being an escape artist means you have to be naked at all costs. you have to
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In 1974, the legal department of the Cleveland Browns sent this letter in response to a complaint from attorney Dale Cox (a season ticket holder), who had objected to fans throwing paper airplanes during games.
In his letter, Cox warned the team, “I will hold the club responsible for any injury sustained by any person in my party attending one of your sporting events.”
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The court found that President Trump failed to allege facts sufficient to support his asserted joint authorship or individual copyright ownership in a set of twenty recorded interviews used in the production of The Trump Tapes, an audiobook and its companion formats… Moreover, the court noted that copyright law does not extend protection to ideas, facts, or uncopyrightable expressions—even if they are spoken during interviews. Without originality or authorship in fixation, President Trump’s claim to ownership of his responses could not proceed.
President Trump’s copyright infringement and tort claims over “Trump Tapes” dismissed
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The first slide of my meeting today was this juxtaposition:
I dunno, might be too positive. I worry we might not be taking this seriously enough.
Eh. I should just shut up and finish making my shoes.
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I watched a clip from the Donny and Marie show. For this, I do not apologize. For the valentine I made from that clip, I do apologize.
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a fem4fem, a bitch that’s into older women, and a bi-curious bitch walk into a bar. Who’s telling you who she is first?
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Once again nothing GENUINELY against the guy but the Black Panther inspired fit he gave his sona is so disappointing to me ( ；∀；) only the beret…?
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“he would not fucking say that” but instead it’s “they would not have access to that mental healthcare”
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Bushwood New Job-Weatherman
Told Ya So
Self Portrait-Weather Prognostigator
After the Panic Subsides
Yesterday I mocked the entire part of the nation that was in an hysterical panic over a snow forecast. People stormed the supermarkets to stock up on bread , milk, and apples. (Why apples, not bananas or mangoes?)
As I predicted, instead of two feet of snow, or one foot, or ten inches, we got…four. After which the…
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Grow a Pair America
Panic over a snowstorm makes us look silly
OH NO! Six Inches of Snow!!
Living in suburban Washington DC, we don’t get much snow. Officially part of The South (South of the Mason Dixon Line), snow is infrequent. BUT not unheard of, not unprecedented. In the past hundred years the area has had snow storms of 28 inches (1928), 40 inches in 2010, (dubbed Snowmageddon), and 25 inches in 2016. Other…
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It is not even that complicated the kind of accommodations you can give for struggling with public transport. But no I guess the world will fucking implode if someone needs a support worker or paratransit or money for taxis
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A Court of Thorns and Roses Chapters 44-45
Last time, Tamlin got stabbed. This time, he’s still getting stabbed, but turns out, he had a heart of stone all along, so he doesn’t die despite being stabbed in the heart. Well, that’s lucky. I wondered if perhaps there was some little wording loophole where they actually had to die for it to count, but no, Amarantha specified “stab them in the heart.” Though… if the dagger never actually pierces Tamlin’s stone heart (on account of it being stone), does it count as stabbing it? Eh, who cares, point is, Feyre has beaten the three tasks.
…….you know, I honestly feel like it would have been better to have the third hood pulled off to reveal Tamlin, and instead of all this nonsense about a stone heart, that’s when Feyre works out the riddle. It would have been cliche enough - no more or less so than the “but wait, there’s a catch” situation that actually happens. Ah well.
[[MORE]]But, yes, there is a catch. A fairly predictable one, given faerie wording games and all.
[A]“I’ll free them whenever I see fit. Feyre didn’t specify when I had to free them—just that I had to. At some point. Perhaps when you’re dead,” she finished with a hateful smile. “You assumed that when I said instantaneous freedom regarding the riddle, it applied to the trials, too, didn’t you? Foolish, stupid human.”
Yeah. Amarantha then begins to brutally torture Feyre, both mentally and physically, flinging her around the room and breaking bones and whatnot. We’re told twice that Rhys is yelling out Feyre’s name, and I don’t give a fuck. He’s done nothing to convince me he actually cares about her.
Faeries began calling foul play, demanding Tamlin be released from the curse, calling her a cheating liar.
This I also find kinda hard to believe. They’re all faeries. They all play the same word games. Every one of them should have seen it coming.
Rhys then grabs the dropped ash dagger, and lunges for Amarantha, but she easily swats him aside. Then she begins to torture him instead. The book clearly wants me to care, but alas, alack, I simply do not. The fucker deserves it. Feyre disagrees with me though, because she asks Amarantha to stop, to no avail.
The bond between us went taut. I flashed between my body and his, seeing myself through his eyes, bleeding and broken and sobbing.
This is… interesting. What are you up to now, Rhys? Does your spyware also allow you to seize control of Feyre’s brain-computer from afar? Tap into her eye-webcams to show her herself? Creep.
Feyre’s torture continues, and her life starts flashing before her eyes. Specifically, the moment of her first kill, a rabbit in the woods.
I’d been starving, desperate. Yet afterward, once my family had devoured it, I had crept back into the woods and wept for hours, knowing a line had been crossed, my soul stained.
I have a question, Feyre. In your eleven years of noble life, did you and your family ever eat meat? Yes, I’m sure it’s much more difficult to kill the thing yourself than to buy it all nice and butchered from the market. But I can’t help but feel like this is a little melodramatic. The time period of ACOTAR is a bit ambiguous, yes, but they aren’t quite at 21st-century levels of divorced from the food-making process. If nothing else, she’d surely seen rats and other pests killed in her noble household.
But I wouldn’t say [that she didn’t love Tamlin]. Because loving Tamlin was the only thing I had left, the only thing I couldn’t sacrifice.
And he didn’t even have to mind-control her into it.
Speaking of Tamlin, he crawls over to Amarantha (his chest wound is apparently healing very slowly), and begs for her to stop tormenting Feyre. Amarantha, of course, doesn’t listen. Then, we get treated to a page or so of Feyre finally working out the fucking riddle, and she says the answer just as Amarantha breaks her spine, seemingly killing her.
Next chapter, Feyre’s consciousness appears to be in Rhys’s body, as she watches the proceedings that happen after her death. Rhys sees Lucien take his mask off first.
The brutally scarred face beneath was still handsome
You say that as if you expected him not to be, Feyre. Fuck off. Scars do not automatically make someone ugly.
But, before long, Rhys is looking at Tamlin, as he goes full beast-mode on Amarantha. He shifts into beast form, slams her against the wall, stabs her in the head with a sword that Lucien tosses him, and then tears out her throat. Normally, I would say this is excessive, but this is the woman who essentially tried to groom him, made him and his entire court live under a curse for forty-nine years, and tortured and then killed his girlfriend right in front of him, so you know what? I’ll allow it. It honestly seems kinda tame all things considered, especially when you compare to say, Hunt’s little tantrum in HOEAB when they were attacked by the kristallos demon.
Once Amarantha is dead, Tamlin runs to Feyre’s body, and does the whole holding it and weeping thing. You know the one. What’s interesting to me, though, is who the first person to give over their power to revive her is.
Someone appeared beside Lucien—a tall, handsome brown-haired man with a face similar to his own. Lucien didn’t look at his father, though he stiffened as the High Lord of the Autumn Court approached Tamlin and extended a clenched hand to him.
Yes. It’s Beron. I certainly did not remember that, but I will have to try and do so for his future appearances in the books. That’s very interesting. Honestly, I think it makes sense here, Feyre told Amarantha her name to save Lucien (which would be a much bigger deal if we had faerie true-name shenanigans going on, but eh), and (eventually) prevented his death in the second task (and remember, no one else knows Rhysand “helped” her, so to Beron’s eyes, it was Feyre again). I could see him doing this out of gratitude. Too bad he becomes such a shallow cartoon later.
Summer and Winter are next, then Dawn and Day. Then, it’s Rhysand’s turn.
“For what she gave,” Rhysand said, extending a hand, “we’ll bestow what our predecessors have granted to few before.” He paused. “This makes us even,” he added, and I felt the twinkle of his humor as he opened his hand and let the seed of light fall on me.
And as you can see, he’s trying to get something out of it, unlike literally every other person who gave their power. This guy, I swear to god. Can’t even revive his maaaaaaaate without trying to use it to cancel out his other assholery. Proper shit-stain of a human being. Well, faerie being. You know what I mean.
Lucky last, of course, is Tamlin.
“I love you,” he whispered, and kissed me as he laid his hand on my heart.
Dawwwww.
You know, much as I wouldn’t say I necessarily like Tamlin, most of the things I dislike about him are either generic asshole YA love interest traits, or are things to do with the book’s framing of things (e.g. focusing on how hard it was for him to send his men to die, instead of on, you know, the dead men) rather than something he himself did. It’s not his fault Feyre/the book doesn’t see the NPCs as people. And, remembering back to the first time I read this book (when I had 0 knowledge of the rest of the series), my opinion of him overall was pretty neutral until we got to the “woe is Tamlin, for he must watch other people suffer!” bits, which is when I started to dislike him. Before then, I thought him a bit bland, but most of his faults I attributed to the genre more so than him. And the abject demonisation of him in the later entries definitely softened my dislike - dude was flawed, and did bad things, but he was hardly the epitome of evil he was made out to be. And I don’t like it when books expect me to believe things that simply are not true. And I wasn’t reading particularly critically then. I’ll be interested to see what I make of him on the rest of this read-through.