#huxter

[yan-lorkai]

.⁠｡⁠*⁠♡ﾟ Chrollo Lucilfer

.⁠｡⁠*⁠♡ﾟ Hisoka Morow

.⁠｡⁠*⁠♡ﾟ Illumi Zoldyck

[amber-angel]

Google depression tips and despair at the vast landscape of people who just want your money. Don't you want to pay 40$ a month for our proven self help kit? What's the cost of your mental health? It's not predatory if it helps people, which we're like 30% sure it does. Try meditating! Go outside! Stop feeling so sorry for yourself! And most importantly, buy our products! I'm drowning I'm fucking drowning stop trying to make me pay for a deflated life preserver

[manonamora-if-reviews]

Put-Peep™ by PMar!owe/Sean Huxter

IFDB - Game

Summary: The rules are simple. Someone hides the Peep™. It’s your turn to find it. Then you Put-Peep™ the next person on the list. But also you have bugs to fix…

This was a fun short parser, mixing some surreal elements with the horror tropes. Late at night, you find yourself back at work to fix one darn bug that's been bugging you for a while, and mess with your colleague. Of course, because you're in an empty building, in the middle of the night, completely by yourself, you hear some strange noises that prompt you to investigate, as they get weirder.

The writing is pretty fun, and plays on horror tropes to give a very eerie vibe, to the point that you question whether what you are experiencing is real or you are hallucinating. I also quite enjoyed the in-game commentary ( * ) while playing, and even typed the command even when there weren't any indicators (there are no hidden one, but the response is funny).

I've only had to use the walkthrough once, for the middle puzzle (yay for in-game walkthroughs!), as the rest was pretty intuitive.

This was a fun time!

[stupid-twink-girl]

Heard u were readin homestuck and Idk why but a lotta your comics kinda remind me of sweet bro and hella jeff

who told you that? who lays bare my shame?

remind that huxter of perjuries, that peddler of slander, the parable of the stone; and who is entitled to cast them.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

"Open" "AI" isn’t

Tomorrow (19 Aug), I'm appearing at the San Diego Union-Tribune Festival of Books. I'm on a 2:30PM panel called "Return From Retirement," followed by a signing:

https://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/festivalofbooks

The crybabies who freak out about The Communist Manifesto appearing on university curriculum clearly never read it – chapter one is basically a long hymn to capitalism's flexibility and inventiveness, its ability to change form and adapt itself to everything the world throws at it and come out on top:

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/communist-manifesto/ch01.htm#007

Today, leftists signal this protean capacity of capital with the -washing suffix: greenwashing, genderwashing, queerwashing, wokewashing – all the ways capital cloaks itself in liberatory, progressive values, while still serving as a force for extraction, exploitation, and political corruption.

A smart capitalist is someone who, sensing the outrage at a world run by 150 old white guys in boardrooms, proposes replacing half of them with women, queers, and people of color. This is a superficial maneuver, sure, but it's an incredibly effective one.

In "Open (For Business): Big Tech, Concentrated Power, and the Political Economy of Open AI," a new working paper, Meredith Whittaker, David Gray Widder and Sarah B Myers document a new kind of -washing: openwashing:

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4543807

Openwashing is the trick that large "AI" companies use to evade regulation and neutralizing critics, by casting themselves as forces of ethical capitalism, committed to the virtue of openness. No one should be surprised to learn that the products of the "open" wing of an industry whose products are neither "artificial," nor "intelligent," are also not "open." Every word AI huxters say is a lie; including "and," and "the."

So what work does the "open" in "open AI" do? "Open" here is supposed to invoke the "open" in "open source," a movement that emphasizes a software development methodology that promotes code transparency, reusability and extensibility, which are three important virtues.

But "open source" itself is an offshoot of a more foundational movement, the Free Software movement, whose goal is to promote freedom, and whose method is openness. The point of software freedom was technological self-determination, the right of technology users to decide not just what their technology does, but who it does it to and who it does it for:

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

The open source split from free software was ostensibly driven by the need to reassure investors and businesspeople so they would join the movement. The "free" in free software is (deliberately) ambiguous, a bit of wordplay that sometimes misleads people into thinking it means "Free as in Beer" when really it means "Free as in Speech" (in Romance languages, these distinctions are captured by translating "free" as "libre" rather than "gratis").

The idea behind open source was to rebrand free software in a less ambiguous – and more instrumental – package that stressed cost-savings and software quality, as well as "ecosystem benefits" from a co-operative form of development that recruited tinkerers, independents, and rivals to contribute to a robust infrastructural commons.

But "open" doesn't merely resolve the linguistic ambiguity of libre vs gratis – it does so by removing the "liberty" from "libre," the "freedom" from "free." "Open" changes the pole-star that movement participants follow as they set their course. Rather than asking "Which course of action makes us more free?" they ask, "Which course of action makes our software better?"

Thus, by dribs and drabs, the freedom leeches out of openness. Today's tech giants have mobilized "open" to create a two-tier system: the largest tech firms enjoy broad freedom themselves – they alone get to decide how their software stack is configured. But for all of us who rely on that (increasingly unavoidable) software stack, all we have is "open": the ability to peer inside that software and see how it works, and perhaps suggest improvements to it:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vBknF2yUZZ8

In the Big Tech internet, it's freedom for them, openness for us. "Openness" – transparency, reusability and extensibility – is valuable, but it shouldn't be mistaken for technological self-determination. As the tech sector becomes ever-more concentrated, the limits of openness become more apparent.

But even by those standards, the openness of "open AI" is thin gruel indeed (that goes triple for the company that calls itself "OpenAI," which is a particularly egregious openwasher).

The paper's authors start by suggesting that the "open" in "open AI" is meant to imply that an "open AI" can be scratch-built by competitors (or even hobbyists), but that this isn't true. Not only is the material that "open AI" companies publish insufficient for reproducing their products, even if those gaps were plugged, the resource burden required to do so is so intense that only the largest companies could do so.

Beyond this, the "open" parts of "open AI" are insufficient for achieving the other claimed benefits of "open AI": they don't promote auditing, or safety, or competition. Indeed, they often cut against these goals.

"Open AI" is a wordgame that exploits the malleability of "open," but also the ambiguity of the term "AI": "a grab bag of approaches, not… a technical term of art, but more … marketing and a signifier of aspirations." Hitching this vague term to "open" creates all kinds of bait-and-switch opportunities.

That's how you get Meta claiming that LLaMa2 is "open source," despite being licensed in a way that is absolutely incompatible with any widely accepted definition of the term:

https://blog.opensource.org/metas-llama-2-license-is-not-open-source/

LLaMa-2 is a particularly egregious openwashing example, but there are plenty of other ways that "open" is misleadingly applied to AI: sometimes it means you can see the source code, sometimes that you can see the training data, and sometimes that you can tune a model, all to different degrees, alone and in combination.

But even the most "open" systems can't be independently replicated, due to raw computing requirements. This isn't the fault of the AI industry – the computational intensity is a fact, not a choice – but when the AI industry claims that "open" will "democratize" AI, they are hiding the ball. People who hear these "democratization" claims (especially policymakers) are thinking about entrepreneurial kids in garages, but unless these kids have access to multi-billion-dollar data centers, they can't be "disruptors" who topple tech giants with cool new ideas. At best, they can hope to pay rent to those giants for access to their compute grids, in order to create products and services at the margin that rely on existing products, rather than displacing them.

The "open" story, with its claims of democratization, is an especially important one in the context of regulation. In Europe, where a variety of AI regulations have been proposed, the AI industry has co-opted the open source movement's hard-won narrative battles about the harms of ill-considered regulation.

For open source (and free software) advocates, many tech regulations aimed at taming large, abusive companies – such as requirements to surveil and control users to extinguish toxic behavior – wreak collateral damage on the free, open, user-centric systems that we see as superior alternatives to Big Tech. This leads to the paradoxical effect of passing regulation to "punish" Big Tech that end up simply shaving an infinitesimal percentage off the giants' profits, while destroying the small co-ops, nonprofits and startups before they can grow to be a viable alternative.

The years-long fight to get regulators to understand this risk has been waged by principled actors working for subsistence nonprofit wages or for free, and now the AI industry is capitalizing on lawmakers' hard-won consideration for collateral damage by claiming to be "open AI" and thus vulnerable to overbroad regulation.

But the "open" projects that lawmakers have been coached to value are precious because they deliver a level playing field, competition, innovation and democratization – all things that "open AI" fails to deliver. The regulations the AI industry is fighting also don't necessarily implicate the speech implications that are core to protecting free software:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2015/04/remembering-case-established-code-speech

Just think about LLaMa-2. You can download it for free, along with the model weights it relies on – but not detailed specs for the data that was used in its training. And the source-code is licensed under a homebrewed license cooked up by Meta's lawyers, a license that only glancingly resembles anything from the Open Source Definition:

https://opensource.org/osd/

Core to Big Tech companies' "open AI" offerings are tools, like Meta's PyTorch and Google's TensorFlow. These tools are indeed "open source," licensed under real OSS terms. But they are designed and maintained by the companies that sponsor them, and optimize for the proprietary back-ends each company offers in its own cloud. When programmers train themselves to develop in these environments, they are gaining expertise in adding value to a monopolist's ecosystem, locking themselves in with their own expertise. This a classic example of software freedom for tech giants and open source for the rest of us.

One way to understand how "open" can produce a lock-in that "free" might prevent is to think of Android: Android is an open platform in the sense that its sourcecode is freely licensed, but the existence of Android doesn't make it any easier to challenge the mobile OS duopoly with a new mobile OS; nor does it make it easier to switch from Android to iOS and vice versa.

Another example: MongoDB, a free/open database tool that was adopted by Amazon, which subsequently forked the codebase and tuning it to work on their proprietary cloud infrastructure.

The value of open tooling as a stickytrap for creating a pool of developers who end up as sharecroppers who are glued to a specific company's closed infrastructure is well-understood and openly acknowledged by "open AI" companies. Zuckerberg boasts about how PyTorch ropes developers into Meta's stack, "when there are opportunities to make integrations with products, [so] it’s much easier to make sure that developers and other folks are compatible with the things that we need in the way that our systems work."

Tooling is a relatively obscure issue, primarily debated by developers. A much broader debate has raged over training data – how it is acquired, labeled, sorted and used. Many of the biggest "open AI" companies are totally opaque when it comes to training data. Google and OpenAI won't even say how many pieces of data went into their models' training – let alone which data they used.

Other "open AI" companies use publicly available datasets like the Pile and CommonCrawl. But you can't replicate their models by shoveling these datasets into an algorithm. Each one has to be groomed – labeled, sorted, de-duplicated, and otherwise filtered. Many "open" models merge these datasets with other, proprietary sets, in varying (and secret) proportions.

Quality filtering and labeling for training data is incredibly expensive and labor-intensive, and involves some of the most exploitative and traumatizing clickwork in the world, as poorly paid workers in the Global South make pennies for reviewing data that includes graphic violence, rape, and gore.

Not only is the product of this "data pipeline" kept a secret by "open" companies, the very nature of the pipeline is likewise cloaked in mystery, in order to obscure the exploitative labor relations it embodies (the joke that "AI" stands for "absent Indians" comes out of the South Asian clickwork industry).

The most common "open" in "open AI" is a model that arrives built and trained, which is "open" in the sense that end-users can "fine-tune" it – usually while running it on the manufacturer's own proprietary cloud hardware, under that company's supervision and surveillance. These tunable models are undocumented blobs, not the rigorously peer-reviewed transparent tools celebrated by the open source movement.

If "open" was a way to transform "free software" from an ethical proposition to an efficient methodology for developing high-quality software; then "open AI" is a way to transform "open source" into a rent-extracting black box.

Some "open AI" has slipped out of the corporate silo. Meta's LLaMa was leaked by early testers, republished on 4chan, and is now in the wild. Some exciting stuff has emerged from this, but despite this work happening outside of Meta's control, it is not without benefits to Meta. As an infamous leaked Google memo explains:

Paradoxically, the one clear winner in all of this is Meta. Because the leaked model was theirs, they have effectively garnered an entire planet's worth of free labor. Since most open source innovation is happening on top of their architecture, there is nothing stopping them from directly incorporating it into their products.

https://www.searchenginejournal.com/leaked-google-memo-admits-defeat-by-open-source-ai/486290/

Thus, "open AI" is best understood as "as free product development" for large, well-capitalized AI companies, conducted by tinkerers who will not be able to escape these giants' proprietary compute silos and opaque training corpuses, and whose work product is guaranteed to be compatible with the giants' own systems.

The instrumental story about the virtues of "open" often invoke auditability: the fact that anyone can look at the source code makes it easier for bugs to be identified. But as open source projects have learned the hard way, the fact that anyone can audit your widely used, high-stakes code doesn't mean that anyone will.

The Heartbleed vulnerability in OpenSSL was a wake-up call for the open source movement – a bug that endangered every secure webserver connection in the world, which had hidden in plain sight for years. The result was an admirable and successful effort to build institutions whose job it is to actually make use of open source transparency to conduct regular, deep, systemic audits.

In other words, "open" is a necessary, but insufficient, precondition for auditing. But when the "open AI" movement touts its "safety" thanks to its "auditability," it fails to describe any steps it is taking to replicate these auditing institutions – how they'll be constituted, funded and directed. The story starts and ends with "transparency" and then makes the unjustifiable leap to "safety," without any intermediate steps about how the one will turn into the other.

It's a Magic Underpants Gnome story, in other words:

Step One: Transparency

Step Two: ??

Step Three: Safety

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a5ih_TQWqCA

Meanwhile, OpenAI itself has gone on record as objecting to "burdensome mechanisms like licenses or audits" as an impediment to "innovation" – all the while arguing that these "burdensome mechanisms" should be mandatory for rival offerings that are more advanced than its own. To call this a "transparent ruse" is to do violence to good, hardworking transparent ruses all the world over:

https://openai.com/blog/governance-of-superintelligence

Some "open AI" is much more open than the industry dominating offerings. There's EleutherAI, a donor-supported nonprofit whose model comes with documentation and code, licensed Apache 2.0. There are also some smaller academic offerings: Vicuna (UCSD/CMU/Berkeley); Koala (Berkeley) and Alpaca (Stanford).

These are indeed more open (though Alpaca – which ran on a laptop – had to be withdrawn because it "hallucinated" so profusely). But to the extent that the "open AI" movement invokes (or cares about) these projects, it is in order to brandish them before hostile policymakers and say, "Won't someone please think of the academics?" These are the poster children for proposals like exempting AI from antitrust enforcement, but they're not significant players in the "open AI" industry, nor are they likely to be for so long as the largest companies are running the show:

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4493900

I'm kickstarting the audiobook for "The Internet Con: How To Seize the Means of Computation," a Big Tech disassembly manual to disenshittify the web and make a new, good internet to succeed the old, good internet. It's a DRM-free book, which means Audible won't carry it, so this crowdfunder is essential. Back now to get the audio, Verso hardcover and ebook:

http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org

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/2023/08/18/openwashing/#you-keep-using-that-word-i-do-not-think-it-means-what-you-think-it-means

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

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

[ihazyourkitty]

Orcas, at the Utah Natural History Museum

The Utah Natural History Museum recently opened an exhibition on orcas. It’s really good, and I highly recommend it if any of you have the chance to go. I wish I had taken more pictures.

The display covers a lot of topics, e.g. natural their natural history, pod/ecotype dynamics, neural anatomy, echolocation, significance to indigenous cultures, conservation, etc. They had a life sized model of Ruffles, and even highlighted how it was discovered that Ruffles was unrelated to Granny! Oh, and some of their models even had a few rake marks on them. Loved that attention to detail.

The section on orcas and indigenous cultures was fascinating! Indigenous voices really took center stage there and I learned a lot about just how significant orcas are to many Pacific Northwest tribes.

It was very immersive and well done!

The overarching theme was our shared history and future with orcas. So not only was it just a bunch of facts about the animals, but it progressed through time, highlighting our changing perceptions of them. They briefly talked about Moby Doll, Skana, Namu, Keiko, Tokitae, Morgan and Tilikum. There were some (debatable) inaccuracies about Tokitae, but I do appreciate how they acknowledged Keiko’s release attempt didn’t work. They showed various orca themed memorabilia from the 60’s onward, which was cool.

They also pulled no punches in talking about the plight of wild orcas like the SRKW’s. They went into a lot of details about PCB’s, plastic pollution, Chinook salmon, boat noise, etc. It was heart wrenching and very well done.

And naturally…. yes Blackfish and the general anti captivity movement were highlighted. This was fine, the museum’s intent was to show how public perception progressed, and it wasn’t so much that they themselves took a side. It was just…. unfortunate the glaring blind spot it left.

There was some mention of the work trainers have to do to take care of their orcas, including some memorabilia from the Vancouver aquarium. But was kind of a blip where if you blink, you’ll likely miss it.

They mentioned the important work museums and labs do for research, as simply observing them in the wild can’t give us all the details we need….. but nothing about the research done at accredited marine parks, aside from just how public display changed how we used to fear orcas. Sealand of the Pacific was highlighted in one corner, with people like Steve Huxter* appearing in video. Comparatively, SeaWorld was barely mentioned in passing on the plaque about Tilikum, which I found odd.

My guess is that this was a combination of not wanting to piss off certain donors or contributors to the exhibit given how hot this topic is, and/or simply the lack of contributions from places besides Vancouver aquarium. Perhaps there were too many PR, bureaucratic hoops to jump through. Perhaps all of the above. Curating museum displays is a complicated thing.

I suppose if nothing else, this is true to how our history has progressed here. One side has come to dominate the public narrative, while the other has just clammed up. The biggest mistake SeaWorld and the larger zoological community made in the wake of Blackfish was to just stick their heads in the sand, hide behind their PR departments, and hope the controversy would just go away. Well, it didn’t. And the less we tell our stories, the more they win. They’ve done the work of cultivating media connections and media training. We haven’t.

This, like many other things, has the unintended side effect of erasing women from the picture. They mentioned Tilikum briefly, but said nothing of Dawn or the Dawn Brancheau Foundation (then again, they may not have gotten permission to do that).

Most marine mammal trainers are women, some of whom have gone on to make important contributions to the science of animal welfare, behavior and training…. do they deserve to be remembered only as anonymous pretty faces in wetsuits? Actually, I don’t remember them ever explicitly citing Ingrid Visser, Naomi Rose, or Lori Marino for that matter, not even in the areas about field research or orca brain MRI’s. There’s plenty to criticize about their anti-captivity lobbying to be sure, but they have made some key contributions to scientific literature. So it’s odd they wouldn’t even be mentioned by name given both that and their place in the anti-captivity movement.

Alas. I am not a museum curator, and while I disagree with Blackfish et al., I do think the museum handled the topic very well overall. It is good to be exposed to different points of view, and the truth is that there are valid points to be made about the ethics of orcas in captivity. So how do we go forward from here? Do orcas deserve special legal protections as non human persons? That was a question left open to the interpretation of the viewer, even if slanted somewhat in one direction. I love it when displays can pull that off.

Or at least, they handled it well except for when they talked about Morgan. I am pretty sure that the Free Morgan Foundation was not only the sole contributor to that part of the display, but was given a huge amount of editorial leeway in what little information was provided. The rhetoric in the writing alone was a dramatic departure from how the rest of the exhibit was handled.

So. Many. Problems with this!

First of all, Loro Parque is not connected with SeaWorld. They’ve had a business relationship in the past in that SeaWorld gave them some orcas on a breeding loan, and then eventually transferred ownership of said animals completely to Loro Parque. Their veterinarians and trainers have networked/collaborated with one another in the past. But that’s it. That is the extent of their relationship. That is not the same thing as being “connected.” They are not affiliated with one another. They are two completely different parks owned by two completely different companies. This is such an important legal distinction, how do you get this wrong!?

There are no international regulations that ban orca breeding. Some countries or localities have banned it, but this is not universal. The part about Morgan not being allowed to breed was misleading. When SeaWorld ended their breeding program, they still owned the male orcas at Loro Parque. As such, they were not allowed to breed them until ownership was transferred. SeaWorld never claimed ownership of Morgan.

There’s no mention of Morgan being deaf, which is one of the key reasons why she can’t be released. This was confirmed by multiple third party studies, including the US Navy. Cases brought by the Free Morgan Foundation to multiple courts to have her released have each been dismissed.

And as for scientists supposedly discovering multiple fake orca “rescues” ….I’m sorry, which orcas are they referring to? With exception of the Russian Whale Jail and some facilities in China and Japan, marine parks have not been collecting orcas from the wild for decades. Most orcas alive today in Western parks were born in captivity. We know which orcas are which, where they are housed, and where they came from. Morgan was an exceptional case. So what in the world are they even talking about here!?

Further, marine parks are not the ones who decide whether or not an orca is releasable. Government agencies do.

Orcas rake each other in the wild and in captivity. It can happen from aggression and also from rough play. This is normal behavior. The following is an actual peer reviewed study on the social interactions among the orcas at Loro Parque. https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C13&q=Loro+parque+orca+communication&oq=loro#d=gs_qabs&t=1731592546318&u=%23p%3DHSC5vZFo3tcJ

Just. So many problems here! Who wrote this!? Seriously, I was able to handle the rest of the anti-cap stuff there up until that point. I had to really bite my tongue to keep myself from getting on a soapbox with my friend in public. Oh well. It was only a very, very small part of the exhibit at least.

(*I’ve actually had a few online conversations with Steve Huxter. While I disagree with him on a lot of things relating to wild vs captive orcas, I do think he’s a genuinely nice guy whose heart is in the right place. I can’t imagine what it must have been like to have been there when Keltie Byrne was killed).

[9w1ft]

oh there’s something so poetic about this paring in this context 😆😆 scooter’s on fire, trump’s being arrested, people are probably in the middle of posting their iftye takes on the heels of taylor and karlie being quiet after karlie appearing at eras tour and taylor’s singing industry disrupters and soul deconstructers and smooth talking huxters are all out there with their hot takes saying the end is coming meanwhile i’m spending my time quietly and loved up with you 🙈

taylor really said, what? post about LA? sorry me and karlie were busy rekindling our friendship shopping for hot body jewelry and getting our ears pierced, so… we forgot that you all existed 🤭

[velocitations]

i am finally understanding the purpose of all of this AI ferver. ironically seeing it pop up everywhere(google searches, advertisements for old apps including new AI features, etc) is reducing my fear that it will take over the future of pop culture, internet etc bc it's the same as the past crypto/NFT media cycle: those producing it are doing what ever they can to give the appearance that it is the Next Big Thing so that companies feel pressured to invest in/adopt it for their business, and eventually its impracticality will be more obvious(this has already sort of happened with AI, at least to me. def with crypto🙄) and the huxters will have gotten rich and moved onto the next widget and at the very least, things will die down. AI is different in a way because its applications are partially viable and more obvious, but it's the same "too complex to understand so just assume what you're told about it is true" type thing that i don't really buy

[local-hellhound-steals-spaghetti]

When Steve Huxter - former head of animal care and training at the infamous SeaLand of the Pacific - calls you a “pro cap shit stirrer” for sharing very real facts about Ric O’Barry beating a dolphin, killing dolphins through irresponsible release ect….

I mean… Like…. damn dude at least I didn’t abuse killer whales for a living and leave one traumatised so badly that he killed 3 people.

[justaboutdead]

Flavor and function in Deadlands: Reloaded

Deadlands: Reloaded is a 2005 ttrpg set in a fantasy version of the United States, particularly the Wild West, post civil war, in which the undead and the supernatural have become fairly common place. Ignoring the questionable depictions of race in the setting, the game has an awesome commitment to flavor, and I love it. So here’s some notable examples of that:

Playing cards: Deadlands: Reloaded uses playing cards for initiative and gun duels among other things. While the initiative system is technically from Savage Worlds (the system Deadlands runs in), Savage Worlds is based on the original version of Deadlands so it still counts. Basically for initiative, every round each participant in the combat is dealt a card, modified by certain abilities, and the action plays out from high to low, with Jokers being able to act whenever they choose. This keeps initiative changing from round to round, and it just works in terms of gameplay and flavor. Dueling is resolved via a game of poker between the participants of the duel. This one’s actually a really clunky system in reloaded, at least to learn. But hidden in that clunk is a lot of depth. Dueling has three contests; the poker game, which adds extra damage, the taunt/intimidation contest, which can buff or debuff the final contest; the shoot roll and the ensuing combat. There is a lot going on (including a few things I haven’t mentioned) and a lot of strategy involved, but once you understand it, it’s really fun, flavorful and good at building tension. There’s also a lot of ways to simplify the system, so its not as much of a mess. In addition to dueling, there’s also Huxters, who are among Deadland’s magic users. When they run out of power pips with which to cast spells, they can choose to play a game of poker with a demon, in exchange for more power if they win, but a penalty if they fail, adding an element of risk vs reward. And that’s cool as shit.

Poker Chips: While Savage worlds normally uses “bennies”, physical coins, as basically an inspiration/hero points system, which already works well for reasons i will get into in a bit, Deadlands: Reloaded takes it a step further and replaces those bennies with three colors of poker chip, each with different effects. This adds a bit more luck to an already engaging system, and encourages players to take note of what their working with. These chips are essential to the flow of the game, and having them be physically there at the table encourages giving them out in a way normal inspiration doesn’t. Additionally, the GM (or marshal) also gets chips to use for sudden villain reversals of fate. Most importantly of all, however, chips don’t carry across sessions, so you’re encouraged to use them rather than hoard them.

Player and Marshal specific rulebooks This last thing isnt something specific to deadlands, but it is something I love in ttrpgs that deadlands also does, and does well, although it comes with an extra price tag. Having a specific handbook for the GM and one for players allows deadlands to hide a lot of information about the setting from the players, creating an air of mystery, while still supplying them with what their characters would know, and the GM with answers to any questions they would have. This makes deadlands a really easy and dynamic setting to run as presented, and boy does it get interesting if you are able to paste the reveals in the Marshal’s book well enough. If any of these concepts sound interesting to you, I highly suggest giving Deadlands: Reloaded a shot!

[mychaotic-academia]

Swear

Swear like a fucking promise.

Like fuck me

Like fuck you

Like I fucking love you

Swear like you swore

Like a promise

Right?

Like swear on the bible

Like swear on your mother’s grave

Like swear you won’t leave

Swear to me

Fuck me

Fuck you

Fuck you and your fucking promises

Yes I swore

But so did you

So it doesn’t fucking mean anything

Does it?

- Huxter, 2023

[laudanine]

I actually have a steamer trunk I paid $50 for from an auntie when I was deep in my hipster phase-

(hipster: noun, slang. 1- Someone who was poor their whole life and when they had a little money decided to spend it on quality goods that will withstand the test of time, even if some of those good are old fashioned. 2- Someone who has never been poor but also has never had quality goods, and therefore is targeted by shady huxters selling inferior merchandise that appears superficially to be of high quality)

- that I still use to store quilts and off-season clothing. Even empty the thing weighs a metric boatload, and when full (as it usually is) it's the heaviest item of furniture in my house.

IMO we use smaller suitcases now because our trips last less than several months and also we wear short-shorts which take up less space.

[marta-bee]

Getting geared up to talk about that Tesla huxterism on the White House lawn along with anti-DOGE protests including the more violent (against property) anti-Musk protests at Tesla showrooms. The optics of protest have always fascinated me, including the fact even I can't quite avoid calling property destruction a kind of violence. It's not. But lifelong biases in the way we talk about these things sometimes run deep.

JCS is a good mood-setter for thinking about these things, if nothing else.

[reinstarnation]

spill some of the family tea you mentioned, pls?

anon you do not know what you have started

some of this is info gotten firsthand, some secondhand, some thirdhand

some context: my grandma had 8 kids that lived to adulthood, that's 16 aunts and uncles I got, plus the ones that are basically family but not related. this does not include any number from the divorces that still show up to family events because grandma likes them better than her own kids.

all of them might end up being featured eventually, but for now let get some anecdotes about the woman, the myth the legend herself: my grandma.

my grandma has the final say about most every family event, most of which are funerals or holiday lunches

she has 5 favorites out of all of us, like all of us who are alive and in some sort of contact with her. those are Uncle John (her daughter's second husband), Uncle Trae (the pig farmer whose husband cheated on him), Uncle Trae's cheating ex husband (they're chill now), My Mom (who is the only child she can trust), and Me (I write her holiday cards and drive her to Indianapolis like twice a month)

my grandma is catholic, goes to church regularly, and is besties with the preacher who im casually chill with (idk his official church rank I was excommunicated at 8 for being a judas apologist). she however goes against the bishop on just about everything because he's homphobic and transphobic and "I've met God, he doesn't like you folk." she is the go to old lady that all the queer kids flock to for protection when the bishop is on his tirades. My grandma was almost excommunicated by said bishop for whacking him with her purse while he was preaching about how everyone is going to hell for the gays existing.

if you want a kickass grandma mine will take as many grandkids as possible.

she met my grandpa (rip) after setting her house on fire for insurance money, which did not work because the firefighters were already on her road, which meant that they were not the usual hour away, but more like 10 minutes. He was one of the firemen and he gave her his coat because she was in her underthings and thought she was cold. she decided she would marry him within 5 minutes of meeting him.

she had 9 kids with this man and beat up doctors for him when he got cancer because "I AINT GOT NOTHING TO LOOK FORWARD TO IF YOU HUXTERS LET HIM DIE." she was banned from that hospital for knocking out 4 teeth off of an oncologist. still is banned.

I told her I didn't think I was a girl and she asked "so ur a boy?" and I said i don't know and she said "well then your my favorite grandthing then." easiest coming out talk I've had in my life. she only sends me Christmas cards with gay cardinals on them.

[no-side-us]

The Invisible Man, Ch. 18 - The Invisible Man Sleeps

He dropped the paper, and his eye went seeking. “Ah!” he said, and caught up the St. James’ Gazette, lying folded up as it arrived. “Now we shall get at the truth,” said Dr. Kemp. He rent the paper open; a couple of columns confronted him. “An Entire Village in Sussex goes Mad” was the heading.

The St. James' Gazette was a conservative newspaper in the 1890s, which, among other things, supported the British occupation of Egypt and opposed Irish sovereignty. I'm not sure how Wells personally viewed the Gazette, but by referencing it here and having Kemp regard its reporting as the "truth," we're probably supposed to have some assumptions of where Kemp's values are likely aligned.

The little snippet we do get of the paper itself doesn't express those values however, cause we only get their view of the Invisible Man debacle, which it regards as a fabrication that is nonetheless "too good not to print,"

Ran through the streets striking right and left. Jaffers insensible. Mr. Huxter in great pain—still unable to describe what he saw. Painful humiliation—vicar. Woman ill with terror! Windows smashed. This extraordinary story probably a fabrication. Too good not to print.

There's something to be said about how the St. James Gazette mirrors Kemp's initial reaction to the idea of an Invisible Man, dismissing it as nothing more than an exaggerated story, only to be proven very wrong in Kemp's case. And despite the paper being only a brief part of the chapter, it does provide a lot of context that was fun to figure out.

Bonus fun fact, the St. James Gazette was bought in 1903 by C. Arthur Pearson, who founded Pearson's Weekly where The Invisible Man was first published and serialized.

Moving on, Kemp's reaction to the paper is pretty interesting:

He caught up the paper again, and re-read the whole business. “But when does the Tramp come in? Why the deuce was he chasing a tramp?” He sat down abruptly on the surgical bench. “He’s not only invisible,” he said, “but he’s mad! Homicidal!”

I never thought about it this much before, but it seems that in the previous chapter when Griffin mentioned his confederate "who tried to steal my money," Kemp didn't put it together that it was Marvel, nor does he know that Marvel was the tramp Griffin was chasing. From his point of view, that tramp was just some random guy Griffin was going after, which would explain why Kemp thinks Griffin has become a homicidal maniac.

Then there's this paragraph when Kemp reads the next morning's paper which would confirm it:

This gave Kemp the essence of the happenings at the “Jolly Cricketers,” and the name of Marvel. “He has made me keep with him twenty-four hours,” Marvel testified. Certain minor facts were added to the Iping story, notably the cutting of the village telegraph-wire. But there was nothing to throw light on the connexion between the Invisible Man and the Tramp; for Mr. Marvel had supplied no information about the three books, or the money with which he was lined. The incredulous tone had vanished and a shoal of reporters and inquirers were already at work elaborating the matter.

Because Marvel never tells about the books or the money, his account of his time with Griffin is framed as an innocent man being forced to help a criminal against his will. All of this would therefore support Kemp's assumptions. The Jolly Cricketer's incident would also become framed less as Griffin getting revenge, but as the "rage growing to mania" Kemp thinks it is.

The end of the chapter, with Griffin waking up in a fit of anger, throwing and breaking things, probably doesn't help dissuade that view.