away the rights to samples from their works. The labels also refuse to sell sampling licenses to musicians unless they are signed to one of the Big Three.

Thus, producing music with a sample requires that you take whatever terms the Big Three impose on you, including giving up the right to control sampling of your music. We gave the schoolkids more lunch money and the bullies took that, too.

https://locusmag.com/2020/03/cory-doctorow-a-lever-without-a-fulcrum-is-just-a-stick/

The monopolists who control the creative industries are already getting ahead of the curve on this one. Companies that hire voice actors are requiring those actors to sign away the (as yet nonexistant) right to train a machine-learning model with their voices:

https://www.vice.com/en/article/5d37za/voice-actors-sign-away-rights-to-artificial-intelligence

The National Association of Voice Actors is (quite rightly) advising its members not to sign contracts that make this outrageous demand, and they note that union actors are having success getting these clauses struck, even retroactively:

https://navavoices.org/synth-ai/

That’s not surprising — labor unions have a much better track record of getting artists’ paid than giving creators copyright and expecting them to bargain individually for the best deal they can get. But for non-union creators — the majority of us — getting this language struck is going to be a lot harder. Indeed, we already sign contracts full of absurd, unconscionable nonsense that our publishers, labels and studios refuse to negotiate:

https://doctorow.medium.com/reasonable-agreement-ea8600a89ed7

Some of the loudest calls for exclusive rights over ML training are coming not from workers, but from media and tech companies. We creative workers can’t afford to let corporations create this right — and not just because they will use it against us. These corporations also have a track record of creating new exclusive rights that bite them in the ass.

For decades, media companies stretched copyright to cover works that were similar to existing works, trying to merge the idea of “inspired by” and “copied from,” assuming that they would be the ones preventing others from making “similar” new works.

But they failed to anticipate the (utterly predictable) rise of copyright trolls, who launched a string of lawsuits arguing that popular songs copied tiny phrases (or just the “feel”) of their clients’ songs. Pharrell Williams and Robin Thicke’s got sued into radioactive rubble by Marvin Gaye’s estate over their song “Blurred Lines” — which didn’t copy any of Gaye’s words or melodies, but rather, took its “feel”:

https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/robin-thicke-pharrell-lose-multi-million-dollar-blurred-lines-lawsuit-35975/

Today, every successful musician lives in dread of a multi-million-dollar lawsuit over incidental similarities to obscure tracks. Last spring, Ed Sheeran beat such a suit, but it was a hollow victory. As Sheeran said, with 60,000 new tracks being uploaded to Spotify every day, these similarities are inevitable:

https://twitter.com/edsheeran/status/1511631955238047751

The major labels are worried about this problem, too — but they are at a loss as to what to do about it. They are completely wedded to the idea that every part of music should be converted to property, so that they can expropriate it from creators and add it to their own bulging portfolios. Like a monkey trapped because it has reached through a hole into a hollow log to grab a banana that won’t fit back through the hole, the labels can’t bring themselves to let go.

https://pluralistic.net/2022/04/08/oh-why/#two-notes-and-running

That’s the curse of the monkey’s paw: the entertainment giants argued for everything to be converted to a tradeable exclusive right — and now the industry is being threatened by trolls and ML creeps who are bent on acquiring their own vast troves of pseudo-property.

There’s a better way. As NAVA president Tim Friedlander told Motherboard’s Joseph Cox, “NAVA is not anti-synthetic voices or anti-AI, we are pro voice actor. We want to ensure that voice actors are actively and equally involved in the evolution of our industry and don’t lose their agency or ability to be compensated fairly for their work and talent.”

This is as good a distillation of the true Luddite ethic as you could ask for. After all, the Luddites didn’t oppose textile automation: rather, they wanted a stake in its rollout and a fair share of its dividends:

https://locusmag.com/2022/01/cory-doctorow-science-fiction-is-a-luddite-literature/

Turning every part of the creative process into “IP” hasn’t made creators better off. All that’s it’s accomplished is to make it harder to create without taking terms from a giant corporation, whose terms inevitably include forcing you to trade all your IP away to them. That’s something that Spider Robinson prophesied in his Hugo-winning 1982 story, “Melancholy Elephants”:

http://www.spiderrobinson.com/melancholyelephants.html

This week (Feb 8–17), I’ll be in Australia, touring my book Chokepoint Capitalism with my co-author, Rebecca Giblin. We’re doing a remote event for NZ on Feb 13. Next are Melbourne (Feb 14), Sydney (Feb 15) and Canberra (Feb 16/17). I hope to see you!

Image: Cryteria (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HAL9000.svg

CC BY 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en

[Image ID: A poster for the 1933 movie ‘The Monkey’s Paw.’ The fainting ingenue has been replaced by the glaring red eye of HAL9000 from 2001: A Space Odyssey.]

#pluralistic #luddie #chokepoint capitalism #generative ai #artificial intelligence #voice acting #labor #creative labor #exclusive rights regimes #copyright #copyfight #careful what you wish for #machine learning #ai #ml #blurred lines #melancholy elephants

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lady-raziel · 19 days

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'canon isn't real' the thing is though that it literally is? I get what you're saying but like. it's still real.

I think what the critical underpinning of what I mean by “canon isn’t real” specifically in the case of Fallout is that it’s not inherently a clean cut case like some other media franchises. In cases where a particular universe has one main creator who has retained and exercised creative ownership over the story, it’s much easier to say “this is what the facts of the story are based on what is explicitly depicted in writing/on screen/etc. and ‘word of god’ additions by the author if you decide to count that.” The more people that are involved in creatively contributing to a story, the more difficult this gets. It becomes SIGNIFICANTLY more complicated if a franchise changes hands and later contributors decide to pick and choose what THEY believe to be the established events of the universe. In these cases, who do you choose to trust as the decisive source of what “canon” is? Is it the original creator above all others, or only the current owner of the property? What happens if the property changes hands multiple times and none of the owners agree on what installments are the “real” ones? What happens if the franchise changes creative control again and they decide something entirely different—are fans to simply take their word for it even if it means the additions to the universe that caused them to fall in love with it in the first place are disregarded?

In the end, all these questions apply to the Fallout franchise in both the past and going forward. I think, for me, it’s a problem of who can and should decide what matters to a story universe—the individual fans who invest their attention to a property, or whomever has a legal document that says they own the copyright (especially if it is not the original creator). This is even more important for interactive entertainment where there is no one set ending or way of completing the elements of the story in the exact same way as someone else.

In the post that this ask is referring to, the main point that I wanted to get across is that you shouldn’t let whoever is, on paper, “in charge” of the story determine why YOU like it. If not strictly viewing events through the lens that the current owner of the property says is the correct interpretation brings you enhanced enjoyment of the story, then THAT is more important.

To sum up, I would ask you to consider who’s word you’re trusting on what is canon and why, with the knowledge that there are many conflicting opinions and that what is canon now could almost certainly change in the future.

#fallout #fallout prime

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the-overthinktank · 2 months

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in what way is it a doomed investment? I've seen a lot of artist lose their jobs to it already, it has had a greater impact than nft's and right now they're going on to make ai video's. I'm sure the bubble will break eventually but, yea share your thoughts.

Here's an article I recommend reading.

We're at the peak of a tech hype cycle. People are absolutely getting hurt and laid off from billions of dollars being poured into the latest money hole that the developers double pinkie prommy will actually work the way they're advertising... at some later date; but I suspect the main staying power for this tech is going to be spam/advertisement generation and disinformation. If you want to provide a quality chat service or make art worth looking at, human intervention is necessary even if you use generative AI as a starting point. While none of this is... good, in the same way NFTs and useless dotcom sites were not good, I am skeptical of a lot of the panic around generative AI replacing humans long term because I think it lends legitimacy to the people claiming it can competently do that.

I also think a lot of the panic around tumblr specifically is kind of redundant. I don't appreciate the site fucking condoning it, but all major social media sites have already been getting fed into these things. There is (currently) no real way to stop these companies from throwing whatever they want off of google into the machine and claiming they totally only use non-copyrighted goods, because they're drawing from billions of images and source texts and there's (currently) no easy way to check besides combing through those massive databases.

Besides, if you publicly post art online, there's already dozens of other websites scraping income off of your work. The social media you use hosts ads, and your art and presence on social media is what draws in new ad viewers and revenue. And there's aggregator sites that draw from and repost stuff from other social media sites, and they host ads. Listacle "news" sites put their top ten favorite web finds on a page covered in ads. Web searches that show your art in a pile of other images host ads. If your art is popular, the number of sites scraping income off of your work grows proportionately. This is my personal opinion, but I'd say AI is a new hat on a commons-exploitation problem that's as almost as old as the internet.

#politics #i also think free social media is going to die in the future so the scraping chain of ad servers may also be doomed but lmao

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asherthehimbo · 5 months

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Listen to my music, listen to your heart

Bang Chan x male!reader [soulmate au]

Synopsis: When his soulbond turned out to revolve around music, Chan had not been surprised - practically his whole life had an aspect of music in it. Only problem is - his soulmate's music seems really, really sad. Ofcourse the occasional party song is in there, and hey, even some of his own songs are there. Yet he can't help but cry everytime he hears the beat in his mind flow softly, a voice - on the verge of/ or already crying - singing the saddest songs Chan had ever heard. It pains him greatly, but there is nothing he can do except search for his soulmate. Who would've thought that his soulmate -one who he could tell went through so much- would be his best friends bubbly older brother whom he used to have a crush on.

Status: slowly posting

The sun and its rays | The father and his kids | The extra's

Meme's | playlist |Soulbound explanation

Chapters:

one| prof. Taemin🤩

two | bubbles and boobie<3

three | new dad

four | Fifi🫶🏻

five | looky here

six | i just miss him

seven | Dt and lil Lee

eight | the cure to depression

nine | fake student yipeee

ten | Rachel stfu

eleven | dinner

twelve | thats..... weird

thirteen | YOU DONT GET IT

fourteen | why?

fifteen | the sun is still a star

sixteen | so.... grandpa

Taglist: [10/30][open]: @foxilsdenn @conwunder @heyogg @zzstar @xavi-in-kpopland @idkwhatto-namethis @glitchyaiko @cybershot-kai @ashersdeadinside

if your names in Orange/ bold it means Tumblr wont let me tag you

#smau #skz #stray kids #skz smau #bang chan smau #stray kids bang chan #bang chan #stray kids fluff #stray kids smau #stray kids x reader #asher 🌑 speaks #my music & your heart smau

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dilf-in-peril · 4 months

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A quick guide to pirating wrestling

There are basically two options when it comes to pirating: streaming (that's what I am calling watching videos on some website for the purpose of this post) and downloading them via torrent.

The problem with streaming is the videos often get taken down from the sites they are hosted on due to copyright claims, which means a lot of links to older shows are just dead.

The problem with torrenting is that it's peer to peer (no hosting website, just all of us sharing the files amongst each other), which means that the older the show the less people still bother to share it, which means a lot of torrent for older shows are dead. (*torrenting also allows people sharing the file to see your IP which copyright holders can theoretically abuse to track you down and sue you but this might depend on your local laws and with torrenting dying because no one knows how it works anymore it's grown much rarer I believe)

Then there is also archive.org which in my experience does not suffer from the issue with videos being taken down but can be rather slow. Archive.org is also a proper archive that does not blast you with pop up ads and links to malware.

For the streaming option there are sites like watchprowrestling.co and watch-wrestling.cc (and many similar ones, they also change urls a lot unfortunately), which do not host the videos but link to them. Links to older shows are often dead as mentioned before.

There are some youtube alternatives that care less about copyright such as bilibili.com and dailymotion.com and have a lot of wrestling shows. You might even be so lucky on youtube.

If you're interested in torrenting you'll need to download some software, I'm sure you'll find guides if you use the search engine of your choice, and then you can also search "torrent sites" and find a list of sites, such as The Pirate Bay or 1337x, where you can search for the show you want to watch.

Lastly, there are some sites that stream wrestling shows live as they happen, such as baked.live.

And then there's asking around if someone's got the file and being invited to private google drive folders and all that, which I guess is modern tape trading but I can't help with that.

Plus, if the issue is not actually money, but just finding the show because it's too old or obscure, try wrestlinghdd.net which has a huge library of shows, which you can either trade for with digital tapes or pay them for.

Feel free to add onto this if you have suggestions.

#wrestling #guide

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kissofsuguru · 3 months

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COMMUNITY QUESTIONS!

This may be a bit of an embarrassing post, but if any of you wouldn’t mind reading and answering a few questions I would be extremely appreciative!

I have had Tumblr for a very long time, but I have never used it for posting. However I have been a writer, and have often used this app for reading purposes! (mostly fanfics and such). I would like to start writing here, but i’m still unsure on what is important to add/have as a writer on this platform. I am a JJK fan, so I aim to write fanfics, one shots, smut, fluff, practically all genre’s (all probably being anime related). Below I will add a segment on what I do know vs. what I do not (or am confused about) and I would love if any of you wouldn’t mind answering or having some advice to give.

WHAT I KNOW:

I am aware that Tumblr is a so-called home to some very good and experienced writers, as well as mostly used for it’s aesthetic purposes and its vast options. I have noticed that the majority of writers specify the genre at the beginning of their posts, as well as the word count and warnings (if there are any). I am also aware that, like most posts, specific hashtags pertaining to your topic are used. I see that most writers also copyright at the bottom of their works, and that some even have masterlists or links that can direct you to other segments of their work. I have also noticed that some authors have a tagged post for their own information.

WHAT I DO NOT KNOW:

As stated above I noted that this platform is notorious for its aesthetics, and as for that I have to ask: does everyone pick their own style or color scheme and go with it for every post, and everything? If so is it okay to change it up? Another thing I must ask is about the warnings. I have seen CW (content warning I assume) a lot, and was wondering if it is used for all content, or just NSFW content. If so, what and all do you have to specify? What should mostly be specified in your warnings in general? I also don’t know if word count is necessary, as well as don’t know how to get it, but that is something I probably won’t have a problem figuring out on my own. I know that for just starting out I don’t have the need for a master list or anything of the sort, but would it be a good thing/or is it necessary to have some sort of introduction post? If so, what information is the most necessary to have? (I assume name, age, and pronouns being most important). Even then though, I am unsure on how to link things if I were to get a master list in the near future (I know, It’s kinda embarrassing and I apologize..)

There are probably more that I cannot think on top of my head at this moment, but if you have read this far I appreciate you very much. I know this is probably an embarrassing and annoying post, but we all start somewhere so I assumed it wouldn’t hurt to ask. I also did not know which tags to add to this post, hence why I chose JJK ones. I hope you all can forgive me and thank you all for your time <3 Once again I do not expect any feedback but any and all would be utterly appreciated.

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facelessoldgargoyle · 9 months

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You know nobody’s going to want to make stuff anymore if some jackass can just lift it , make money off it and claim it’s theirs . It’s not gonna make a free idea paradise it’s just going to lead to huge company’s robbing the shit out of smaller creators even worse than they do already and driving them out of every single creative industry .

For context, this is regarding an AITA post about a someone resenting someone else for using many element of their fan AU in their own fan creations. My response was fuck that, down with intellectual property.

First, I think it’s hypocritical to write a fanfic derived from someone else’s work and then turn around and resent someone else for deriving something from your work. This is a situation in which no one is making money, it’s just people playing in a sandbox of ideas together. Resenting a smaller artist in this context seems pretty despicable to me. Your feelings about this may vary.

Second, in in my 30 second reply, I did not elaborate on my politics. I think it was fair to assume from the reply that I was a libertarian shithead. I am, in fact, a c-c-c-communist.

The primary concern you raise here seems to be that artists won’t get paid. Art already isn’t profitable though. You can work for shit wages at an animation studio, you can become an influencer to hock your book, or you can be a good enough poster that people support you on patreon. Stricter copyright laws wouldn’t fix that, it would just make it easier for Disney to go after fan artists. The problem is that the market is oversaturated with art. There are more people out there making art than can get paid a decent living for it.

That sucks! I think artists should get paid more, and I think more people should be artists! It’s depressing that such a large percentage of working artists are the children of rich people, but the flip side of the coin is that when people have financial security and leisure time, they gravitate to the arts. The obvious answer here is to create a society in which everyone has financial security and leisure time.

Finally, copyright laws most benefit people who already have accrued capital. If you’re a working artist, you’re not making enough money to take people to court over them selling merch based on your design. If you’re Anne Rice, you can afford employ lawyers to threaten people who write stories where your vampires bone and burn thousands of dollars on ads decrying a restaurant built in an empty lot featured in one of your books. This is silly, but it’s a logical extension of feeling possessive over your story and being empowered by the law to do something about it.

Copyright law promises that one day you, yes you, will profit off of your creations. Unfortunately, except for a few people who win the lottery, it’s just not gonna happen.

Instead of supporting intellectual property, it would be more meaningful to actually give artists you know money. Support someone’s patreon. Buy someone’s shit on itch.io.

#op #vilesprout

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maniculum · 6 months

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Bestiaryposting Plan

So the poll is still running, but I think I'm safe in saying there's sufficient interest, so I'm going ahead and typing up a "how we're going to do this" thing, which I will schedule to post after the poll ends properly. As of the time I'm writing this, over 500 people have voted for the "yes I want to draw things" option, and I had been expecting to get maybe a dozen, so we definitely have enough participants. Let's get started then:

Our Source

I had originally planned to translate an Old or Middle English bestiary, but haven't been able to find a good one -- the best option I was able to dig up only has thirteen critters, which I feel like isn't enough to really have fun with. I was debating the idea of translating a Latin one -- this would have been far more time-consuming since my Latin is terrible, but also I do need to practice it, so I figured it evens out -- when I found a solution that doesn't involve me spending hours and hours on translating.

It seems that when Aberdeen University created their digitized version of the famous Aberdeen Bestiary, they released it under a Creative Commons license. (Assuming I'm reading their copyright policy correctly; I'm not a lawyer.) It does not seem to specify whether the transcriptions and translations they attach to the scanned images are also covered by Creative Commons, but since all of those are already freely available online through their website, I can't imagine they would have a problem with me posting them here as long as I provide attribution (which I am hereby doing right here on this post) and am not using it for commercial purposes (which I am not).

The Aberdeen Bestiary is missing a few pages, but there exists a very similar manuscript, the Ashmole Bestiary (they're sometimes called "sister" manuscripts), which is not missing those pages. And I happen to have a translation of the Ashmole Bestiary in hardcopy on my bookshelf, so I can just use it to fill in the gaps. Edit: whoops, the one I have is the Bodley Bestiary. They are in the same bestiary "family", though, so it still works well enough. (I think that should qualify as "fair use", since I'm only taking excerpts and not using them commercially.)

The upside of using the Aberdeen Bestiary is that it means when I round up all the art of each critter, I can include their very nice illustrations alongside the reveal of what animal was being described.

The downside of using the Aberdeen Bestiary is that since it already is free online, people might be tempted to "cheat" by looking up the entries and finding out what animal they describe. For that, please see the next section...

Guessing the Animal

Guessing what animal is being described is not the point of the exercise. (Feel free to have theories and whatnot, but please keep them to yourself so as not to influence the artists.) If you see an entry and think, e.g., "oh that's describing a raccoon"*, and then you create a picture of a raccoon... well, you could have done a perfectly good raccoon at any point and didn't need this framework to do it. So just don't worry about what animal is meant, and do your best to draw (or paint or stitch or whatever else) based on the description! You're not getting ranked on accuracy and there are no prizes forthcoming, so... just have fun with it.

*Example chosen as something that will, for obvious reasons, definitely not be in a 13th-century European bestiary.

Edit after starting to type these things up: some of these are going to be super easy to guess, though, to the point where I don't know how possible it'll be to block out prior knowledge. Sorry about that.

General Procedure

I'm going to schedule a post every Monday (I'm thinking of queuing them for 6pm Eastern Time) with a new entry. It will be the translation of an entry from the Aberdeen Bestiary with all references to the animal's name replaced by a randomly-generated nonsense word. (Henceforth to be referred to as "nonsense-names". I'm Googling* each one before using them so I don't accidentally generate one that actually means something.) These posts will all be tagged maniculum bestiaryposting, so you can follow that tag if you want to make sure you see them.'

*Later Note: Did you know that if you search dozens of nonsense words within a short span of time, Google makes you prove you're not a robot? Repeatedly?

Anyone who wants to draw the critter being described should do so. (You are encouraged to describe your thought process re: why you've depicted it the way you have.) You can put it in its own post, or reblog the description with an image, or however you want to do it. Then tag your art with the nonsense-name I've given to the animal.This will let me and others find it. (You should probably employ copy/paste there to make sure the spelling is the same, since nonsense words are hard to spellcheck.)

A week after posting the bestiary entry, I'll go through that tag and round up all of the art contributed. Then I'll put the images in a big post (or series thereof, considering how many people might participate), along with an @ and a link to your original post.

If you want...

to not have your work included in the round-up post

to have only a link to your post included and not an image

to have me include a link to your website / other social media / etsy shop in addition to or instead of your tumblr

to have other information included alongside your work

anything else along those lines

... then just say so in your post and I will follow your instructions to the best of my ability.

I will also include, at the end of the round-up post, an image of the creature as depicted in the Aberdeen Bestiary and what it is actually called.

All posts I make on this will be collected at https://maniculum.tumblr.com/bestiaryposting so that people can look at previous ones without scrolling through the tag.

Various Notes

I'm going to trim out any religious digressions in the original entries -- bestiary authors had a habit of adding stuff like "and the raccoon is symbolic of god in such-and-such fashion, which teaches us...", and I just don't think that's relevant here.

The entries will also be presented in a random order. This is because they're sorted into categories in the original text, so if I don't change the order we're going to get stuck with, e.g., a few months of All Birds All The Time.

You should all be aware that the animals described are not guaranteed to be, you know, real. There are several entries describing animals that straight up do not exist -- some of which are mythical creatures familiar to most people, others of which are extremely obscure.

Explanations of the animal's name within the entries will be redacted.

If other animals are mentioned within the entries, they will not get replaced with nonsense-names. Originally, I was going to make the switch globally, so that if, e.g., the entry for "raccoon" read "a raccoon is about the size of a possum", and the random generator had decided that a raccoon was a balzikhear and a possum was a flunggrish, the "raccoon" entry would now read "a balzikhear is about the size of a flunggrish". However, I decided that it will cause more problems than it solves to obscure any comparisons to other animals -- so the name-switch is now localized only to the specific entry. A possum is a flunggrish only in its own entry, and remains a possum everywhere else.

I was originally going to do one post for every single entry, but there are a lot of them and they vary wildly in length & quality. So I've cut it down to exactly 52 posts, meaning that if I queue them up for once a week, this will run for roughly a full year.

Most of that cutting-down mentioned above was done by combining a bunch of the really short entries into categories -- the last half-dozen posts in this series will be group entries. You can choose to make art of any of them that strike your fancy, or do a group portrait, or just ignore them --I dunno, I'm not a cop, do what you want.

I did also directly cut some, mostly domesticated animals because there's a somewhat different approach to them based on author and audience familiarity.

So yeah, that should cover everything.

#maniculum bestiaryposting

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fuckyeahbaldursgate · 6 months

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Viconia - Plot Support extraordinaire

Just to preface this as I don't want this to seem like I am hating on BG3 as a diehard fan of the original series because I really do love BG3. I've completed it twice now and think it will absolutely be joining my annual rotation of BG1/SOD/BG2 playthroughs but it has its problems, much in the same way that the originals themselves have problems as well.

So after my Sarevok post I wanted to treat Viconia to the same critical analysis as unfortunately I think she also gets the short end of the evil plot stick. I get it, evil characters can be hard to get right but again similar to Sarevok, in my opinion, her character regresses to evil Shar mook number one rather than actually being Viconia. Worse still she's entirely at the mercy of being wrapped up in ShadowHeart's backstory.

Anyway this is a bit of a deep dive into Viconia's issues in BG3. Spoiler warning for both BG3 and BG2.

1. No Grey DeLise.

Again, similar to Sarevok, another prolific voice actor that has done recent video game work seemingly not approached for the role. I can't help but think that some of this is down to the rushed nature of act three generally and Larian just having to get whoever they could for the job in the time that they needed it. Unlike Jaheria and Minsc there's no attempt to mimic her original VA or get someone who sounded like her so she ends up sounding completely and utterly different.

This version of Viconia sounds haughty and stuck up which while the original Viconia VA has a degree of arrogance, she is also pretty sultry. Haer'dalis even comments that she has 'the throaty voice of the most expensive courtesan' and Viconia deliberately plays on the stereotype of the sensual female drow with certain male party members for her own benefit e.g the male Bhaalspawn, Edwin, Sarevok and even Anomen (I cover this a bit here and here).

2. Her in game design...just isn't great.

Let's be honest, combined with the voice, Viconia's design basically makes her unrecognisable. She looks like a generic old drow lady to the point that I did have 'Is that meant to be Viconia?' moment when I first met her.

Now I appreciate there is minor controversy with Viconia's original BG2 portrait (which is probably the most recognisable image of her) because the artist actually used a famous porn star as the base for it.

For info, this was a common practice at Bioware at the time as they used to use lots of different images as bases for portraits. They finally got into legal trouble for it in NWN where due to various copyright claims they had to change quite a few portraits.

More recently, I think that Beamdog actually did quite a good job of recreating a faithful adaption of her original portrait in Siege of Dragonspear while presumbably navigating the original copyright issue.

In comparison to her BG3 portrayal, my first impression was she looks incredibly old. Now as far as I'm aware we've never been given a canon age for Viconia but we do know she was around for House DeVir being defeated by the Do'Urden house so she has to be at least 100 years old by the time of BG1... but her character level is between 2 and 6 (depending on the party's XP) so a relatively inexperienced cleric. With that in mind I definitely assumed she was on the younger side (maybe 200-300?). Either way 5e elves can live between 750 to 1000 years although there are instances in the Forgotten Realms books of drow living to over 2000. Now tack on the additional 120 years for BG3 in my mind it would definitely put her in the middle aged category but not necessarily anywhere near the end of her life. Critically she would be aging much slower than Jaheria but with those wrinkles she looks WAY older than her. I honestly feel cheated of an interaction between the two about how hagged and old Jaheria looks in comparison to herself.

In terms of her outfit, although initially she wears the Sharite mask and hooded outfit, which is good for concealing her identity, we eventually end up with Viconia in a spider adorned dress. This seems like a strange choice given the spider motif when she literally stopped worshipping Lloth for Shar - maybe she's being ironic? The lack of armour,when she's a cleric that knows there's a good chance she's about to have a fight seems kind of stupid. If you do choose to fight her, she then looks entirely comical in her light dress accompanied by an enormous oversized shield and mace.

For me though this really identifies her design problem: her leather armour was a critical part of her original design. Given that we only see portrait style headshots of BG characters, the decision not to include her leather corset with the three straps and the head band is really what makes her unrecognisable. It would be like removing Minsc's head tattoo or Jaheria's braids or Sarevok's armour (which even with all the problems I talked about in my post, at least he got to keep that).

My hope is that some enterprising modder out there makes a more BG2 accurate version of her in future. Larian, please give my lady her leather armour back or maybe even a justicar outfit!

3. Ignores her BG1/2 alignment, motivations and twists her original epilogue.

Now I do appreciate BG3 deliberately assumes that the events of BG1/BG2 are a little bit fluid, which Jaheria confirms this when she talks about the bards that tell stories of her slaying gods or bedding them depending on which one you listen to. But the game goes onto confirm certain events in Viconia's history that don't really make sense:

A.) The game confirms that Viconia did travel with the Bhaalspawn but not for the entirety of the game. Minsc informs you that after trying to dissect Boo she was expelled from the group. I have to admit this story didn't gel with me at all because it implies Viconia is some sort of chaotic evil idiot (reminder: Viconia is neutral evil with a 16 INT score and 18 WIS score in BG2) who would deliberately provoke a giant raging berserker man by murdering his beloved pet. Like that's the sort of thing I could see Xzar (who is completely and utterly mad) doing but not Viconia. What benefit would she get out of it? Maybe it would be a good tribute for Shar but that would be a pretty short term benefit. In fact in BG2 Viconia offers begrudging respect to Minsc for his effectiveness in battle, she knows he's powerful and she wants to be on the right side of that. Minsc for his part does what he does with many of the female characters, particularly in BG2 and makes her a proxy substitute for Dynaheir offering to protect her. That's not to say she won't insult people (Aerie and Jaheria or characters who she perceives as weak often get the brunt of it) but she's generally smart enough to stay out of an actual fight. Important to note that in any of NPC conflicts that end in a fight in BG1/2 (e.g. Kivan, Ajantis, Keldorn) it's never Viconia that's starts the fight.

B.) The Waterdeep cult.

In Viconia's epilogue, which you only get if you kept her for the end of Throne of Bhaal and you didn't romance her, Viconia goes on to do a few things which you can see below (obviously massive spoilers for BG2) :

So it feels like Larian has taken the first part of this ending but nothing else, which really leaves a lot of questions. We know Shar isn't entirely happy with Viconia based on her diary entries so why is Shar still giving powers to a woman that basically killed a whole bunch of her followers? Why is Viconia still working for a goddess that hates her? Why is she so accepting of Shar's plot to groom Shadowheart as her replacement? Why on earth hasn't Viconia got the fuck out of dodge, which is pretty much what she has been shown to do in the past? And this comes neatly onto my next point.

4. Viconia is just a plot device for Shadowheart.

I love Shadowheart and I love her arc but honestly Viconia being the Mother Superior just felt like a way of inserting her into the game in a way that didn't really fit especially when Viconia's diaries in BG3 show that she knows that Shar intends for Shadowheart to essentially replace her as one of her prominent followers/chosen. The whole plot ignores two critical points about Viconia and her backstory:

Firstly the reason Viconia left the Underdark in the first place was because she refused to sacrifice a child to Lloth and Lloth turning her brother into a drider after he saved her from being sacrificed. Now Viconia is many things, she's self serving, cruel and dedicated to her own survival at the expense of anything and anyone else (quintessential neutral evil through and through) but at the same time she threw away her position, caused the downfall of her house and got most of her family murdered to save a child. You're telling me she would then willingly go along with Shar's plan to deliberate plan to kidnap and repeatedly torture a child for YEARS whilst also training said child to replace her? My girl doesn't have many lines in the sand but harming children definitely seems like one of them. I actually wandered whether Shadowheart not liking to harm children / prefers saving them is not just about her being a secret Selunite but also a potential a hint of Viconia's influence.

Secondly, that plot seems to ignores Viconia's other primary driver, which is to survive: it's why she leaves the Underdark, it's why she travels with the Bhaalspawn, it's why she worships Shar and it's why she murders an entire cabal of Shar's followers after one person betrayed her. Now if we ignore that she has qualms about children, you're telling me that she would instead essentially train her replacement to be an amazing cleric who is 99% likely to murder her? I'm pretty sure Viconia would have tried to kill Shadowheart way before her becoming a justicar or simply skipped town as she has done before.

The alternative?

Personally I would have liked to have seen Viconia ultimately involved in a plot to overthrow the Mother Superior or maybe doing something even crazier like going after Shar herself out of revenge following her fall from grace after the events of the Waterdeep cult. Maybe she works with the Absolute to get her revenge and keep her divine powers - hell who better to help Ketheric with the Nightsong in Shar's temple then an ex priestess of Shar?

If not the Absolute then Shar's got plenty of enemies and Viconia has converted before. Maybe she could have joined the team to achieve a particular goal while giving fans of the original series the opportunity to have one of the original evil characters to join the crew. I would have loved to see the contrast with Minthara who is still fairly fresh from leaving drow society and a complete blunt instrument compared to Viconia's more subtle ways. Maybe Viconia would take the paladin under her wing, maybe introduce her to a new patron god (something I don't think is ever explained is how Minthara still retains her divine powers given neither Lloth or the Absolute are fueling them anymore). Shevarash the elven god of revenge, would be a fantastic fit for both of their back stories (which would also be a nice little throw back to Viconia's heated / sometimes fatal arguments with Kivan in BG1) presuming that Viconia could get over her disdain for the elven pantheon by that point in the timeline. The fireworks with Jaheria of course would be grand while Minsc I feel would be very conflicted given his mind's tendancy, as noted above, to sub in any female magic user as Dynaheir.

#baldur's gate #baldur's gate 3 #baldur's gate 2 spoilers #baldur's gate 3 spoilers #viconia #viconia devir #discourse #spoilers

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yankpop · 1 year

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Yandere Taehyung (BTS): He wants a big family

Summary: Your kidnapper has ambicious plans for the two of you.

DISCLAIMER: This is a FICTION work only made for entertainment purposes so please don’t take any of this seriously. I do not support or encourage any type of abusive behaviour. Please, be 18+ to read this, no minors are allowed. Make sure to read the trigger warnings before you get started, but almost everything is yandere and includes toxic behaviours.

Check more: Masterlist.

All copyrights belong to @yankpop (aka me) so do not post/translate my works on any other platforms without my consent/knowledge.

Female reader

WARNINGS: Kidnapping/captivity situation; mentioned future forced marriage and forced pregnancy; breeding kink.

AN: Hope you guys enjoy it 💖

“And then, once we’re properly married, we’re gonna start trying for babies right away.” Taehyung declares, his deep voice breaking off with the amount of excitement he has while his eyes shine with delirious insanity. It makes your heart paralyze with fear, your tied hands curling into a ball. Why was this happening to you? You didn’t even know the guy.

“We’re gonna have so many babies! I’m always gonna keep you full of my babies and we’re gonna have a big family.” he gushes over his plans, his hand coming over to rub your curled fist as he presses his warm lips to the skin, making your stomach turn with disgust.

A sickened expression appears on your face before you can stop yourself. Your nose wrinkles with repulsion as you look at the crazy man in front of you.

His eyes immediately catch up to your hostile reaction, his whole expression darkening, the previously wide smile dropping to a thin line. The abrupt change scares you to your core, a bad feeling taking over you.

His large hand comes to roughly grab your jaw, his face coming impossibly closer to your own. The sudden proximity makes you hold your breath, not daring to even breath so close to him. His face no longer contains any traces of happiness, but instead flooding with striking anger.

“You better tone down that attitude of yours, honey. I’m only gonna tolerate it until the kids start arriving and I’m not letting their mom be an absolute brat just because she wants to.” His voice is dangerously low, a tinge of impatience showing off.

You can’t stop the tears from burning your eyes, as his words intensify your fear for him. He lets out a frustrated growl. His hand squeezes your jaw harder, making you wince. His dark eyes hold out an implicit warning.

“Don’t zone out now, I need you to fucking understand every word I say.” he asserts, his voice a bit louder this time, prompting you to listen to him.

“Your days of being an ignorant brat are over cause you’re mine now. And you’re gonna do as I say so, otherwise there will be consequences that, trust me, you won’t like a bit.” he concludes, releasing your jaw and walking away to the bed, sitting on its edge.

You repeatedly blink your eyes, swallowing to ease the knot in your throat. You don’t dare to look in his direction, scared of making him angry even more.

Your mind is racing through so many thoughts, yet they all share the same intent. That you need to get away from him. You need to run away and hide in some place that he can never find you.

The only problem is that it’s impossible to do so.

Tags:

@mwitsmejk

#yandere bts #yandere v #yandere taehyung #yandere taehyung x reader #@yankpop #yandere kpop #bts yandere #yandere scenario

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sgiandubh · 6 months

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Logo wars: the unicorn vs. the griffin

Ever since August, the battle between the Warchief and the Sassenach has been lurking somewhere, on the outskirts of my radar. While some still deny there is anything going wrong between S and McTavish, I have strong reservations it's all about sunshine, lollipops and roses in that department. And I couldn't help but wonder if the key to the problem was not to be found in the very disingenuous way Graham chose to build the marketing strategy of his products and to update his own personal brand, in the process.

So I took a deep dive into socials and this is something that is going to take some more time to complete. If this kind of content is not your jam or you disagree with my premises, it's totally fine with me, but maybe you should skip these posts. And since we have to start somewhere, let's start with their companies' logos: they have a lot of things to tell us.

Soon after the Remarkable Week-end, S finally unveiled a business project he'd been alluding to for quite a while (if anything is wrong in here, kindly correct me in comments). This was the logo and the slogan they are still using until today:

The Sassenach Unique Spirits. Spirit of Home.

As compared with what McTavish released this summer:

McTavish Spirits. A Scotsman's Dream of America.

First logo: clean, sober lines. A Unicorn, whose contours seem more aptly designed for a sports car or a new, innovative line of home equipment (think rather audio systems, not refrigerators). Or even an elegant, country life oriented clothing line, with all the paraphernalia (gloves, scarves, etc - but we already knew about the First Love tartan, then, so it's still a possibility).

Unique spirits, with all my deep affection and due respect for a real effort, is not the best they could have come up with. You see, that's hardly a sales argument or an efficient pitch. Just like any dog owner on this planet would tell you that Bebe or Fido or Snoopy are 'the best dogs ever', a new entrepreneur would confidently tell you his booze is 'unique'. The effort S put into patiently educating his passion for whisky and creating something personal out of it deserved better. Not the completely expected and almost meaningless 'unique' - this is very lazy copywriting, I think (not a copywriter, just an exacting client, here). It spells low budget where we needed something irresistible.

Onwards to the Unicorn. Of course, it's all about Scotland - it's whisky, for Christ's sake. But, it's also about this:

This is the sixth panel of one of the most moving, exquisite things that ever graced this planet: The Lady and the Unicorn cycle of Flemish tapestries, now making the pride and joy of the Cluny National Museum of the Middle Ages, in Paris. A place I know well and was a very frequent visitor of, when I was living just about three blocks away from it. Its story has to do with the Five Senses and this is the last panel, featuring a mysterious message on that lavish tent's roof:

A mon seul Désir. It's French for: "To my sole desire". Unique, indeed.

Let's let things flow a bit in free association mode (I know Puffy did it on her blog with the Barbour project, but she didn't invent it and she certainly has no copyright - so yeah, waiting for a couple more idiots to block right after posting this):

Unicorn... Scotland... legend... purity...even Mary Queen of Scots asked for a unicorn horn to make sure the water was not poisoned, while in prison... untamed...chivalry.... woman...only a woman can tame and lure a unicorn... Medieval...Cluny... desire... sole desire... soul desire (heh)...unique...passion.... statement... labor of love... personal testimony...first love and we wrap it up nicely with a smile ('she is the original Sassenach', ahem).

That was the first set of (genuine) talking points he went with. Now, we deal with a contorted & painful explanation: Scotland is an inclusive nation and land, I am the Sassenach, etc. What do our unsuspecting American friends know, after all? But to a #silly European, it makes no sense: yes, Scotland is a very inclusive, open and even avantgarde society for many things, but this is whisky and should spell tradition, not innovation. It should spell mystery and something that comes (at great costs) from a faraway, fabled land of mists and druids and lochs. Not from a blaring EDI crossroads, where people are gathered to protest against global warming. Then how about that unnecessary 'I am the Sassenach' - no, Sir, you aren't, plus I hope you know how we, shippers immediately interpret it ('blood of my blood and bone of my bone' - 😁).

But your main problem with the name and the brand that goes along with is not even this. The problem is that a unicorn is always female. You have a feminine brand for a masculine product.

So instead of a haphazard explanation which smells of improv, why not just take the second, abstract, meaning of unicorn and just say cheekily something along those loose lines, for example:

'Well, we are a new, innovative enterprise which aspires to be a smaller unicorn in the world of spirits. Maybe we'll never make it to 1 billion dollars, but it's the bravery and the innovative spirit that we bring with us from Scotland, our home (cue in waxing lyrical and fill in the blanks with all the tropes you can think of). So we're the new kid on the block, the outsider, the underdog set to conquer new lands and new opportunities, exactly like Jamie Fraser, the character I play in OL does (cue in credible retconning of your initial strategy: you need a new client base to generate sales volume & secure or even multiply returning sales and those people DGAF about OL).'

Granted, you'll totally throw under the bus the whole initial plan, but hey - it's an elegant way out of a conundrum.

Second logo, quite a different situation. It's busy, busy, busy with the kind of motifs that make one immediately think of an engraved Colt grip. Something like this, perhaps, only stylized:

Instead of the Unicorn, we have a double beast: a Lion and an Eagle. In Ancient Greece, this mythical combo was called a γρύψ (gryps), which later gave 'griffin' in English. It is a hybrid, but then so is bourbon. The Lion is a symbol for the European roots of the brand and the Eagle, well - easy, America, pointing West and meaning new perspectives, freedom, etc. But the brand is McTavish Spirits, in a very personal approach: this is my bourbon (isn't it ironic, for a white label project?) and this is my story and these are my (a Scotsman's) dreams of America. Transparent. Legible. I mean business - this is not a labor of love.

Free association again:

The Lion self... the Older, Wiser Guy... the Leader... the Statesman... Dougal MacKenzie...the (hello) Warchief...but this is America... so I am also the Lonely Gunman... I am exploring a New Frontier... bringing my past with me (all the classy, gentleman-like persona)... telling my personal story, too, in the process... from my Scottish roots to making it in Hollywood... so I am also The Storyteller (unlike that young nincompoop, who just goes zorbing and chases barmaids) ... so, maybe, just maybe if you listen to my stories, you will forget I put zero effort into trying samples and touring the whole land looking for perfect balance, and just went for the easy solution and a quick buck... buy my booze and I'll tell you more... I am reliable and tried and tested and still young enough and strong enough and determined enough (the Eagle) to have a new wife and new plans.

Plus: a masculine brand for a masculine product. I won't keep scores for a while, but pfff... point taken.

This is not only logo conception copycat and shameless, reactive competition, on very thin ice and on a (at this point in time, at least) very slim portion of the market. This is, mark me, war between two people who still have some gigs together.

We'll see next time who shows up at their parallel events and buys their booze and also how they choose to engage (or not) with these people. I think I begin to understand what McTavish's brand strategy is, but I need to have a second, closer look. More on this, tomorrow.

#BoozeWars

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astralspellcaster · 1 year

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Astrology observations Ⅱ

Hi there! This is the second part of my astro observations. If you haven't checked out the first part, then you may want to take a look after reading this post!

These are only my personal maden observations. If something doesn't resonate with you, see that astrology is complex and we're all unique individuals who use the sign's energy differently. Also some planets' energies are more dominant in the chart than others and they even work differently in every chart.

✧ Mars in Taurus has a really good and an accurate gut feeling. Mars is responsible of energy, drive, passions and actions. Mars is also about personal strategies, what they are and how you follow them. Known as one of the most grounded sign, following the senses comes naturally to them. Venus tules the sign Taurus, which belongs to the category of benefic planets and as a planet, it's particularly sensual. Venus has an influence to their Mars and through this, makes them sensually aware. ♂️

Earth signs are generally in touch with the nature, which gives them a good gut feeling and/or intuition!

✧ Pluto conjuct MC/in the tenth house holds lots of power, especially the power of their own. In the public eye, they may seem kind of intimidating. Their presence is noticeable. They could have an influence on others, because they are perceived as authoritarive and significant. Also, they're possibly the most dominant person in social circles. Generally, they have what it takes to be a tough leader. As they're seen as authoritarive, problems with authority or following the rules usually comes with this placement. This can cause also problems with being in control, especially if Pluto is one of the most dominating celestial body in one's birth chart. A sense of importance may cause them using too much power, even taking more power for themselves from others. Too much power in hands of an individual makes people good at manipulating, and in this case Pluto conjuct MC/in the tenth house could indicate a person with the abilities of a master manipulator. They have a strong sense of ego and its death and rebirth often affects others around them. This Pluto is independent and a bit detached. They really value their freedom and they should remember to respect the freedom of others as well.

My sister has this placement. She also has Uranus in the first house, which makes her kind of uncontrollable by other people. She usually has that look in her face that nothing will really make her back out or even scare her (even if the situation is exact opposite). I have Pluto descending and I no longer wonder why others have been wondering that why are we so different from our natures haha.

✧ In synastry, any planet (often the malefic ones) conjuct South Node somehow triggers the South Node person. The connection could make them both feel drained by other's presence, which is a result of multiple shared past lives. They have shared karma from (a) past life/lives and both they are meant to teach and to take something from each other. They have missing lessons that weren't learned previous lifetime(s). During this lifetime, these lessons must be learned so their souls may begin continuing the spiritual growth. It's vital for greater self-awareness and for their own life path. These kind of karmic connections usually aren't meant to last the whole lifetime.

Still, these connections are as important as all connections. Every individual in your life has something to bring and to take from you for growth in their and in your own spiritual path. Let's appreciate the importance of every being's presence in your life. 🤍

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carriesthewind · 1 year

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a question, if you don't mind it! I read your post about the IA, and it makes a lot of sense, I wasn't aware of how their lending system operated, so thank you for that. I was curious, does there exist/do you know of any digital library that operates fairly and without harming authors? lending on a one to one basis etc? this isn't an "aha, there is not ethical option available to me so I'm allowed to steal, gotcha!", I just genuinely hope something like that exists bc for several reasons I don't have access to a physical library rn. thanks and I hope this isn't a bother <3

Hi Anon!

Unfortunately, I think the answer to what you are looking for is going to boil down to "there are a lot of free online books and resources, but not resources that will allow you to borrow any given book." But it's going to be a little bit of a complicated path to get there.

Part of the problem is the words "fairly" and "without harming authors." Because "fair" does not necessarily equal "legal," and authors can and do disagree about what systems cause them harm. So is "controlled digital lending"(CDL) (where instead of buying or licensing an e-book, the lender digitizes print book and lends the digital copy) that's one-to-one owned-to-loaned fair and not harm authors? Well, as the district court held, it's certainly not legal in the U.S. (because to be clear: while the IA was/is not doing one-to-one owned-to-loaned, the holding of the court was that even it it was, that would violate U.S. copyright law). But is it fair (or more fair and equitable than current digital copyright law) and does it harm authors? As I've said in a previous post, I have not stated and will not state a personal opinion on that. If you want to read more, the statement I previously linked by the National Writer's Union takes a position that it is unfair and harms authors; for a counter-position that it is fair and does not harm authors, here's the memorandum the EFF filed in support of their motion for summary judgement for the IA. And you can find lots and lots more written on both sides of the issue. (If you are struggling with where to start: a google search for "internet archive controlled digital lending" will bring up a lot of articles about the case with links to various statements and opinions.)

If you are looking to avoid illegal or disputed CDL, there are options, but they are limited: that is, there is plenty of digital books and reading material that is legally and fairly available online, but you are unlikely to be able to borrow any specific book. Some options that exist:

On the IA's "Open Library": anything in the public domain (including, as of 2023, anything published or released in the U.S. prior to 1928), as well as anything where the rights-holder has allowed the IA to distribute their work. (If legality matters less to to you "fair" and "harms authors," you might also be ok with works on IA if the author has permitted the IA or another site to loan their work in defiance of an allegedly unfair or exploitative contract.)

If you want to avoid the IA's "Open Library," HathiTrust Digital Library won their copyright case (correctly, imo) and host a bunch (17+ million) of digital books and other items. (By the way: this was a case where the IA - as one of their partner organizations - was on the right side and the Authors Guild, who sued them, was, imo, on the wrong side. Just to emphasize how complicated this is.) But (unless you are a member of one of their partner institutions - mostly universities) your access is limited to reading works that are in the public domain or for which they have been given permission from the copyright holder.

Lots of individuals and organizations post written material for free online! For example, while many journal articles are hidden behind paywalls, many are not; lots of short story magazines (esp. genre fic) have free digital versions; and lots of people post books for free online under a Creative Commons License. I don't know of any universal library for these kinds things though - where to look will depend on what you are looking for.

Beyond that, it depends on where you are and what you are looking for. For example, if you aren't in the U.S., there may be country-specific digital resources (e.g. does your country have a national library, and does it have digital resources)?

You can try looking into:

Local university or resource centers: sometimes, even if you aren't a student or profession, many of these institutions offer resources, including digital resources, to their local communities.

Local museums: same as above.

Local cultural or other kinds of resource centers: sometimes these kinds of organizations will have community libraries. These will often be specific to the interest of the organization in question, but it's worth checking!

Finally, if you are in the U.S.: if your lack of access to a physical library is based on the fact that you can't physically get to or access the library, but you do have a local library, you have options! Even if you can't get there to access a library card, some libraries will allow you to create a card online just for their digital collection. And many libraries have resources to assist home-bound patrons - it's always worth calling and asking.

If anyone else has any other suggestions, please feel free to add them! (Especially if you have information on non-U.S. and/or non-english specific resources)

#libraries #internet archive #asks #anonymous

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