Yes please be mad about it, genuinely- You used to be able to purchase a single disk to install it and use it forever after that initial purchase of one key. It sickens me to see all this stuff which used to be a one time purchase be shunted under a subscription now.
Itās possible to buy a non-subscription version of Word; Microsoft just intentionally makes it very difficult to find (and also expensive).
However, I know a guy who knows a guyĀ website: MS Office Pro for $50. If the link starts going to a Page Not Found, just search the site; they usually have some form of this sale available.Ā
Worth noting: while $50 is still more money than $yo-ho-ho, that money is a great way to make VERY clear to Microsoft that we DO want one-time-purchase products, not subscriptions.
My laptop just died. If it can't be fixed and I need to replace it, this post is gonna be a real life saver, because my family has been sharing an old version of Word that came with a limited number of lifetime licenses, and we're fresh out.
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Further context: Durham city council (Reform UK) cut funding and support for Pride. The Durham Miner's Association and other trade unions raised enough money for Durham Pride 2026 to go ahead - a direct call back to when Lesbian and Gays Support the Miners (LGSM) raised money for mining communities when Margaret Thatcher seized union funding during the miner strikes of 1984-85.
At the 1985 Labour party meet, the motion to support LGBT rights as a party was passed due to a block vote from mining unions.
Stephen Guy, the chair of the Durham Minersā Association, said that when it became apparent Durham Pride was under threat, he took it upon himself to āencourage the trade union movement to step up and do the right thing, and stand shoulder to shoulder with the LGBT+ community [ā¦] They not only raised funds for us, but came to our communities, uplifted our spirits when they were down, and showed their solidarity.ā
harry dubois would end death note in one episode. he'd be unkillable bc he has no fucking idea what his name is and then he'd go drink driving and accidentally run light over and the killings would mysteriously stop
This man... He can see Ryuk? But how? The only explanation is that he touched my Death Note, but I've had it with me all day! Did he sneak into my room last night while I was asleep? But, all my security measures were intact... And he seems confused, is he putting on an act? Let me see if I can...
"Pardon me officer, I don't think I caught your name?"
"Uh, well that's the thing, I, uh, don't actually remember it at the moment."
Damn him! He knows I need a name to kill, and now he's taunting me! He can see Ryuk, too, so one wrong move could end me! I might have to make the eye deal at this point...
---------------------------------
LOGIC [Medium, failure]: This bone monster is obviously Kira. You are fucked.
Try to make Kim see the bone monster. [Suggestion, Legendary]
Attempt to arrest the bone monster.
Put yourself between the bone monster and Light.
Ask Light for some money.
Try to play it off as a joke and leave quickly. [Composure, Formidable]
PERCEPTION [EASY: FAILURE] - You can't tell what gender it is.
YOU - "Excuse me, sir-- or, uh, madam?-- Bone... person..."
THE BONE MONSTER - It laughs, a deep, gutteral sound, like air escaping from the lungs of a corpse. As its jaw moves, you can see rows upon rows of sharp teeth inside its gaping maw.
COMPOSURE [CHALLENGING: SUCCESS] - You stand your ground and manage not to freak out.
YOU - "I'm afraid I'm going to have to ask you to come down to the police station. You... uh, match the description of a suspect... I think."
THE BONE MONSTER - It lets out a loud, phlegmatic belly laugh. "What are you going to do, arrest me?"
AUTHORITY - Damn right you are. Cuff him.
YOU - "Yes, as a matter of fact, I will. You are under arrest on suspicion of being Kira. Put your hands forward, wrists together."
KIM - "How exactly are you going to handcuff a hallucination, Detective?"
THE BONE MONSTER - It laughs again, like this is the funniest thing in the world, before obediently sticking out its arms.
THE BONE MONSTER'S KID - His eyes go wide and his face goes pale as you place the cuffs on the monster's wrists, before his gaze darts to Kim.
KIM - He is staring at the cuffs. He looks bewildered. "Are those handcuffs... floating?"
-----------------------------------
Shit! Ryuk, why did you have to comply?! Is this a game to you? No matter... They still don't realize that I'm Kira, not Ryuk. All I have to do is stay calm and act surprised. I'm sure Ryuk can just escape later, once he gets bored. And this other cop obviously can't see him, so it seems it's only the first one who has touched a Death Note... I just need to make it seem that he's the only one who can see Shinigami. Then I'll seem innocent, and he'll be the suspicious one!
"How did you do that? Is it some kind of magic trick?"
--------------------------------------
SHIVERS [Heroic, Success]: As intimidating as it looks, the bone monster isn't the real threat.
Deduce who the real Kira is [Logic, Godly]
Ask Light what he knows about the bone monster.
Tell Kim I-told-you-so.
Convince Light you are a sorcerer [Drama, Impossible]
As a woman who is both gender non-conforming and who is planning a pregnancy in the near future AND who works with children, I am very invested in the conversation about the confines of femininity, the complexities of motherhood and the fascistic expectation of women to have children. I also often find it deeply frustrating.
I do not think it should need to be said, but unfortunately it absolutely is, that nobody should ever be forced to become pregnant, be a parent or carry a pregnancy to term. Ever. This requires both complete and total abortion rights & access but also the dismantling of the gendered expectation of women to want and need children. Remaining child free should not only be possible for women, it should also be normal and completely accepted. Anything else is oppressive.
However, I am deeply bothered by how many people who share these views talk about children. I have come across many posts describing children in cruel and dehumanizing ways, emphasizing how gross and terrible children are and how much of a burden they are to their parents. This, I think is also wrong.
Children are a particularly vulnerable population. They often have very little rights and autonomy and are at the whims of adults around them, which makes then particularly vulnerable to abuse. Children are real, fully realized people who have very specific needs and considerations. Constantly discussing how disgusting and terrible children are, means attacking people who have no power and cannot defend themselves, legally or otherwise. These views cannot be separated from calls to remove children from public life, like parks and transportation, the practice of which is both dehumanizing and oppressive. This goes hand in hand with the gendered oppression of women who are unfortunately still often the primary caregivers of children. Forcing children out of the public sphere means forcing mothers out of it too. And the right to not have children needs to go hand in hand with the right to have children. Women need abortion rights and access but they also need the right and access to give birth for free. They need robust childcare and child & family friendly infrastructure. Otherwise the only people who can afford to have children are wealthy elites.
The rights of women to not have children and the rights of children and mothers go hand in hand. They are not contradictory. Being a parent is a complex relationship, one wrought with a long history of violence and oppression of children and women. It is not easy to navigate, and nobody should be expected to do it. Simultaneously, the people who do decide to do it deserve help and support, not scorn or mockery. And most of all, children, all children, even the annoying, dirty and screaming ones deserve a safe loving world that sees their full humanity, respects their perspectives and their bodily autonomy. We are all a part of creating that world for them. Society should be about being good to each other, and that includes children too.
I feel like I like. Donāt really get the whole Studentverein thing in Germany. I mean on a sociological level, young human males left to their own devices will carcinate to āhomosocial bonding group that involves strong ceremonial markers of identity, drinking, and violence designed to prove how tough you are.ā Thatās just a given. But the overtones in the German context feel alien to me.
I *think* because thereās no clear Anglo reference point for the political moment they emerged from? Like the major cultural current they seem to have arisen out of is 19th century liberal nationalism; in Germany the 19th century liberal nationalist current was (AIUI) substantially dominated by a middle class that was culturally quite conservative, but which by virtue of wanting a modern unified state as a vehicle for German identity was nonetheless quite radical in comparison to the truly reactionary post-1815 status quo. And Germans gonna Germ, so the expression of this was these very organized serious clubs where they would do drinking and swordfighting and gymnastics about it, and also about The Catholicism/Protestantism (and also often be real weird about Jews; but there are and were also Jewish Studentenverbindung, so I donāt wanna claim they were intrinsically defining themselves against Jewishness, even as antisemitism was a powerful current in German society). And when Germany was unified and 19th century liberalism lost its identity and had to become something new they ended up (while still being very nationalistic) these still very intense political societies but ones where a sort of conservative-liberal aesthetic still dominated.
There just isnāt a good analogue for this in American historyāa lot of the German liberal 48ers who came to the US ended up staunch supporters of the Union in the civil war, but as much as I want to make the joke āimagine if your frat started as an abolitionist athletic club that did swordfighting and was super Catholic/high church Lutheran,ā the map isnāt quite accurate. The 48ers in the US are a sample biased toward the most radical side of the mid-19th century liberal spectrum, and one that had to remap itself to an American political context.
There were German-style Turnvereine in the US, started by the 48ers, but they feel to me subtly different in political flavor from their German cousinsāplaced in an American political context the nearest analogue to conservative liberalism is the Northern middle class abolitionist who is consonant in a number of respects but isnāt really in a position where they can be quite so ethnically chauvanist. Many Stidentenvereine in Germany didnāt allow non-Germans to join, and I feel like while they might look down their noses at Italians or whatever, the WASPS of the late 19th century simply could not function if they refused to share social clubs with people of French or Dutch background or whatever. The US was just as a baseline a more ethnically diverse place, even in subcultures that were overwhelmingly white Western European. And though itās the comparison I sort of reached for above, even the Civil War wasnāt a struggle for the realization of a nation that felt itself held in potentia by reactionary forcesāit was a struggle for one part of a nation (one which didnāt have to defend its nationhood) to break away, and not for very strong *nationalistic* reasons.
There was also a militaristic element to the Studentenverbindung from the beginning: you did swordfighting and sport so you would be Ready To Fight For The Fatherland, many had caps or whole uniforms based on 19th century military uniforms, and many groups had āCorpsā in their name. And that has no parallel in either the earlier academic or later social fraternities of the US.
By the early 20th century the relative political position of the conservative-liberal-nationalist had shifted in Germany and there was something distinctly conservative politically in their makeup, just bc āconservativeā relative to the status quo now quite incontrovertibly included āpart of and in favor of a united Germany.ā The Second Industrial Revolution has happened, and in Germany (as in the U.S. and many other places!) the previous broad liberal coalition had broken up into both more progressive and socially conscious wings and more conservative ones.
As you might imagine from the military aesthetic, Studentenverbindung were enthusiastic to fight for Germany in WW1, and in the postwar years there was quite a natural path from āmember of a āliberalā student club in 1912ā to āmember of a proto-fascist Freikorps outfit in the 1920s.ā This isnāt so strange when you consider that 19th century liberalism just did not mean what liberalism means now (even for those most cynical about it!), both for reasons of semantic drift and just how political coalitions were structured.
I donāt want to give the impression that conservative elements of this culture yielded entirely to fascism. When Studentenverbindungen were told to join the Nazi umbrella organization or close up shop, many did. Many members also were part of the same āyeah weāre conservative nationalists who want to Make Germany Great Again, but thatās why this dipshit Hitler has to goā tendency as Claus von Stauffenberg. A lot of those guys were nobility though and another way in which the Studentenverbindungen kind of fail to map to Anglo cultural categories as I understand them is that AFAICT theyāre not aristocrat-coded: the modal member was the son of a middle class professional, bourgeoise and not adlig. These werenāt clubs for toffs (though they certainly were not unwelcome).
The Studentenverbindung culture, always strongest in particular regions like the Rhineland, has declined precipitously since its 19th century/early 20th century peak. And being quite conservative my sense is that most of these organizations (like frats in the US) tend to fall somewhere on the cringe-to-alarming spectrum. But they are also pretty identifiably young mensā clubs Of A Type, complete with extensive alumni networks that can all by themselves be a reason to entice people to join. And the slicing each other in the face with swords thing is often optional now, if they do it at all. So maybe in their modern form theyāre less unusual as an institution. But in an age of increasing cultural fusion in Europe they do feel like a rare really particular national institution.
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Ok now that my parents are home and their house is no longer empty I can explain.
My parents went on a cruise for their 45th wedding anniversary. Leaving myself, who lives an hour away, to check on their house from time to time. The first time I do this while they're on the trip I also got my winter tires changed for summer tires (late as we're in our first heat wave of the year).
My car guy has also been my parents car guy for over 30 years, so the expectation is that we drop the car off in the morning and pick it up at the end of the day. Basically, he gets to it when he gets to it. So I do this and tell him to call or text me when he's done the tire swap.
Reader, the phone number on file was my mother's, not mine. My mother, somewhere in the sea around Norway, does not get the text. So I do not get the text.
By the time I go to collect the car right before the garage closes, I'm playing chicken with a hell of a storm. It's either try and beat it or get home super late and drive around all this storm damage in the dark. I have been awake since 5 am, so I decide to gun it home. The radar says the storm is two waves, and my plan is to skirt around the south side of the first way and drive up into my city between the two waves.
Two things are important here: 1. I miss this window by about 20 minute and 2. I live in an area that gets tornadoes (not a lot, but some).
As I'm driving, I am approaching the storm front. It is fuck off big and so dark it looks blue. I get a tornado warning alert on my phone. I'm not worried, we get these a lot, and the coverage area is wide. I keep driving, and I see a storm chaser pulled over with his phone out, filming the front. Slightly more worried.
I then get a shelter in place alert on my phone.
Then, in about 45 seconds, the clouds turn from deep blue to green, and the winds pick up enough that debris is being blown in from the fields and visibility drops to maybe 10 metres.
Fuck that.
I hang a hard left into the nearest driveway, try to find the spot between all their trees so if something falls, I'm not under it, and put my four way lights on. I'm going to wait.
A woman pokes her head out of the house and beckons me in.
I live in a pretty friendly part of Canada, and if my odds are between an unknown woman and a tornado, I'm picking the woman. I haul my backpack and I into her house. I am drenched from the ten seconds I am in the rain. The power is out. She has a mastiff. He immediately leans in for pets.
"I will tell you" she says by way of greeting, "you picked the weirdest house on the road. That's Moosifer, and the cat is Kitty Kitty, and the skunk is Skittles."
Skunk.
Turns out I have pulled into a wildlife rescue and rehabilitation centre she runs out of half of her home. In the hour I am there as her newest (and first human) rescue, I meet five squirrels, waved at four baby raccoons, cuddled with a skunk, pet a cat, pet the dog so much my hands got numb, and learned a lot about how wildlife rehab works in my province. The skunk is a tripod, and has been a species ambassador for several years, going to community events so folks can learn about skunks "with eye candy". She loves cuddles and spends 30 minutes wedged between my back and the couch. In the classic small town things, the woman knows quite well someone that I did community theatre with. I owe her a giftcard or a giftbasket or something.
god israel's destruction of tyre is like especially depressing tbh like thats one of the oldest inhabited cities in the world. people have lived there since the bronze age. there is so, so so much history and world heritage there that's being blown up and destroyed forever because its existence doesn't fit israel's nationalist vision of history.
lots to say about israel's politicized and propagandized use of history and archaeology to further their narrative tbh. here's a good article about it.
Weaponizing antiquities is part of Israel's colonial legacy, says Rafi Greenberg, whose colleagues have largely remained silent about Gaza's
The thing thatās always missing from the āwomen didnāt fight for the right to work they were already working they fought to get paidā is that many women also very much wanted to work.
Women wanted to be lawyers and engineers and chemists. They wanted to use their brains in challenging and interesting ways. They wanted to get the satisfaction from solving problems and inventing new shit and getting attention for it.
I know not everyone is born with intellectual curiosity or drive or determination but some people are and many of those people are women.
There's a recurring online tendency to aestheticize consensus itself. The imagined future village is full of emotionally compatible people who enjoy communal gardening, conflict resolution circles, acoustic folk music, mutual aid potlucks, and repairing bicycles together at sunset. Which is nice for the people who genuinely enjoy that lifestyle. But plenty of humans are solitary, prickly, obsessive, urban, nocturnal, sensory-seeking, technologically attached, contrarian, novelty-seeking, private, or just plain difficult. Those people do not evaporate after the revolution. They do not get Left Behind while you are Raptured into the Utopia. They become your neighbors.
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You said something in āSmithā which I hope I grasped, and there was a feeling almost of recognition. An odd feeling of grief overcame me when I read it. I cannot explain my feelings any clearer. It was like hearing a piece of music from way back, except that it was nearer poetry by Gravesā definition. Thank you very much for writing it.
Terry Pratchett, in a letter to J. R. R. Tolkien, 22 November 1967
Thank you very much for your letter. The first one that I have received with regard to Smith of Wootton Major. You evidently feel about the story very much as I do myself. I can hardly say more.
J. R. R. Tolkien, in reply to Pratchettās letter, 24 November 1967
And he did in fact say on at least one occasion that it was this that pushed him to always engage with his own fans in the same kind and conscientious manner.
The old world is dying. The new world had that thing happen where the umbilical cord gets caught around the neck as it's coming out, yuuuurk, no new world either. So it's basically just gonna be monsters forever
Listen, buddy, I get it when it's monstrosity-as-a-marker-of-marginalization or it's a, a commentary on arbitrary constructions of beauty standards or whatever. That's one type of monster, that's fine. Very fuckable type of monster. But we're talking about, like, the metaphysical worldly manifestations of imperialist warmongering and rapacious depletion of the environment and systemic racism and shit like that. And I mean it's obviously not conceptually impossible to eroticize all that, you see people doing it, but it's fraught, right? It's fraught. Thin Ice. And if you're gonna go there you can't be flippant about what you're doing, man. This shit affects people's lives in real, non-metaphorical ways. When I was at CVS I just saw three or four anthromorphic personifications of the concept of medical debt pulling a little old lady apart like a wishbone
Not to intrude! As a woman, I've been hearing that birth control bills messes up hormones and hage very bad effects on women. I think you should look up the studoes about it / don't type: does birth control bills hav3 a negative effec/ type: studies about the effects of birth control bills.
I only wanted to bring it to ur attention only out of care. Not out of anything else. I genuinely hope you're safe and healthy.
God bless you, have a sweet day/ night.
I am absolutely gonna answer this because it's so important.
Let's say it out loud: with conservative views rising, especially on the internet, the birth-control-scare we are seeing is a propaganda tool.
I've seen so many women obsessed with being "natural" lately preaching to always have unprotected sex and avoid pregnancies just by observing their menstrual cycle. Which is, how my father got unwillingly conceived in the 60s.
I was scared too in the beginning, so I looked into it, I picked up a book on female sexual health on the library, and this is what I found:
"Messes up with your hormones" is a phrase I hear a lot about it. Yes, it does. Because it stops your natural hormonal cycle by giving you hormones that will stop you from ovulating. Afftecting hormones is litterally how it works.
However, it's proven that when you stop taking the pill you get back to how you were before taking it. It doesn't have any lasting effects on your fertility.
The most talked about side effect of birth control pill is thrombosis. It's proven that birth control pills raise the chances to have it. It's also getting less common in the past decades because now the pill has a lower dosage.
What convinced me to ignore this issue is the fact that the risk of thrombosis is way higher for pregnant people than it is for people on birth control.
So if you don't want a pregnancy, and your reason to risk a pregnancy is fear of thrombosis, you are actually just putting yourself in double danger.
The medical professionals still take this risk very seriously, so if your medical history shows a predisposition to it, they will prescribe some specific pills that are known to not have the same risk. Because actually genetics have a major role in this side effect.
About the risk of cancer, it's more complicated, it might raise the chance of some specific cancers (we don't really have clear results on this), but it's proven to avoid other specific cancers. So there are proven good effects and possible bad effects, to me, they balance each other out.
All of the other side effect that you see on the internet (lower libido, mental health issues, depression) are not proven. It's anecdotal knowledge, and whenever they tried to do real studies on it, they didn't find any clear results.
There are a lot of confusing variables about the mental impact of birth control, e.g. most people start taking it when they get into a long term relationship, so when after a few months of taking it they say they have lower libido, how do we know that's because of the pill, when most long term realtioships experience a lower libido after the honeymoon stage?
Among my friends and family, different people had different reactions to the pill, most of them still takes it because they had a good experience, or found one that works for them after a bit of trial and error. Some chose to just stop taking it.
My take on this is that, just like everyone has a different realtionship with their cycle, we all see different changes of it when they take birth control.
But we can't ignore the fact that scaring people away from birth control is putting them in danger. Especially in a time when we see our right to abortion at risk.
I think that we should celebrate the pill, because it's an amazing invention that gives us full agency on our own bodies and our ability to plan pregnancies.
And even if you don't want to take it, you need a form of reliable birth control, it doesn't need to be hormonal, but in 2026 we cannot think that pulling out (expecting the other person to pull out) or observing our cycle will keep up safe.
I look forward to start taking it because condoms stopped working for me, because I want to skip my period as much as I can (it's just boring to have it) and because it feels feminist to me.
Copyright governs who has the "right" to produce and distribute "copies" of books/music/movies/creative works. This is where fair use doctrine applies, because most creative works are referential by nature.
Weird Al is allowed to parody everything because he's operating under copyright law, not trademark law.
Trademark governs who can "trade" under what "mark" i.e. the brand identity of a company. Companies don't own their trademarked word forever, but they maintain the exclusive right to sell things under that brand in their specific market sector. Patagonia doesn't own the name of a geographical region, they just own the right to be the only company using that name to sell clothing and outdoor gear.
A drag queen name can be a parody of a clothing and outdoor gear company.
A company's trademarked logo can be used in parody creative works, with more leeway if it's not for commercial purposes. Trademark parody is allowed! Patagonia has been aware of and allowed Pattie Gonia's trademark parody for years.
Trademarks are specific to market sector. Actress Chase Infiniti could start a makeup line named after herself and her trademark would not infringe on the Infiniti car brand because they are different markets and there is no risk of confusion. Pattie Gonia could probably trademark her name to sell frozen veggie burgers and Patagonia would not care.
Drag queen Jan Sport did a collab with JanSport bags. What Jan Sport almost certainly did not do is independently apply to register "Jan Sport" as a trademark in order to sell bags on her own, because that would infringe on JanSport's own trademark in the bag market sector.
What Pattie Gonia is not allowed to do -- the thing that Pattie Gonia actually did do and is being sued for -- is apply to register "Pattie Gonia" as a trademark to sell clothing, because apparently Pattie is in talks with North Face and HydroFlask to sell "Pattie Gonia"-branded gear. These companies probably won't finalize anything unless Pattie shows that she actually owns the trademark. Unfortunately, "Patagonia" is already a registered trademark in the clothing market sector, and these two names are too similar to exist in the same sector (see: "likelihood of confusion" legal standard).
Your drag queen name can parody a clothing company. You can parody the trademarked logo of a clothing company. But you cannot use the same name to then go on to also become a clothing company.
In order to maintain their own trademark, Patagonia must sue for trademark infringement. If they don't sue, and Pattie Gonia gets her own trademark, Pattie could sue Patagonia for infringement on her trademark. You can see why Patagonia won't be dropping this suit no matter how much you harass them.
Yes, Pattie's legal fees to fight this will cost more than the $1 she's being sued for. Pattie could also not fight this, withdraw her trademark application, not spend any money, and carry on being an environmental activist drag queen named Pattie Gonia. She would probably be better off making nice with Patagonia in the hopes of a Jan Sport-esque deal where Pattie designs an exclusive fabric and Patagonia maintains the trademark, but apparently Pattie's legal team has been sassing off to Patagonia in their communications for years, has applied for a trademark they should 100% know they'll never get, and has now decided to play the victim on social media just in time for Pride month, so I don't know how likely that is. I guess we'll see!
This is mostly correct, but Iād like to offer a small correction. The product deal with Hydroflask and North Face apparently occurred in 2022, and HydroFlask got Patagonia involved to make sure everything was in the clear. It seems like Patagonia was very agreeable about everything at the time, and only asked that Pattie Gonia and her partners avoid using the Patagonia logo and font or similar images, and to avoid putting the words āPattie Goniaā on any products. This is the email exchange from 2022, from the recent Patagonia trademark complaint, including Pattie Gonia apparently agreeing to the limitations.
The new conflict is from Pattie Gonia using the Patagonia imagery and the Pattie Gonia name on her own merchandise. This is the email Patagonia sent, with the images they feel conflict with the 2022 agreement.
Pattie responded to that by disagreeing that she had broken any agreement, and also obliquely threatening to expose Patagonia for making tactical gear for the US military?
Itās possible that Patagonia understood the terms from 2022 to be a good-faith ongoing agreement about keeping the brands separate, and Pattie interpreted it as an agreement limited to the now-ended North Face and Hydroflask collaboration. Itās also possible that Pattie Gonia didnāt believe she was actually agreeing to anything at all, since her responses were very neutral, though positive in tone, up until 2025. The email chain does, however, show what I think is a very clear effort on Patagoniaās part to protect their trademark while also showing support and goodwill towards Pattie in her use of the Pattie Gonia stage persona.
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There should be a napoleon in every generation. Like the dalai lama. French revolutionary monks searching the countryside with a group of artillerymen which each candidate child must attempt to command
Longtime readers may be aware of how much I relish an excuse to bully a company, so I'm sharing the wealth;
Clothing company Patagonia is currently sueing drag queen Pattie Gonia for "irreparableā harm to their brand.
To be clear; Pattie named herself after the region in South America.
So Pattie is asking people to politely ask Patagonia to drop the lawsuit.
I'm extending the invitation to all of you, because sueing a drag queen for 'infringement' in the current political cultural landscape is vile.
Especially a drag queen who has raised millions of dollars for non-profits, uses her platform to raise awareness for climate activism, and fully aligns with Patagonia's apparent climate-conscious mission statement.
They're claiming they're sueing for $1. They're actually asking her to stop using her name, and pay over $1 million in legal fees. They're straight up harassing her.
In contrast, drag queen Jan Sport has a Jansport bag line. It's that easy to just... work with a queen.
Anyway. Be respectful(ish), but feel free to be annoying on Patagnoia's socials, asking them to 'DROP THE LAWSUIT'
This is being discussed heavily on Bluesky, such as here.
Patagonia is suing specifically for trademark infringement, and they're suing for the sum of $1. If they don't sue, then that means they could lose the trademark.
They aren't trying to "silence" them or prevent them from using the name, they're specifically protecting their company trademark. They'd have to sue *anyone* who was using such an obvious knockoff of their logo; in this case it happens to be a drag queen.
Go nuts.
The point is that this isn't a company trying to dogpile on a drag queen, it's a company following a standard legal practice to protect its trademark. Disney does it all the time.
If you get a soda out of a vending machine and it has a Coca-Cola label but it's actually a knockoff made with ditchwater, that's obviously okay because Coca-Cola is a huge corporation and it's thus fine for someone to violate their trademark.
You can hate Patagonia all you want, but the lawsuit is about anodyne trademark law, not specifically that a drag queen is involved.
if Patagonia loses their trademark, which they would if they didn't sue and win (again for one dollar), there would be no assurance against people putting a Patagonia label on amy dogshit
Absolutely insane to see this shit playing out like this. It is not bootlicking to say laws are specifically for a purpose and they protect not only large companies but small companies and small creators and the general public from harm and confusion. Patagonia was literally turned into a special trust and non-profit to fund environmental protection and climate change work.
Meanwhile Pattie Gonia has been called out and criticized about their misappropriation of indigenous peoples work and not giving credit to those in those spaces when sheās used their work as part of her ābrandā because letās be real. In both of Patagonia and Pattie Goniaās situations this is brand. If weāre going to play purity politics then be genuine about it and hold everyone to their word, because Pattie Gonia is making money on their brand and thatās partly why their releasing this statement and being so public. Itās a PR push.
This is like the opposite of the McDonaldās coffee case playing out and itās going to be studied in law school as an absolute insane PR thing that had nothing to do with the real facts of the case, the law, or reality of the situation.
Can someone explain to me why companies *have* to sue any small fry doing a parody to protect their trademark instead of just choosing to sue when they feel there is an actual risk to their brand?
legally, if they don't sue, they can later be deemed to have "abandoned" their trademark.
Pattie Gonia has tried to file a clothing trademark that directly, clearly overlaps with Patagonia's. if Patagonia doesn't sue, then in a year or two, another company can come along and start a clothing brand called "Patogonla" that only sells poor quality copies of Patagonia designs made exclusively by slaves in sweatshops, and no one can stop them because Patagonia doesn't have an enforceable trademark anymore.
is this a reasonable way for the trademark system to work? probably not. can Patagonia change that system? no.
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