“Please save me! I’ll do anything for you!” “Then perish.”
“Hell is empty, and all the devils are here.”
“Will you fight? Or will you perish like a dog?”
“…Then I shall face God, and walk backwards into hell.”
“…I’d strike the sun if it insulted me.”
-All of these are from shitposts, regrettably not from literary classics.
Shakespeare’s ghost is simultaneously thrilled that these happened and irate that he didn’t create them
Except for the one that he did.
ARIEL:
Not a soul But felt a fever of the mad and play’d Some tricks of desperation. All but mariners Plunged in the foaming brine and quit the vessel, Then all afire with me: the king’s son, Ferdinand, With hair up-staring,–then like reeds, not hair,– Was the first man that leap’d; cried, ‘Hell is empty And all the devils are here.’
–The Tempest, Act I, Scene 2 by William Shakespeare.
On June 20, the EU’s legislative committee will vote on the new Copyright directive,
and decide whether it will include the controversial “Article 13”
(automated censorship of anything an algorithm identifies as a copyright
violation) and “Article 11” (no linking to news stories without paid
permission from the site).
These proposals will make starting new internet companies effectively
impossible – Google, Facebook, Twitter, Apple, and the other US giants
will be able to negotiate favourable rates and build out the
infrastructure to comply with these proposals, but no one else will. The
EU’s regional tech success stories – say Seznam.cz,
a successful Czech search competitor to Google – don’t have
$60-100,000,000 lying around to build out their filters, and lack the
leverage to extract favorable linking licenses from news sites.
If Articles 11 and 13 pass, American companies will be in charge of
Europe’s conversations, deciding which photos and tweets and videos can
be seen by the public, and who may speak.
The MEP Julia Reda has written up the state of play
on the vote, and it’s very bad. Both left- and right-wing parties have
backed this proposal, including (incredibly) the French Front National,
whose Youtube channel was just deleted by a copyright filter of the sort they’re about to vote to universalise.
So far, the focus in the debate has been on the intended consequences of
the proposals: the idea that a certain amount of free expression and
competition must be sacrificed to enable rightsholders to force Google
and Facebook to share their profits.
But the unintended – and utterly foreseeable – consequences are even
more important. Article 11’s link tax allows news sites to decide who
gets to link to them, meaning that they can exclude their critics. With
election cycles dominated by hoaxes and fake news, the right of a news
publisher to decide who gets to criticise it is carte blanche to lie and
spin.
Article 13’s copyright filters are even more vulnerable to attack: the proposals contain no penalties for false claims of copyright ownership, but they do
mandate that the filters must accept copyright claims in bulk, allowing
rightsholders to upload millions of works at once in order to claim
their copyright and prevent anyone from posting them.
That opens the doors to all kinds of attacks. The obvious one is that
trolls might sow mischief by uploading millions of works they don’t hold
the copyright to, in order to prevent others from quoting them: the
works of Shakespeare, say, or everything ever posted to Wikipedia, or my
novels, or your family photos.
More insidious is the possibility of targeted strikes during crisis:
stock-market manipulators could use bots to claim copyright over news
about a company, suppressing its sharing on social media; political
actors could suppress key articles during referendums or elections;
corrupt governments could use arms-length trolls to falsely claim
ownership of footage of human rights abuses.
It’s asymmetric warfare: falsely claiming a copyright will be easy
(because the rightsholders who want this system will not tolerate
jumping through hoops to make their claims) and instant (because
rightsholders won’t tolerate delays when their new releases are being
shared online at their moment of peak popularity). Removing a false
claim of copyright will require that a human at an internet giant looks
at it, sleuths out the truth of the ownership of the work, and adjusts
the database – for millions of works at once. Bots will be able to
pollute the copyright databases much faster than humans could possibly
clear it.
I spoke with Wired UK’s KG Orphanides about this, and their excellent article
on the proposal is the best explanation I’ve seen of the uses of these
copyright filters to create unstoppable disinformation campaigns.
There’s pretty detailed information about the law from the above-mentioned Julia Reda here.
This site gives info on the 10 remaining ‘undecided’ MEPs, and contact information. (Oddly, it seems to be a different list from this other set of undecided MEPs on the committee.) I don’t get the impression any MEPs outside the Legal Affairs committee have any influence at this point in the legal process.
There’s a gadget on this page that will apparently identify your MEP and set up a call between your phone number and them.
I admit I’m not sure what I can say that would make the Conservative MEP ‘representing’ me prioritise things like artistic expression and access over the wealth of giant tech and media companies, but I can try.
Þrymskviða. Compressed down, it goes like this: A Jotun steal Thor’s hammer Mjolnir and says he’ll only give it back if he’s given Freyja to marry, as she is the most beautiful goddess in all of existence. The gods argue over what to do for a while before Heimdall suggests they stick a bridal veil on Thor, says he’s Freyja, and pretend they’re giving Freyja (Thor) to the Jotun to marry so Thor can get close enough to the Jotun to steal Mjolnir back.
Now typically when people talk about this story, it’s with an element of disbelieving comedy. “Oh my god, who would believe Thor was a woman, let alone Freyja, the most beautiful goddess in the world?”
But I propose a different way to look at the story.
See, different cultures have different beauty standards. Modern western beauty standards may be a delicate hourglass supermodel, but that’s not always been the case. Greece, for instance, depicted Aphrodite like this:
Yeah. A Greek sculptor was told “sculpt the goddess of beauty” and they thought “alright, fat rolls, that’s where beauty is at, let’s do this”. And everybody else apparently agreed with them, because up went the statue. Beauty is a malleable concept is what I’m getting at.
Now this is where it becomes relevant that Freyja is not just the goddess of love, sex, and beauty. She’s also the goddess of war. And the righteous dead. Goddess of war in the same Viking warrior culture that gave us shield maidens, women who wielded seven fucking kilogram (15 lbs) shields in combat.
Sooooo … when the Norse storytellers said, “This is Freyja, goddess of war and the righteous dead, who rode giant murder cats into battle, she is the most beautiful goddess in the world”, I’m guessing they weren’t thinking of her as some willowy waif. No, I’m guessing they probably thought more along the lines of:
190 cm (6′3″), broad shoulders, built like a brick shithouse, with a jawline like whoa, and fully capable of murdering everything in her path.
Put in that context, the story of Thor dressing up as Freyja sounds less like a punchline about “how could anyone ever mistake Thor in a veil for Freyja?” and becomes more a case of “ohhhhhhhhhhh, no wonder all the gods thought this plan would work”.
It did, by the way. The plan totally worked.
YES THIS
Loki and Thor; “Hey Freyja, so funny story…”
Freyja, flexing; “I will crush both your heads like eggs.”
Loki and Thor; “…and that story is that never mind we’ll figure it out ourselves haha!”
I think of it this way: Freya and Freyr are twins, yeah?
And everybody just KNOWS that well duh of course Freyr is this big ol’ farm boy. What are you thinking??? Why wouldn’t he be?? It’s the only thing that makes SENSE, ok?
And people just… like… pass over the fact that they’re twins? And a lot of twins don’t really resemble each other, but a lot of them really, REALLY do. And a lot of the families that have been generations on generations of farm folk and hard labor working class folk… uh… don’t always pass on the “little dainty girl” type of genetics. Unless they also get passed on to the boys.
Nah.
Instead you get both BIG BEEFY FARM BOY and OMG THAT ONE BABUSHKA COULD PUT PAUL BUNYAN TO SHAME coming from the same source.
You know the ones I’m talking about.
Freyja can squat 1500 pounds CONFIRMED
using only one leg
While petting her cats with the other hand
using only one
legwhile petting her cats
with the other hand
^Haiku^bot^9. I detect haikus with 5-7-5 format. Sometimes I make mistakes.
In response to @radioactivepeasant‘s post on how humans are the fair folk of the universe…
Never let yourself be lured into one of their “nightclubs.” A place where delight turns to mania, they say that humans spend eternity dancing beneath blinding lights in a constant state of frenzy. Once you have entered, they will not allow you to leave.
Be warned. Time moves strangely when in the Human world. Keep an eye on the hours, else you’ll find you’ve gone through an entire day in a handful of minutes. As the chilling Human saying goes; Time Flies when you’re Having Fun
Do not play their games. Humans are known tricksters and their “games,” while first appearing innocent, can quickly become deadly.
Be wary when seeking help from a human. While it is true that many are benign and will not accept payment for their aid, most will require equal recompense for their time.
on that note, Humans do not enjoy being in debt to another. Not accepting payment for services rendered will insult and anger them.
If you are in the company of humans, be cautious when leaving. They will try and persuade you to stay. Be wary of the phrase “just one more…” You will not be seen again.
Tread with caution when interacting with humans. They are fickle and vain creatures. Be wary when seeking their favour, for it is for their own enjoyment that they indulge you.
apparently the key to happiness is to have a long and shitty winter
and if you can’t have that, surround yourself with deadly wildlife
or maybe these countries have free or reasonably priced health care, good education and costs nothing or very little, marriage equality(not all do however on the list but they at least aren’t extremely homophobic either), decent minimum wages, stable economies, low crime rates and so forth and also deadly wildlife because we protect our environment
Artisan Scribbles 