Don't land on my soul, okay?

34 | melancholic | i try to be okay but sometimes i'm not | if life would stop throwing me whales it might help

[roguefandoms]

I love that Wei Wuxian takes on the role of the weak maiden when his whole life he's been the Hot Bad Boy making Lan Wangji the girl he chases despite her refusal of his affections, and then as soon as Wei Wuxian comes back to life, Lan Wangji flips their dynamic like a coin.

[high-pot-in-noose]

The first half of their relationship, WWX is like 'why is my Virtuous Maiden not being wooed :c ???' And then he comes back to Grown Up™ LWJ and is like 'oh shit. It me. I'm the Virtuous Maiden to be wooed.'

[begoodwhale]

I’m gonna fucking vomit. I just realized in my sleep that I forgot to confirm something for the office, so I logged into the website and somehow?????? It is confirmed?????? I don’t know how but Dear God if this miracle lets me keep my job know that I am forever fucking grateful.

[sanaalex]

[weirdmeowyankovic]

@todaysbird

[jasontoddiefor]

I care normal amounts about Jiang Cheng and Lan Zhan spending like 3 months together searching for Wei Ying without Jiang Cheng having any idea why Lan Zhan gives a fuck. I choose to presume that he considered asking but decided that no, actually, he was not going to get involved. King.

[yunmeng-jiang]

[marthajefferson]

“It’s rather chilling to consider that one of the most indelible images in the Star Wars saga is its heroine silenced, stripped down, and in chains. I know a lot of men have positive feelings about this particular costume — in fact there’s an entire episode of the popular sitcom Friends that’s devoted to it — which is why it’s kind of hilariously ironic that Han Solo was blind during these scenes. That is, the one man who is romantically attached to Leia is the one man who never saw her in the golden bikini. Which means Han Solo is more attracted to a mouthy space age shield maiden than he is to a tight female body on display. In fact, if I could be so bold, I would suggest that Han Solo would be more turned on hearing about how Leia strangled Jabba the Hutt to death — using nothing but the chain that enslaved her — than he would be hearing about how his sworn enemy turned the woman he loved into a tawdry plaything.”

— HAN SOLO: WAS THE ‘STAR WARS’ HERO A NOT-SO-SECRET FEMINIST? (via laurenbacal)

[versegm]

Btw much as I love to make fun of twitter and reddit's business decisions, I have 0% trust in tumblr's management to not go a similar route so this is your gentle reminder that you should regularly go to your blog settings to export your blog. That's a fancy way of saying you can download a backup of your blog so if everything goes down you'll still have a backup of your posts & convos.

[versegm]

It's gonna come as a surprise to most of you, but if you don't want to do that for whatever reason you're allowed to not reblog this post. I'm not holding a gun to your head here I'm just trying to spread the word for people who do want a backup of their stuff.

[magz]

Also, made this guide for backup Tumblr blogs (ft. export blog method, and python 3 script method):

How To Backup Your Tumblr Blog

Tumblr Backup (Python 3 Script) Index Summary What this does: Things used in this method: How to set up: Setting up Python If you messed it

[redglassbird]

I will NEVER get over the fact that I can write stories. Like I can weave threads of whimsy in a whole new world and make people feel things if I weave them well enough???? Stories are worth so much!!! Lines of poetry are literally currency to me like I get to write little lines and then writing little lines helps me notice things when I read other peoples' lines????? Magic! Whimsy! Characters! Words! Words! Words!

[raointean]

You mean? I make thing? Thing that didn't exist before? Rad.

[carriesthewind]

Good evening everyone! As I said in an answer to a previous ask, there wasn't a public call-in line to listen to the Show Cause Hearing in Mata v Avianca (the ChatGBT lawyer case) today.

However, while we are waiting for a transcript of the hearing (because there was a court reporter! yay!) and a written decision by the judge, we did get this absolutely anxiety-inducing live tweet of the hearing:

(Caveat: this thread was not an official transcript of the hearing and should not be taken as such. It is possible the actual events and statements made in the hearing differ significantly from this report - i.e., take this with a grain of salt and reserve final judgement for the actual transcript.)

I'll put the full thread with some (light) commentary below the cut.* But the overall impression I am left with is that the judge seems to feel this pair of attorneys are treating their duty of candor toward the tribunal with the same seriousness with which they are treating their duty of competence to their clients. (And in this case, that's a very bad thing.)

*The full thread except for a soon-to-follow part 2 because I ran out of space for images again.

(All of the following screenshots are from the above tweet thread by Inner City Press @ innercitypress on twitter, made on June 8, 2023.)

Normally I would overlook that "you, personally," but in this case, you really get the feeling that the judge is concerned that LoDuca might just start talking about what Schwartz did again.

Establishing LoDuca's base of knowledge - he should know how to look up cases and check if they are real; he should know what a real case looks like.

The March 1 submission was the plaintiff's opposition to the motion to dismiss, where they first cited the fake cases.

How bad this answer is depends, I think, on LoDuca's wording here. Best case scenario, his statement about Schwartz was a specific statement about what inquiry was reasonable for him to do under the circumstances (which - for that first filing - I think is actually a reasonable argument. You don't expect your colleague to just make up cases). Worst case, this reads like him trying to wiggle out of his obligations. I will withhold judgement until I see the official transcript.

Rule 11, by the way, refers to Rule 11 of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure. Rule 11(b) states:

(If you remember the Order to Show Cause, we are dealing with a Rule 11(b)(2) issue here. Rule 11(c) allows the court to impose sanctions for violations of Rule 11(b))

Oh no, bad answer. (If anyone reading this is good at photoshop, I cannot express how badly I want a version of the "this sign can't stop me because I can't read" meme with the sign being the quote from defendant's reply where they say, "The undersigned has not been able to locate this case by caption or citation, nor any case bearing any resemblance to it.")

Oh that is not a good way of characterizing those orders. (Those were the orders, remember, where the Court said, "By April 18, 2022, Peter LoDuca, counsel of record for plaintiff, shall file an affidavit annexing copies of the following cases cited in his submission to this Court: as set forth herein. Failure to comply will result in dismissal of the action pursuant to Rule 41 (b), Fed. R. Civ. P.")

I would simply perish on the spot.

Oh yeah, I forgot to mention in my original attempted summary of "Varghese" - the first paragraph states that it is a wrongful death suit by the widow of the passenger. Then the second paragraph states that the passenger was denied boarding on a flight due to overbooking and thus missed his connecting flight and therefore incurred additional expenses. The case was such nonsense that I legitimately forgot about that inconsistency by the time I got to the end.

Your honor I plead "2 stupid 2 sanction."

(I believe the "different fonts" is in reference to the April 25 affidavit, in which the case names - and some of the surrounding text - are in a different font from most of the text in the affidavit. It seems like this is because they may have been copied straight from ChatGPT. See e.g., #3 below. It's hard to tell just based on this twitter thread, though.)

A short and simple answer! You did it!

"I have all the answers I need" is not a good sentence in this context.

Very genuinely: shorter is better here. At least I don't think he hurt himself with that statement.

Judge Castel: How do you conduct legal research?

Schwartz: I research cases.

Judge Castel: Do you read them?

Schwartz: Well, I may have once upon a time, but after hearing you ask that question in this context, I have decided to retire from the practice of law forever and also possibly sink into the ground and die. Also, by answering "yes," here, I just realized that I'm either admitting that I read the cases I submitted and therefore must have known they were fake, or else I just possibly committed perjury. Oh shit oh fuck.

Oh god I'm cringing myself into a pretzel just reading this.

Hey, by the way? You can actually use google (esp. google scholar) to do legal research. (It's not a good tool and you will miss things, but it will do in a pinch.) But. Um. If you know that...why didn't you double check your cases at very least on google when you were told they seemed to be made up?

So, once again, I am going to withhold judgement until I see the actual transcript. That said, if Schwartz did say this, I would like to compare it briefly to a part of the chat transcript he provided to the court. Here is the first question asked about the Montreal Convention in the provided transcript:

"analysis"

Oh god. I can't even provide commentary on this one. I hope this is worse than the actual transcript will prove to be. I'm reading through my fingers like I'm watching a horror movie.

"Misperception" (or "misconception") doesn't work once you have evidence that should cause you to doubt - like not being able to find a case that was supposedly published in the Federal fucking Reporter.

This is overshooting "2 stupid 2 sanction" into "too stupid to function."* You either looked for "Varghese" or you didn't. If you looked for "Varghese," it is not credible that you continued to have a good faith assumption that ChatGPT couldn't lie. If you didn't look up "Varghese," you just lied to the Court under oath.

*Just to be clear: for an ordinary person, this would be a very understandable lack of knowledge issue. A lawyer has no excuse not to know this.

Judge Castel: Mr. Schwartz, I think you have the fucking audacity to try to lie to me to my face in my fucking courtroom.

Honestly at this point I'm surprised he could still talk. I think screaming, "I'm melting, I'm melting!" as he vanished into steam, leaving his crumpled suit behind, would be an appropriate response.

NO.

Oh no, oh honey.

Ok. Two options here (again, assuming he actually fucking said "They said they couldn't find them," in response to the Court asking, "When Avianca said you cited non existent cases?"):

Schwartz is once again trying to purposefully downplay what the defendant's reply brief actually said and dodge responsibility.

Schwartz honestly, truly believes that when the defendant filed a reply containing the line, "The undersigned has not been able to locate this case by caption or citation, nor any case bearing any resemblance to it," they were just asking for assistance with their legal research?!??!

I honestly don't know which is worse.

Oh no....

Oh man, I haven't gone over it here yet, but I think that "I looked up the judge" is a panicked attempt at bringing up a talking point the Professional Responsibility Lawyers raised in their memorandum of law. (Again, I'm giving this reading of his response with the caveat that it is based only on this thread, not the official transcript, which might read very differently and contain different/more info.) The Professional Responsibility attorneys noted in a footnote that two of the judges listed in the "opinion," including the "author," were actual 11th circuit judges, and the other is an actual 5th circuit judge. My read of this footnote was as an extra little detail tossed in by the Professional Responsibility attorneys to try to dress up their argument that the "opinions" had various "indicia of authenticity."

But here's the problem. If Schwartz is telling the truth - if he was reading carefully and critically enough that he bothered to look up the judge (why would you do that if you didn't think the case might be fake?!) there is no way he could have missed that the case was gibberish. Again, if this is really what he said at the hearing, he either lied in the hearing, or he must have know the "opinions" were bogus when he gave them to LoDuca to file.

"Did it cross your mind" - if the court actually said this, oh my god.

Hey, that's the point that I made in my original post(s)!

This whole thing about the "+h" to "th" with the notary date is from the recent affidavits filed on 6/6/23, you can read them about them if you want, I'll be honest, I don't really care as much about the notary stuff so I'm going to skip it for the moment.

....and I've run out of space for images again. Part II to follow shortly!

[carriesthewind]

Part 2! When we left off, Schwartz had started an apology to the Court:

All I can hope is that the official transcript will include a lot more than was included here. Like an apology to the court instead of self-pitying reflection, and most importantly, an apology to his FUCKING CLIENT. (Hey, remember him? The guy whose interests he's supposed to be defending?)

And why didn't you have procedures (or a culture) in place where if an attorney ran into a legal research problem, they did literally anything other than pulling this shit?

Defendant's counsel, unlike plaintiff's council, remember they have a client! (Genuinely) nice job guys, you are the only ones who come out of this looking good.

LoDuca's attorney: He had so much reason to doubt, but it's the argument you have to make, fine.

Schwartz's attorney: ...I'm hoping the transcript version of this will be better? Because what?

Mmm.

...This is a very hard argument this attorney has to make.

Ooof. I actually feel for Counsel for Schwartz here. It really sucks when you don't have a good argument, but you have to try, and the judge is clearly not interested.

If I was the Professional Responsibility attorneys, I would be having a really tough conversation with my clients after this to try to prepare them for this to go very, very badly.

(Not saying it necessarily will. But at best, it won't go well.)

Aka: maybe the excuses and explanations would have flown if you had just submitted the opposition with the cites to fake cases. But you were told they were fake, and you doubled down. I do not buy that you had any good faith belief that the cases were real after that.

In summary: Ouch.

[mclennonyaoi]

everyday i wake up and i go “god i’m so tired. i can’t do this anymore.” and then i get up and i continue to do it

[midnightinjapan]

[sauntering-down]

i had three fic ideas.  wrote one.  i still have three fic ideas.  this is not how math is supposed to work.

[seasnailglass]

can this post please back up it’s too close to home

[alexseanchai]

I had five ideas, I wrote two, now I have seven

[bisexualbaker]

Listen. They’re called “plot bunnies” for a reason, and it’s not just because they hop around all over your brain demanding attention.

[redsixwing]

🎶99 fanfic ideas on my blog

99 fanfic ideas~

Take one down, pass it around

137 fanfic ideas on my blog🎶

[sevdrag]

this post walked into my house and kicked in my ribs

[neil-gaiman]

For anyone who ever asked me where ideas come from. They creep in and breed when you’re making something else.

[rosenfey]

⊱ SKYRIM CREATURES — THE SPRIGGAN

Little is known of the mysterious Spriggans, save that they revere Skyrim’s forested regions, and will defend these regions with their lives.

[itznarcotic]

[lavenderlemniscate]

inaccurate, they will survive.

[super-metroid]

can someone please make it so the cats spit the fireball back and forth

[the-trans-exo]

[mysharona1987]

[wigglewigglewigglenot]

Only 1 row left on the gen 1 cross stitch!!! New Pokémon are Kabutops, Aerodactyl, Snorlax, and Articuno!

Only 7 more to go, 144/151 gen 1 Pokémon complete! :D

[bonesblubs]

Moshang

[friend-crow]

My noisy children.

[sleepy-bebby]

Oh god, why didn’t you just let him through?

[skirefly]

🚨 CONTAINMENT BREACH 🚨