🗣️ 𝐼 𝑤𝑎𝑡𝑐ℎ 𝐶𝑎𝑝𝑡𝑎𝑖𝑛 𝐴𝑚𝑒𝑟𝑖𝑐𝑎 𝑓𝑜𝑟 𝑡ℎ𝑒 𝑝𝑙𝑜𝑡

𝑇ℎ𝑒 𝑝𝑙𝑜𝑡 :

more funny Bucky faces.

Sebastian Stan as Bucky Barnes aka The Winter Soldier

Exclusive Outtake from Captain America: The Winter Soldier

@homoeroticfisticuffs asked for a way to find all of these outtakes so I'm gonna post this. These are all I have posted so far. I only have 5 left unreleased.

[transcript: Cameron Klein, seated: I’m not going to launch those ships. Captain’s orders. Brock Rumlow, draws firearm: Move away from your station. Klein closes his eyes. Sharon Carter crosses the room, her weapon raised to aim at Rumlow: Like he said… Captain’s orders. Uniformed security teams (presumably Hydra) and jacket-and-button-up office workers all draw weapons in a stand-off. Rumlow: You picked the wrong side, Agent [Carter]. Carter: Depends on where you’re standing.

/end transcript]

I want to share this analysis of this scene from cakeisnotpie

Because we are seeing that right now with the world situation and the fight against the Orange Fucker and Muskrat. All kinds of people gumming up the works, including people within the government itself, saying “no, I’m not doing that.” and many of them will be fired or removed. But people are digging in their heels for the small moment of mercy it will grant us.

May everyone with the power to resist find the will and courage to do so. Be like Cameron.

Oh.

OH.

I’m crying @comicgeekscomicgeek because I needed to hear this right now. To see my own words, to know that someone read the thought I shouted into the void and remembered. Thank you for being my Sharon Carter and reminding me that I do have a choice.. there’s always a choice.

So, Cap’s orders, I’m not taking my pronouns out of my email signature or pulling Nimona from my class. I can’t change anything, but I can plant myself like a tree, let my students take shelter behind me, and say, “no, you move.”

OH MY GOD??????

THEY WERE GATEKEEPING IT FOR 10 YEARS

'𝚃𝚑𝚞𝚗𝚍𝚎𝚛𝚋𝚘𝚕𝚝𝚜*'

Hahahahahaha Finn here is too cute😭

Ouugghggh i am deeply and inconsolably unwell ….

+ the fact that in the movie the first interaction doesn’t come off as hostile even in the slightest like the script calls for… he knows he really really tried…. oughrgrhvrh

So I see you all are exhausted by streaming services effectively recreating cable. I see you’re all tired of ads. Pirating is a great alternative, but I have another fantastic option for you all!

I live in Seattle. And in Seattle we have America’s largest physical media store, Scarecrow Video. They are a non-profit that has pretty much any film or tv show you can imagine. Like, everything. So much so that one of our local cinemas does a program with them called “Unstreamable” where they show a film from Scarecrow’a archive that you can’t access anywhere online. It’s a bit overwhelming to go to their store, which is two levels of every program under the sun.

ANYWAY, I bring this up because they recently started a Rent-by-Mail program. It’s pretty similar to what Netflix used to do. You can rent up to six titles (barring their super rare stuff and pornos) and they will ship it to you, then you return it in the included pre-paid envelope.

Why does this rock? Sure, you still have to pay money, BUT you are supporting a non-profit that is dedicated to preserving media instead of some corporation looking for endless profit. They can also expand your palette with their vast selection. And if you have a favorite piece of media, you never have to worry about it disappearing! All their stuff is there in perpetuity.

So this is all to say, now that Scarecrow has expanded their reach beyond the Greater Seattle Area, I implore you to check them out. If you don’t want to rent right now, the could always use donations to keep them afloat.

You can check out their catalogue HERE!

I've been here!! But holy shit a rent by mail service. Like how Netflix started.

Here in Portland we have Movie Madness which isn't physically as massive but it is very similar and doubles as a prop museum, with heavy focus on sci fi and horror!

They have an entire Bigfoot section, because Seattle

Scarecrow is fucking amazing, and they are also currently in danger of having to shut down their physical location if they don't get enough money by the end of the year.

I've lived in the Seattle area for just about my entire life. Over the decades, I've seen this region change and shift and grow—sometimes in good ways, other times in very bad ways. The area I grew up in is nearly unrecognizable. All of the places I used to go as a child and teenager have been bulldozed and built over. My childhood home and the adjacent grove were torn down years ago and replaced with condos.

But Scarecrow is still there. Through all the changes and the bullshit, Scarecrow is still there, just like they have been for years. I've gone to Scarecrow looking for everything from anime to sci-fi movies to a 1980s Czech stop-motion adaptation of Alice in Wonderland, and they have always had it on their shelves, no matter how old or obscure it is. This place is truly amazing, and they're one of the last bastions of physical media I know of.

I know times are fucking awful for everyone right now, and I am not here to pressure or guilt anyone into donating. But if you happen to have some spare money that you want to put to a good cause, I think this cause is very, very deserving. They also accept physical donations (e.g. DVDs, video players, etc) and are always looking for volunteers. You can find all the information on ways you can help them here.

full vid. needed this on my blog

Interior of the Don Bosco Chapel in Brasilia by Rick Ligthelm on Flickr

If anyone wants to know why every tech company in the world right now is clamoring for AI like drowned rats scrabbling to board a ship, I decided to make a post to explain what's happening.

(Disclaimer to start: I'm a software engineer who's been employed full time since 2018. I am not a historian nor an overconfident Youtube essayist, so this post is my working knowledge of what I see around me and the logical bridges between pieces.)

Okay anyway. The explanation starts further back than what's going on now. I'm gonna start with the year 2000. The Dot Com Bubble just spectacularly burst. The model of "we get the users first, we learn how to profit off them later" went out in a no-money-having bang (remember this, it will be relevant later). A lot of money was lost. A lot of people ended up out of a job. A lot of startup companies went under. Investors left with a sour taste in their mouth and, in general, investment in the internet stayed pretty cooled for that decade. This was, in my opinion, very good for the internet as it was an era not suffocating under the grip of mega-corporation oligarchs and was, instead, filled with Club Penguin and I Can Haz Cheezburger websites.

Then around the 2010-2012 years, a few things happened. Interest rates got low, and then lower. Facebook got huge. The iPhone took off. And suddenly there was a huge new potential market of internet users and phone-havers, and the cheap money was available to start backing new tech startup companies trying to hop on this opportunity. Companies like Uber, Netflix, and Amazon either started in this time, or hit their ramp-up in these years by shifting focus to the internet and apps.

Now, every start-up tech company dreaming of being the next big thing has one thing in common: they need to start off by getting themselves massively in debt. Because before you can turn a profit you need to first spend money on employees and spend money on equipment and spend money on data centers and spend money on advertising and spend money on scale and and and

But also, everyone wants to be on the ship for The Next Big Thing that takes off to the moon.

So there is a mutual interest between new tech companies, and venture capitalists who are willing to invest $$$ into said new tech companies. Because if the venture capitalists can identify a prize pig and get in early, that money could come back to them 100-fold or 1,000-fold. In fact it hardly matters if they invest in 10 or 20 total bust projects along the way to find that unicorn.

But also, becoming profitable takes time. And that might mean being in debt for a long long time before that rocket ship takes off to make everyone onboard a gazzilionaire.

But luckily, for tech startup bros and venture capitalists, being in debt in the 2010's was cheap, and it only got cheaper between 2010 and 2020. If people could secure loans for ~3% or 4% annual interest, well then a $100,000 loan only really costs $3,000 of interest a year to keep afloat. And if inflation is higher than that or at least similar, you're still beating the system.

So from 2010 through early 2022, times were good for tech companies. Startups could take off with massive growth, showing massive potential for something, and venture capitalists would throw infinite money at them in the hopes of pegging just one winner who will take off. And supporting the struggling investments or the long-haulers remained pretty cheap to keep funding.

You hear constantly about "Such and such app has 10-bazillion users gained over the last 10 years and has never once been profitable", yet the thing keeps chugging along because the investors backing it aren't stressed about the immediate future, and are still banking on that "eventually" when it learns how to really monetize its users and turn that profit.

The pandemic in 2020 took a magnifying-glass-in-the-sun effect to this, as EVERYTHING was forcibly turned online which pumped a ton of money and workers into tech investment. Simultaneously, money got really REALLY cheap, bottoming out with historic lows for interest rates.

Then the tide changed with the massive inflation that struck late 2021. Because this all-gas no-brakes state of things was also contributing to off-the-rails inflation (along with your standard-fare greedflation and price gouging, given the extremely convenient excuses of pandemic hardships and supply chain issues). The federal reserve whipped out interest rate hikes to try to curb this huge inflation, which is like a fire extinguisher dousing and suffocating your really-cool, actively-on-fire party where everyone else is burning but you're in the pool. And then they did this more, and then more. And the financial climate followed suit. And suddenly money was not cheap anymore, and new loans became expensive, because loans that used to compound at 2% a year are now compounding at 7 or 8% which, in the language of compounding, is a HUGE difference. A $100,000 loan at a 2% interest rate, if not repaid a single cent in 10 years, accrues to $121,899. A $100,000 loan at an 8% interest rate, if not repaid a single cent in 10 years, more than doubles to $215,892.

Now it is scary and risky to throw money at "could eventually be profitable" tech companies. Now investors are watching companies burn through their current funding and, when the companies come back asking for more, investors are tightening their coin purses instead. The bill is coming due. The free money is drying up and companies are under compounding pressure to produce a profit for their waiting investors who are now done waiting.

You get enshittification. You get quality going down and price going up. You get "now that you're a captive audience here, we're forcing ads or we're forcing subscriptions on you." Don't get me wrong, the plan was ALWAYS to monetize the users. It's just that it's come earlier than expected, with way more feet-to-the-fire than these companies were expecting. ESPECIALLY with Wall Street as the other factor in funding (public) companies, where Wall Street exhibits roughly the same temperament as a baby screaming crying upset that it's soiled its own diaper (maybe that's too mean a comparison to babies), and now companies are being put through the wringer for anything LESS than infinite growth that Wall Street demands of them.

Internal to the tech industry, you get MASSIVE wide-spread layoffs. You get an industry that used to be easy to land multiple job offers shriveling up and leaving recent graduates in a desperately awful situation where no company is hiring and the market is flooded with laid-off workers trying to get back on their feet.

Because those coin-purse-clutching investors DO love virtue-signaling efforts from companies that say "See! We're not being frivolous with your money! We only spend on the essentials." And this is true even for MASSIVE, PROFITABLE companies, because those companies' value is based on the Rich Person Feeling Graph (their stock) rather than the literal profit money. A company making a genuine gazillion dollars a year still tears through layoffs and freezes hiring and removes the free batteries from the printer room (totally not speaking from experience, surely) because the investors LOVE when you cut costs and take away employee perks. The "beer on tap, ping pong table in the common area" era of tech is drying up. And we're still unionless.

Never mind that last part.

And then in early 2023, AI (more specifically, Chat-GPT which is OpenAI's Large Language Model creation) tears its way into the tech scene with a meteor's amount of momentum. Here's Microsoft's prize pig, which it invested heavily in and is galivanting around the pig-show with, to the desperate jealousy and rapture of every other tech company and investor wishing it had that pig. And for the first time since the interest rate hikes, investors have dollar signs in their eyes, both venture capital and Wall Street alike. They're willing to restart the hose of money (even with the new risk) because this feels big enough for them to take the risk.

Now all these companies, who were in varying stages of sweating as their bill came due, or wringing their hands as their stock prices tanked, see a single glorious gold-plated rocket up out of here, the likes of which haven't been seen since the free money days. It's their ticket to buy time, and buy investors, and say "see THIS is what will wring money forth, finally, we promise, just let us show you."

To be clear, AI is NOT profitable yet. It's a money-sink. Perhaps a money-black-hole. But everyone in the space is so wowed by it that there is a wide-spread and powerful conviction that it will become profitable and earn its keep. (Let's be real, half of that profit "potential" is the promise of automating away jobs of pesky employees who peskily cost money.) It's a tech-space industrial revolution that will automate away skilled jobs, and getting in on the ground floor is the absolute best thing you can do to get your pie slice's worth.

It's the thing that will win investors back. It's the thing that will get the investment money coming in again (or, get it second-hand if the company can be the PROVIDER of something needed for AI, which other companies with venture-back will pay handsomely for). It's the thing companies are terrified of missing out on, lest it leave them utterly irrelevant in a future where not having AI-integration is like not having a mobile phone app for your company or not having a website.

So I guess to reiterate on my earlier point:

Drowned rats. Swimming to the one ship in sight.

Hi, Tumblr. It’s Tumblr. We’re working on some things that we want to share with you. 

AI companies are acquiring content across the internet for a variety of purposes in all sorts of ways. There are currently very few regulations giving individuals control over how their content is used by AI platforms. Proposed regulations around the world, like the European Union’s AI Act, would give individuals more control over whether and how their content is utilized by this emerging technology. We support this right regardless of geographic location, so we’re releasing a toggle to opt out of sharing content from your public blogs with third parties, including AI platforms that use this content for model training. We’re also working with partners to ensure you have as much control as possible regarding what content is used.

Here are the important details:

If you have concerns, please read through the Help Center doc linked above and contact us via Support if you still have questions.