YouTuber. Filmmaker. VFX artist. Nerd. Threat to democracy.
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Shane Killian retweeted
RIP to the great Walter Koenig, who brilliantly played Psi Cop Bester on all five seasons of Babylon 5. A frightening performance by a wonderful man.
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The entire left-right political spectrum is a lie designed to keep you arguing about the wrong things.
Both "far left" and "far right" share one defining feature: the total subordination of the individual to collective power. The Soviet Politburo murdered kulaks for holding grain. The National Socialists murdered Jews for holding capital. Different scapegoats, identical mechanism: the state deciding who deserves to exist and on what terms.
The conventional model places maximum government on both ends and freedom somewhere in the center. This model is geometrically incoherent. A line with tyranny at both poles and liberty in the middle tells you nothing about the actual variable being measured, which is the concentration of coercive power.
The only axis worth mentioning runs from zero coercion to total coercion. Mao's China and Hitler's Germany sit centimeters apart on that axis. Venezuela under Maduro and Mussolini's Italy were structurally identical in their economic controls, even as their ceremonial aesthetics differed wildly.
What passes for "far right" in media coverage today often means nationalism plus market skepticism, which is state capitalism with a flag. What passes for "far left" means internationalism plus market abolition, which is state capitalism with a committee. You get robbed either way; the paperwork just differs.
The prefix "far" does no analytical work. It signals emotional distance from a speaker's preferred center, nothing more.
A government that controls prices, conscripts labor, and criminalizes dissent is totalitarian. The color of its flag is insignificant.
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Shane Killian retweeted
Robert Reich in 2025: Trump is a fascist dictator for even suggesting that a company be taken over by the government and for telling a CEO what to do.
Robert Reich in 2026: SpaceX and Starlink must be taken over by the government.
Small man, giant fraud.
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I LOVE this! Replacing Photoshop, Premiere Pro, Illustrator, After Effects, and even Word with FREE open-source software!
AI-powered development could deliver us the greatest moment ever for the free software movement!
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I just had to highlight this comment on my latest podcast. He's absolutely got it right. They think that copyright is there to maintain their outdated business model. We saw that with the record labels with mp3s, we saw it with Hollywood with online video, and we're seeing it with the mainstream news media with AI.
Making this twice as worse is the fact that we KNOW the New York Times and many of the others are using ChatGPT for reporting and accounting purposes—even as they sue them for "market dilution"!
If you're an artist or an author or a musician, understand that NONE of these anti-AI cases are for you. They're for the big content cartels, so they can have control over every last bit of our expression!
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And that claim is VERY easily demolished! papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.…
.. and both Complaints also identically argue, in a selective reading of SCOTUS' Harper & Row decision, that "good faith" is a prerequisite to finding fair use, which plaintiffs allege can't be shown in these cases:
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"As the article explains, there is no historical, legal, or logical reason that these or any other supposed measures of bad faith should play a role in the fair use analysis. The bad faith inquiry does not serve the central goal of copyright — to increase public access to new works — and in fact does much to impede this goal. It also needlessly confuses fair use with other areas of law, makes copyright litigation more costly and less predictable, and undermines copyright’s built-in First Amendment protections. Yet bad faith has persisted as an element of fair use for the past several decades, largely because of a failure to appreciate either the lack of historical or legal basis for this doctrinal mistake or its consequences. In an effort to correct this misunderstanding, the article offers the first in-depth exploration of both the historical origins of the bad faith inquiry and the many reasons courts should drop all considerations of bad faith from fair use." papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.…
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What? Is he saying the ONLY purpose for Anthropic making Claude was for it to produce song lyrics???
Counsel turns to Factor 1, starting with transformativeness as defined by Warhol noting that we should look at whether Anthropic's copying for training had a "further purpose". Counsel says no, it was to produce lyrics
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Yeah, the "effect of the outputs." Like "a depiction of Prince," which Goldsmith DID NOT OWN. This is the problem with Warhol: the mere fact that it ended up competing with Goldsmith's photo, even with all of the expressive elements altered or removed, still wasn't fair use!
Plaintiffs say the "better approach" to analyzing copies to look at it "holistically"; the effect of the outputs per, he argues, Warhol.
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I think this is an important thing for people to understand about #Malfoid. It's not that Rowling wrote a bad book series. If she had, the whole thing would have been forgotten.
Indeed, she wrote a spectacular series that succeeded beyond anyone's wildest dreams! And as they say, it's hard to argue with success.
It's a testament to how good a job she did that the Malfoid improvements don't need anything except the gender change, and everything slides in organically.
Rowling wasn't focused on the romantic elements. That's fine. Malfoid is tapping in to what people feel is missing, and very much yearn for. That's also fine.
But here's something to keep in mind: It's been 19 years since the release of Deathly Hallows. As clear as it seems in hindsight, it took almost two decades for the fans to come up with this! So I think we can forgive Rowling for not thinking of this at the time.
But this is also why mythmaking is so important. Shakespeare's Hamlet was written only eleven years after Ur-Hamlet, the play upon which it's based.
It was mythmaking that allowed Shakespeare to make Hamlet, Romeo and Juliet, and so many other plays that magnificently derived the source material into something new.
It's how Cinderella, Little Red Riding Hood, and so many other folk tales developed—just faster, now that we have the Internet.
Without the creativity-sucking insanity that is modern copyright laws, people would be able to take the beloved stories of their childhood and transform them into something new, just as we have throughout the history of mankind.
Malfoid fans talk about the yearning: how we all yearn for love, devotion, commitment, family, and a happy ending. The same yearning that's pushed the development of classic stories for thousands of years.
But there's a different kind of yearning we're seeing now as well: a yearning for the power of myth, the kind that can only come when a derivation of a classic story takes hold in our hearts.
What could the fans have done with Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings, Star Wars, and so many others if we'd truly been able to make them our own? Instead of waiting decades for Hollywood to condescend to resurrect our favorite stories, only to turn them into absolute garbage for the sake of a cash grab.
We shouldn't have to wait until 70 years after Rowling dies to do this. It's amazing to watch this happen now, in real time, and so magnificently.
And that just makes it harder to watch as so many people derisively condemn it as "mere fanfiction."
Maybe the term "fanfiction" should disappear from the vocabulary. Maybe we should make the point by calling it what it truly is: mythmaking.
And it's every bit our right as humans to do.
I actually re-read the books every year. So I know the story very well.
It's how I know that Malfoid works simply works better. There wasn't that much wrong in the original story, but Malfoid is in hindsight such a missed opportunity.
As for the movies. I remember them vividly as well which is how I know that compared to the books, I think they're not all that great. I still like them, to a certain extent. But the books are very different. And the movies just ruin a lot of the characters. I'll only mention one example, this post is already getting to long as it is.
I think one of the main reasons people love Snape is because of Alan Rickman's legendary performance. (I think Paul Darrow could have played an excellent Snape as well though.)
And maybe this is an opinion that differs from a lot of people, but I did not like the ending of Chamber of Secrets (the movie). As a kid I didn't notice, but now...
It is so cringe inducing. It is the literal definition of a redditor's 'and then everybody clapped'. I can't watch the ending anymore. Rest of the movie is perfectly fine though. Just that ending though...
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In the waiting room at the doctors office, on my phone.
What everyone thinks I'm doing: I dunno, whatever they're doing, I guess.
What I'm actually doing: Scrolling and bookmarking all the #Malfoid videos to watch when I'm home!
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Kevin Kelly, NYT best-selling author and founding executive editor of Wired, just filed an amicus brief in In Re: OpenAI arguing that training AI models on copyrighted works is fair use.
As in, NOT theft!
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A song this good needs a good scene to go along with it! Harry and Malfoid are at their lowest here; she became a Death Eater and betrayed him, now he's lashed out with a horrible cutting curse.
The best romances have a gulf between them that seems uncrossable, making it all the more meaningful when they finally do. This sets up that gulf.
I'd LOVE to see some AI genius bring this scene to life!
Sectumsempra
A song from Malfoy to Harry during this iconic moment.
#Malfoid
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