#justice for the 96

[soranatus]

“I’m trying as hard as I can, Captain Dadom!”   CAPTAIN ATOM in Showcase ‘96

[astralhope]

The prompt of the day 9 of @zexalmonth, "G for Gate", gives me the chance to talk about something that, since it came to my mind, I couldn't stop thinking about.

My love for Zexal has always been so great that it led me to see similarities between it and my other favorite things, in this case, one of my favorite comics of all time, PKNA.

Both of them have:

(Astral and Uno)

a very intelligent and logical character created with a purpose who became best friends/partners with the main character and, thanks to him, learns about emotions and what it means to feel alive. They have ways to think and act very differently from their partners, but they trust them completely and are ready to do everything to help them. They also have little to no autonomy and can't interact very much with the world around them, and most of the time, only the main character can see and talk to them.

Plus, they are both extraterrestrial, in a way.

(Spoiler: they both “die” momentarily and have a heartbreak scene where they say goodbye to the main character. They come back, luckily)

(Number 96 and Due)

a sort of evil copy of Astral/Uno who took over the latter and thinks of being better than the other one, but he is defeated by him and the main character.

(Eliphas and il Custode)

A character connected to the first one who is very strict on following purpose for which he was created and starts antagonistic to the main character, but then changed thanks to him.

(Yuma and Donald)

A main character who feels his emotions very intensely most of the time and tries his best to help everyone and whom most of the cast end up loving (even adversaries). They changed the lives of the people around them. They also have a very strong connection to extraterrestrial beings.

(Kaito and il Razziatore)

A character who started as an antagonist and then became an ally, who can manipulate time and has a younger relative whose he cares very much. They also are (kind of) thieves.

(Spoiler: they both die sacrificing themselves but they are later brought back)

Maybe some of them are a little of a stretch (it has been a while since I read the PK comics), but I had fun doing this comparison (and it made me remember how much I love PKNA, and also PK2 and PKNE. I have to read them again one of these days).

[rubyreduji]

why is the 97z performance of light a flame more popular than the 96z :') thats literally their song 😭

[quotesfromscripture]

Everyone join in

Let the heavens rejoice, let the earth be glad;  Let the sea resound, and all that is in it.  Let the fields be jubilant, and everything in them;  Let all the trees of the forest sing for joy.  Let all creation rejoice before the LORD, for he comes,  He comes to judge the earth.  He will judge the world in righteousness  And the peoples in his faithfulness. 

- Psalm 96:11-13 NIV (2011)

[fakeicecubes]

Reasons why the rest of the JL believes Batman and all of his children are metas/cryptids

-Weirdly good instincts

-They only see the bat and kids at night

-Hasn’t died

-If they have died, they came back within the year

-The JL has seen all of them at one point or another stay up for 96 hours straight and act semi-normally

-One time Batman was stabbed and started bleeding green(it was slime Bruce packed for kids to play with if they were at a crime scene)

-Red Robin didn’t cry while watching A Dogs Purpose for Young Justice’s movie night(he did, the mask hid his tears)

-They all know an absurd amount of Golf facts

-Somehow none of them age

-All of them are friends with a super

Wonder Women has the list and they update it after every mission.

[emacrow]

Alfred's new ward making sure everyone is having great day during their day off from crime whether they want to or not.

Previous original post

Damian knew from day one of meeting alfred's new ward that he was going to be trouble..

He may have been stalking the kid doing alfred's work while alfred sat down in a comfy couch with a plate of fresh jasmine tea, his prescription medince bottle at ready and a raspberry strudel to nibble on.

He ain't going to replace his favorite Butler, not now, not ever. So Damian got Tim and Dick to help sabotage this heathen from taking over...Not knowing this kid was expecting their over the top sabotages. They tried scaring him with Titus but the little traitor lay there on his back getting belly rubs like it was heaven itself.

Changing the plumbing in his shower to freezing cold, but he walk out there refreshed. Tim trying to look of anything to blackmail him only for the batcomputer to go off the frizz with a virus.

Alfred did make sure to have his work sort out alphabetical because he is the Glue that keep these Wayne Manor going and everyone living in it not because caveman style creatures of the night.

Danny made sure Bruce didn't escape to his batcave on his supposed day off after 96 hours without sleep and spite driven nature, and don't even come with Justice never sleep excuses is going to run by him. He got Alfred's speical Bruce's tranquilizer gun at ready and he is not hesitating to shot you Bruce.

He does kept Tim from overdoing with the coffee addiction, giving him a better offer of coffee as long as he goes to sleep. Dick will still talk about Saturday night when Tim tries to sneak out to do some more investigating in the batcave only to see Danny dragged a unconscious Tim back to his room, a two tranquilizers to the back and one of his arm, though he didn't mention the Danny's glowing cat light green eyes that shine in the dark.

Danny's funny puns neon ghost stickers made dick's days, every morning as he goes to get his lunch, and he really want to know where he get them from.

Danny did actually helped a lot with the Wayne Manor as it never been cleaner before, Jason visited one time even mentioned that the chandelier never feel so clean to hang on from, not a speck of dust on it.

Damian getting a new animals book/documentaries, a new knifes for the collection or art supplies that match his demands in a way that keep his stabby nature at sate and bay for now.

Barb, Cass and Duke are amused by the fact that Bruce, Tim and Damian are having a little mid crisis that danny making them have day off on certain days such as holidays.

All this free time actually had alfred's going back to old hobbies that were nearly long forgotten such as conversations with old dear friends, practicing his old shooting skills, and having well deserved rest. Once his arm was healed, he stil did his duty along side with Danny as it was much quicker to do together as two people at hand.

What they will probably find out later on in the future that danny is actually Bruce's great grand uncle from his older sister side, and that he had disappeared when he was 20 years old in a old spooky town that vanished and still on today uneXplained series after his great grandmother moved to gotham. (But that another story for next post)

[cleolinda]

Are the Trump indictments election interference? asked someone whose question I will take in good faith against my better judgment.

The American presidential election (November 5, 2024) is more than a year away. There is more than a whole year for these four (4) trials to occur. If candidates want to start campaigning (and have already been campaigning) year(s) in advance, that is not the American judicial system's problem. Do not let anyone tell you that "I DECLARE CAMPAIGN SO YOU CAN'T TOUCH ME" is how this works.

I welcome criminal charges of actual substance for any candidate of any party. If you have dozens of pages of carefully documented charges against any/all Democrats, please have a DA call a grand jury whenever you would like. Political parties are not sports teams to me. Justice can do what it gotta do, whether it's convenient or not.

If someone doesn't want to get pulled up on racketeering charges (RICO), they maybe shouldn’t have racketeered. Or falsified business records, or mishandled documents to the tune of 31 charges under the Espionage Act, or incited an insurrection, the latter of which, I don't know about you, but which I personally watched on TV, live, for several hours, including coverage of the Trump rally that sent crowds marching over to the Capitol. We have heard the Georgia phone call that is part of the fourth indictment. We have seen pictures of classified documents piled in a random Mar-a-Lago bathroom. I am confident that these are not frivolous accusations.

District Attorney Fani Willis was careful to state that there should be a presumption of innocence (a standard American judicial doctrine). That said, I consider (as one example), this fourth indictment to be “charges of actual substance” because she delivered a 96-page document describing the racketeering (which, ironically, WAS ITSELF ELECTION INTERFERENCE):

u/code_archaeologist: The math on this is easy. For a jury to find a person guilty on a RICO charge in Georgia the prosecutor has to prove, beyond a reasonable doubt, that they engaged in two incidents that predicated the overarching conspiracy. The RICO charge lists 161 predicating incidents. So Fani Willis has 161 shots at each defendant, and only has to hit twice.

(I like to read r/politics.)

Fani Willis has 161 predicating incidents of conspiracy to work with. I am pretty confident that, while a defendant is innocent until proven guilty in the American justice system, these charges have some weight and deserve to be heard in court.

tl;dr if you don't want to campaign under a legal cloud, don't do crimes.

Also try not to publicly intimidate witnesses. And prosecutors. And judges.

If anyone reading this truly wondered if the substance or timing of these proceedings are warranted, sincerely, I hope laying it out like this helped.

[gettingcomfyinyourwalls]

DP x DC prompt #96

Instead of the ghost portal turning into Danny into a halfa, it traps him in the ghost zone.

Years later, the Justice League is trying to stop a cult from summoning some entity, but they're surprised to find a young adult come out, looking like he came from an apocalypse.

[undertale-ost-tournament]

ROUND 2: MATCH 2

Last Goodbye vs Spear of Justice

[cuephrase]

so idk about you, but i say all the time "this panel has been living in my mind rent free" and the other night i got the idea to make a compilation of all the panels that have been doing that this month and see what picture that paints, but then also to do that for the next few months and see which panels stick around/what changes.

anyways, nobody asked for this and it may only be interesting to me but when i realized i had more than 30 images and that i'd have to stitch them together if i wanted it all in one post i def noticed some themes and that was super neat!!

might reblog later with commentary but for now i'm just going to share the panels/compilations and a brief summary. all source issues are listed left to right ;)

batman: urban legends # 5, legends of the dark knight #100

robin 80th anniversary 100-page super spectacular #1, batman and robin (2011) #14

batman: gotham knights #26, batgirl (2000) #34

batman: urban legends #18, batman: gotham knights #2

detective comics #572, from the dc vault: death in the family: robin lives! #1, justice league (2011) #19

nightwing (1996) #106, batman: urban legends #10, young justice (1998) #7

robin (1993) #10, nightwing (1996) #69, nightwing (1996) #25, azrael: agent of the bat #56, robin (1993) #133, detective comics #723, nightwing (1996) #96, teen titans (2003) #24

batman #455 (twice), robin (1993) #102, red robin #7, robin (1993) #132, adventure comics (2009) #3

titans/young justice: graduation day #2, robin (1993) #46, knight terrors: robin #2, batman (2016) #147 (yes i meant to put it three times), the boy wonder #4, batman (2016) #130

some stats:

34 total panels (timmy hands only counted once), 65% (22) post crisis, 6% (2) n52, 29% (10) rebirth onward.

22 separate titles (might be off by one or two but i think that's right), with robin (1993) getting the most rep, 5 panels. nightwing (1996) came in second with 4 panels, and then, batman: urban legends in third with 3.

i've also only read/re-read i think 6 of these recently? obvs robin lives and boy wonder, and then robin #132-133, adventure comics #3, and batman #455.

at a glance observations- shocker, there is so much tim lmao. i think about jason more than i think i do, kind of? like obviously ik i'm thinking about him a lot but it feels like more all laid out lol. lot of focus on grief/loss, not at all surprising. i think that damn "i fell from the moon" panel is never going to leave, bc ik for a fact that bad boy has been squatting since november of last year lmao. lil sprinkle of timkon. damian feels underrepresented *squints*, but this is also strictly panels i'm thinking of and not just like character thoughts. no dick and damian panels, that is interesting to me, bc i do think about them. the dick & tim, dick & jason, jason & tim focus, in that order too, makes a lot of sense.

seeing all of these put together feels like i reached into the junk drawer of my brain and organized it, very wild lmao

[mamawasatesttube]

hi! i wanted to know if you had any thoughts about possibilities for the interactions between kon & matrix? as she was supergirl when he came into the scene and i know they interacted at least a little

they did! this is gonna get kinda long, my apologies, but lets gooo.

so kon and mae's relationship is... fascinating. they started off pretty sweet, with her being a warm and friendly presence when he started off as superboy - she invited him for dinner with lex, and all that, plus helped him with the stinger bridge incident. i often also think about the bit during the trial of superman arc where he tried to teach her to play magic the gathering with him:

however. their relationship took a significant turn for the worse shortly after this, during the arc in which knockout groomed kon into a relationship and manipulated him into helping her run from accountability for a murder he thought she was falsely accused of committing. the press turned very negative about kon aiding and abetting her escape, and mae showed up to confront him about it:

superboy (1994) #28

now there is a LOT to say about this arc and this issue, but there are two main things that stand out to me the most. firstly - this is pretty much a textbook example of what NOT to do when someone is in an abusive relationship, i.e. throw an ultimatum that they have to listen to you and leave immediately. it's how to drive them further into their abuser's arms, and that's exactly what happens with kon and knockout (she even literally tells him he doesn't need anyone but her, which is a classic abuse tactic. isolate the victim from his other would-be support.) ironically, this is also exactly how mae herself reacted when clark and the kents objected (much more gently than she did here!) to her relationship with lex luthor. it is so textbook "what not to do when someone you care about is in an abusive relationship" that i really wonder if kesel did it on purpose. i can't say he did with any confidence, though, given how victim blamey the rest of the narrative gets towards kon and how much he clearly still has a boner for knockout even after this arc ends, but... it is fascinating, i guess.

secondly, though, as much as it sucks, i would say this is completely consistent with mae's characterization in her own run (supergirl '96) which starts not too long after this. mae fuses with linda, which means... she and kon never actually work this out between them. however, mae is consistently characterized as someone who means well but can be hotheaded, judgmental, and prone to being pretty holier-than-thou when she jumps into situations without assessing them fully beforehand, like when a priest of a scam church in her name dies in front of her because she ignored him having a heart attack, not realizing he was trying to reach for his pills and begging her to help him reach the bottle he'd dropped, because she thought he was just scared of her and pleading for mercy. so her harshly judging kon for being in an abusive relationship, having recently escaped her own with lex luthor (in supergirl 1994), is in line with her characterization; in fact, it's entirely possible that she's so angry with kon here because it's the misplaced remnants of her anger at herself.

this is pretty much the last nail in the coffin for kon and mae's relationship. as long as mae is the more dominant personality in the linda-mae fusion (i.e. the first 50 issues of supergirl vol 4), she and kon don't really interact much anymore, and when they do it's without the warmth their relationship used to have (the "skyhog!" moment, hilarious as it is, comes to mind). HOWEVER, once mae and linda separate, and linda becomes supergirl, she has other opinions on it:

young justice (1998) #38

kon and linda have a much better relationship than kon and mae - this is the first time kon talks to her since her split from mae, and from there on, their interactions are pretty warm! linda gives him advice on how to patch up his friendship with robin after their fight on apokolips, and takes some inspiration from their conversation to patch up her bond with buzz, too. i won't get too far into linda & kon since that's not what you asked about and this is already a long post, but i do love them dearly 🥺

tl;dr my thoughts on kon and mae are mostly like, i think she saw herself in him in a lot of ways (the naivety, for one), but she didn't always like what she saw, and that put some significant strain on their relationship. there was love to be lost between them, like, in sb94 #28 kon even mentions they were just working together and helping free superman from false accusations, and mae is trying to reach him; she just doesn't go about it in the best way and it blows up in both of their faces, and her run establishes that she's got a proud streak and doesn't really like apologizing. so it's.... complicated! oof.

[anotherhumaninthisworld]

Was suicide really seen as noble during the French Revolution? Was there any recorded tension regarding this cultural shift with more religious or less revolutionary people/groups? Thanks!

In the book La liberté ou la mort: mourir en député 1792-1795 (2015) can be found a list of all the deputies of the National Convention that died unnatural deaths between 1792 and 1799. Of the 96 names included on it, 16 were those of suicide victims, and to these must also me added a number of botched suicide attempts as well. 

Only a single one of these suicides appears to have been driven by something outside of politics, that of the deputy Charlier, who shot himself in his apartment on February 23 1797, two years after the closing of the Convention. The rest of the suicides are all very clearly politically motivated, more specifically, deputies killing themselves just as the machinery of revolutionary justice was about to catch up to them. There’s those who killed themselves while on the run and unsheltered from the hostile authorities — the girondin Rebecqui who on May 1 1794 drowned himself in Old Port of Marseille, Pétion and Buzot who on June 24 1794 shot themselves after getting forced to leave the garret where they for the last few months had been hiding out, Maure who shot himself while in hiding on 3 June 1795 after having been implicated in the revolt of 1 Prairial, Brunel, who on May 27 shot himself after failing to quell a riot in Toulon, and Tellier, who similarily shot himself on September 17 1795 due to a revolt directed against him in the commune of Chartres. Barbaroux too attempted to shoot himself on June 18 1794 but only managed to blow his jaw off. He was instead captured and guillotined. There’s those that put an end to their days once cornered by said authorities — Lidon, who on November 2 1793 shot himself after having been discovered at his hiding place by two gendarmes (he did however first fire three shots at said gendarmes, one of whom got hit in the cheek) and Le Bas who shot himself in the night between July 27 and 28 1794 as National guardsmen stormed the Hôtel de Ville where he and his allies were hiding out (according to his wife’s memoirs, already a few days before this he had told her that he would kill them both right then and there wasn’t it for the fact they had an infant son). In an interrogation held two o’clock in the morning on July 28 1794, Augustin Robespierre too revealed that the reason he a few hours earlier had thrown himself off the cordon of the Hôtel de Ville was ”to escape from the hands of the conspirators, because, having been put under a decree of accusation, he believed his death inevitable,” and there’s of course an eternal debate on whether or not his older brother too had attemped to commit suicide at Hôtel de Ville that night or if he was shot by a guard (to a lesser extent, this debate also exists regarding Couthon). There’s those who committed suicide in prison to avoid an unfriendly tribunal — Baille who hanged himself while held captive in the hostile Toulon on September 2 1793, Condorcet who took poison and was found dead in his cell in Bourg-la-Reine on 29 March 1794 (though here there exists some debate on whether it really was suicide or if he ”just” died from exhaustion) and Rühl, who stabbed himself while in house arrest on May 29 1795. On March 17 1794, Chabot tried to take his life in his cell in the Luxembourg prison by overdosing on medicine (he reported that he shouted ”vive la république” after drinking the liquor) but survived and got guillotined. Finally, there’s those who held themselves alive for the whole trial but killed themselves as soon as they heard the pronounciation of the death sentence —  the girondin Valazé who stabbed himself to death on October 30 1793 and the so called ”martyrs of prairial” Duquesnoy, Romme, Goujon, Bourbotte (in a declaration written shortly before his death he wrote: ”Virtuous Cato, no longer will it be your example alone that teaches free men how to escape the scaffold of tyranny”), Duroy and Soubrany who did the same thing on June 17 1795 (only the first three did however succeed with their suicide, the rest were executed the very same day).

To these 24 men must also be added other revolutionaries that weren’t Convention deputies, such as Jacques Roux who on February 10 1794 stabbed himself in prison, former girondin ministers Étienne Clavière who did the same thing on December 8 1793 (learning of his death, his wife killed herself as well) and Jean Marie Roland who on November 10 1793 ran a sword through his heart while in hiding, after having been informed of his wife’s execution, Gracchus Babeuf and Augustin Darthé who attempted to stab themselves on May 27 1797 after having been condemned in the so called ”conspiracy of equals,” but survived and were executed the next day, as well as two jacobins from Lyon — Hidins who killed himself in prison before the city got ”liberated,” and Gaillard who did the same thing shortly after the liberation, after having spent several weeks in jail.

With all that said, I think you could say taking your life was considered ”noble” in a way, if it allowed you to die with greater dignity than letting the imposition of revolutionary judgement take it instead did. It was at least certainly a step up compared to before 1789, when suicide (through the Criminal Ordinance of 1670) was considered a crime which could lead to confiscation of property, opprobium cast on the victim’s family and even subjection of the courpse to various outrages, like dragging it through the street. To nuance this a bit, it is however worth recalling that this was only in theory, and that in practise, most of these penalties had ceased to be carried out already in the decades before the revolution, a period during which suicide, in the Enlightenent’s spirit of questioning everything, had also started getting discussed more and more. The word ”suicide” itself entered the French dictionary in 1734. Most of the enlightenment philosophes reflected on suicide and the ethics behind it. There’s also the widely spread The Sorrows of Young Werther that was first released in 1774. Furthermore, most revolutionaries were also steeped in the culture of Antiquity, where suicide was seen as an admirable response to political defeat, perhaps most notably those of Brutus and Cato the younger, big heroes of the revolutionaries. Over the course of the revolution, we find several patriotic artists depicting famous suicides of Antiquity — such as Socrates (whose death is considered by some to have been a sort of suicide) (1791) by David, The Death of Cato of Utica (1795) by Guillaume Guillon-Lethière, and The death of Caius Gracchus (1798) by François Topino-Lebrun. According to historian Dominique Godineau, the 18th century saw ”the inscription [of suicide] in the social landscape, at least in large cities: it has become “public,” people talk about it, it is less hidden than at the beginning of the century,” and she therefore argues that the decision to decriminalize it in the reformed penal code (it didn’t state outright that suicide was now OK, but it no longer listed it as a crime) of 1791 wasn’t particulary controversial.

Furthermore, that committing suicide was more noble than facing execution was still far from an obvious, universal truth during the revolution. In his memoirs, Brissot does for example recall that, right after the insurrection of August 10, when he and other ”girondins” discussed what to do was an act of accusation to be issued against them, Buzot argued that ”the death on the scaffold was more courageous, more worthy for a patriot, and especially more useful for the cause of liberty” than committing suicide to avoid it. The feared news of their act of accusation did however arrive before the girondins had reached a definitive conclusion on what to do, leading to some fleeing (among them Buzot, who of course ironically ended up being one of the revolutionaries that ultimately chose suicide over the scaffold) and some calmly awaiting their fate. In her memoirs, Madame Roland did her too consider going to the scaffold with her head held high to be an act of virtue — ”Should I wait for when it pleases my executioners to choose the moment of my death and to augment their triumph by the insolent clamours of the mob to which I would be exposed? Certainly!” In his very last speech to the Convention, convinced that his enemies were rounding up on him, Robespierre exclaimed he would ”drink the hemlock,” a reference to the execution of Socrates. The girondin Vergniaud is also said to have carried poison on him but chosen to have go out with his friends on the scaffold, although I’ve not yet discovered what the source for this is. It can also be noted that the number of Convention deputies who let revolutionary justice have its course with them was still considerably higher than those who attempted to put an end to their days before the sentence could be carried out.

According to Patterns and prosecution of suicide in eighteenth-century Paris (1989) by Jeffrey Merrick, there was indeed tension regarding the rising amount of suicides in the decades leading up to the revolution. Merrick cites first and foremost the printer and bookseller Siméon Prosper Hardy, who in his journal Mes loisirs ou journal des evenements tels qu'ils parviennent a ma connaissance (1764-1789),  documented a total of 259 cases of Parisian suicides. Hardy saw these deaths as an unwelcome import from the English, who for their part were led to kill themselves due to ”the dismal climate, unwholesome diet, and excessive liberty.” He also blamed the suicides on "the decline of religion and morals," caused by the philosophes, who in their ”bad books” popularized English ways of thinking and undermined traditional values. He was not alone in drawing a connection between the suicides and the new ideas. The clergy in general ”denounced the philosophes for legitimizing this unforgiveable crime against God and society, which they now associated with systematic unbelief more than the traditional diabolical temptation.” In practice, many parish priests did however still quietly bury the bodies of persons who killed themselves. The future revolutionary Louis Sébastien Mercier did on the other hand blame the government and its penchant for inflated prices and burdensome taxes for the alleged epidemic of suicides in his Tableau de Paris (1782-1783).

In La liberté ou la mort: mourir en député, 1792-1795 it is also established that there weren’t that many participants of the king that killed themselves once the wind started blowing in the wrong direction, but that is not to say they didn’t exist. As example is cited the case of a man in April 1793 shot himself on the Place de la Révolution, before having written ”I die for you and your family” on a gravure representimg the head of Louis XVI. There’s also the case of Philippe Nicolas Marie de Pâris, former king’s guard and the murderer of Michel Peletier, who, similar to Lidon, blew his brains out when the authorities had him cornered a week after the murder.

Sources:

Patterns and prosecution of suicide in eighteenth-century Paris (1989) by Jeffrey Merrick 

Pratiques du suicide à Paris pendant la Révolution française () by Dominique Godineau

La liberté ou la mort: mourir en député, 1792-1795 (2015) by Michel Biard, chapter 5, ”Mourir en Romain,” le choix de suicide.

Choosing Terror (2014) by Marisa Linton, page 276-279, section titled ”Choosing how to die.”

[genshin-impact-updates]

Fountain of Belleau｜Genshin Impact

Genshin Impact's Fontaine OST album "Fountain of Belleau" is out now! The album's four discs "Chanson of Justice and Impartiality," "Arioso of Belle Epoque," "Chapelloise of Trickling Springs," and "La bataille de Fontaine" feature 96 remarkable tracks composed by the HOYO-MiX team, each one an original composition for the region of Fontaine in Genshin Impact.

The songs featured on the Fontaine OST album were recorded by the London Symphony Orchestra with special guest folk musicians at Abbey Road Studios, Angel Studios, Air-Edel Recording Studios, and other recording studios respectively.

Click here to listen to "Fountain of Belleau"

Spotify

iTunes/Apple Music

[thatsonemorbidcorvid]

“By simply existing as women in public life, we have all become targets, stripped of our accomplishments, our intellect, and our activism and reduced to sex objects for the pleasure of millions of anonymous eyes.

Men, of course, are subject to this abuse far less frequently. In reporting this article, I searched the name Donald Trump on one prominent deepfake-porn website and turned up one video of the former president—and three entire pages of videos depicting his wife, Melania, and daughter Ivanka. A 2019 study from Sensity, a company that monitors synthetic media, estimated that more than 96 percent of deepfakes then in existence were nonconsensual pornography of women.”

Recently, a Google Alert informed me that I am the subject of deepfake pornography. I wasn’t shocked. For more than a year, I have been the target of a widespread online harassment campaign, and deepfake porn—whose creators, using artificial intelligence, generate explicit video clips that seem to show real people in sexual situations that never actually occurred—has become a prized weapon in the arsenal misogynists use to try to drive women out of public life. The only emotion I felt as I informed my lawyers about the latest violation of my privacy was a profound disappointment in the technology—and in the lawmakers and regulators who have offered no justice to people who appear in porn clips without their consent. Many commentators have been tying themselves in knots over the potential threats posed by artificial intelligence—deepfake videos that tip elections or start wars, job-destroying deployments of ChatGPT and other generative technologies. Yet policy makers have all but ignored an urgent AI problem that is already affecting many lives, including mine.

Last year, I resigned as head of the Department of Homeland Security’s Disinformation Governance Board, a policy-coordination body that the Biden administration let founder amid criticism mostly from the right. In subsequent months, at least three artificially generated videos that appear to show me engaging in sex acts were uploaded to websites specializing in deepfake porn. The images don’t look much like me; the generative-AI models that spat them out seem to have been trained on my official U.S. government portrait, taken when I was six months pregnant. Whoever created the videos likely used a free “face swap” tool, essentially pasting my photo onto an existing porn video. In some moments, the original performer’s mouth is visible while the deepfake Frankenstein moves and my face flickers. But these videos aren’t meant to be convincing—all of the websites and the individual videos they host are clearly labeled as fakes. Although they may provide cheap thrills for the viewer, their deeper purpose is to humiliate, shame, and objectify women, especially women who have the temerity to speak out. I am somewhat inured to this abuse, after researching and writing about it for years. But for other women, especially those in more conservative or patriarchal environments, appearing in a deepfake-porn video could be profoundly stigmatizing, even career- or life-threatening.

As if to underscore video makers’ compulsion to punish women who speak out, one of the videos to which Google alerted me depicts me with Hillary Clinton and Greta Thunberg. Because of their global celebrity, deepfakes of the former presidential candidate and the climate-change activist are far more numerous and more graphic than those of me. Users can also easily find deepfake-porn videos of the singer Taylor Swift, the actress Emma Watson, and the former Fox News host Megyn Kelly; Democratic officials such as Kamala Harris, Nancy Pelosi, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez; the Republicans Nikki Haley and Elise Stefanik; and countless other prominent women. By simply existing as women in public life, we have all become targets, stripped of our accomplishments, our intellect, and our activism and reduced to sex objects for the pleasure of millions of anonymous eyes.

Men, of course, are subject to this abuse far less frequently. In reporting this article, I searched the name Donald Trump on one prominent deepfake-porn website and turned up one video of the former president—and three entire pages of videos depicting his wife, Melania, and daughter Ivanka. A 2019 study from Sensity, a company that monitors synthetic media, estimated that more than 96 percent of deepfakes then in existence were nonconsensual pornography of women. The reasons for this disproportion are interconnected, and are both technical and motivational: The people making these videos are presumably heterosexual men who value their own gratification more than they value women’s personhood. And because AI systems are trained on an internet that abounds with images of women’s bodies, much of the nonconsensual porn that those systems generate is more believable than, say, computer-generated clips of cute animals playing would be.

As I looked into the provenance of the videos in which I appear—I’m a disinformation researcher, after all—I stumbled upon deepfake-porn forums where users are remarkably nonchalant about the invasion of privacy they are perpetrating. Some seem to believe that they have a right to distribute these images—that because they fed a publicly available photo of a woman into an application engineered to make pornography, they have created art or a legitimate work of parody. Others apparently think that simply by labeling their videos and images as fake, they can avoid any legal consequences for their actions. These purveyors assert that their videos are for entertainment and educational purposes only. But by using that description for videos of well-known women being “humiliated” or “pounded”—as the titles of some clips put it—these men reveal a lot about what they find pleasurable and informative.

Ironically, some creators who post in deepfake forums show great concern for their own safety and privacy—in one forum thread that I found, a man is ridiculed for having signed up with a face-swapping app that does not protect user data—but insist that the women they depict do not have those same rights, because they have chosen public career paths. The most chilling page I found lists women who are turning 18 this year; they are removed on their birthdays from “blacklists” that deepfake-forum hosts maintain so they don’t run afoul of laws against child pornography.

Effective laws are exactly what the victims of deepfake porn need. Several states—including Virginia and California—have outlawed the distribution of deepfake porn. But for victims living outside these jurisdictions or seeking justice against perpetrators based elsewhere, these laws have little effect. In my own case, finding out who created these videos is probably not worth the time and money. I could attempt to subpoena platforms for information about the users who uploaded the videos, but even if the sites had those details and shared them with me, if my abusers live out of state—or in a different country—there is little I could do to bring them to justice.

Representative Joseph Morelle of New York is attempting to reduce this jurisdictional loophole by reintroducing the Preventing Deepfakes of Intimate Images Act, a proposed amendment to the 2022 reauthorization of the Violence Against Women Act. Morelle’s bill would impose a nationwide ban on the distribution of deepfakes without the explicit consent of the people depicted in the image or video. The measure would also provide victims with somewhat easier recourse when they find themselves unwittingly starring in nonconsensual porn.

In the absence of strong federal legislation, the avenues available to me to mitigate the harm caused by the deepfakes of me are not all that encouraging. I can request that Google delist the web addresses of the videos in its search results and—though the legal basis for any demand would be shaky—have my attorneys ask online platforms to take down the videos altogether. But even if those websites comply, the likelihood that the videos will crop up somewhere else is extremely high. Women targeted by deepfake porn are caught in an exhausting, expensive, endless game of whack-a-troll.

The Preventing Deepfakes of Intimate Images Act won’t solve the deepfake problem; the internet is forever, and deepfake technology is only becoming more ubiquitous and its output more convincing. Yet especially because AI grows more powerful by the month, adapting the law to an emergent category of misogynistic abuse is all the more essential to protect women’s privacy and safety. As policy makers worry whether AI will destroy the world, I beg them: Let’s first stop the men who are using it to discredit and humiliate women.

Nina Jankowicz is a disinformation expert and the author of How to Be a Woman Online and How to Lose the Information War.

[deafmangoes]

Dungeon Meshi Chapter 96 Spoilers:

I... really feel for Thistle. Not to say that he didn't commit some pretty heinous acts (like a full on reign of terror and executing those who disagreed with him), but his life can be summed up as:

Bought as a slave novelty for a tyrant king

Raised as a figure of fun in the court

Forced into learning magic

Manipulated using his genuine friendship with Delgal (which was never equal, nor fully reciprocated judging by later chapters)

Manipulated over a thousand years by the Winged Lion

Eventually hated and feared by all

And this scene in the chapter really hit me. Thistle, freed from the Winged Lion, is having all the issues Mithrun had but worse because the Winged Lion left almost nothing of him intact. He's barely breathing. The only thing that causes him to wake up is hearing the Golden Kingdom kids cheering for the king - Laios, though he assumes it means Delgal has come back - and then he sees Yaad in Delgal's body. Yaad opts to not tell him the truth, and Thistle dies in his arms, content that he finally kept Delgal safe.

It's just really tragic. Yaad was perhaps the only person who felt sorry for Thistle and tried to help him at the end, but even he knew that Thistle was too far gone to accept the truth that Delgal was truly dead. There's no new life waiting for Thistle like there was for Mithrun. That's it.

... Anyway justice for Lunatic Magicians

[gunsandspaceships]

Chiron

"Kheiron's name was derived from the Greek word for hand (kheir) and meant something like "skilled with the hands." In myth it was also closely associated with the word kheirourgos "surgeon."" (Source)

Fragment from "The seven physicians"

"Wisest and justest of all the centaurs" immortal Chiron, mentor of heroes. He invented pharmacy, medicine and surgery and taught Asclepius, the god of medicine, himself.

He lived in a cave on Mount Pelion until he was driven out of his home.

Statius, Silvae 1. 4. 98 "If there be any herb [to cure this illness] in twy-formed Chiron's health-giving cave."

Pindar, Nemean Ode 4. 55 ff "Then [Akastos] sought Pelias' son [Peleus], stealing his sword, the blade of Daidalos' (Daedalus') magic, to contrive his death by ambush; saved by Kheiron's (Chiron's) hand, the fate destined by Zeus he made his own."

Ho Yinsen, an Afghan surgeon, saved Tony in a cave using his innovative surgical methods after Tony was betrayed by Obadiah Stane, who stole his weapon and ordered the "wild centaurs" to kill him from an ambush in the mountains.

Propertius, Elegies 2. 1 "Medicine can cure all human pains . . . Chiron, son of Phillyra, healed the blindness of Phoenix."

Ho and the Ten Rings "healed the blindness of Phoenix" Tony by showing him what was really going on with his creations and that he couldn't trust the people in his company. Yinsen also helped Tony see his true self.

Statius, Achilleid 2. 96 ff "Also did he teach me of juices and the grasses that succour disease, what remedy will staunch to fast a flow of blood, what will lull to sleep, what will close gaping wounds; what plague should be checked with a knife, what will yield to herbs; and he implanted deep within my heart the precepts of divine justice".

"Chiron holding Achilles"

Chiron was wounded by a poisoned arrow while visiting the cave of the centaur Pholus. Even though Chiron was a master of medicine and healing, he could not heal himself from the poison and suffered excruciating pain for several days. He wanted to give up his immortality and die to stop the pain.

Chiron went to Zeus and offered to exchange his life for the life and freedom of Prometheus.

He died willingly so that Prometheus could go on living and continue his mission of teaching humankind and bringing it science and technology.

"Chiron sacrifices himself for Prometheus"

Gifs by @thepunisher