#Matthew Cortez

[raymadrigal]

Ghastly Elegance

2023

Documentation by Lillian Heredia

[lostfan23]

[apenitentialprayer]

Discussions of reforming our criminal justice system demand us to ask philosophical and moral questions. What should be the ultimate goal of sentencing and incarceration? Is it punishment? Rehabilitation? Forgiveness? For Catholics, these questions tie directly to the heart of our faith. Solutions are already beginning to take shape, which include unraveling the War on Drugs, reconsidering mandatory minimum sentencing, and embracing a growing private prison abolition movement that urges us to reconsider the levels at which the United States pursues mass incarceration. No matter where these proposals take us, we should pursue such conversations with an openness to change and an aim to rehabilitate our brothers and sisters wherever possible and wherever necessary. By nature, a society that forgives and rehabilitates its people is a society that forgives and transforms itself. That takes a radical kind of love, a secret of which is given in the Lord's Prayer: Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us. And let us not forget the guiding principle of "the least among us" found in Matthew: that we are compelled to care for the hungry, thirsty, homeless, naked, sick, and, yes — the imprisoned.

- Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Italics original, bolded emphases added.

[athousandboxjumps]

Finch taught Crutchie how to use a slingshot then immediately regretted it cuz Crutchie got way too good with that thing pass it on.

[todd-queen]

really this could just be labeled Favorite Characters and Favorite Traps ❤️‍🩹🫀<3

template source

[canonqueercharacters]

The canon queer character of the day is:

Lieutenant Steve Cortez from Mass Effect 3, who is gay.

[teampsgames]

Chapters: 1/1 Fandom: Red Dead Redemption (Video Games) Rating: Teen And Up Audiences Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence Characters: Dutch van der Linde, Hosea Matthews, Sam Freeman, Sadie Adler, Esteban Cortez, Original Male Character(s) Additional Tags: Fix-It, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Post-Chapter 6: Beaver Hollow (Red Dead Redemption 2), Magical Realism, Canon-Typical Violence, Mild Language, Action Series: Part 2 of Последний рассвет, первый рассвет Summary:

Одинокий всадник, скрываясь от призраков своего прошлого, въезжает в умирающий город. Одинокий всадник пока еще не догадывается, что он уже давно не один. И что призраки гораздо ближе, чем он думал.

[mariacallous]

As national legislation on deepfake pornography crawls its way through Congress, states across the country are trying to take matters into their own hands. Thirty-nine states have introduced a hodgepodge of laws designed to deter the creation of nonconsensual deepfakes and punish those who make and share them.

Earlier this year, Democratic congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, herself a victim of nonconsensual deepfakes, introduced the Disrupt Explicit Forged Images and Non-Consensual Edits Act, or Defiance Act. If passed, the bill would allow victims of deepfake pornography to sue as long as they could prove the deepfakes had been made without their consent. In June, Republican senator Ted Cruz introduced the Take It Down Act, which would require platforms to remove both revenge porn and nonconsensual deepfake porn.

Though there’s bilateral support for many of these measures, federal legislation can take years to make it through both houses of Congress before being signed into law. But state legislatures and local politicians can move faster—and they’re trying to.

Last month, San Francisco City Attorney David Chiu’s office announced a lawsuit against 16 of the most visited websites that allow users to create AI-generated pornography. “Generative AI has enormous promise, but as with all new technologies, there are unintended consequences and criminals seeking to exploit the new technology. We have to be very clear that this is not innovation—this is sexual abuse,” Chiu said in a statement released by his office at the time.

The suit was just the latest attempt to try to curtail the ever-growing issue of nonconsensual deepfake pornography.

“I think there's a misconception that it's just celebrities that are being affected by this,” says Ilana Beller, organizing manager at Public Citizen, which has been tracking nonconsensual deepfake legislation and shared their findings with WIRED. “It's a lot of everyday people who are having this experience.”

Data from Public Citizen shows that 23 states have passed some form of nonconsensual deepfake law. “This is such a pervasive issue, and so state legislators are seeing this as a problem,” says Beller. “I also think that legislators are interested in passing AI legislation right now because we are seeing how fast the technology is developing.”

Last year, WIRED reported that deepfake pornography is only increasing, and researchers estimate that 90 percent of deepfake videos are of porn, the vast majority of which is nonconsensual porn of women. But despite how pervasive the issue is, Kaylee Williams, a researcher at Columbia University who has been tracking nonconsensual deepfake legislation, says she has seen legislators more focused on political deepfakes.

“More states are interested in protecting electoral integrity in that way than they are in dealing with the intimate image question,” she says.

Matthew Bierlein, a Republican state representative in Michigan, who cosponsored the state’s package of nonconsensual deepfake bills, says that he initially came to the issue after exploring legislation on political deepfakes. “Our plan was to make [political deepfakes] a campaign finance violation if you didn’t put disclaimers on them to notify the public.” Through his work on political deepfakes, Bierlein says, he began working with Democratic representative Penelope Tsernoglou, who helped spearhead the nonconsensual deepfake bills.

At the time in January, nonconsensual deepfakes of Taylor Swift had just gone viral, and the subject was widely covered in the news. “We thought that the opportunity was the right time to be able to do something,” Beirlein says. And Beirlein says that he felt Michigan was in the position to be a regional leader in the Midwest, because, unlike some of its neighbors, it has a full-time legislature with well-paid staffers (most states don’t). “We understand that it's a bigger issue than just a Michigan issue. But a lot of things can start at the state level,” he says. “If we get this done, then maybe Ohio adopts this in their legislative session, maybe Indiana adopts something similar, or Illinois, and that can make enforcement easier.”

But what the penalties for creating and sharing nonconsensual deepfakes are—and who is protected—can vary widely from state to state. “The US landscape is just wildly inconsistent on this issue,” says Williams. “I think there's been this misconception lately that all these laws are being passed all over the country. I think what people are seeing is that there have been a lot of laws proposed.”

Some states allow for civil and criminal cases to be brought against perpetrators, while others might only provide for one of the two. Laws like the one that recently took effect in Mississippi, for instance, focus on minors. Over the past year or so, there have been a spate of instances of middle and high schoolers using generative AI to make explicit images and videos of classmates, particularly girls. Other laws focus on adults, with legislators essentially updating existing laws banning revenge porn.

Unlike laws that focus on nonconsensual deepfakes of minors, on which Williams says there is a broad consensus that there they are an “inherent moral wrong,” legislation around what is “ethical” when it comes to nonconsensual deepfakes of adults is “squishier.” In many cases, laws and proposed legislation require proving intent, that the goal of the person making and sharing the nonconsensual deepfake was to harm its subject.

But online, says Sara Jodka, an attorney who specializes in privacy and cybersecurity, this patchwork of state-based legislation can be particularly difficult. “If you can't find a person behind an IP address, how can you prove who the person is, let alone show their intent?”

Williams also notes that in the case of nonconsensual deepfakes of celebrities or other public figures, many of the creators don’t necessarily see themselves as doing harm. “They’ll say, ‘This is fan content,’ that they admire this person and are attracted to them,” she says.

State laws, Jobka says, while a good start, are likely to have limited power to actually deal with the issue, and only a federal law against nonconsensual deepfakes would allow for the kind of interstate investigations and prosecutions that could really force justice and accountability. “States don't really have a lot of ability to track down across state lines internationally,” she says. “So it's going to be very rare, and it's going to be very specific scenarios where the laws are going to be able to even be enforced.”

But Michigan’s Bierlein says that many state representatives are not content to wait for the federal government to address the issue. Bierlein expressed particular concern about the role nonconsensual deepfakes could play in sextortion scams, which the FBI says have been on the rise. In 2023, a Michigan teen died by suicide after scammers threatened to post his (real) intimate photos online. “Things move really slow on a federal level, and if we waited for them to do something, we could be waiting a lot longer,” he says.

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Matthew Sheffield at Flux:

Despite the evidence provided by history, polling, and daily news events, there are millions of people in the United States who actually think that Democrats are just as extreme as Republicans. In a 2022 CNN poll, 52 percent of respondents said that Democrats’ viewpoints were generally mainstream, little different from the 54 percent who said the same about Republicans. A survey also done in 2022 by CBS found that 49 percent of respondents said Democrats were “extreme,” only slightly higher than the 54 percent who said the same about Republicans.

Needless to say, thinking that Democrats are anywhere as extreme as Republicans is totally absurd. Donald Trump is the only president in American history who refused to leave office after losing a free and fair election. He frequently lavishes praise on violent January 6th rioters as “great people” with “love in their heart.” He frequently promises “vengeance” against opponents and says he will imprison and execute people who disagree with him. And it’s not just Trump. Moderate Republicans in Congress have been extinct since the Trumpist hordes eliminated the few who hadn’t been swept away during the Tea Party movement of the late 2010s. The Republican Party nationally and in a variety of states devised and executed a criminal scheme to steal the 2020 election and throw out the votes of tens of millions of Americans. The American right is also much more violent than the left. Since 1970, about 75 percent of political hate crimes are committed by right-wing extremists. Only 4 percent were committed by far-left extremists.

There are no leftist members of Congress who are anywhere as radical as Paul Gosar, the Arizona Republican who was censured for posting a stylized video of himself murdering New York Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in 2021. He and Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) attracted national controversy for speaking at a neo-Nazi political event just a few months later. There aren’t any Democratic members of Congress who have spoken at rallies of communists who advocate violence. The anecdotal evidence of individual members’ extreme views is also borne out when we examine Congress from aggregate statistical measures. Since 1992, congressional Democrats have moved slightly to the left, while Republicans have moved much further to the right.

On most specific political issues, Americans agree overwhelmingly with Democratic policies. Republicans’ desires to mandate school prayer, eliminate all abortions, ban same-sex marriages, give billionaires lower taxes, and block people from getting health care are terribly unpopular. (That Republicans enjoy majority support on other issues like the economy mostly stems from the fact that Democratic-leaning voters are more willing to criticize their own side than Republicans are.) A party with such extreme opinions shouldn’t be able to win elections anywhere outside of rural areas in the Old Confederacy. This is why lying to the public about supposed Democratic extremism is the core component of all Republican messaging. Trump uses the phrase “radical left” in every speech he delivers, and the talking point is repeated hundreds of times a day at Fox, Newsmax, OAN, Real America’s voice, and the entire gigantic propaganda apparatus of right-wing media.

But Republicans don’t just lie about the opposition, they are also constantly being deceptive about their own views. Under the watchful eyes of leaders like Mitch McConnell, they have outsourced their most unpopular policy viewpoints to unelected judges who can do things that could never get passed through legislation—like stopping student loan forgiveness or banning the sale of completely safe abortion medication. And under the new Project 2025 agenda being constructed for Trump by Christian nationalist extremists like his former budget director Russ Vought, national-level Republicans will move the remains of their policy apparatus from the Congress and into the bureaucracy, where they intend to do things like using an obscure 150-year-old law commonly referred to as the Comstock Act to criminalize abortions through agency rulings. Freed from having to advocate or legislate on their most controversial viewpoints, congressional Republicans are able to focus their public messaging exclusively on the few issues like immigration or the economy where they currently have majority support. They spend the rest of their time attacking Democrats through spurious investigations, like their endless hearings on Hunter Biden. None of these efforts ever results in substantive legislation. Senate Republicans scuttled their own immigration enforcement bill, Kentucky Rep. James Comer’s years-long impeachment investigations have turned up nothing, and House Republicans voted more than 60 times to repeal the Affordable Care Act (ACA) without bothering to offer an alternative.

[...] Abortion is far from the only issue on which radical Republicans are far out of step with the majority of Americans, and it’s unfortunate that millions of people are having to be the personal object lesson about what the far right wants to do to the rest of us. But at long last, it appears that the public is waking up to the unpleasant reality that far-right Republicans don’t believe in democracy and will do anything they can to restrict and control others. Democrats must act with great urgency to ensure that this process continues and expands by building an infrastructure to protect democracy.

Matthew Sheffield wrote in Flux that the Republicans' extreme views are being camouflaged in public by pushing the laughable assertion that the Democrats are just as extreme… except that even the leftmost Dems are nowhere near as extreme as GOPers.

[simptasia]

ages of LOST characters when we first meet them vs the ages of the actors when they first started playing them. reminder that the starting point of LOST is september 22nd 2004. if a character’s age seems one less than sounds right to you its because their birthday is coming up. if a character is missing from this it’s because we don’t know their age in canon (looking at you, desmond)

jack shephard: 34 matthew fox: 38

kate austen: 27 evangeline lilly: 25

hugo “hurley” reyes: 25 jorge garcia: 31

james “sawyer” ford: 35 josh holloway: 35

sawyer says he’s 35. but lostpedia only has sawyer’s birthyear, 1968, making him 36. however an easy explanation for this is that sawyer has a birthday coming up in the post september to december range (like many other characters here) thus making the birthyear and what sawyer said still right

john locke: 48 terry o’quinn: 52

sayid jarrah: 36 naveen andrews: 35

jin-soo kwon: 29 daniel dae kim: 36

sun-hwa kwon: 24 yunjin kim: 31

claire littleton: 21 emilie de ravin: 23

charlie pace: 27 dominic monaghan: 27

okay so an odd thing happened here. we don’t actually know charlie’s age in canon, except that based on a statement from liam that he’s absolutely less than 30. and basically what happened is there was big debate on lostpedia, the general gist being he’s 25 to 28, until everybody just gave up and they slapped dom’s birthday on charlie’s page. and it’s still there to this day

walt lloyd: 10 malcolm david kelley: 12

walt’s actor was gonna age outta the role anyways due to the nature of lost’s timeline but their first mistake was casting a 12 year old. like, hello, puberty?

shannon rutherford: 20 maggie grace: 21

boone carlyle: 23 ian somerhalder: 26

danielle rousseau: 44 mira furlan: 49

ethan rom: 27 william mapother: 39

the consequences of season 5 are starting to hit

bernard nadler: 56 or 57 sam anderson: 58

ana lucia cortez: 29 michelle rodriguez: 27

eko tunde: 35 adewale akinnuoye-agbaje: 38

alexandra “alex” rousseau/linus: 16 tania raymonde: 17

benjamin “ben” linus: 39 michael emerson: 51

this isn’t even due to later timeline decisions, they just decided to do this

miles straume: 27 ken leung: 38

daniel faraday: 26 jeremy davies: 39

charlotte lewis: 33 rebecca mader: 31

and theeere’s the season 5 whammy. for those who don’t know (you must be new to my blog) dan and miles ages differ so much from their actors because when our guys are in 1977, it suited the story and characters better for miles to be a baby and dan to be an embryo (and char to be 6) at the same time. the writers were set on 1977 being the year everybody got stuck in and that’s how we get daniel faraday being an oxford professor at fucking 18

it’s something that gets funnier and sadder the longer you think about it

anyways. thank you for your time!

[buckybarnesss]

Stiles's parents both being Polish and to different "degrees" was one thing I never questioned. Granted, I grew up in Chicago, where it was common for someone that was essentially Polish in last name only to marry someone that had Poland-born parents that were happy the spouse was also Polish to any extent.

I have a lot of questions for Jeff Davis about his choices for the McCalls and Hales, however. It definitely felt like the Hales were hispanic-coded and/or indigenous-coded at times despite being played by white actors. Meanwhile, we get almost nothing about the background of either of Scott's parents beyond Melissa's maiden name and, I guess, Rafe speaking Spanish to teenage Derek. What a wild combination of choices.

the names scott and stiles come directly from the 1985 teen wolf movie but everything else is jeff and the writing team.

the way that we know more about the argents, the hales, the yukimuras and the stilinskis than we do about scott's family has always made me feel a particular way.

the argents and hales are the driving force behind so much of the narrative that their history is important to the overall narrative. noshiko's story was important to the story of 3B. malia's history intersects with the hales.

we even get a whole season to learning about lydia's banshee grandmother.

(i want to say there's something in that cora ended up in south america after the fire and went back there after she left beacon hills. do the hales have ties there?)

rafael mccall is just kind of there. i have affection for matthew del negro because he was steve cortez in mass effect and he was fucking wasted by teen wolf. how did he and melissa meet? did scott actually live with him for a while after the divorce as was said in season 1? why didn't we get to see rafael learn about the supernatural as was implied? did this man pay child support?

it's funny. @dear-massacre and i discussed earlier that there's such a small polish population in california but jeff gives us the vaguely polish name stilinski and claudia's maiden name is gajos. stiles is named for his polish grandfather mieczyslaw.

the only other vague slavic name we have is paige's last name, which is never said in canon but it's krasikeva.

jeff did something very deliberate with paige. she's a narrative mirror to sitles.

but yeah it would make sense that noah's family has been in the states longer and assimilated losing some of that cultural tie whereas claudia's either family came more recently and/or they kept cultural ties refusing to lose them to assimilate as much.

[aftermoved]

𝐑𝐎𝐋𝐄𝐏𝐋𝐀𝐘 𝐇𝐈𝐒𝐓𝐎𝐑𝐘 !!

the rules are simple! post characters you’d like to roleplay as, have roleplayed as, and might bring back, then tag people to do the same!

CURRENT MUSE(S): ➥   this blog only dear god so... matthew bronson, xander fox, lillian baker, daisy bronson, zahirith lyvan, haden lyvan, timothy lynch, mara graves, uri holzen-glover, william mason, layla birch, allistair fraser, miguel cortez, cadie baker, daniel fletcher, tomas morte. ALL OC's.

WANT TO WRITE: ➥   carlos reyes (911 lone star), probably my boys from rw&rb.

HAVE WRITTEN: ➥   haaaaa................. ok. grantaire, eponine thenardier, elsa, merritt mckinney from one of my fav movies now you see me, hazel grace, cosima neihaus, katniss everdeen, scar (yes, that scar), hermione granger, rey (sw), harry potter, ellie satter, allen ginsberg (from kill your darlings), vax'ildan, mollymauk tealeaf, the 11th doctor, amy pond, clara oswald, and then a shit ton of oc's i don't remember the names of but honorable mentions are oliver, jackson, && that poltergeist i wrote once. && i'm also probably missing a bunch here i've been in the rpc for literally 15 years so you're bound to forget some.

WOULD WRITE AGAIN: ➥   vax in a heartbeat, && grantaire my baby boy

tagged by: i stole this

tagging: whoever wants to :)

[ropermike]

Justin Johnson Cortez and Matthew Barnes in Walker: Independence - "The Owl and the Arrow". More pics here.

Callan is put on trial for murder; Kate ties Ethan to a chair and interrogates him.

[athousandboxjumps]

I gotta say, Matthew Duckett and Damon Gould are really feeding the FinchxCrutchie fan in me that I didn’t even know was there. So without further ado, I give:

Three BirdCrutch moments from tonight’s Uksies performance (March 19) that make me soft.

During Carrying the Banner, after Morris knocks Crutchie down, Finch helps him back up and just holds Crutchie’s hand for the longest time (he also gets hella stressed when Jack goads the Delanceys into a fight Uksies!Finch is this close to having a heart attack at all times)

When Crutchie comes in during Seize the Day to show off the banner he made, Race says “that’s great? That’s pitiful!” And Finch softly replied “hey I like it”

During the fight, right before Crutchie is arrested, he calls for Jack, Romeo and Finch. Finch tried to go back for Crutchie yelling “we have to help him!” He had to be physically held back and dragged away by Romeo, my poor boy was distraught about leaving Crutchie behind.

[rxlcve]

an indie, semi-selective, multi-muse & multi-verse rp blog written by aj (25+, she/her, gmt+2). // guidelines. muses (mobile friendly here). open starters. wanted plots. wanted opposites.

liam burke — logan lerman, 26-31, unemployed, straight. ( tw: drug addiction )

threads. musings. visage. playlist.

ship: your faithless love's the only hoax i believe in ( ft. catalina )

nathaniel palermo — matthew daddario, 32-36, er doctor, bisexual.

threads. musings. visage. playlist.

sebastian cortez — aron piper, 26-28, culinary arts student/chef, bicurious.

threads. musings. visage. playlist.

adam foster — dylan minnette, 22-25, student/funeral home assistant, bisexual.

threads. musings. visage. playlist.

khalil murad — alexander abdallah, 28-32, gang member, straight. ( tw: violence, death, drugs )

threads. musings. visage. playlist.