I'm a very Loveable Tiger

A crossover request from @abluntblade of Caitvi x Horizon Zero Dawn

“Court files exposed the program in January under the internal name Project Panama.

Brokers now sell the same book-buying service to other artificial intelligence (AI) firms.”

The reason why it was ruled legal to buy and slice books is due to the whole “you buy, you own it thing”

“Lawyers call that the first-sale doctrine.”

“Judge William Alsup applied it plainly. Anthropic "purchased its print copies fair and square," he wrote in his June 2025 order.

So the authors were not arguing about payment.

They were arguing about the switch from paper to PDF.”

Alsup found that switch added no copy at all.

"Here, every purchased print copy was copied in order to save storage space and to enable searchability as a digital copy. The print original was destroyed. One replaced the other," wrote Alsup in the Bartz v. Anthropic case.

“Here is the strange part. Destroying the book is what kept it legal.

Keep the paper and you hold two copies. Shred it and you hold one.

Mass book scanning has reached court before, and the precedents cut both ways.”

inside project Panama

They tried the free version first, which costed them around 1.5 billion due to lawsuits

Buying physical books happened around 2024, where Tom Turvey had to "all the books in the world."

Contractors then cut the bindings, trimmed the pages, and scanned each copy.

“The order names no supplier. However, the Washington Post reported two, the used-book sellers Better World Books and World of Books.

It also described hydraulic cutters removing the spines.”

This method has cost them no legal fees

why old books

Because they’re clean, no AI in sight.

If you scan a book that has AI in it, the model will degrade and get worst. Which is why they usually try to avoid more modern day books

“So books printed before ChatGPT cannot contain machine writing. Brokers spotted the gap.

ISBNdb sells book sourcing to AI firms. "The world's best AI training data is sitting on a shelf," its site says.”

more funny and surprising bit

But funny enough, Elon musk doesn’t actually support this idea and instead simply scans the books without destroying them

It remains to be seen if he’s lying or not

Dr. Serkan Toto, CEO of Japanese game industry consultancy firm Kantan Games (totally not someone who is pro Sony and someone who benefits from this, but we'll get to that) has said that Sony will try not to reverse their decision

"I sympathize with physical media fans, but Sony will not reverse this decision," Toto (ignore his doomer attitude) told IGN.

"They of course knew what the online reaction would look like, and they now wait for this storm to pass.

"Sony has over 120 million active PlayStation users," he continued. "Around 50 million people subscribe to PlayStation Plus. As a thought experiment, let's say 500,000 cancel in protest, that would be just 1% of that business gone — of course not enough to Sony to start rethinking. Digital is just too lucrative."

Toto says Sony wants to save money on manufacturing games, distribution and not having to give retailers a cut

"I do think Sony will respond in some capacity given the backlash (and tbh they shouldn't have announced this until they were ready to disclose how discs would work on PS6)," said Daniel Ahmad, Director of Research & Insights at Niko Partners, via a post on X/Twitter. "But I'd be surprised if they do a full reversal at this point."

"Their current profit margin has been too weak for years now, so they feel like they must act," Toto concluded. "From an economic perspective, digital sales just make too much sense especially for platform holders."

guess what? this "expert" is actually pro sony!

The analyst, Dr. Serkan Toto who said that people should give up and that Sony won’t give in, “ is accredited by Keio University, a digital media & Microlens R&D facility & trade partner of Sony's located 10 minutes from Sony Global HQ”

And he also benefits “monetarily by developing the microlenses that will supplant the Austrian disc factory.”

So he is a Sony guy and someone who benefits from this

so don't listen to him and keep on fighting guys!!!

“Dutch non-profit group Stichting Massaschade & Consument is suing the company for roughly $450 million in damages, alleging that killing discs will hand PlayStation a monopoly over its digital games.”

"The end of physical discs removes the last place where a PlayStation game could still be bought and sold at a competitive price," Lucia Melcherts, chair of SMC, said in a statement to wccftech.

"No discs means no second-hand market and no alternative to the PlayStation Store, so from 2028, Sony alone decides what a game costs and even how long you are allowed to use it.

That is exactly the harm our Fair PlayStation claim is about: a price can never be fair when the buyer is left with no ownership and no alternative."

“Melcherts is referring to the robust PlayStation terms of service, which explicitly lays out that "the software is licensed to you, not sold." Digital purchases are not the same as physical.

You are not buying a copy of a game, you are buying a non-exclusive personal license to play the game, which can be revoked at any moment without compensation.

Combined with a closed ecosystem in which only the PlayStation Store is made available, the only option consumers have is to pay whatever Sony demands, without ever having the guarantee of true ownership.“

“Sony is now facing regulatory action in Mexico over their decision to stop making PlayStation game discs.”

“Federal Representative Iraís Reyes and Senator Luis Donaldo Colosio are filing a complaint against their National Antitrust Commission.

While Rep. Reyes and Sen. Colosio are both members of the political party Movimiento Ciudadano, they are filing this complaint as private citizens.

However, they both clearly understand the situation from a gamer/consumer perspective.

Rep. Reyes talked about how PlayStation gamers would only be able to buy their games directly from PlayStation.

“If discs disappear, anyone who owns a PlayStation will no longer be able to choose where to buy their games and will be forced to purchase them exclusively through Sony’s store,” Reyes said.

Subsequently, Sen. Colosio pointed out how local retailers, like Liverpool, Sanborns, and GamePlanet, would be harmed by this move.

This move may be a prelude to other political actions, including legislation.

Their complaint refers to this as a relative monopolistic practice that violates Mexico’s Federal Economic Competition Law.

But then again, since Mexico’s antitrust commission only started last year, this issue could show how powerful it actually is.

If Mexico does take action, it could force the EU to reexamine if they should regulate Sony as well.”

all digital future

These two law makers warn of a all digital future, referencing when 500 digital movies were removed from stores and libraries

“According to the complaint, Sony’s strategy could create an excessive concentration of power by allowing the company to simultaneously control the console hardware, the digital storefront, game distribution, and pricing.

“Sony would become both the referee and the player within its own ecosystem, and we know what can happen when a single company controls every part of the market,” Reyes stated.

Colosio added that the transition to an all-digital ecosystem also ignores infrastructure disparities across the country.

“By forcing everything to become digital, the assumption is that everyone has access to reliable high-speed internet, when we know that isn’t the reality throughout Mexico,” he said.”

@itsuwari-no-kibo-offical @tf2anddeltarunefan @the-best-noob @1nkyraven @i-am-trashyy @i-suggest-piracy @chaos-triangle

No Disc, No Buy!

Link to the petition to dave physical games down below:

No, T. rex did not look like a round, soft bird. No, plesiosaurs were not penguin shaped. No, a Triceratops was probably not bright pink and purple all over, and no, Brachiosaurus could never have had a trunk. These are things we absolutely can and do know.

Wikipedia can actually be quite useful here - look at the citations on a page, and you will find all of the academic papers referenced for the information. Sites like New Scientist and National Geographic are reliable sources of information when it comes to scientific discovery. The British Natural History Museum has its own website with some facts and news; I'm sure other museums have the same. Some palaeontologists have blogs, like TetZoo (Darren Naish), and there are podcasts and websites full of information, like Love In The Time Of Chasmosaurus.

Twitter is full of palaeontologists, and if you follow them, you can often keep up-to-date on palaeontological news - Darren Naish, Mark Witton, Thomas Holtz Jr., Nizar Ibrahim, Riley Black, just to name a few. If you check out who these guys are following, you can find a bunch more palaeos to follow!

Dinosaurs, How They Lived And Evolved by Darren Naish and Paul M. Barrett is a good, recent book that goes over what we know of dinosaurs. Locked In Time by Dean R. Lomax is a great book, just published, which discusses some of the extraordinary fossils we've found and what they can tell us. The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs by Steve Brusette follows both the history of the field of palaeontology, and discusses what we know about dinosaurs. If you want to venture outside of Dinosauria, Pterosaurs by Mark P. Witton is a good book - and in fact The Palaeoartists Handbook, also by Witton, is great if you want to know more about dinosaurs and how to draw them!

Purely for fun, All Yesterdays by Cosemann, Naish and Conway was an interesting book on fun, speculative, and out-of-the-norm palaeoart. This book has been rather misunderstood as encouraging wild speculation, but it was actually pushing for a new perspective on palaeoart and how it is done. It makes for a fun read though.

(I haven't linked to any of these books, but you can find them in various places, including Amazon. If you don't want to buy them, check out your local library!)

If you want to poke at the more academic side of things, using Google Scholar to look for published papers can take you directly to the source. Journal of Palaeontology, Palaeontology (PalAss) and Journal of Vertebrate Palaeontology are just a few palaeontology-focused journals that publish scientific papers. Full disclaimer that it can be a little hard to find exactly what you want, often the answers are spread across multiple papers rather than gathered into one, and they can be long, dry, and technical. However, reading the abstract, introduction, and conclusion, as well as looking at the figures, can generally give you an idea of what the paper is talking about.

This should be a good jumping off point - you can find more resources by looking at these ones, as most books and papers will list references for where they got their information, and poking around a palaeontologist's Twitter will often dig up their own recommendations for books and such. If you're looking for websites with information, or checking out Wikipedia reference links, make sure you're researching whether or not it is a reliable source, and checking how up-to-date its information is.

The research suggests that when intolerant white people fear democracy may benefit marginalized people, they abandon their commitment to democracy.

Whites See Racism as a Zero-Sum Game That They Are Now Losing

Martin Luther King and the ‘polite’ racism of white liberals

White Americans long for the 1950s, when they didn’t face so much “discrimination”

lmaoo white people love to act like we don’t have centuries of examples of who they are. always want to act brand new. like this suspicion and mistrust of your character isn’t earned every fucking day by your behavior, your treatment of black people, native people, brown people, by who you vote for, who you support with your money, who you tone police, your “jokes” and more. foh!  like there isn’t a trail of dead black, native and brown bodies in your wake. we watched y’all whitewash the fuck out of mlk’s legacy (AFTER KILLING HIM BTW) and then tried to use that whitewashed version to limit our fight for liberation and justice to just the acts your comfortable with and then have the fucking nerve to say that calling out your typical behavior to be “guilt tripping?” fuck you.

no effort whatsoever. like mlk said…

In real life, countries around the world are in frequent states of war. Not everyone has access to easy air travel. There are places in the world ruled by war lords and terrorists. There are countries which do not allow foreigners to move freely.

There are still refugees who have to make long travels across dangerous parts of their country just to get to a border stop where they might be granted asylum.

Child soldiers are still recruited by terrorist groups, and it would actually have been pretty cool to have explored modern child soldiers in the Avatar universe, juxtaposed with the Gaang everyone cheered for in the original.

Odysseus: Regret it why?

Cassandra: You won’t believe me if I tell you. If I prophecy, nobody believes me. That is my curse.

Odysseus: … I’m Nobody. Fill me in. 

*A couple of months later* 

Odysseus: HELLO PENELOPE, I AM HERE PRECISELY ON TIME AND NOT YEARS LATE incidentally I rescued and adopted a Trojan seer while I was away, she’s great, got me home really fast, Cassandra this is your new mother who’s not going to treat you like shit. 

Penelope: … I’m going to need more details, but okay, sure. 

Simply put: Hama had a family while hiding out in the Fire Nation territory. And then the family died because of the Fire Nation, underscoring the loss of family and community.

She found another survivor who escaped from a different prison. Hurt and traumatized, but alive. The other person was too scared to draw attention back to the Southern Water Tribe by heading home because what if what if what if someone else got home. Time passed as Hama and the Survivor found solace in each other; they don't have home but they have each other and that's enough given the journey home and safety there being too long and uncertain. (Maybe they eventually had kids? Whether they were drafted or fled, they're gone but hopefully alive.) The comb the Gaang finds is assembled from pieces each managed to hold onto - let's face it: the thing is HUGE for something supposedly hidden in her hair for years, and it'd be poetic if it was a whole remade from clutched fragments.

... and then one day a local boy from the village - one SO PROUD of the Fire Nation (so fearful not to be) - somehow realizes that Survivor is A Foreigner. Not the full extent of the truth, not even thinking that The Foreigner is dangerous in themselves or a spy or anything like that... just that somehow someone who "doesn't belong" is living in the Nation and there'd be trouble if anyone was found "harboring" them.

Local Boy was spoonfed propaganda until he choked on it, paranoid and fearful of any hint of Not Fire Nation / Perception of Treason and the problems that'd result if someone more volatile finds out.

So Local Boy abducts Survivor, ties up Survivor in a cave, and goes home panicking over what to do and how to solve the "problem". Survivor's trauma is back in full force over the imprisonment so they're blind to everything but the fear and the darkness. A week of misery results in their death.

Local Boy is panicking worse now. He doesn't think Hama knows what Survivor "really is", and is too scared to open up to friends or family. So he goes to the nice innkeeper who always has a smile for the kids and is so nice such a nice auntie that of course she'll know what to do.

Hama coaxes Local Boy to lead her to Survivor's cave. Sees what happened. And something in her breaks, but she's still smiling sweetly as she turns to Local Boy with assurances that she knows just what to do. And she does: Local Boy is the first victim of her revenge. Made to suffer exactly how Survivor suffered: fear, darkness, no water, no food, no idea if anyone is looking, not even Hama's presence to give some solace that he's not alone.

And then she turns on the rest. Hama has so much wasted time to make up for.