#uk june 22 | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

mostlysignssomeportents · 3 months

Text

How to design a tech regulation

TONIGHT (June 20) I'm live onstage in LOS ANGELES for a recording of the GO FACT YOURSELF podcast. TOMORROW (June 21) I'm doing an ONLINE READING for the LOCUS AWARDS at 16hPT. On SATURDAY (June 22) I'll be in OAKLAND, CA for a panel (13hPT) and a keynote (18hPT) at the LOCUS AWARDS.

It's not your imagination: tech really is underregulated. There are plenty of avoidable harms that tech visits upon the world, and while some of these harms are mere negligence, others are self-serving, creating shareholder value and widespread public destruction.

Making good tech policy is hard, but not because "tech moves too fast for regulation to keep up with," nor because "lawmakers are clueless about tech." There are plenty of fast-moving areas that lawmakers manage to stay abreast of (think of the rapid, global adoption of masking and social distancing rules in mid-2020). Likewise we generally manage to make good policy in areas that require highly specific technical knowledge (that's why it's noteworthy and awful when, say, people sicken from badly treated tapwater, even though water safety, toxicology and microbiology are highly technical areas outside the background of most elected officials).

That doesn't mean that technical rigor is irrelevant to making good policy. Well-run "expert agencies" include skilled practitioners on their payrolls – think here of large technical staff at the FTC, or the UK Competition and Markets Authority's best-in-the-world Digital Markets Unit:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/12/13/kitbashed/#app-store-tax

The job of government experts isn't just to research the correct answers. Even more important is experts' role in evaluating conflicting claims from interested parties. When administrative agencies make new rules, they have to collect public comments and counter-comments. The best agencies also hold hearings, and the very best go on "listening tours" where they invite the broad public to weigh in (the FTC has done an awful lot of these during Lina Khan's tenure, to its benefit, and it shows):

https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/events/2022/04/ftc-justice-department-listening-forum-firsthand-effects-mergers-acquisitions-health-care

But when an industry dwindles to a handful of companies, the resulting cartel finds it easy to converge on a single talking point and to maintain strict message discipline. This means that the evidentiary record is starved for disconfirming evidence that would give the agencies contrasting perspectives and context for making good policy.

Tech industry shills have a favorite tactic: whenever there's any proposal that would erode the industry's profits, self-serving experts shout that the rule is technically impossible and deride the proposer as "clueless."

This tactic works so well because the proposers sometimes are clueless. Take Europe's on-again/off-again "chat control" proposal to mandate spyware on every digital device that will screen everything you upload for child sex abuse material (CSAM, better known as "child pornography"). This proposal is profoundly dangerous, as it will weaken end-to-end encryption, the key to all secure and private digital communication:

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/article/2024/jun/18/encryption-is-deeply-threatening-to-power-meredith-whittaker-of-messaging-app-signal

It's also an impossible-to-administer mess that incorrectly assumes that killing working encryption in the two mobile app stores run by the mobile duopoly will actually prevent bad actors from accessing private tools:

https://memex.craphound.com/2018/09/04/oh-for-fucks-sake-not-this-fucking-bullshit-again-cryptography-edition/

When technologists correctly point out the lack of rigor and catastrophic spillover effects from this kind of crackpot proposal, lawmakers stick their fingers in their ears and shout "NERD HARDER!"

https://memex.craphound.com/2018/01/12/nerd-harder-fbi-director-reiterates-faith-based-belief-in-working-crypto-that-he-can-break/

But this is only half the story. The other half is what happens when tech industry shills want to kill good policy proposals, which is the exact same thing that advocates say about bad ones. When lawmakers demand that tech companies respect our privacy rights – for example, by splitting social media or search off from commercial surveillance, the same people shout that this, too, is technologically impossible.

That's a lie, though. Facebook started out as the anti-surveillance alternative to Myspace. We know it's possible to operate Facebook without surveillance, because Facebook used to operate without surveillance:

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3247362

Likewise, Brin and Page's original Pagerank paper, which described Google's architecture, insisted that search was incompatible with surveillance advertising, and Google established itself as a non-spying search tool:

http://infolab.stanford.edu/pub/papers/google.pdf

Even weirder is what happens when there's a proposal to limit a tech company's power to invoke the government's powers to shut down competitors. Take Ethan Zuckerman's lawsuit to strip Facebook of the legal power to sue people who automate their browsers to uncheck the millions of boxes that Facebook requires you to click by hand in order to unfollow everyone:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/02/kaiju-v-kaiju/#cda-230-c-2-b

Facebook's apologists have lost their minds over this, insisting that no one can possibly understand the potential harms of taking away Facebook's legal right to decide how your browser works. They take the position that only Facebook can understand when it's safe and proportional to use Facebook in ways the company didn't explicitly design for, and that they should be able to ask the government to fine or even imprison people who fail to defer to Facebook's decisions about how its users configure their computers.

This is an incredibly convenient position, since it arrogates to Facebook the right to order the rest of us to use our computers in the ways that are most beneficial to its shareholders. But Facebook's apologists insist that they are not motivated by parochial concerns over the value of their stock portfolios; rather, they have objective, technical concerns, that no one except them is qualified to understand or comment on.

There's a great name for this: "scalesplaining." As in "well, actually the platforms are doing an amazing job, but you can't possibly understand that because you don't work for them." It's weird enough when scalesplaining is used to condemn sensible regulation of the platforms; it's even weirder when it's weaponized to defend a system of regulatory protection for the platforms against would-be competitors.

Just as there are no atheists in foxholes, there are no libertarians in government-protected monopolies. Somehow, scalesplaining can be used to condemn governments as incapable of making any tech regulations and to insist that regulations that protect tech monopolies are just perfect and shouldn't ever be weakened. Truly, it's impossible to get someone to understand something when the value of their employee stock options depends on them not understanding it.

None of this is to say that every tech regulation is a good one. Governments often propose bad tech regulations (like chat control), or ones that are technologically impossible (like Article 17 of the EU's 2019 Digital Single Markets Directive, which requires tech companies to detect and block copyright infringements in their users' uploads).

But the fact that scalesplainers use the same argument to criticize both good and bad regulations makes the waters very muddy indeed. Policymakers are rightfully suspicious when they hear "that's not technically possible" because they hear that both for technically impossible proposals and for proposals that scalesplainers just don't like.

After decades of regulations aimed at making platforms behave better, we're finally moving into a new era, where we just make the platforms less important. That is, rather than simply ordering Facebook to block harassment and other bad conduct by its users, laws like the EU's Digital Markets Act will order Facebook and other VLOPs (Very Large Online Platforms, my favorite EU-ism ever) to operate gateways so that users can move to rival services and still communicate with the people who stay behind.

Think of this like number portability, but for digital platforms. Just as you can switch phone companies and keep your number and hear from all the people you spoke to on your old plan, the DMA will make it possible for you to change online services but still exchange messages and data with all the people you're already in touch with.

I love this idea, because it finally grapples with the question we should have been asking all along: why do people stay on platforms where they face harassment and bullying? The answer is simple: because the people – customers, family members, communities – we connect with on the platform are so important to us that we'll tolerate almost anything to avoid losing contact with them:

https://locusmag.com/2023/01/commentary-cory-doctorow-social-quitting/

Platforms deliberately rig the game so that we take each other hostage, locking each other into their badly moderated cesspits by using the love we have for one another as a weapon against us. Interoperability – making platforms connect to each other – shatters those locks and frees the hostages:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/08/facebooks-secret-war-switching-costs

But there's another reason to love interoperability (making moderation less important) over rules that require platforms to stamp out bad behavior (making moderation better). Interop rules are much easier to administer than content moderation rules, and when it comes to regulation, administratability is everything.

The DMA isn't the EU's only new rule. They've also passed the Digital Services Act, which is a decidedly mixed bag. Among its provisions are a suite of rules requiring companies to monitor their users for harmful behavior and to intervene to block it. Whether or not you think platforms should do this, there's a much more important question: how can we enforce this rule?

Enforcing a rule requiring platforms to prevent harassment is very "fact intensive." First, we have to agree on a definition of "harassment." Then we have to figure out whether something one user did to another satisfies that definition. Finally, we have to determine whether the platform took reasonable steps to detect and prevent the harassment.

Each step of this is a huge lift, especially that last one, since to a first approximation, everyone who understands a given VLOP's server infrastructure is a partisan, scalesplaining engineer on the VLOP's payroll. By the time we find out whether the company broke the rule, years will have gone by, and millions more users will be in line to get justice for themselves.

So allowing users to leave is a much more practical step than making it so that they've got no reason to want to leave. Figuring out whether a platform will continue to forward your messages to and from the people you left there is a much simpler technical matter than agreeing on what harassment is, whether something is harassment by that definition, and whether the company was negligent in permitting harassment.

But as much as I like the DMA's interop rule, I think it is badly incomplete. Given that the tech industry is so concentrated, it's going to be very hard for us to define standard interop interfaces that don't end up advantaging the tech companies. Standards bodies are extremely easy for big industry players to capture:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/30/weak-institutions/

If tech giants refuse to offer access to their gateways to certain rivals because they seem "suspicious," it will be hard to tell whether the companies are just engaged in self-serving smears against a credible rival, or legitimately trying to protect their users from a predator trying to plug into their infrastructure. These fact-intensive questions are the enemy of speedy, responsive, effective policy administration.

But there's more than one way to attain interoperability. Interop doesn't have to come from mandates, interfaces designed and overseen by government agencies. There's a whole other form of interop that's far nimbler than mandates: adversarial interoperability:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/10/adversarial-interoperability

"Adversarial interoperability" is a catch-all term for all the guerrilla warfare tactics deployed in service to unilaterally changing a technology: reverse engineering, bots, scraping and so on. These tactics have a long and honorable history, but they have been slowly choked out of existence with a thicket of IP rights, like the IP rights that allow Facebook to shut down browser automation tools, which Ethan Zuckerman is suing to nullify:

https://locusmag.com/2020/09/cory-doctorow-ip/

Adversarial interop is very flexible. No matter what technological moves a company makes to interfere with interop, there's always a countermove the guerrilla fighter can make – tweak the scraper, decompile the new binary, change the bot's behavior. That's why tech companies use IP rights and courts, not firewall rules, to block adversarial interoperators.

At the same time, adversarial interop is unreliable. The solution that works today can break tomorrow if the company changes its back-end, and it will stay broken until the adversarial interoperator can respond.

But when companies are faced with the prospect of extended asymmetrical war against adversarial interop in the technological trenches, they often surrender. If companies can't sue adversarial interoperators out of existence, they often sue for peace instead. That's because high-tech guerrilla warfare presents unquantifiable risks and resource demands, and, as the scalesplainers never tire of telling us, this can create real operational problems for tech giants.

In other words, if Facebook can't shut down Ethan Zuckerman's browser automation tool in the courts, and if they're sincerely worried that a browser automation tool will uncheck its user interface buttons so quickly that it crashes the server, all it has to do is offer an official "unsubscribe all" button and no one will use Zuckerman's browser automation tool.

We don't have to choose between adversarial interop and interop mandates. The two are better together than they are apart. If companies building and operating DMA-compliant, mandatory gateways know that a failure to make them useful to rivals seeking to help users escape their authority is getting mired in endless hand-to-hand combat with trench-fighting adversarial interoperators, they'll have good reason to cooperate.

And if lawmakers charged with administering the DMA notice that companies are engaging in adversarial interop rather than using the official, reliable gateway they're overseeing, that's a good indicator that the official gateways aren't suitable.

It would be very on-brand for the EU to create the DMA and tell tech companies how they must operate, and for the USA to simply withdraw the state's protection from the Big Tech companies and let smaller companies try their luck at hacking new features into the big companies' servers without the government getting involved.

Indeed, we're seeing some of that today. Oregon just passed the first ever Right to Repair law banning "parts pairing" – basically a way of using IP law to make it illegal to reverse-engineer a device so you can fix it.

https://www.opb.org/article/2024/03/28/oregon-governor-kotek-signs-strong-tech-right-to-repair-bill/

Taken together, the two approaches – mandates and reverse engineering – are stronger than either on their own. Mandates are sturdy and reliable, but slow-moving. Adversarial interop is flexible and nimble, but unreliable. Put 'em together and you get a two-part epoxy, strong and flexible.

Governments can regulate well, with well-funded expert agencies and smart, adminstratable remedies. It's for that reason that the administrative state is under such sustained attack from the GOP and right-wing Dems. The illegitimate Supreme Court is on the verge of gutting expert agencies' power:

https://www.hklaw.com/en/insights/publications/2024/05/us-supreme-court-may-soon-discard-or-modify-chevron-deference

It's never been more important to craft regulations that go beyond mere good intentions and take account of adminsitratability. The easier we can make our rules to enforce, the less our beleaguered agencies will need to do to protect us from corporate predators.

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/2024/06/20/scalesplaining/#administratability

Image: Noah Wulf (modified) https://commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Thunderbirds_at_Attention_Next_to_Thunderbird_1_-_Aviation_Nation_2019.jpg

CC BY-SA 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/deed.en

#pluralistic #cda #ethan zuckerman #platforms #platform decay #enshittification #eu #dma #right to repair #transatlantic #administrability #regulation #big tech #scalesplaining #equilibria #interoperability #adversarial interoperability #comcom

99 notes · View notes

slavghoul · 2 years

Text

Hello, I prepared some statistics to give you a short overview of Ghost's amazingly successful 2022. It is based on data I collected between 22/12/2021 and 22/12/2022.

The big Ghost event of 2022 was of course the release of the band's fifth album, IMPERA.

Since March 11, it has sold nearly 500,000 copies, won the American Music Award for Favorite Rock Album and received a Grammy nomination for Best Metal Performance ('Call Me Little Sunshine').

Within the first week of its release, the album reached #2 on the Billboard 200 (ranking the 200 most popular music albums and EPs in the United States) and ranked in the top 20 best-selling albums in 19 countries across the world:

#1 in Sweden, Austria, Germany, Finland, Spain

#2 in US, UK, Belgium, Norway, Netherlands

#3 in Australia, Canada

#5 in Switzerland, Ireland, France

#7 in Poland

#8 in Hungary

#12 in Denmark, Portugal

#20 in Italy

IMPERA is Ghost’s best charting album to date.

On YouTube, the band amassed a staggering 260 million views. 840,000 people subscribed to the channel this year, which makes up 42% of all current subscribers.

5 most watched videos on YouTube in 2022:

Mary On A Cross (Official Audio) – 32 million views

Call Me Little Sunshine (Official Music Video) – 15 million views

Square Hammer (Official Music Video) – 11 million views

Mary On A Cross (Live in Tampa 2022) – 8.2 million views

Spillways (Official Music Video) – 6.8 million views

On Spotify, the band amassed 1,285,625 new followers. That’s around 61% of all followers since the band appeared on the platform.

5 most streamed songs on Spotify in 2022:

Mary On A Cross - 193,709,473 streams

Call Me Little Sunshine – 41,108,589 streams

Square Hammer – 29,720,042 streams

Dance Macabre – 26,494,053 streams

Spillways – 24,910,870 streams

It goes without saying that the viral success of Mary On A Cross on TikTok brought in a lot of new fans this year, but the magnitude of it becomes even more astonishing if you look at numbers.

On this graph, I marked a few events that resulted in a noticeable spike in the number of monthly listeners on Spotify, including the approximate time when MOAC began to gain traction on TikTok. As you can see, nothing, not even the release of a new album, gave the band as much attention as the 3-year old song suddenly raising in popularity on one single platform.

Between end of July and beginning of October, the number of monthly listeners on Spotify skyrocketed from 2.5 million to 12 million. This is a 380% increase.

Although the numbers have been in decline since then, it appears that for the past month they have stayed at a steady 9 million. As of today (Dec 22, 2022) the exact number is 9,110,996. Exactly a year ago (Dec 22, 2021) the number was 1,999,951. A hefty 355% increase in only a year.

Some other milestones and fun facts:

On June 7, Cirice, Dance Macabre, and Square Hammer were all certified Gold by the RIAA for sales of 500,000 units in the USA. Following the viral success, Mary On A Cross was also certified Gold on November 20.

The band's most liked post on Instagram this year was a video of Papa throwing the first pitch at the White Sox game (273,241 likes).

The episode of Jimmy Kimmel Live where Ghost performed Call Me Little Sunshine was watched by around 1.3 million people.

In September, Ghost reached over 12 million monthly listeners on Spotify and was the 450th most streamed artist globally - that's 450 out of over 11 million!

As of today with over 1.6 billion accumulated streams Ghost is one of the 1,000 most successful artists on the platform of all time (currently #808).

On September 11, Mary On A Cross peaked at #1 in the Viral Hits chart on Spotify in 54 countries across the world.

It was also the highest charting Swedish song on the platform in 2022, peaking globally at #31.

At this point I think it’s safe to declare that Ghost’s global success reached unprecedent heights this year and even allowed them to officially join the ranks of mainstream artists. With all of the above, 70 completed shows this year and many more to come in 2023, and with media of the likes of The Wall Street Journal proclaiming Ghost “the next generation of arena stars,” it looks like that the band is well on the way to become one of the biggest rock acts of this century. Not bad for a side project started by one Swede in his bedroom somewhere in Linköping.

Let us hope 2023 will be as devilishly good!

#the band ghost

691 notes · View notes

conhivemindcent · 1 year

Text

Sorry to bring back up the Titan submersible, but I find it fascinating in a very morbid way. Mostly in terms of the news. This will be the media student in me talking but to me, it’s a perfect example of so many of Galtung and Ruge’s news values. I’ll also be looking at the migrant boat that sunk off the coast of Greece for similar comparison and why an American centric website would probably see more news relating to the submersible.

Put simply, one of Galtung and Ruge’s news values is proximity, aka how close to home it was and how meaningful it is to the people there. Since the submersible launched from Newfoundland, Canada would’ve gotten more news stories about the submersible. Meanwhile, the boat with the immigrants was found off the coast of Greece, with more stories about it there. Since the USA is closer to Canada than Greece, they got more stories about the sub than the boat.

Another value is currency. This is why me, a Brit, got more news coverage on the boat for the first few days. The UK has a known immigration problem and some really dodgy laws about it (basically in most circumstances you can only apply for a permit once you’re in the country but entering the country without a permit is illegal, so it’s a catch 22), so something about immigration would always be more relevant. However, the antithesis recency would affect how in the last few hours of the sub being missing when the air was thought to be running out (so morning and afternoon of 22nd June) there were more stories on the sub.

A fourth value is uniqueness. Sadly, a migrant ship sinking with people dying and going missing is not an uncommon thing nowadays. A maritime disaster involving billionaires touring the Titanic? Never happened before, I hope it will never happen again (and it most likely will not). Of course the news will focus on something that hasn’t happened before - when will they get the chance to do it?

There’s also the values of Elite People. These people were billionaires. The people on the migrant ship were most likely just normal unnoteworthy people. And also recency - the Messenia boat occurred in the 14th June, and by the time the debris of the boat had been discovered it has already been a week.

I think it is important we take these news values into consideration and also how we as a community on Tumblr can see how we played right into these. An American website with a large American usership would naturally gravitate towards an American story, no matter how global it claims to be. In addition, it’s unusual enough with such strange circumstances that jokes and criticisms were bound to occur. The continuity (another news value) of the story with the search was also intriguing, as we saw it play out first hand with the initial disappearance, the potential signals, the discovery of the wreckage. Add in a level of expectedness (another news value - these people would either be found or not, and let’s be honest they were more likely to be dead than alive) and we have a perfectly newsworthy story to top the trending page for a few days.

It’s something I find fascinating, how despite people saying we should focus on the Messenia migrant boat disaster, we were still echoing the news perfectly on the site. One thing I’ve noted is that I didn’t really see anybody mentioning it before the Titan set out, but once the searching started it started becoming more relevant and trending a little below it. This isn’t a call to do better, this is just something I’ve noticed.

If there’s any saving light, out of the estimated 750 (maximum) of migrants, 104 have been confirmed alive and rescued. And I’m so happy for that.

#con(versation)#greece #migrants #titanic #titan submersible #news values #galtung and ruge #seriously though tumblr look into news values if you want to know what we consume in the news #anyway it’s all old news now there’s a coup in russia

369 notes · View notes

hldailyupdate · 5 months

Text

Louis Tomlinson has dropped a surprise album ‘Live’ – featuring songs that he recorded at 15 shows across 15 different cities.

Announced and shared yesterday (April 25), the album comes after the singer and former One Direction member embarked on two world tours over the past three years – playing just shy of 200 shows globally.

Now, a variety of performances from both tours – the ‘Louis Tomlinson World Tour’ and the ‘Faith in the Future World Tour’ – have been compiled into a new live album, which is available now.

Fifteen songs are included in the tracklist, and each was recorded in a different city, at a different show from across the three-year run. The album comes in both digital and physical formats, and features his singles including ‘Bigger Than Me’, ‘We Made It, ‘Walls’ and ‘Out Of My System’, alongside fan favourite album tracks, all released live for the very first time.

“I’ve been lucky enough to spend the last 3 years touring the world twice over. The feeling I get sharing those live moments will be with me forever,” Tomlinson said in a statement. “To be able to record these songs from all over the world and put them out as an album like this feels so special, and a real tribute to the fans who make each and every show feel unique and incredible. Thank you! Enjoy!”

There are four exclusive tracks split between the physical editions of ‘Live’, including a special version of the One Direction classic ‘Where Do Broken Hearts Go’ – which is available only on the double CD.

Accompanying video clips of compiled tour footage will be shared on Louis’s social channels to support the release, showcasing a glimpse into his past three years on the road and 170 performances.

The ‘Live’ tracklist is:

‘The Greatest’ (Live From London, 17 November 2023) ‘Face The Music’ (Live From Nashville, 18 July 2023) ‘Bigger Than Me’ (Live From Vancouver, 26 June 2023) ‘Holding On To Heartache’ (Live From Barcelona, 6 October 2023) ‘We Made It’ (Live From Manila, 16 July 2022) ‘Chicago’ (Live From Chicago, 15 June 2023) ‘Fearless’ (Live From Rio, 27 May 2022) ‘Common People’ (Live From Sheffield, 10 November 2023) ‘All This Time / She Is Beauty We Are World Class’ (Live From Munich, 22 October 2023) ‘Walls’ (Live From Buenos Aires, 21 May 2022) ‘Written All Over Your Face’ (Live From Budapest, 15 September 2023) ‘Out Of My System’ (Live From Brisbane, 30 January 2024) ‘Saturdays’ (Live From Paris, 14 October 2023) ‘Silver Tongues’ (Live From Krakow, 10 September 2023)

At time of writing, Tomlinson has shared two huge solo albums since departing from One Direction. His debut album arrived in the firm of 2020’s ‘Walls’, which has sold over 1.5 million copies, and the follow-up was called ‘Faith In The Future’. The latter went to Number One in the UK, Spain and Belgium, and Top 5 in the USA, Australia, New Zealand and across Europe.

Since May last year, Tomlinson has been on his ‘Faith In The Future World Tour’, which hits South America next month for its final leg. From there, the vocalist has a number of festival appearances lined up for the summer. Find remaining tickets to his shows here.

In other Louis Tomlinson news, earlier this week the singer, alongside Courteeners and English Teacher, were among the acts to be honoured at the first-ever Northern Music Awards.

The inaugural ceremony was hosted by the UK’s largest music therapy charity, Nordoff And Robbins and took place at the Albert Hall in Manchester; celebrating northern artists, festivals, venues and industry figures. The event saw Tomlinson named as Artist Of The Year.

#louis tomlinson #louis update #louis tomlinson live #nme #article #april 2024

51 notes · View notes

brf-rumortrackinganon · 9 months

Text

Timeline Part 3: May 2017 - June 2017

Previously: 2015 - April 2017 | Update to April 2015 - April 2017

As I mentioned before, I'll be doing these in smaller chunks because Tumblr keeps crashing when I do longer posts. In this edition, we'll look at Sussex PR from May 2017 to June 2017.

A quick note first. There isn't as many pieces from Meghan's mouthpieces during this window as there were earlier in the year. I suspect either a) Harry caught on to how much Meghan talked to the press so she scaled back to keep working him or b) the articles were handled when Meghan's team was scrubbing the internet.

This is also when we start seeing the Daily Mail start dripping hints about Meghan's dossier.

Here we go!

And as always, if you have updates, corrections, additions, please share!

5/2/2017: Meghan gives an interview to Good Housekeeping. This is the first known "roast chicken" reference.

5/3/2017: Meghan teases that Harry uses caviar pills to cure his male pattern baldness. "He" credits Meghan's holistic wellness.

5/4/2017: Buckingham Palace announces that Prince Philip is retiring after the summer and will stand down from royal duties. Anna Wintour is made a Dame by The Queen.

5/6/2017: The BBC claims that Harry's father is actually James Hewitt.

5/6/2017 - 5/7/2017: Audi Polo Challenge 2017 at Coworth Park. Meghan attends to watch Harry play polo and she is photographed with Mark Dyer. On Day 1 (May 6th), paparazzi catch Harry and Meghan kissing in the car park. On Day 2 (May 7th), William also plays polo and allegedly has Meghan thrown out of Coworth Park for stalking. Also on May 7th, Meghan leaks that she will be attending Pippa's wedding.

5/8/2017: Meghan wears a wedding dress for a movie.

5/9/2017: It's revealed that Meghan ditched Serena William's baby shower to go to London to see Harry.

5/10/2017: Mark Dyer sells his pubs to move out of London. The article is the first confirmation that he/his pubs had hosted Harry and Meghan for dates in the early days of their relationship. Speculation begins that Dyer doesn't like Meghan at all.

5/12/2017: Risque photos from a production Meghan did in 2011 resurface.

5/16/2017: Meghan flies into London for Pippa's wedding, although it isn't reported until May 17th and it isn't confirmed until May 18th.

5/18/2017: Meghan confirms she is in London to attend Pippa's wedding.

5/19/2017: Meghan does a pap walk in leggings and shows off her bum. The photos lead to the headline "Wedding of the Rears" and a front page photo by The Sun. Eugenie gives a tone-deaf interview about her "career" and mentions that she loves "The Crown."

5/20/2017: Pippa's Wedding. Meghan is not invited to the ceremony but is allowed at the after-party. Harry leaves the wedding midday to drive 3 hours round-trip to pick Meghan up from Nottingham Cottage. Rumors begin that Meghan wasn't allowed at all to Pippa's wedding, making Meghan angry, so to keep the peace, Harry left the wedding early and picked Meghan up so they could drive past local press to pretend they were going to the wedding.

5/21/2017: Meghan is papped leaving Kensington Palace early in the morning to fly back to Toronto.

5/22/2017:

Meghan gives an interview to Glamour UK about her fashion sense and style. She gives an infamous quote about how she likes to wear monochromatic neutrals (which later bites her in the butt when she says the royals made her wear only neutrals).

The Daily Mail reveals that Meghan's legal first name is actually Rachel.

Risque photos from Meghan's 2013 film resurface.

Meghan claims she was given rooms at the hotel where Pippa's wedding breakfast was being held and that she stayed away from the service out of respect to the bride. This completely contradicts her earlier story that she had stayed at Kensington Palace and that Harry left the wedding early to collect her for the after-party.

5/24/2017:

Priyanka Chopra gives an interview in which she speaks about Meghan and hints that she and Harry are engaged, saying she hopes for an invite to the wedding.

Meghan leaks that Harry plans to take her to Lesotho.

Sentebale's financial report is published.

5/28/2017: Meghan teases that she and Harry are house-hunting in Norfolk to be near William, Kate, and the children.

5/29/2017: William's GQ issue is published, in which he gives an intervew speaking about Diana's death and new photographs of the Cambridge family (in black and white!) are released.

5/31/2017: Camilla Thurlow (of Love Island) gives an interview about having dated Harry back in 2014 when they were photographed at a nightclub together.

6/4/2017: Harry travels to Singapore for four days to play polo in a fundraiser for Sentebale. He also does AIDS awareness work. The polo game is where he meets and befriends Nacho Figueroa.

6/7/2017: Harry travels to Sydney to promote the 2018 Invictus Games, merching his Meghan bracelet. Also, Pippa and James Matthews are in Perth for their honeymoon at the same time.

6/8/2017: Andrew applies to the UK Intellectual Property Office to trademark his Pitch@Palace initiative.

6/9/2017: Meghan is just like Queen Letizia!

6/10/2017: Meghan the yoga influencer. Meghan gives an airport papwalk in Texas ahead of the ATX Festival, merching her Panama hat, The Economist, and Chanel. Patrick Adams gives an interview to ATX about Meghan's relationship and speculates Harry ought to make a cameo on Suits.

6/11/2017: US Weekly speculates that Harry and Meghan could be getting married soon.

6/14/2017: The Sun recaps Harry's past relationships. They also reveal that Meghan had been invited to the 2016 Invictus Games in Orlando. The Sun claims that Meghan accepted the invitation and attended the games, but she and Harry didn't meet.

(June 14, 2017, is also the Grenfell Tower fire.)

6/16/2017: The Daily Express speculate on what Harry and Meghan's children could like.

6/17/2017:

The royal family celebrates The Queen's Birthday Parade, Trooping the Colour. (Kate and Charlotte wear pink.)

Meghan merches a gold and diamond thumb ring that she claims is from Harry. She also claims that Harry gave her a Cartier Love Bracelet (which we know now is actually from Trevor).

E News reports that Harry flies to Toronto after Trooping festivities to visit Meghan. E News also claims that Harry will propose by the end of the year and that Meghan is preparing to move to London. They later update the article to say Harry's camp denied that he went to Toronto and instead went directly to Malawi/Africa.

6/20/2017:

William and Kate make their first Royal Ascot appearance.

Meghan puts Beatrice and Eugenie on notice that she knows they're trying to take her down.

Rumors of Meghan's attitude/behavior causing problems on the Suits set begin. She brushes it off in an interview saying the cast is upset she keeps ditching them to spend time with Harry and that it'll blow over when she introduces Harry to them.

According to unverified claims by E News, Harry leaves Toronto and flies to Malawi for conservation charity work.

Meghan's character arrives on "The Windsors."

6/21/2017: Harry's Newsweek interview to commemorate the 20th anniversary of Diana's passing, and is part of his Hero Harry PR drive. Infamous snippets:

He's in no rush to get married or propose (clapback to all of Meghan's PR trying to hustle him down the aisle).

No one wants to be king or queen.

He wanted to quit the royal family at one point.

Meghan "communed with the dinosaurs" date night at the Natural History Museum.

"Small window of when people are interested in me before George and Charlotte take over."

6/22/2017: Fleet Street criticism of Harry's Newsweek interview begins. It lasts for about a week.

6/25/2017: Sexy photos from Meghan's 2014 model shoot resurface. Meghan leaks that Harry is making her engagement ring with diamonds and emeralds from Diana's collection and that he is collaborating with the royal jeweller, Harry Collins. She also says that Harry wants to marry sooner rather than later while Philip is still around to attend. (This comes after news that Philip was hospitalized for an infection and immediately causes speculation that Philip is seriously unwell/knocking at death's door.)

6/26/2017: E News claims that Harry's discussion about modernizing the monarchy and his role in the modernized monarchy is him preparing for marriage. This immediately causes speculation amongst royal watchers that he and Meghan had fought about the monarchy's way of charitywork (versus her issues-based campaigning) and Harry's sudden discussions about how the monarchy was modernizing was his attempts to fix it.

Also on 6/26/2017, the Court Circular confirms Harry is in Malawai. It is his only Court Circular appearance between 6/17/2017 (Trooping) and 7/6/2017.

6/27/2017: Meghan flies to London. Harry merches Sandals' Grande St. Lucian resort in a promo article. He stayed at the resort during his Caribbean tour in November 2016.

6/28/2017: Meghan merches her clothes and Channel 4 announces a "Meet the Markles" reality show/docuseries about Meghan's family.

6/29/2017: Meghan merches her clothes again and again tries to be a fashion influencer by plugging the "Meghan Effect." The trailer for Suits Season 7 drops and Charles and Camilla travel to Canada for a 3-day tour.

6/30/2017: Meghan leaks that she and Harry are very private homebodies and prefer to stay at home.

7/1/2017: The Cambridges, Harry, and the Spencers attend a private memorial service at the Althorp estate for Diana. (Meghan is in Toronto filming the 100th episode of Suits, courtesy of Patrick Adams' instagram.) Meghan's relationship history is published. Charles announces plans to throw an enormous 70th birthday party for Camilla.

#timeline #brf #sussexes #pr stunts

69 notes · View notes

colinodonoghue · 5 months

Text

222aghoststory & colinodonoghue1: 🚨 MEET YOUR DUBLIN CAST 🚨 @shonabmx @birdspotting @colinodonoghue1 @thewhitmore will be taking #222AGhostStory to Dublin’s @3olympiatheatre this Summer, 21 June - 11 Aug. For a strictly limited run 🚨Do you dare to join us? Book your tickets now! Link in bio 👻📸 @seamusphoto

Colinodonoghue1: Woohoo!! So excited to be a part of this show!!

[Get your tickets here!!!]

Runaway Entertainment in association with 3Olympia Theatre presents

2:22 - A GHOST STORY

Shona McGarty, Jay McGuiness, Colin O’Donoghue, Laura Whitmore, Announced for The Very Special, Standalone Irish Production

The smash hit play by Danny Robins Makes Irish Debut At 3Olympia Theatre This Summer For a Strictly Limited Run

Directed by Matthew Dunster & Isabel Marr

“A slick, chilling, romp of a play” The Guardian

‘A modern classic’ Sunday Times

Producer Runaway Entertainment is delighted to announce the stellar cast for the critically acclaimed, smash hit, supernatural thriller 2:22 - A Ghost Story opening at Dublin’s 3Olympia Theatre this summer for its debut Irish performances.

Shona McGarty (Eastenders) will play Jenny, Jay McGuiness (The Wanted, BIG! The Musical, Rip It Up), who is currently on the UK tour in 2:22 - A Ghost Story, will play Ben, Colin O'Donoghue (Once Upon A Time, The Tudors, The Right Stuff, The Gray House) will play Sam with Laura Whitmore (Love Island, Finding Joy, Queenie, and Jenny in 2.22: A Ghost Story in her West End debut) stepping into the role of Lauren.

The very special, standalone Irish production, produced for Dublin’s 3Olympia Theatre, will open on Thursday 20th June 2024 with performances until Sunday 11th August 2024 - for a strictly limited run only.

Full list of performances below. Age Suitability: 12+

Tickets priced from €26.50 including booking fee and €1.50 restoration levy on sale now with Ticketmaster Ireland

2:22 - A Ghost Story began in summer 2021 at the Noël Coward Theatre, starring Lily Allen, Julia Chan, Hadley Fraser and Jake Wood, and where it won the WhatsOnStage award for Best Play. It then transferred to the Gielgud Theatre for 10 weeks from 4 December 2021. The production there starring Stephanie Beatriz, James Buckley, Elliot Cowan and Giovanna Fletcher completed its run on 12 February 2022. For the first season at the Criterion (May - September 2022) the cast was Tom Felton, Mandip GIll, Sam Swainsbury and Beatriz Romilly. In late September Laura Whitmore, Matt Willis, Felix Scott and Tamsin Carroll took over.

The box office record-breaking run at the Lyric starring Cheryl, Jake Wood, Scott Karim, and Louise Ford, concluded its run on 23 April. The West End season at the Apollo Theatre starred Sophia Bush, Frankie Bridge, Ricky Champ, Clifford Samuel and Jaime Winstone, and set off on its UK tour in Autumn 2023 with Joe Absolom, Charlene Boyd, Nathaniel Curtis and Louisa Lytton in the cast. Current cast on the UK tour: Vera Chok (Lauren); Jay McGuiness (Ben); George Rainsford (Sam); Fiona Wade (Jenny).

2:22 is written by award-winning writer Danny Robins, creator of the hit BBC podcast The Battersea Poltergeist, and is directed by Matthew Dunster and Isabel Marr; it’s an adrenaline-filled night where secrets emerge and ghosts may or may not appear…

Danny Robins said: ‘I'm really looking forward to seeing how Dublin audiences respond to 2:22 this summer. The tour continues to be a great success and I can't think of a better place to round off the journey in 2024 than here with a brand new cast to be announced soon!'

What do you believe? And do you dare discover the truth?

“THERE’S SOMETHING IN OUR HOUSE. I HEAR IT EVERY NIGHT, AT THE SAME TIME"

Jenny believes her new home is haunted, but her husband Sam isn’t having any of it. They argue with their first dinner guests, old friend Lauren and new partner Ben. Can the dead really walk again? Belief and scepticism clash, but something feels strange and frightening, and that something is getting closer, so they’re going to stay up... until 2:22... and then they’ll know.

2:22 - A Ghost Story features set design by Anna Fleischle, costume design by Cindy Lin, lighting design by Lucy Carter, sound by Ian Dickinson for Autograph Sound and illusions by Chris Fisher. Casting by Matilda James.

2:22 - A Ghost Story is produced by Tristan Baker and Charlie Parsons for Runaway Entertainment, Isobel David and Kater Gordon. [source]

#colin o'donoghue #twitter #instagram #theatre #shona mcgarty #laura whitmore #jay mcguiness #3OLYMPIA THEATRE #Sam #2:22 a ghost story #danny robins #isabel marr #matthew dunster

46 notes · View notes