!neolibs !chuds

What do people think? Generic slop? Well-crafted gorefest? I've seen the first one and am half way through the second.

@KatserKitty1987 (RIP) said in an old thread:

The first one was overly long and exceedingly tiring. The sets were all lit like a play and the gore is a level or extreme to where it wraps around to not being distributing. It's a shame as the killer is actually pretty cool and interesting it's just that nothing else is.

I think the clown is cool, I like his mischievous smile. The women he kills are always pretty 1D and I'm sad when I see their boobs because I want to see them but not covered in blood while they're screaming.

https://t.co/v7jS1B7cJC pic.twitter.com/6q61TihxFT

— sascha (@SaschaAmato) October 30, 2024

A curator at a museum in New York City has discovered a previously unknown waltz written by Frédéric Chopin, the first time that a new piece of work by the Polish composer has been found in nearly 100 years.

The waltz, written on a small manuscript measuring about 4 inches by 5 inches, was first discovered by curator Robinson McClellan in 2019, who then sought outside expert help, according to a statement from the Morgan Library & Museum on Monday.

"He found it peculiar that he could not think of any waltzes by Chopin that matched the measures on the page," reads the statement.

"Chopin famously wrote in 'small forms,' but this work, lasting about one minute, is shorter than any other waltz by him," adds the statement.

"It is nevertheless a complete piece, showing the kind of 'tightness' that we expect from a finished work by the composer."

McClellan asked Chopin expert Jeffrey Kallberg, associate dean for arts and letters at the University of Pennsylvania, to help authenticate the waltz. "Extensive research points to the strong likelihood that the piece is by Chopin," according to the statement.

This research included analysis by paper conservators who found that the paper and ink match those that Chopin normally used. This dated the manuscript to the 1830s, a museum spokeswoman told CNN Tuesday.

"The penmanship matches other examples of Chopin's handwriting," said the spokeswoman. "The score contains fingerings and dynamic markings, suggesting that Chopin thought the piece might be performed someday."

The Morgan Library & Museum believes that the fact that the manuscript is so small could mean that it was meant to be a gift that the recipient would have kept in an autograph album.

Chopin was known to sign manuscripts that were gifts, but this one is unsigned, which the museum says suggests that he ultimately decided against giving it away.

"This newly discovered waltz expands our understanding of Chopin as a composer and opens new questions for scholars to consider regarding when he wrote it and for whom it was intended," said McClellan in the statement.

"To hear this work for the first time will be an exciting moment for everyone in the world of classical piano."

The museum spokeswoman said that the work "offers a look into Chopin's creative process," particularly given its short length and "some interesting dynamic markings."

"We can see Chopin trying things that would become hallmarks of his style," she added, highlighting the fact that the manuscript would have been written when Chopin was in his early 20s.

The discovery of an unknown piece of work by Chopin has not happened since the late 1930s, according to the museum.

"Our extensive music collection is defined by handwritten examples of the creative process and it is thrilling to have uncovered a new and unknown work by such a renowned composer," said Colin B. Bailey, museum director, in the statement.

The Polish composer was born in 1810 and was best known for solo piano pieces.

Chopin died in Paris, France, at the age of just 39. He's one of Poland's most famous sons, and his name adorns the airport serving the capital Warsaw, as well as parks, streets, benches and buildings.

His works and image are ubiquitous across the central European country, and his residences bear unmissable plaques. Busts and statues of his likeness are dotted across several major cities.

Even his heart, preserved in alcohol after his death in 1849 is sealed into a wall of Warsaw's Holy Cross Church.

@Strachmistrz have you visited this Church?

But recent suggestions about Chopin's private life collided awkwardly with Poland's staunchly conservative traditions – and caused some to question whether the story of Chopin that Poles are told from a young age is true.

According to a Swiss radio documentary released in 2020, the composer had relationships with men, and those relationships were left out of history by successive historians and biographers; a potentially thorny charge in one of Europe's worst countries for LGBTQ rights.

!Classics what's your favorite waltz?

Darklands Series

1 - Darklands LP Part I

2 - Darklands LP Part II: Charles Bronson Edition

3 - Darklands LP III: Nuns and Coins

4 - Darklands LP Ep IV: Introduction to Equipment & Combat

5 - Darklands LP Part V: We finally briefly go out into the dark lands

6 - Darklands LP VI: We actually start a quest!

7 - Darklands LP VII: We reach our destination

8 - Darklands LP VIII: Raubritter confrontation & learning how combat works

9 - Darklands LP IX: I'm not giving you my goddarn alchemical materials

Miners working in the Erzgebirge. I forgot to include this in the last episode am using this as a segue from the last episode.

Hunt for Formulas

A few of the more important cities have universities, the same ones that had one in real life. There's one in Leipzig but we're heading to Bohemia anyway so let's go to Prague. Charles University was established in 1348 by the Holy Roman Emperor Charles IV as the first university in Central Europe. There was like, I dunno, 8 universities in Europe at this point and most were in Italy, so this was a really big deal. About 80% of the students were foreign as it was the only university in the eastern half of Europe. The Hussite revolution of 1415 that wracked the whole Empire began here. It's one of the oldest universities still operating today.

To save time, we'll take a boat up the Elbe. One criticism I hear of the game is that the cities are all interchangable. Obviously that's a really tarded observation because the city couldn't be nearly this complex if you made them unique. And there are some subtle differences that you'll pick up on if you know your history. Like notice here that the castle is the Hradcany.

Academia is full of uncooperative peepeeheads just like in our time. It'll be tough to find someone who can navigate their bullshit. One person in the party is the "leader". This is the person who will take on any solo task that doesn't depend on the whole party. For almost the entire game up to this point I've left Sasha as the leader because almost all of those tasks involved talking to people and she's the charismatic one. But these university students are a bunch of spergs so we have to deal with them on their own level. Yuna is perceptive and has 29 in Speak Latin, but Redactor has the same skill and slightly more when we add up the other two attributes.

I'll get Thunderbolt. It's explosives. (I'll describe these in detail below.)

After that it was night time so we had to leave. Let's try this again tomorrow. Wow! Redactor pulled it off again. What to get now? Noxious Aroma and Eyeburn are fairly useful in combat. (These are the two potions that evil alchemist used against our guys in the last fight.) Unfortunately the formulas they're selling are for the best versions of it, so they're probably way too hard to make until Redactor gets extremely good at alchemy. So we'll get Black Cloud. This isn't used in combat, but in a lot of dangerous situations it lets you create a smokescreen. Now that Redactor has 5 formulas it's more likely that other alchemists will trade formulas with him.

Having gone through all that ordeal of finding a university and convincing them to sell me a formula, I remember that actually the regular local alchemist will also sell them in any relatively big city. Well at least you guys got to hear the university music. Let's take a look at our formulas. (No I will not call them "formulae".) "Mystical number" is the difficulty. 112 is fairly easy. There's only three ingredients which means it's very likely I'll find both of them soon. (BTW: "Pitchblende" is a uranium ore. Marie Curie first discovered uranium in pitchblende from the Erzgebirge.) Looking at my other formulas I see that actually I've collected all the ingredients needed to make Quickmove, so I could have demonstrated alchemy to you guys a whole episode ago. Oh well. I'll do it now.

Alchemy

We could just stay at the inn and do our alchemy here, but some of these potions will blow up in your face if you make a mistake. If that happens I don't want it to happen in the middle of Prague. So we go camp just outside the city. Quickmove temporarily increases agility, which doesn't help much in combat but is very important in a lot of other situations, like any time you need to climb. Let's look at that equation:

• +100 - Bonus for making just one

• +18ps - The quality of my philosopher's stone. This is something you keep permanently that helps you do alchemy. I picked up a cheap one at some point. Getting a really high level one is expensive and a pain in the butt since you have to deal with the university.

• +42int - I hope this is obvious.

• +44alch - My alchemy skill

• -101mn - The mystical number of the formula.

We got enough ingredients to make more than one, so let's do that. Generally you mix up potions in big batches. It gets increasingly difficult after the third one though. If we try to make 4, that +100 bonus turns into +50 and our chance of success drops to 53%. At a batch of 6 it's a +33 bonus, and so on. So obviously we'll make 3. Nice. That's what I like to see. I'll actually stay here and make a few more batches. You can sell the potions for a profit. Late in the game you can make obscene amounts of money this way, but late in the game you've already got all the money you'll ever need.

More Wandering

At this point I think we're pretty well ready to get into mid-game content with one exception. We really need Redactor to make some potions for us because we're going to run into trouble that you don't want to face with just steel. Also the game will tell us when we're ready. So I'm going to do more wandering, focusing on learning new formulas and stockpiling alchemical components.

We run across a rural monastery. Let's go in. They usually have a lot to offer.

Well these guys seem like peepees. Monasteries run the spectrum from honest to wicked. (Reading the game's data files, there was going to be crypto-Satanic monasteries where if you spend the night they send a Satanic nun or monk to try to seduce one of your party. If they fail a Virtue check they... do things that you're not supposed to outside of marriage. I'm pretty sure that's one of the things that got cut just because they were so far behind schedule.)

This is not my kind of monastacism!

I can't complain about their library though. Books can't be corrupted. We pick up St. Hubert. He was a bishop in the Ardennes in the 600s-700s who is famous for spending a lot of time hunting and just hanging out in the forest with the animals and converting the people around Liege. In the game, he'll help us out a lot. If we run into an encounter in the wilderness that we want to run away from (this will happen) our Woodwise and Stealth skills will be tested. Even Nathan only has 24 in each.

I wandered over to St. Joachimsthal and it definitely wasn't just an excuse to give you a history lesson. It only has a couple thousand inhabitants now, but it was a boom town after the discovery of silver in 1512. Coins were minted called Joachimstaler. This was soon abbreviated as thaler and evolved into the word "dollar". Agricola, who revolutionized metallurgy and geology and pushed alchemy toward being science instead of bullshit did much of his studies here.

Wolves! With our equipment we should be pretty well immune to their attacks, but they're always a little scary. In Darklands if you lose a battle most opponents will take all your money and equipment but leave you alive. Wolves are one of the exceptions. If you lose they'll eat one of your people. I'm glad our New World wolves are nicer. Wolves attacking humans is pretty much unheard of in North America.

Notice how they've landed a 1 point and a 2 point hit on us. That indicates they're not penetrating our armor.

They're not a big threat during the day though. One of the great things in this game that they really follow through on is the day/night cycle. Before electricity a lot of your life was dictated by where the sun was. The Darklands are much more dangerous when it's literally dark.

Kutna Hora, the other important center of silver mining in Bohemia. It played an important role in the Hussite Wars in the early 1400s. Actually I'm pissed because it's depicted in the game as being a small town when in real life it was a major city in this era. If Arnold Hendrick were still around I'd give him an earful.

I guess I'll have to pay. It would be a pretty major sin to get in a physical fight with a bishop even if he is in the wrong.

We go east and spend some time in Moravia. We can get good bows there. Thrown weapons are just not going to be viable going forward because they only have 2-3 penetration. I get Sasha and Yuna longbows. These have 6 penetration, which cuts through any armor an ordinary human wears.

Well we can't let this happen. This aggression cannot go unchecked. It's time to draw a line in the sand.

A surprisingly easy fight. Sasha got beat up pretty bad because she's not strong enough to wear the same level of armor as everyone else. I'm gonna have to figure out what to do about that. I might have to actually do some math and see how much weight we can cut by losing the longbow and maybe even giving her a lighter weapon. I don't need her out there slaughtering the enemy, the rest of my party can do that, but I do need her to stay in the fight. If she gets knocked out there's just 3 of us and we'll get swamped by whatever enemy we're facing.

Castle

Eventually my wandering takes me to the castle of Zossen in Brandenburg.

Sasha tries to figure out if the local lord is a good guy by talking to people but can't figure out anything definitive.

Yuna prays to St. Dorothea of Montau, a native to these parts who lived a pretty hard life. She reveals to her what this guy's true nature is. Woodchippers haven't been invented yet, but we all know what needs to happen to male feminists.

How are we going to get in? We could try to bribe someone but they might just con us. Nathan is very agile (and we could give him one of those Quickmove potions we made to increase his agility even more) but there's always risk there. Yuna could implore St. Reinold, the patron of stonemasons to help.

I'm gonna pick the last one just because even after all these years I've never done this yet. Nice. Now we're going to get into an extended combat, like the raubritter castles but bigger.

Oh wait, actually we won't. We happened to climb into the room where the castle lord is so this will be a quick fight to the death.

Whoa... -17... I think that's the single worst hit we've ever taken so far.

It gets pretty chaotic. Yuna is knocked out but the lord is taken down at about the same time. These guys were wearing brigandine armor, level 4, same as chainmail, so it wasn't easy, but we prevailed.

Zossen turns from a castle into an ordinary village. Let's stop in and see if we can heal our wounds here. Hey wait, wtf, they're Satanic??? Maybe they did need some brutality to keep them in line. We'll mend our wounds and then come back and massacre them.

More Wandering

Eventually we come back to Magdeburg. Everyone loves us in Saxony so it's good to be back home. It's a good place to sell off some of our loot, taking advantage of the bonus from our local reputation.

I bounce around the region for a while doing various boring things. We had about 50 florins worth of dead people's armor to sell off and we invest most of that into alchemical components for Redactor. We concentrate on stuff we need for the formulas we already know, but get a little of everything in case we learn something new. We can afford to now. Also we do some more training.

We've now collected the ingredients for every formula Redactor knows. I was a bit surprised by this. We must have gotten lucky with what happened to be available in the towns we visited. Let's go camp out in the woods and start cooking up some potions.

Alchemy - Mass Production

Of the 6 formulas that Redactor knows, we've made a lot of Black Cloud and Quickmove. We'll only need to use these on rare occasions and we already have more than enough. As for the other 4, all of these are very useful in combat. I'll make at least a few of each. One thing to watch out for is that some of them use the components. So for example I don't want to use up all my orpiment making Fleadust and not have any left to make Thunderbolt. For each formula I'll explain what it does in game and what the ingredients are, because even I don't know what the heck half of these are. After all, this is edutainment. (It's been decades since I took chemistry so tell me if I write something stupid. And some of this I'm just copying from the manual.) Note that for each kind of potion there are 3 different formulas that can make it. They make increasingly high quality versions of the potion but also are more difficult.

First, let me explain the bases. Alchemy ties into the other sciences of the time, so of course the four elements play an important role. The bases are just common mundane stuff that is associated with an element. This stuff is cheap and very common. All the formulas at least one. I'll just copy the descriptions straight out of the manual.

MELANCHOLIC BASE: A variety of plants considered useful in alchemy, such as bell mushrooms, belladonna, camphor, hemlock, seed of sea holly, nightshade, thorn apple, henbane, turpentine, etc.

SANGUINE BASE: A variety of animal materials, such as eye of newt, toad tongues, bat claws, powdered unicorn horn, etc.

CHOLERIC BASE: A variety of acids and other liquids considered useful, including aqua fortis, vitriol and Roman vitriol, alcohol, distilled water, etc.

PHLEGMATIC BASE: A variety of common minerals, such as kupfer (copper), lead, lime (calcium oxide), quicksilver, and kohle (coal).

Fleadust

This reduces the skills of anyone caught in the cloud, affecting them more the heavier their armor is. This ranges from 10% if they're just wearing leather up to 50% if they're wearing plate. We have the highest level formula for Fleadust so the effects will last for 60 seconds.

This is a really useful one. Weapon skill makes a huge difference not just in hitting the enemy but also in defending yourself. The 60 second duration is enough time for me to send someone out to kill the guy before he recovers. It's less effective against poorly armored enemies, but I wouldn't be wasting potions on them anyway.

Orpiment is an arsenic sulfide mineral. It was used as a pigment for its striking yellow color. Some alchemists figured if it was yellow it must be somehow related to gold so they studied it a lot. Be careful with it though, it's extremely toxic.

Cinnabar is a mercury sulfide crystal that looks kind of like quartz. It comes in all kinds of colors. The red kind was used as a pigment. More importantly for us alchemists, pure mercury could be distilled from it. Why ours has to be white, I dunno.

Nickel was named by the miners of the Erzgebirge after a mischevious supernatural being that lives underground. (I wonder if we'll ever run into one?) They were pissed off because they would dig up what they thought was copper ore but it turned out to actually be nickel ore and they had to blame someone for it. In the 1400s it was a curiosity but there wasn't any use for it yet.

Breath of Death

Poison gas. We have the lowest level formula for this so our potions will do 5-12 damage to anyone caught in the cloud. Victims with higher endurance will take less damage.

That may not sound like a lot of damage but the cloud is pretty big so you can easily catch several enemies with it. Note that even though Redactor has the easiest formula, it's still pretty darn hard to make. We've only got a 31% chance each time we try.

Marsh Vapor A natural gas, whose medieval admixture produced a sharp smell. Acquiring and containing this vapor was extremely difficult because it is virtually colorless. It is also known as methane.

Aqua Regia A mix of nitric and hydrochloric acid. This is dangerous stuff as it can dissolve lots of things, including people. Alchemists were fascinated by it because it could dissolve gold.

Thunderbolt

A bomb. Anyone nearby is hit by a fragment. These are treated just any other missile. Damage and penetration depend on how close the victim is to the explosion, dropping off rapidly with range. In my experience, if you throw this into a crowd the guy who is actually hit will take significant damage but for the rest it will be less than 5.

Redactor only knows the lowest level formula, so it won't be terribly useful in combat. It may be better to just use an ordinary missile weapon instead. A longbow or crossbow might do a little less damage in total but it will all be concentrated on one target. However, there are a lot of non-combat situations where we might need to blow something up or just create a distraction.

Manganes You probably had a chemistry teacher light this on fire to show you how incredibly bright it is when it burns. Alchemists found that just as cool as you do.

Arabian Fire

Greek fire or napalm. It does about the same damage to the target as Thunderbolt and a few points to those nearby. It slightly reduces the quality of the target's armor.

I don't see this as terribly useful, especially the low level formula we have. In order to noticeably degrade the target's armor you'd have to hit them 5-10 times. I imagine it will have some noncombat uses so it'll be good to keep a few on hand.

Naphtha The lighter part of petroleum. This stuff catches fire very easily.

Conclusion

We spend a couple weeks camping out while Redactor churns out potions. I made 10 Fleadust as I expect this is actually the most useful in combat and several of the others. We've defeated two evil alchemists and looted their potions so now I think we've got the alchemical support we need to get into mid-game content. I've been dragging my heels a bit as there's a special event that plays when the game explicitly tells you that you're ready. I thought it would have triggered by now. Maybe next time we'll move along to a new stage in the plot.

I also remembered to put it in /h/sports again, and I promise to not forget a game (hopefully). It's all looking up Football fans!

Good sorning. I'm writing this before MNF, but I know even if I win I'll be back in the slight negatives again for betting. We'll call it a net 0 for 123 games, but in my defense I usually bet first and therefore blind to the actual risk/reward ratio. Not bad for putting 24600 dramacoin on the line! I'll call it an overall personal .

Last Sunday was the 6th annual tight end day as you probably heard at least 6 times per game you watched, TE's caught 16 TDs and 177 total receptions on Sunday! Good job lads!

Steelers and 49ers are taking a rest this week

15 games this week- TNF as usual, 8 Sunday early games, 4 afternoon games, 1 primetime Sunday game, and 1 lonely MNF game.

@BasicallyAMonster will have the college games

Finally for those keeping track, here's a excel spreadsheet I've been using to track gambling wins/losses. Column A has the winner of their matchup (listed in the same order I list them for this thread, B is the gross Payout , C needs to be filled with a 1 if you won that bet, and a 0 if you lost. So it will be easy to track your weekly and seasonal gains/losses. Prior threads: week 1, week 2, week 3, week 4, week 5, week 6, week 7, week 8

pings: !mensfootball !goomblers @carpathianHORRORist @Freak-Off as always if you want to get @'ed and don't want to join those ping groups, just ask. We love our gamblers.

I actually saved too many things to insert so remember that Al Michaels is a chad that never eats a vegetable, look forward to him on TNF

Get ready to rumble! Thursday Night Football is

Some Jets humiliation, which I don't revel in. A Rod took half the Packers offense over there, guys I've watched and liked for awhile, so I want to see them do well... and it's been much smoother sailing in GB. No refunds

closed

!nooticers

I thought Resetera losing their shit over Cyberpunk was bad, Well this is worse.

https://www.theverge.com/24282022/kamala-harris-endorsement-presidential-election-2024

In the first part:

https://rdrama.net/h/erstory/post/310720/the-mitfords-bonglands-most-dramapilled-family

We learned about Tom the Jap-bashing bussy-blaster, Diana the super-smart-and-witty-but-repeatedly-cucked fascist and Decca the communist proto-redditor. Let's continue our look at the dramafull Mitford family...

Deborah

'Debo' was the baby of the family and the longest-lived. She only died in 2014. She lived long enough to hear Chocolate Rain by Tay Zonday- imagine that.

_{I'm only putting this here because it'll totally frick with people who just scroll through this post to see the images}

Debo married into serious money and position and became the Dutchess of Cavendish. She and her husband were Nazi sympathisers, but much more circumspect and low-key about it than Tom, Diana or Unity. Nevertheless, Decca still felt the need to rat them. These facts never really came to light until the couple decided, after decades of keeping their heads down, to suddenly enter politics and campaign for the newly-formed Social Democratic Party* in the 1980s. The official reports on them and their family, including salacious details provided by Decca, were circulated in the press. When the SDP merged with the Liberal Party, the Libs kicked the Cavendishes to the curb. The Liberals have a habit of attracting embarrassing supporters...

_{*Minor note on the SDP: this party was formed by five prominent members of the Labor Party who quit after the party took a hard-left turn in the late 70s. They merged with the Liberals and disappeared. This is ironic because, under Tony Blair, the Labor Party effectively became the SDP. Their leader, David Owen, flapped around helplessly as a European envoy to Bosnia during their horrible war, eventually getting recalled after a vote of no-confidence by the Euro Parliament. He got a peerage and became 'Lord Owen' for doing what everyone does in the politics of Europe- frick all.}

There's not much else to say about Debo except that her very recent death might explain why nobody's ever tried to make a TV show about the Mitfords.

Pamela

Pamela lived in the country and briefly married the physicist Derek Jackson. Jackson married 5 other women and blasted many a bussy although he went to Rugby school and served in the RAF so Tom was not one of them. Jackson was famed for his work in atomic spectroscopy (how atoms absorb and emit radiation- useful for a whole bunch of things in medicine and science), his riding career- including riding a horse in the Grand National and the enviable amount of fricking he got done. His biographer Simon Courtauld describes him as a "rampant bisexual". He shacked up at one point with two half-sisters and was banging both at the same time.

Behold the King:

After her break-up in 1951 Pamela lived with Italian horse-rider Giuditta Tommasi. The nature of their relationship was never disclosed but Decca described her, somewhat chuddily, as a 'You-Know-What-Bian'. Diana's letters reveal she thought their relationship was platonic but was not bothered one way or another. Make of that what you will.

Nancy

Nancy was the nearest thing to the normal one, which is darning considering this is a longpost about a Dramapilled family. She was also, apparently, a decent writer. Like many of her sisters, she had a nickname... 'Woman'. Yes, her sisters called her 'Woman'. Not 'The Woman' just 'Woman'. This was because she was the eldest and the most sensible. Nancy managed to stay on good terms with her whole family- despite a brief falling out with Diana during WW2. She was smart, sensible, good at what she did and got along well with others. What a crushing bore- let's move on to the most dramapilled of them all...

Unity

As a child, Unity Valkyrie Freeman-Mitford was the Jan Brady of the Mitfords. Her sisters were smarter than her, better looking than her and more socially adept than her.

In the words of Diana's biographer Jan Dalley:

"Unity found life in her big family very difficult because she came after these cleverer, prettier, more accomplished sisters."

While another biographer, David Pryce-Jones, added:

"If you come from a ruck of children in a large family, you've got to do something to assert your individuality, and I think through the experience of trying to force her way forward among the sisters and in the family, she decided that she was going to form a personality against everything."

So, in short, she became a Dramatard.

What could she do to stand out?

How could she make herself special?

Who could help to really make everyone notice poor little Unity?

Hitler was to Unity what stickyposts were to Masterlawlz.

"I think the desire to shock was very important, it was the way that she made herself special. When she discovered Nazism and discovered that it was a fantastic opportunity to shock everybody in England she'd discovered the best tease of all."

-Jan Dalley (Diana's Biographer)

Her younger sister, Decca, with whom she shared a bedroom, was (as we saw in the previous episode) a dedicated communist. The two drew a chalk line down the middle to divide the room. Decca's side was decorated with hammer and sickles and pictures of Vladimir Lenin, while Unity's was decorated with swastikas and pictures of Adolf Hitler.

Unfortunately neither had the common sense to realise this was childish larping. Decca had a long life to do so... Unity did not.

In 1934, Unity had enrolled in a German language school close to the Nazi headquarters in Munich. She was determined to stalk Hitler and, as it happened, this was pretty easy to do.

One of the great lies that always gets told is that we, the good guys, are virtuous simple folk while our enemies are decadent and addicted to opulence. Hence Hitler is always presented in stately rooms with high-ceiling, wearing shining jackboots and a crisp uniform while sitting upon cushioned luxury chairs. Some of the Nazis definitely were like that but in the early 30s, when not attending official functions, Hitler generally wore an old tweed jacket with a crumpled fishing hat stuck on his head. He often drank coffee and ate strudel at the same restaurant he had visited years ago before the Great War. He walked around Munich without guards and would speak to any passerby who spoke to him, even if they were critical of him and his party.

Unity was literally able to just sit in the same place Hitler took his breakfast. She didn't approach him, however: like Landlord Messiah hanging around a slutty-and-used-up-but-strangely-likeable pornstar, she just sat there and stared. Eventually- after months of this shit- Hitler asked her over. They spoke for over 30 minutes- Hitler paid her bill.

She wrote to her father; "It was the most wonderful and beautiful [day] of my life. I am so happy that I wouldn't mind a bit, dying. I'd suppose I am the luckiest girl in the world. For me he is the greatest man of all time"

Hitler was taken by this strange Bong girl too and fascinated by her middle name- Valkyrie. Turned out that Unity's grandmother had been a friend of Richard Wagner who was, of course, Hitler's fav. He was very superstitious- a trait later used to justify fantastic theories of how he intended to dispell Christianity and reintroduce worship of the Germanic gods- or worshipping the Warlords of Atlantis... or the Ark of the Convenant but less Jewish. Or maybe some other shit, IDK. Aliens probably. Anyway, he thought Unity was destined to be in his life.

The big question is whether she got a taste of the old meat-and-one-veg.

Well, there was one person who definitely saw it as a possibility...

Eva Braun was intensely jealous of the attention her boyfriend was suddenly paying to this Bong strumpet. She wrote to a friend;

"She is known as the Valkyrie and looks the part, including her legs. I the mistress of the greatest man in Germany and the whole world, I sit here waiting while the sun mocks me through the window panes."[

Hitler would spend days away, apparently with Unity. He often did not come home at night and would claim he had business at the office doing Nazi stuff when Eva would demand to know where he had been.

Eventually Eva did what most foids would do in this situation and tried the old attempted suicide trick. This got Hitler to cut back on his time spent with the Bong. As Wikipedia puts it, Unity "learned from this that desperate measures were often needed to capture the Führer's attention."

Unity knew there was one thing Adolf loved more than blondes and that was ragging on Da Joos. She attended the Hitler Youth festival in Hesselberg with Hitler's friend Julius Streicher, where she gave the kind of speech about God's Chosen People that would get standing ovations in many American universities today. She subsequently repeated these sentiments in an open letter to Streicher's paper, 'Der Stürmer', which read:

"The English have no notion of the Jewish danger. Our worst Jews work only behind the scenes. We think with joy of the day when we will be able to say England for the English! Out with the Jews! Heil Hitler!

P.S. please publish my name in full, I want everyone to know I am a Jew hater."

This caused an outrage in some parts of the Bong media, but Hitler rewarded her with an engraved golden swastika badge, a private box at the 1936 Berlin Olympics, and a ride in a party Mercedes to the Bayreuth Festival. So the first part of "Operation: Sit on the 'Dolf Peepee" had been accomplished.

She was inducted into the inner circle of the Nazi Party, appearing on the balcony with Hitler when he declared the Anschlauss and she was sent on a mission to meet with pro-Nazis in Prague where she was arrested.

A 1936 MI5 report called her "more Nazi than the Nazis."

In 1938, Hitler gave her a choice of four apartments in Munich. Unity visited one apartment to discuss her decoration and design plans while the soon-to-be-dispossessed residents, a Jewish couple, sat in the kitchen crying. She was given special treatment even Hitler's closest confidants did not have. Albert Speer wrote that nobody was allowed to talk about politics to the Furher except Unity.

Although Hitler told Unity many times that an alliance with Bongland was unlikely, she kept pressing for it and even drew up plans with lists of potential allies. Some of the names that were mentioned were Lord Halifax (Churchill's Tory rival to lead the coalition government) and eccentric Scottish soceror and self described "sensual adventurer" Aleister Crowley. Both men expressed horror when they were told of Unity's beliefs that they might be pro-Nazi. Crowley, who the Daily Mail called "the wickedest man in the world" seems very unlikely to have supported Hitler.

In 1939 Unity and Diana were in Germany when Hitler told them both that they should leave as soon as possible because he believed war with Bongland would follow within weeks. Diana left, Unity didn't.

Diana said later: "She told me that if there was a war, which of course we all terribly hoped there might not be, that she would kill herself because she couldn't bear to live and see these two countries tearing each other to pieces, both of which she loved."

After war was declared, the fate of Unity was initially unclear. She had visited the office of the Bavarian governor to ask if she would be detained as a enemy alien. He told her she would not be but was concerned enough about her mrntal state to mention her visit to Hitler who, apparently, did not look up from his papers when Unity was mentioned. There are some stories that Unity tried to see Hitler and even resorted to calling Eva Braun to try and get Adolf's atrention.

Rumors started trickling through to Bongland that Unity had been arrested and shot by the Nazis. This was only half true- she had shot herself.

Fricking ineptly, as it happens. She used a pearl-handled pistol given to her before her mission to Prague by Hitler himself. He visited her several times in hospital despite the huge amount of work he had organising a fricking world war. She remained unaware throughout that he was beside her.

Despite the war, the Germans and British cooperated to have her repatriated. She was initially sent to Bern in Switzerland where her mother and Debo went to collect her. Debo said in an interview many years later:

"We were not prepared for what we found – the person lying in bed was desperately ill. She had lost 2 stone [almost 29lbs], was all huge eyes and matted hair, untouched since the bullet went through her skull. The bullet was still in her head, inoperable the doctor said. She could not walk, talked with difficulty and was a changed personality, like one who had had a stroke. Not only was her appearance shocking, she was a stranger, someone we did not know. We brought her back to England in an ambulance coach attached to a train. Every jolt was agony to her."

She arrived in Bongland in January 1940:

Showing she still had a bit of the old dramatard in her she declared she "was glad to be back in England even though I'm not on your side."

Her mental age was likened to that of a 10-year-old, or a "sophisticated child" as James Lees-Milne (cousin of Winnie the Pooh creator and a bussy-buddy of Unity's brother Tom) called her. She had a tendency to talk incessantly, had trouble concentrating her mind, and showed an unusually large appetite with sloppy table manners. Lees-Milne observed her to be "rather plain and fat, and says she weighs 13+1⁄2 stone [189lbs- fricking Bongs and their weird weights]". She did however, retain at least some of her devotion to the Nazi party; her family friend Billa Harrod recalled Unity stating that she wished to have children and name the eldest Adolf.

In 1941 she was caught banging an RAF pilot and MI5 reported that she had been seen trying to solicit other airmen around an RAF base. The men said she would ask them "intelligent questions" about their planes and missions. The pilot she was banging was reassigned to the supersonic propellor tests in the north of Scotland (fly your Spitfire up really high and dive towards the ground- see if you can break the sound barrier). He died, believe it or not.

Unity Valkyrie Mitford died of meningitis after the area around the bullet in her head began to swell. It was impossible at that time to remove the bullet.

She, was buried at Saint Mary's Church in Swinbrook Oxfordshire. Her sisters Nancy and Diana would join her later.

I hope you enjoyed this overview of the Mitfords:

Tom, Diana, Decca, Debo, Pamela, Nancy and Unity.

And let's not forget the amazing suppporting cast which included Oswald Mosely, King Edward and Queen Wallis, numerous bussy-blasting pals of Tom, Derek 'Action' Jackson, Tay Zonday, The British SDP/Liberal Alliance Party and, of course, Adolf Hitler himself.

Goodbile.

BEGUN, THE CLOUD WARS HAVE

On Monday, Microsoft came out guns blazing, posting a blog accusing Google of "dishonestly" funding groups conducting allegedly biased studies to discredit Microsoft and mislead antitrust enforcers and the public.

In the blog, Microsoft lawyer Rima Alaily alleged that an astroturf group called the Open Cloud Coalition will launch this week and will appear to be led by "a handful of European cloud providers." In actuality, however, those smaller companies were secretly recruited by Google, which allegedly pays them "to serve as the public face" and "obfuscate" Google's involvement, Microsoft's blog said. In return, Google likely offered the cloud providers cash or discounts to join, Alaily alleged.

The Open Cloud Coalition is just one part of a "pattern of shadowy campaigns" that Google has funded, both "directly and indirectly," to muddy the antitrust waters, Alaily alleged. The only other named example that Alaily gives while documenting this supposed pattern is the US-based Coalition for Fair Software Licensing (CFSL), which Alaily said has attacked Microsoft's cloud computing business in the US, the United Kingdom, and the European Union.

That group is led by Ryan Triplette, who Alaily said is "a well-known lobbyist for Google in Washington, DC, but Google's affiliation isn't disclosed publicly by the organization." An online search confirms Triplette was formerly a lobbyist for Franklin Square Group, which Politico reported represented Google during her time there.

Ars could not immediately reach the CFSL for comment. Google's spokesperson told Ars that the company has "been a public supporter of CFSL for more than two years" and has "no idea what evidence Microsoft cites that we are the main funder of CFSL." If Triplette was previously a lobbyist for Google, the spokesperson said, "that's a weird criticism to make" since it's likely "everybody in law, policy, etc.," has "worked for Google, Microsoft, or Amazon at some point, in some capacity."

Google's "shadowy campaign" also includes hiring supposedly neutral experts, including industry commentators and academics, to "attack Microsoft and author 'studies' that can be cited to discredit us," Alaily alleged.

Alaily said that Google's plan with these groups and other activities was to "distract from the intense regulatory scrutiny Google is facing around the world by discrediting Microsoft and tilt the regulatory landscape in favor of its cloud services rather than competing on the merits."

Google is seemingly lashing out at Microsoft, Alaily claimed, because Google is "facing a reckoning," with "at least 24 antitrust investigations" circling its business on all sides.

"At a time when Google should be focused on addressing legitimate questions about its business, it is instead turning its vast resources towards tearing down others," Alaily wrote. "It is disappointing that, with the foundation of their business facing jeopardy, they have sought to bolster their cloud computing service—Google Cloud Platform—by attacking ours."

Google's spokesperson told Ars that Google has legitimate concerns about Microsoft's cloud business.

"We've been very public about our concerns with Microsoft's cloud licensing," Google's spokesperson said. "We and many others believe that Microsoft's anticompetitive practices lock in customers and create negative downstream effects that impact cybersecurity, innovation, and choice. You can read more in our many blog posts on these issues."

Link to Micropeepee Blog

Orange your glad I didn't say Crapple Deconstructs

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41977108 (CNBC)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41990346 (Ars)

Kamala Harris got access to intelligence reports and this is what she did? I feel like this is a parody of a liberal. pic.twitter.com/JaZNu0Gr3l

— Zaid Jilani (@ZaidJilani) October 26, 2024

!nonchuds !khive Let's get her in!

Part 9 of our epic voyage through the classic 1992 RPG Darklands.

Darklands Series

1 - Darklands LP Part I

2 - Darklands LP Part II: Charles Bronson Edition

3 - Darklands LP III: Nuns and Coins

4 - Darklands LP Ep IV: Introduction to Equipment & Combat

5 - Darklands LP Part V: We finally briefly go out into the dark lands

6 - Darklands LP VI: We actually start a quest!

7 - Darklands LP VII: We reach our destination

8 - Darklands LP VIII: Raubritter confrontation & learning how combat works

Thanks for making this @Losercel.

We ended last episode in Paderborn, having just been rewarded for slaying a raubritter and now we've got 16 florins to spend. We had some concerns about our weapons not penetrating armor well enough during that battle, so that's our first priority. Let's see what they have for sale here.

Equipment

OMG look at this. See where it says 38q next to the name of each item for sale? That means it's 38 quality. Weapons, armor, shields, alchemical potions, and various things like lockpicks have a quality rating which has a subtle impact on how well they work. For every 10 points of quality your weapon is better than their armor you get one extra point of damage. That may not sound like much but you get that bonus point even if you failed to penetrate their armor. That may not sound like much, but with a fast high quality weapon it can really add up.

Average items have a quality of 25. There is a shop in the marketplace that always sells 25q items wherever you go. But each city can have a swordmith, armorer, bowyer, and tinkerer (these sell certain specialized weapons) each with its own level of quality. So if you happen to be in a town with really good swordsmiths like we are now, you want to jump on that opportunity. You never know when you'll find that opportunity again.

One rule that I only just learned now after all these years while going through the hint book is that all the equipment you loot off of dead bodies drops in quality by 10. That explains a lot, because that crap is hardly ever worth using by the time you get your hands on it.

• Sasha - I'd like to get her a better quality longsword but they don't have any in stock.

• Redactor & Yuna - I'm going to replace their maces with military hammers. It does one point less damage than the mace but it has 5 penetration so it even matches plate. The main job of our impact weapons people is to penetrate heavily armored enemies, so that's my highest priority here.

• Nathan - There's not much selection of polearms here. I get him a pike, which at least has pen 4, but it's very slow. I'll keep that around just for heavily armored enemies.

The armorer here is only 23q so I'm ignoring that. Same with the bowyer. Paderborn isn't that big of a city so they must specialize in weapons.

As long as I'm here, I pick up some camomile for Redactor's alchemical experiments. One of my formulas uses it, and I have no idea when I'll find a store stocking it again, so I better get it while I can. Alchemey can be very expensive because you've got to hoard ingredients like this until you've collected every one you need for a formula.

At this point I'm just going to play for a while because we need more money before I can show you some mid-game content. Higher tier quests are quite a bit more difficult than anything we've done yet, so we're going to need good armor for the whole party. Also we won't get far without alchemy. I go on a couple more raubritter quests. If you want to maximize your earnings on these, go around to nearby cities and ask everyone for a job. A lot of them will want you to kill the same guy and there's no reason why you can't accept all of their offers.

Education

I end up in Leipzig. I managed to get a meeting with the mayor and he offered me a raubritter quest. This is a big win for us as the mayor pays out more than the merchants (20 florins I think?) and you get a huge boost to local reputation if you complete a quest for him. An especially big win since Leipzig is such an important city in this era, the most important marketplace in eastern Germany. As you can see, it's at the junction of roads leading in all directions. It even has a university.

Speaking of education, we've got 55 florins so we can afford to study for a while. We'll have to find teachers willing to take us in as students. Let's start with the monastery. They can teach us Read/Write, Speak Latin, and Religion. Usually these guys are pretty cooperative. They'll only refuse if you have little Virtue or local reputation.

Redactor has 40 in Alchemy, which is quite respectable, but you can never have too much skill. The higher it is, the higher the chance that you'll succeed in making potions. Let's see if we can get the alchemist to teach him. Nice. The alchemists are what we would today call "on the spectrum" so they often refuse. (Notice how the text here hints at which skills, attributes, etc. were being checked. You'll see this often all over the game.)

As long as we're here, I'll try trading formulas with him. See, this is what I mean.

I go to the tinkers and ask them for a teacher as well. They teach Artifice.

Let's go to the inn and start studying. Sasha is going to work on her Artifice. This skill represents your technical abilities. It's used in lockpicking and many other situations. We'll have Yuna study Religion as that's her specialty. As for Nathan, none of these skills would really do him much good. When these skills are checked it's almost always against your best party member and we've already got people better than him. So we'll have him work. He earns 9 pfennings per day as a blacksmith. The occupation you work at depends on your abilities. In his case it's probably his strength that got him the job.

We study for a week and each of us picks up 2-3 points in our skill. That may not seem like much, but most non-combat skills are extremely difficult to increase through normal gameplay.

Random Encounters

I'm going to just play the game for a while now. I won't write everything I'm doing as it's is going to be pretty boring if you're not the playing. I want to show you guys how alchemy works, so I'm going to roam around to various cities buying new formulas and the ingredients we need for them. I'll just write about the random encounters I run into. There are many of these and they make up a big part of the game.

I'm going to try to sneak away. It's probably just some bandits that we could take care of easily but you never know. Besides, this is a rare chance to practice our Woodwise skill.

These guys have no idea who they're dealing with. I wipe them out without breaking a sweat.

Pagans. I hate these guys. Let's vandalize their stupid altar.

Uh oh. These are schrats, basically German bigfoot. It must have been their altar. Some schrats are good Christians, but just like humans many of them worship Satan. I may be in over my head.

Oh boy. That's a lot of them. They're so close, our missile weapons won't be much help. There's not much to do but just fight it out.

It's a very close fight, with both Redactor and Yuna getting knocked out. A prayer to St. Clare healed Sasha and kept her in the fight. Without that we would have lost.

Yuna gains some Virtue. Which makes sense since we all got beaten up really bad for doing that. We'll camp here and rest for a little while and then head over to Magdeburg to stay at the inn to get fully healed.

Frick this guy. I'll just pay him to avoid any trouble. I don't want the Dominicans on my butt.

Where should I wander around? It's nice to have a certain region that's your home base where you've got good local reputation. You can return there every once in a while to take advantage of the better prices and do your studying there. But you've also got to do a lot of wandering to find quests, alchemy ingredients, and new saints. Let's go into Bohemia.

I head down to Dresden, kill another raubritter, and achieve "local hero" reputation.

Notice that near Freiberg there's two mines. The Erzgebirge ("Ore Mountains") between Germany and Bohemia were extremely important at this time. Tin had been mined there since prehistoric times, but in 1168 silver was discovered near Freiberg and settlers flooded in. More discoveries were made in the late 1400s. During this period the mines of the Erzgebirge were on the cutting edge of technology, driving progress toward the Industrial Revolution.

The important thing for us is that we can buy alchemical components there. But first let's learn some more formulas so that I know what to buy. I keep striking out when I try to trade formulas with other alchemists, but we're rich enough now to just buy some.

Bad Alchemist

I'm not giving you my goddarn alchemical materials. This guy may be a tough opponent but I think we can take him if we really have to.

His guards are poorly equipped. Like many of the thugs we've run into they're using falchions (basically machetes) which ordinarily would bounce right off our armor. But notice the plus there. That means they've been enhanced through alchemy. Depending on which potion was used, that could mean they can slice right through our armor. The alchemist himself would be easy to kill if we could get to him, but his guards will block us. They're even blocking us from using missile weapons against him. But he can toss potions over their heads at us. My first priority is going to be dispersing my guys because he's no doubt got some area effect attacks and I don't want us bunched up.

This is probably Noxious Aroma. It decreases all skills for several seconds before it wears off. He hits Redactor with the same thing and Sasha with tear gas which temporarily incapacitates her. When these get clear of the bridge I'm going to have Nathan try to get around them and go after the alchemist.

Sasha got tear gassed again. He tossed Stonetar at Yuna, which greatly slows down anyone walking through it, so she won't be able to get into the fight soon. Redactor is holding off two enemies while Nathan slips past them. I bet Nathan Chen could be a really good running back IRL.

He tries to slow down Nathan with stonetar but it's too late. He's run out of potions. Nathan kills him instantly with one swing of his halberd and the guards are easily mopped up.

This is some nice loot. He ran out of combat potions but he has a lot that can temporarily enhance our characters or their equipment. We'll save these to use in an emergency.

Notice how this combat was way more complex than just killing street thugs. Combat in Darklands is never going to be as intricate as Troubleshooter but once you get into the mid-game it's not just mindlessly slashing at each other.

Maybe in the next episode we'll finally do some alchemy. (Spoiler: we do!)

2024 election results predictions a week out and my 2020 predictions a week out vs actual.

I was off by 4 points in 2020. The rDrama prediction modeling is statistically the most accurate in the world. pic.twitter.com/qxlJEXvUbL

— rDrama.net (@rdramanet) October 30, 2024

!nooticers

I have spent a quarter century obsessed with the weirdest corner of the weirdest section of the worst internet law on the US statute books: Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, the 1998 law that makes it a felony to help someone change how their own computer works so it serves them, rather than a distant corporation.

Under DMCA 1201, giving someone a tool to "bypass an access control for a copyrighted work" is a felony punishable by a 5-year prison sentence and a $500k fine - for a first offense. This law can refer to access controls for traditional copyrighted works, like movies. Under DMCA 1201, if you help someone with photosensitive epilepsy add a plug-in to the Netflix player in their browser that blocks strobing pictures that can trigger seizures, you're a felon:

https://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-html-media/2017Jul/0005.html

But software is a copyrighted work, and everything from printer cartridges to car-engine parts have software in them. If the manufacturer puts an "access control" on that software, they can send their customers (and competitors) to prison for passing around cowtools to help them fix their cars or use third-party ink.

Now, even though the DMCA is a copyright law (that's what the "C" in DMCA stands for, after all); and even though blocking video strobes, using third party ink, and fixing your car are not copyright violations, the DMCA can still send you to prison, for a long-butt time for doing these things, provided the manufacturer designs their product so that using it the way that suits you best involves getting around an "access control."

As you might expect, this is quite a tempting proposition for any manufacturer hoping to enshittify their products, because they know you can't legally disenshittify them. These access controls have metasized into every kind of device imaginable.

Garage-door openers:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/11/09/lead-me-not-into-temptation/#chamberlain

Refrigerators:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/06/12/digital-feudalism/#filtergate

Dishwashers:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/05/03/cassette-rewinder/#disher-bob

Treadmills:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/06/22/vapescreen/#jane-get-me-off-this-crazy-thing

Tractors:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/23/reputation-laundry/#deere-john

Cars:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/28/edison-not-tesla/#demon-haunted-world

Printers:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/08/07/inky-wretches/#epson-salty

And even printer paper:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/02/16/unauthorized-paper/#dymo-550

DMCA 1201 is the brainchild of Bruce Lehmann, Bill Clinton's Copyright Czar, who was repeatedly warned that cancerous proliferation this was the foreseeable, inevitable outcome of his pet policy. As a sop to his critics, Lehman added a largely ornamental safety valve to his law, ordering the US Copyright Office to invite submissions every three years petitioning for "use exemptions" to the blanket ban on circumventing access-controls.

I call this "ornamental" because if the Copyright Office thinks that, say, it should be legal for you to bypass an access control to use third-party ink in your printer, or a third-party app store in your phone, all they can do under DMCA 1201 is grant you the right to use a circumvention tool. But they can't give you the right to acquire that tool.

I know that sounds confusing, but that's only because it's very, very stupid. How stupid? Well, in 2001, the US Trade Representative arm-twisted the EU into adopting its own version of this law (Article 6 of the EUCD), and in 2003, Norway added the law to its lawbooks. On the eve of that addition, I traveled to Oslo to debate the minister involved:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/10/28/clintons-ghost/#felony-contempt-of-business-model

The minister praised his law, explaining that it gave blind people the right to bypass access controls on ebooks so that they could feed them to screen readers, Braille printers, and other assistive cowtools. OK, I said, but how do they get the software that jailbreaks their ebooks so they can make use of this exemption? Am I allowed to give them that tool?

No, the minister said, you're not allowed to do that, that would be a crime.

Is the Norwegian government allowed to give them that tool? No. How about a blind rights advocacy group? No, not them either. A university computer science department? Nope. A commercial vendor? Certainly not.

No, the minister explained, under his law, a blind person would be expected to personally reverse engineer a program like Adobe E-Reader, in hopes of discovering a defect that they could exploit by writing a program to extract the ebook text.

Oh, I said. But if a blind person did manage to do this, could they supply that tool to other blind people?

Well, no, the minister said. Each and every blind person must personally - without any help from anyone else - figure out how to reverse-engineer the ebook program, and then individually author their own alternative reader program that worked with the text of their ebooks.

That is what is meant by a use exemption without a cowtools exemption. It's useless. A sick joke, even.

The US Copyright Office has been valiantly holding exemptions proceedings every three years since the start of this century, and they've granted many sensible exemptions, including ones to benefit people with disabilities, or to let you jailbreak your phone, or let media professors extract video clips from DVDs, and so on. Tens of thousands of person-hours have been flushed into this pointless exercise, generating a long list of things you are now technically allowed to do, but only if you are a reverse-engineering specialist type of computer programmer who can manage the process from beginning to end in total isolation and secrecy.

But there is one kind of use exception the Copyright Office can grant that is potentially game-changing: an exemption for decoding diagnostic codes.

You see, DMCA 1201 has been a critical weapon for the corporate anti-repair movement. By scrambling error codes in cars, tractors, appliances, insulin pumps, phones and other devices, manufacturers can wage war on independent repair, depriving third-party technicians of the diagnostic information they need to figure out how to fix your stuff and keep it going.

This is bad enough in normal times, but during the acute phase of the covid pandemic, hospitals found themselves unable to maintain their ventilators because of access controls. Nearly all ventilators come from a single med-tech monopolist, Medtronic, which charges hospitals hundreds of dollars to dispatch their own repair technicians to fix its products. But when covid ended nearly all travel, Medtronic could no longer provide on-site calls. Thankfully, an anonymous hacker started building homemade (illegal) circumvention devices to let hospital technicians fix the ventilators themselves, improvising housings for them from old clock radios, guitar pedals and whatever else was to hand, then mailing them anonymously to hospitals:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/07/10/flintstone-delano-roosevelt/#medtronic-again

Once a manufacturer monopolizes repair in this way, they can force you to use their official service depots, charging you as much as they'd like; requiring you to use their official, expensive replacement parts; and dictating when your gadget is "too broken to fix," forcing you to buy a new one. That's bad enough when we're talking about refusing to fix a phone so you buy a new one - but imagine having a spinal injury and relying on a $100,000 exoskeleton to get from place to place and prevent muscle wasting, clots, and other immobility-related conditions, only to have the manufacturer decide that the gadget is too old to fix and refusing to give you the technical assistance to replace a watch battery so that you can get around again:

https://www.theverge.com/2024/9/26/24255074/former-jockey-michael-straight-exoskeleton-repair-battery

When the US Copyright Office grants a use exemption for extracting diagnostic codes from a busted device, they empower repair advocates to put that gadget up on a workbench and torture it into giving up those codes. The codes can then be integrated into an unofficial diagnostic tool, one that can make sense of the scrambled, obfuscated error codes that a device sends when it breaks - without having to unscramble them. In other words, only the company that makes the diagnostic tool has to bypass an access control, but the people who use that tool later do not violate DMCA 1201.

This is all relevant this month because the US Copyright Office just released the latest batch of 1201 exemptions, and among them is the right to circumvention access controls "allowing for repair of retail-level food preparation equipment":

https://publicknowledge.org/public-knowledge-ifixit-free-the-mcflurry-win-copyright-office-dmca-exemption-for-ice-cream-machines/

While this covers all kinds of food prep gear, the exemption request - filed by Public Knowledge and Ifixit - was inspired by the bizarre war over the tragically fragile McFlurry machine. These machines - which extrude soft-serve frozen desserts - are notoriously failure-prone, with 5-16% of the broken at any given time. Taylor, the giant kitchen tech company that makes the machines, charges franchisees a fortune to repair them, producing a steady stream of profits for the company.

This sleazy business prompted some ice-cream hackers to found a startup called Kytch, a high-powered automation and diagnostic tool that was hugely popular with McDonald's franchisees (the gadget was partially designed by the legendary hardware hacker Andrew "bunnie" Huang!).

In response, Taylor played dirty, making a less-capable clone of the Kytch, trying to buy Kytch out, and teaming up with McDonald's corporate to bombard franchisees with legal scare-stories about the dangers of using a Kytch to keep their soft-serve flowing, thanks to DMCA 1201:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/20/euthanize-rentier-enablers/#cold-war

Kytch isn't the only beneficiary of the new exemption: all kinds of industrial kitchen equipment is covered. In upholding the Right to Repair, the Copyright Office overruled objections of some of its closest historical allies, the Entertainment Software Association, Motion Picture Association, and Recording Industry Association of America, who all sided with Taylor and McDonald's and opposed the exemption:

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2024/10/us-copyright-office-frees-the-mcflurry-allowing-repair-of-ice-cream-machines/

This is literally the only useful kind of DMCA 1201 exemption the Copyright Office can grant, and the fact that they granted it (along with a similar exemption for medical devices) is a welcome bright spot. But make no mistake, the fact that we finally found a narrow way in which DMCA 1201 can be made slightly less stupid does not redeem this outrageous law. It should still be repealed and condemned to the scrapheap of history.

This work – excluding any serialized fiction – is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. That means you can use it any way you like, including commercially, provided that you attribute it to me, Cory Doctorow, and include a link to pluralistic.net.

https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Quotations and images are not included in this license; they are included either under a limitation or exception to copyright, or on the basis of a separate license. Please exercise caution.