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𝑪𝒐𝒏𝒔𝒐𝒍𝒆 𝑺𝒑𝒊𝒓𝒊𝒕𝒖𝒂𝒍𝒊𝒕𝒚, curated by LAN Party, explores video games as a means to glitch existing systems and build alternate realities✨ Opens June 24—preview and set reminder to view, collect, and join an online talk with programming partner Rhizome👇 Artists: Emi Kusano🌠 john provencher 𝙎𝙖𝙗𝙖𝙩𝙤 Gabriel Massan Keiken Curators: Benoit.Tokyo... show more
15,732 görüntüleme • 1 yıl önce •via X (Twitter)
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NB1 yıl önce
@rhizome Familiar names, but with some new very exciting creative directions 👀🖤
Lauren Jones1 yıl önce
@rhizome ✨✨✨
Linda Dounia1 yıl önce
@rhizome omg omg omg this is so guuuuuud 😍
Feral File1 yıl önce
@rhizome 🤍🤍🤍
nygilia.eth 💎1 yıl önce
@rhizome This is dope! I’m all about the gaming vibes 😍😍 amazing curation @bennavkim @benoit_tokyo_
Jiggy🏀 (🐇🕳,🐣🪱)1 yıl önce
@rhizome amazing! is there anyway to preview the works?
p1xelfool1 yıl önce
@rhizome 🖤
🎀 benna 🎀 more active on Farcaster @benna 👼1 yıl önce
@rhizome !!!!
𝘿⃥𝙊⃥𝙊⃥𝙈⃥ (🐥,🪱)1 yıl önce
@rhizome Yes yes yes
Unruly Unroll1 yıl önce
@rhizome 🤩
![Marathon | Ultimate Overview, Gameplay, Hands-On Impressions ▪️Team based extraction shooter set on Tau Ceti IV, scavenge remains of a lost colony for glory and fortune ▪️Launch: Coming to PS5, Xbox and PC on September 23 ▪️Will be a "premium" product, meaning not F2P ▪️"Weapons and movement feels crisp, fluid, and incredibly satisfying in that rarified way that few studios can achieve" ▪️3 maps, 6 runner classes at launch, more to follow post-launch ▪️Plans to support the game with new maps, weapons, characters, and more as it goes on ▪️Ranked play, end game challenges, seasonal storytelling, secrets to discover, community events all in Season One with more content coming ▪️You play as a "runner", cybernetic mercenary who's given up their human form for a bio-synthetic shell with unique abilities and stats ▪️Runner Types: "Locus" is a soldier class for pushing forward, can use a shield, "Void" is stealth, sneak by undetected, use smoke grenades, "Blackbird" is reconnaissance based, find players, positioning, and more ▪️Uncover secrets hidden in the wake of the original Marathon trilogy's events - how and where this overlaps or clashes with the original games "is a story that will unfold over time" ▪️Objective is to get in, get as much loot as you can, and get out alive ▪️If you die, your gear and loot will be up for grabs. Survive and you can take your gear with you on future runs as you grow in power and fill your vault ▪️Fight in a crew of up to 3 players, various map sizes up to 18 players ▪️PvP + PvE, battle other players, security forces, and "otherworldly threats" ▪️Contextual pings, shared objectives, down-but-not-out mechanics ▪️Environments are filled with weapons, materials, items, resources, cores, keys, backpacks, secrets etc to find You can find things like backpacks that expand your inventory, powerful and unique weapons, consumables to heal yourself, ▪️Select your runner, strategically build your loadouts pre-match ▪️Factions in the game can sponsor you and your loadout ▪️You have the freedom to opt out of crew fill and take all the glory for yourself as a solo runner ▪️"This is probably the best-looking, best-feeling extraction shooter ever made", not easy for newcomers to the genre, can be tough to get into, but one previewer was "reluctant to put Marathon down. This is a good sign – the best thing I can say after any preview is that I want more – but big questions remain" ▪️No two matches ever play out the same, dynamic events, variable weather, unpredictable players etc ▪️Customization: Each Runner "brings their own flair", but serve as foundations to customize your playstyle - collect implants and equipment to augment your Runner, like stacking implants/upgrades to reduce heat build-up to allow you to keep running, jumping, sliding longer ▪️Contracts: "Ingenious" incentives, finish contracts you accept for permanent upgrades to your stats, add precious items like grenades, shields, inventory-expanding backpacks, etc to your market. The bigger your market, the better your minimum loadout becomes ▪️Contracts provide "valuable direction", bring welcome diversity and add a "precious hit of semi-permanent progression" ▪️Prestige Cores: Rare items that can "really push the boundaries" (ex: Glitch has an upgrade that turns double jump into triple jump for more manueverability) ▪️Another rare item is a backpack that turns you invisible while interacting with containers (very useful when everyone on the map is hunting you) ▪️Each match "feels like the most important one ever", high stakes, "surprisingly challenging AI enemies" that were "much, much better at surrounding and overwhelming players than the vast majority of AI enemies found in other games" ▪️Having a balanced crew helps in exploring the "dark and forgotten places" in maps - filled with deadly creatures like a species of giant ticks who swarm you frantically ▪️Battles can become frantic as you encounter other crews, stalk them across the map, encounter AI enemies to fend off when others come to claim your loot (one preview battle turned into a 9 player free-for-all) ▪️Downside could be the reward system where skilled players enter fresh matches with high level gear that outmatches less skilled players, though Bungie says it has gone out of its way to try and make it where a poorly equipped squad can still stand a chance if they play well ▪️Even if you die, you can can still get upgrades, improve your reputation with factions, advance in perk trees, etc by completing various quests, looting chests, or fulfilling specific objectives which unlock new bits of story and can grant perks like buying slightly better gear from vendors ▪️"The world Bungie has built is every bit as beautiful as it is creepy and dystopian, and there are moments where they satisfyingly hint at the events of the Marathon trilogy from the ‘90s", though "what little I saw did only slightly more than pay lip service to the world" ▪️Uses the seasonal reset model like in Diablo 4, where players are stripped of their loot and progress at the end of each season to mix things up with new content and new meta ▪️Game is designed to get you killed, Bungie expects average exfiltration rates to be comfortably below 50% ▪️"You will lose a lot, and losing hurts a lot[...]Extracts are snapshots of this unpredictability. That white-knuckle countdown may become a gut-punch defeat, an unforgettable clutch, a desperate last-second dive into the portal as your downed allies watch in envy and horror (couldn't be me), or an unnerving anticlimax. It's not always a pleasant one, but it is a strong emotional hook" ▪️Some previewers worried about variety, weren't impressed with the objectives in the alpha, like hunting computer monitors on the map, sprinting over, marking dropships, sprinting over, and repeating, though random events help spice things up ▪️Not a 20-map game says Bungie, map design "does have that sticky battle royale quality of generating memories", though still worried 3-4 medium sized maps might not be enough ▪️Bungie's "verbiage" on updates sounds like possibly 1 new map a year + refreshing existing ones in between, which could work in its favor pushing players to really learn maps, but will they hold up over hundreds of hours? ▪️Fights are decided by gun skill, clever ability use, map awareness, how strong your shield is, how many healing supplies you have, etc ▪️Example: If you have one bar of shield and enemy has four, you'll lose 1v1, but change it up with powerful grenades, status effects like toxic or overheat, backpacks are "transformative", etc Gameplay Trailer ▶️ Gameplay Overview ▶️ PS Blog ➡️ IGN ➡️ GamesRadar ➡️ ▶️](https://image.24vids.com/tw-1911151387884368075/amplify_video_thumb/1911144961749184512/img/PCWzZVWXyT_s-3eX.jpg)
![Good morning. In November of 2024, I laid out why Brian Tully, Kate Peter, and Jason Broyles leaked an unredacted 15-year extraction of Lindsey Gaetani's phone. I didn't want the world to listen to me. I wanted someone, somewhere, to protect Lindsey. I can finally breathe. Here is the full text of my report (that now has 700,000 views); Okay, fine, as a special treat (on this, the day of oral arguments in the #KarenReadTrial appeal), I will lay out some of what I am thinking as to the timeline of events between August of 2023 and the spring of 2024. You are going to get a lot of inside information in this post. You have been warned. In the fall of 2023, via a woman named Natalie (who was friends with Karen Read and enjoyed talking about houseplants with Karen), I believe the Commonwealth of Massachusetts came to be in possession of evidence indicating that Read and blogger Aiden Turtle Boy Kearney were conspiring to intimidate witnesses in Read's ongoing criminal trial related to the murder of John O'Keefe. See the evidence of that contact (which started in April/May of 2023 --because of Natalie-- and occurred directly with Read and via Read's lawyers, David Yannetti and Alan Jackson) here - As a result of this information being uncovered, I believe the Commonwealth then began targeting Mr. Kearney with criminal charges related to witness intimidation in the context of Read's criminal trial (Kearney had been organizing, with Read's help, rallies at the homes of witnesses in the case and running smear campaigns to poison the jury pool in the lead up to Read's trial). I believe the intent of this targeting was multifaceted but, primarily, involved the following: 1) Getting Kearney to stop his abhorrent behavior related to witnesses in Read's case (which included, in some cases, Kearney's followers putting semen on pictures of witnesses' children and then sending those pictures to said witnesses, as explained here - 2) Placing criminal charges on Kearney in an effort to pressure him to "flip" on Karen Read and, in turn, testify that Read did, indeed, order the witness intimidation in question via a conspiracy. Kearney, when he was eventually jailed in late 2023/early 2024, confirmed that such an offer was presented while he was incarcerated. 3) Getting information for the Massachusetts State Police, and the Norfolk District Attorney, as to the nature of an ongoing federal probe into the conduct of those departments (an investigation which, in time, it turns out had moved on from investigating John O'Keefe's death and, in turn, evolved into a probe of a potential cover-up of the death of Sandra Birchmore). Read more background on that complex situation --involving two Troopers assigned to the Norfolk DA, who also worked on the Read case, that signed off on a "misleading" state-level police report into Matthew Farwell-- here - At the same time, and in furtherance of those investigatory activities, I believe the State Police began working directly with a former colleague of Aiden Kearney, a woman named Kate Peter AKA MafiaMasshole who has a small online cult following related to humiliating First Amendment Auditors (which, admittedly, is noble work). What may have not been so noble (along with Peter taking cash in a Chick-Fil-A parking lot for her "efforts" on behalf of some wealthy witnesses in the Read trial), however, is that --as Mr. Kearney became the subject of police investigations related to the aforementioned witness intimidation-- the Norfolk DA announced to the public that a Special Prosecutor would be appointed to oversee those charges (because of the numerous allegations of corruption that Kearney had made towards the DA in public). That Special Prosecutor, Ken Mello, was nonetheless assigned to work with the same State Police Trooper (Brian Tully) who worked on the Read case and who reported directly to the Norfolk DA at the time. And, furthermore, I believe the State Police and the Norfolk DA, via Brian Tully, also around this time (fall of 2023) began working directly with Kate Peter (who, for some time, was working for a Private Investigations firm with ties to a number of figures in the orbit of the Read case) in order to obtain evidence against Mr. Kearney, seek out and catalog information from sources close to Mr. Kearney and, in some cases, even help draft parts of Mr. Kearney's eventually October, 2023, criminal indictment. However, what I think the State Police (and the Norfolk DA) did not know at the time was that Aiden Kearney was working as a confidential federal informant, specifically looking into allegations of civil rights violations against said State Police, since at least May of 2023. Furthermore, I also think the State Police were not aware that it was Karen Read's lawyers, Alan Jackson and David Yannetti, who had the necessary connections in order to help Kearney obtain that status. Read more here - That said, at the same time, when Kearney was initially brought on by the federal government in May of 2023, in my view, I don't think the DOJ was finished looking into the death of John O'Keefe. In fact, I think the DOJ pulled out an old FBI tactic (which I can confirm exists) and, after the US Attorney for the District of Massachusetts wrapped-up the O'Keefe probe in the fall of 2023, Kearney was encouraged by the FBI to use his coverage of the Read case to generate leads related to other misconduct by the State Police unit attached to the Norfolk DA (in particular Brian Tully). Read more about that FBI playbook here - Indeed, that timeline perfectly synchs with a recent announcement by US Attorney Josh Levy indicating that the federal probe of Sandra Birchmore's death began in, roughly, August of 2023. See more background on Birchmore's tragic life and death here - Nonetheless, because of Kearney's ongoing work for the federal government in the fall of 2023, and because the State Police did not realize this was happening (although they should have been able to put it together, because Kate Peter and Kevin from Yellow Cottage Tails for sure knew, as early as May of 2023, that FBI agents were calling around, on behalf of Kearney, related to ongoing criminal cases entirely removed from the Read trial) I believe said State Police, stupidly, committed some of the very civil rights violations that the FBI was looking for. I believe the State Police did this, in particular Brian Tully, by way of his relationship to Kate Peter. [Side note: I will always remember talking to Kate, over winter and spring of 2024, and explaining my firm belief that Aiden Kearney was an FBI agent. Peter simply could not come to terms with that reality, despite having been the person who called the FBI back in May in order to confirm the agency was poking around some of Kearney's criminal cases, and, in that moment, I knew that pride was, indeed, about to cometh before her fall.] And, indeed, I also think Karen Read, herself, was well aware that the federal probe into John's death had ended in the fall of 2023 (for the most part) and that, in turn, the feds were going to move on to other serious allegations of corruption related to Tully and his unit at the State Police. However, for many reasons, I think Karen was happy to let the FBI (and TurtleBoy) use her trial as "cover" to get more information, and leads, related to said Troopers (this was, after all, the very same unit that had investigated Read and mocked her with horrifying language during that process). [Also, another side note, there is an intense history of tension between the Norfolk DA's office and the DOJ in Boston which dates back to the 1990's and William Delahunt, but which, in reality, really heated up during a 2015 mob trial.] Basically, there is a connection between Josh Levy (Acting US Attorney For District of Massachusetts) + Karen Read (accused murderer) + Dustin Chao (head of Boston DOJ's Public Integrity Section) + David Yannetti (lawyer for accused murderer Karen Read) + Rachael Rollins (former Suffolk County DA, and US Attorney for the district of Massachusetts, until Spring of 2023, who was also Josh Levy's boss in November of 2022 and who previously had direct contact with Read's lawyer, Mr. Yannetti) + Aiden TurtleBoy Kearney (blogger indicted with 19 felonies in relation to targeting witnesses in the Read case, until he was thrown out of Read's inner circle for exposing Read's connection to Acting US Attorney Levy). Chao (aforementioned head of the DOJ Boston's Public Integrity Section) had a grudge to use whatever means necessary take down the Norfolk DA since 2015 (After Chao's wife was passed over for a promotion and left that DA's office on bad terms) and, in turn, the proxy-battle behind all of this chaos becomes a bit more clear. Read the primary source documents laying all of this out here - and here - That said, I think there one was wild-card who came into the picture between October of 2023 that no one (be it Kate Peter, the FBI, the DOJ, the State Police, Aiden Kearney or otherwise) expected, and her name is Lindsey Gaetani. At first, between October and December of 2023, Lindsey was simply someone who had met Mr. Kearney online, chatted with him, and then begun to form a bond. Little did Ms. Gaetani realize, however, that, by virtue of a simple twist of fate, Kearney's pillow talk related to Karen Read and Josh Levy having direct contact, FBI agents, and civil rights probes of the State Police would put her directly in the middle of an unholy conflagration that was, on the night of December 23rd, 2023, about to take a turn that would change the course of history for an untold number of human lives. For, you see, in the weeks leading up to Christmas of 2023, the State Police discovered that Ms. Gaetani had information about Karen Read and TurtleBoy being in direct communication (along with information that Read and Josh Levy spoke directly). See those documents here - That, in turn, meant Ms. Gaetani was going to be forced to provide testimony at a Grand Jury scheduled for the week after Christmas (roughly December 26th, 2023). When Kearney found out this news, on or around December 22nd, it sent him into a tailspin (for good reason, it turns out, as what Mr. Kearney did next would, over time, lead to him being kicked out of Karen Read's inner circle and sent to jail...or, as Kearney says it, "...[that night] was a very expensive trip to [the city where Lindsey lives.]" Leveraging a very difficult time in Ms. Gaetani's life, Kearney demanded he be able to visit her, at home, late at night on December 23rd of 2023. Then, Kearney forced Gaetani to allow Kearney to review the contents of her phone (specifically her messages with Kate Peter) and take notes (using an ongoing medical situation that Gaetani was going through as leverage to get permission to do so). However, after Gaetani raised an objection to Kearney taking those notes, and after Gaetani retrieved her own notepad (that Kearney had used to take said notes) Kearney entirely lost his cool, pushed Gaetani onto a couch, and then began illegally recording her with his phone (an audio file Kearney would later try to edit in order to suggest Gaetani had consented to the recording, although that plan failed when a copy of the original recording, without the line about consent, was introduced into the court record). That, in turn, led to Kearney being criminally charged (again) with witness intimidation, illegal interception of an oral communication and assault and, as a result, a warrant to arrest (with probable cause) was issued. Kearney, after being a self-admitted "fugitive" from justice for multiple days with the warrant active, then turned himself in to authorities and was sent to jail after a Judge in Dedham district court revoked Kearney's bond as a result of the new charges involving Gaetani. See the post where Kearney admitted to being a fugitive here - See full coverage of the moment Kearney's bail was revoked here - In turn, Kearney then spent the next 60 days in jail (in protective custody, per my sources, because of his status as a federal informant) and, during that time, Kearney has confirmed that he would have been able to "walk free" if he "flipped" on Karen Read in the context of an ongoing conspiracy and witness intimidation probe into the pair of star-crossed attention seekers. However, Kearney did not do so and, in turn, was released from jail in late February of 2023 after serving the full 60 days on his bail revocation. For Ms. Read, however, a newly-leaked series of text messages confirm that, even thought Kearney stayed loyal and sent love-letters begging Read's forgiveness while locked up, the incident on the 23rd with Lindsey was Karen's red line and Kearney had been cut off from Read's inner circle. See that leaked text message (from March 3rd) here - Interestingly, on one of the first day's that TurtleBoy was out of jail (February 26th, 2024), I captured this fascinating moment where Karen clearly is uncomfortable around Kearney (she entirely ignores his presence outside of court and her lawyer, Alan Jackson, puts his arm on Karen's back to gently tug her away from Kearney as they walk by his hallowed-shell) - And, even more interestingly, it was also on the same day (2/26/24) that Lindsey Gaetani (under mysterious circumstances that, again, trace back to Kate Peter being shady) attended a court hearing, wherein, because of Gaetani's active restraining order on Kearney, Kearney was forced to leave the courtroom during Karen's case (and, on this same day, Kearney was also charged with a violation of that RO for hiding in the bushes outside of the court after being asked to leave the area by authorities). See video of that day here - However, sadly, I believe Gaetani's "usefulness" also quickly ended around this time as Kearney, within weeks, got his RO amended to allow TurtleBoy to attend any court hearing in the Commonwealth (even with Lindsey present) and, furthermore, the pressure tactics to get Kearney to "flip" on Karen Read had failed. Furthermore, because Karen was now in fear of TurtleBoy (having cut Aiden off), I believe Peter, Tully and the Norfolk DA took an entirely new direction. They would try to get Karen Read to cooperate regarding the ongoing investigations into TurtleBoy. This move, however, had unintended consequences (in particular for Lindsey Gaetani). In what I believe was a colloquial "crime of opportunity" -- and because Gaetani was no longer "useful" for the purposes of pressuring Kearney into a plea or for the purposes of keeping Kearney away from Karen Read hearings -- Kate Peter came up with a new idea: Kate, before knowing anyone else in the case, was connected with Jen McCabe (a witness in the Read trial who heard Karen confess to hitting John O'Keefe and who was tormented by TurtleBoy, for months, as a result of her willingness to testify on behalf of justice for John). Kate, also, had extensive connections to a network of Discord operatives who use fake profiles and hunt down bad people on the internet (again, a noble calling). However, I believe Kate weaponized some of those people (including someone named Father Mark Murphy, who used a fake profile called "The Jennings Report" and a parking clerk named Jason Broyles who moonlights as a woman online named "Hailey W.") to, in a last ditch effort now that Lindsey had no other use and because TurtleBoy could not be stopped, deflect the attention of TurtleBoy's fans (known as "TurtleRiders") away from Jen McCabe and onto --an unwitting and entirely innocent-- Lindsey Gaetani). What makes this even more shocking is that the way public attention was deflect onto Lindsey involved, what I believe, was an operation (run by Kate) to leak sensitive documents about Lindsey (along with other private information) to those fake profiles (including Jason Broyles, who Kate Peter has known since 2019). Interestingly, Broyles (and Murphy) began operations targeting Lindsey, and her support network/allies, right around the end of February, 2023 (and, interestingly, those accounts, for months, went out of their way to avoid mentioning Kate Peter or Jen McCabe, nearly entirely). Read more about the fake "Jennings Report" profile here - and read more about the disturbing tactics deployed by Jason Broyles here - and here - Anyway, that entire fiasco was the subtext (that I referenced in earlier posts) behind my question to Karen Read, in April of 2024, regarding whether Karen wanted to apologize to Lindsey for what was happening (as, by that point, Karen knew full well what it was like to become the target of Aiden's ire simply because Karen had cut him off). Karen may not have responded to my question, but she is a smart person (really, I don't mean that gratuitously: Read plays on a level I don't think most of us understand, and she does it by hiding in plain sight) and Karen knew exactly what I was talking about (she probably could have written this post herself, in fact, but she probably wouldn't have said as much about her gilt as to John's death). See video of me asking Karen that pointed question here - So, where does that leave us? Well: 1) In my view, Karen Read is vulnerable, concerned about what Aiden will do to her and her family, running out of money, and constantly at risk of having her conversations with TurtleBoy and other insiders (past and present leaked). Karen, after she loses her appeal at the SJC, is likely to look for a way to take a plea and cooperate against Aiden (Robert Cosgrove, the new special prosecutor in the Read/Kearney cases, and Hank Brennan, the new ADA in Read's murder trial, are serious legal heavy hitters and Read is in deep trouble, in my view). 2) Likewise, I think Brian Tully and Kate Peter are also deeply concerned because they didn't realize the FBI is, in reality, probably coming for them (and it has nothing to do with John O'Keefe's death, but instead it has everything to do with Kate and Tully's actions between the fall of 2023 and the summer/fall of 2024 and, also, probably Tully's actions in the context of the Sandra Birchmore investigation). I think this is why Peter is facing so many state-level criminal charges (despite trying to use her connections to get those cases to "go away" and, even in one case, managing to get the Norfolk DA not to recuse itself related to one of those charges, despite a special prosecutor being assigned to Peter's other criminal cases in the jurisdiction because of her connection to the State Police and the DA). 3) I think a lot of people are trying to keep Lindsey Gaetani and her story away from the media, and away from documentaries/podcasts that they do not control, in order to hide this information from the public, punish Lindsey for "knowing" Aiden, and insulate Peter and Brian Tully from accountability. I do not think this strategy is going to work because, and I cannot understate this enough, Lindsey is actually a genius (and none of you can see it, because you're blinded by greed, ego, jealously or otherwise). 4) I think, at the end of the day, Karen Read killed John O'Keefe, while Karen was drunk driving, at 12:31am on 1/29/22 by hitting John with her SUV and then leaving John to die. In turn, I think Karen was mad that people "flipped on her" related to Karen's actions that night, and, in turn, Karen leveraged her political connections (which I don't fully understand, but which I think are based in the intelligence community) to "punish" the Norfolk DA and the State Police Troopers who uncovered said evidence of Karen's guilt. Little did Karen realize, all the way back in November of 2022, that she had stumbled onto overlapping social circles of power that, when the dust settles, would have been consumed by their hubris --and wanton disregard for the memory of John O'Keefe-- regardless. "Remember," dear friends and readers, "it's about Justice For John." I'm a towel, and that's what I think happened (as of November, 2024). Usual disclaimer: I am a towel, not a lawyer. This is not legal advice. You are reading social media. Get a lawyer if you have questions about the law.](https://image.24vids.com/tw-1951990598375796787/amplify_video_thumb/1951989042272227328/img/AR5vFlH4FWaF-znG.jpg)
![COMMONS HOUSING SELECT COMMITTEE: STATEMENT FROM FREE LEASEHOLDERS 3/3/26 Today, we told Parliament the truth. About the cynical games Conservative and Labour governments have been playing with your homes, money and lives. It was awkward. We had to motor through to cover as many points as humanely possible in a short time. Sorry if we didn’t cover yours. We are the insurgents against a very closed and broken political system. We will go away when they finally free the people from the property servitude of leasehold. Until then, we will keep challenging the official line and holding power to account, however uncomfortable that may be. Parliament has been talking about abolishing leasehold, a legacy of serfdom, since the 1880s, before working men and women had the right to vote. In 2026, we keep hearing it’s “complicated” and our politicians need more time because they might get sued by the wealthy landowners. What happened to the will of the people? Isn’t Parliament sovereign? Wasn’t that what all the Brexit lark was about? And doesn’t this Labour government have the second biggest parliamentary majority in its 126-year history as the so-called working people’s party? Keir Starmer can do a TikTok stunt on ground rents. But he can’t run away from the truth. His government are peddling a draft Commonhold and Leasehold Reform Bill that has been purged of policies that you voted for in the The Labour Party manifesto. Policies promised again in the July 2024 King’s Speech: the remaining Law Commission enfranchisement and Right to Manage recommendations. So you can finally “take back control”. The Starmer administration appears to be captured by the deep-pocketed freeholder lobby and property cartels. And the Prime Minister is in thrall to the hand-wringing lawyers who bleat on about the risk of judicial review and ECHR lawfare, as if the rights of extortionists, many offshore, and lofty international law matter more than the British people being looted in their homes and what election manifestos have promised time and time again. This government claims that they are ending the feudal leasehold system. Instead, they keep it on life support by protecting money-for-nothing ground rents until 2068. We’ll have flying cars before feudalism is banished from our homes! And buried away in the small print, the Labour government concedes our point: “leasehold as a tenure will not disappear overnight and it will be a feature of the housing market for many years to come.” The government is also siding with the leasehold grifters by failing to restrict development value in the draft legislation, which means many flat leaseholders will never be able to afford to buy their freehold, something that must happen before conversion to commonhold. Remember, the freeholders’ main lobby group, the Residential Freehold Association, admits that the typical freeholder owns just 2.5% capital value in a block of flats. These wealth-destroying corporates own a sliver of our homes and have the cheek to talk about their human rights. We are not Mugabeists. We will, of course, pay a fair rate to compensate the freeholder to leave our homes for good. But demanding more of our money so they can thwart our right to buy them out, on the basis that they could theoretically build a skyscraper in the garden, is taking the mick and must end, as the government first promised in 2021. Don’t take our word on the scam of freeholders invoking development value to block leaseholders’ bid for self-rule. Barrister Nicola Muir, of Tanfield Chambers, has written that “it is amazing what developments landlords believe are possible and the profits they claim they will generate”, citing a telling example from practice: “The landlord initially claimed £34 million for the alleged potential to build a skyscraper in the front garden of the block. Such claims can obviously be a deterrent to leaseholders, who probably have no intention of developing.” And we were the ONLY campaign group that urged the Housing, Communities & Local Government Committee to ensure that this government sets enfranchisement rates high in the Leasehold and Freehold Reform Act 2024, to the benefit of leaseholders. There is a major risk that, due to the influence peddling of ground rent grifters and their lobbyists in Westminster and Whitehall, the government will fail to implement these long-awaited reforms already on the statute books. Matthew Pennycook MP promised in November 2024 to put enfranchisement rates out to public consultation last summer, but it never happened. And if the government is forced to begin the enfranchisement changes in the 2024 Act, it will likely set the deferment and capitalisation rates artificially low, stuffing freeholders’ mouths with gold when desperate leaseholders try to extend their leases or buy out the freehold. These deferment and capitalisation rates are already derived from freeholder-friendly case law, specifically the 2006 Upper Tribunal decision known as Sportelli, with the deferment rate set at 4.75% for houses and 5.0% for flats, and a capitalisation rate of 6.0%. While the 2024 Act is vague on what these rates should be, we know that investors routinely buy freeholds at auction or directly from developers at higher rates than those implied by Sportelli, meaning they pay significantly less than leaseholders are already required to pay under statutory schemes with the low Sportelli rates. For example, an analysis of Allsop Ground Rent Auctions found that investors have been paying an average 9% capitalisation rate for the ground rent in freehold titles – well above Sportelli’s 6%. This situation is clearly unfair, and there is significant industry lobbying to keep the deferment and capitalisation rates low, i.e. below the going market rates, so that freeholders are excessively compensated by leaseholders. Once the rates are set in the 2024 Act, they remain fixed for ten years, creating jeopardy that they will be set to the disadvantage of leaseholders, who are less organised and resourced than industry interests to influence policy. If the rates are set substantially below Sportelli rates, the savings from other provisions of the 2024 Act – such as the removal of marriage value, the 0.1% restriction on ground rents, and the end of the requirement to pay the freeholder’s reasonable legal and valuation costs – would be more than cancelled out, leaving leaseholders paying more than they do today under the current rules. Minister Pennycook highlighted this risk while in opposition during the passage of the 2024 Act, stating that Labour “remain[s] convinced that this government, or a future one, could be lobbied by vested interests to set a deferment rate that will be punitive to leaseholders.” He proposed an amendment on the deferment rate to guide the Secretary of State, requiring that “in setting the deferment rate, the Secretary of State must have regard to the desirability of encouraging leaseholders to extend their lease at the lowest possible cost”, although the amendment was not passed. This policy ought to be in the draft Bill, yet it remains absent. We are urging that the 2024 Act be amended to require that the enfranchisement rates must not fall below an absolute floor of the existing Sportelli rates (with the deferment rate of 4.75% for houses and 5.0% for flats, and a capitalisation rate of 6.0%). But leaseholders should really benefit from market rates, i.e. those which developers and investors already enjoy being significantly above Sportelli, to ensure that they do not pay excessive compensation to freeholders, as occurs under the current system, to buy their freehold or extend a lease. And this isn’t just about what goes into the algorithm for the online enfranchisement calculator under the 2024 Act, or about ending the development value scam, a reform dropped from the legislation after behind-the-scenes lobbying. We will not accept a failure to bring forward a Universal Right to Manage, as part of a glidepath to commonhold. Watch what our founder said about a well-connected landlord and tenant barrister who bragged to the property tribunal last year that he had worked on the Law Commission’s Right to Manage reforms, all while representing an offshore billionaire freeholder trying to block leaseholders’ quest for Right to Manage. It should be easy. But the leaseholders at this development had to spend £150,000 just to defend their no-fault right against this legal onslaught at the First-tier Tribunal. They won, but the freeholder is now appealing… Beyond Right to Manage reform, we need a Right to Participate in collective enfranchisement so that all flat leaseholders can buy a share of the freehold even if they miss out the first time when one group of neighbours has enough support to enfranchise the block. It is unfair for leaseholders to be locked out of decisions over the charges they pay and the services affecting their home when they are ready to buy their share of the freehold. Sorting this inequity was the will of Parliament with Right to Enfranchise provisions in the 2002 Act. It’s also what the Law Commission originally recommended before seemingly being pressured by vested interests to drop the policy from their final recommendations in 2020. Also, why on earth should leaseholders have to contort themselves to get 50% support of all unit-owners in a block? Satisfying the onerous 50% participation threshold is near impossible in bigger buildings and those with high levels of buy-to-let, yet scummy investors face no qualifying criteria when hoovering up the freeholds of our homes from developers or auctioneers behind our backs. Don’t patronise us with Lord Best’s scheme for managing agents. We want liberation, not regulation. There’s a reason both the freeholder and managing agent lobbies are gagging for the cosy Lord Best policy, which wasn’t promised in either the Labour manifesto or the King’s Speech. It will jack up leaseholders’ already sky-high service charges, repeat the cruel joke of the Building Safety Regulator, and keep freeholders and their managing agent cronies firmly in the ecosystem. At the same time, a statutory regulator of managing agents will no doubt restrict competition by keeping out small ethical new entrants. It will also allow the government to claim job done while failing to end leasehold. Even without leasehold abolition, leaseholders will still be denied rightful control of their service charges and the power to easily sack their managing agent - the real regulation needed to rein in rip-off service providers and put them out of business, not some powerless or captured regulator in Whitehall. Labour should be for the grafters. If the government wants to win back public support after the Gordon and Denton by-election drubbing, salvaging this draft legislation and swiftly commencing the 2024 Act must be its priority. Show that politics can be a force for good. Stand up to the ground rent grifters and offshore property mafia. Free leaseholders. 5.3 million households in England and Wales are watching.](https://image.24vids.com/tw-2028949666432205114/media/HChK-xoXEAAI0u3.jpg)
![Apple’s iPad “Crush” Ad Is Bleak, Ominous and Threatening I don’t know if you’ve seen Apple’s just-released commercial for the “New” iPad Pro, but it’s pretty awful. It is dark, humorless, and feels like a not-so-thinly veiled threat to writers, musicians, game makers, developers, and artists of all kinds. …and children, even. I’ve watched it at least five times today alone, and I’m left with one big question. “Who on earth approved this?” It’s absolutely baffling that the world’s largest technology company, with the world’s biggest marketing budget, thought this would be a good idea. What kind of idiot—or idiots, since dozens or hundreds of people had to be involved in the writing, staging, producing, recording, and editing—felt this kind of ad would somehow create a positive emotional connection with consumers? Seriously, it’s terrifying. In a dank, cold warehouse, devoid of all life and humanity, an industrial crusher comes to life, and slowly starts destroying a collection of musical, philosophical, and artistic devices and instruments. For no apparent reason, everything starts getting smashed: first, a trumpet, then an arcade video game, then cans of paint, a piano, a globe, a metronome, a guitar… on and on it goes, obliterating everything in sight into a colorful, gooey, explosive mess. Books, camera lenses, lamps, a guitar, a sculpture, and a typewriter—all tools of the liberal arts—get mangled into a garbage heap as Sonny & Cher cheerfully sing, “All I ever need is you.” In the penultimate moment, a goofy yellow smiley emoji becomes a bug-eyed scary-clown freak as it, too, is crushed to death. Worse, if you enable closed captions like I do by default, the video says: “[POPPING] [SPLAT]” right as its eyeballs pop out of its head when Cher sings, “Give me a reason to build my world around you.” It’s enough to make a child cry. It has all the comforting vibes of the burnt pink teddy bear floating in the swimming pool on Breaking Bad after two planes crash in mid-air. I have so many questions (aside from simply wondering the names of the soon-to-be ex-employees who greenlit this abomination). First of all, as a trumpet player myself, I am personally offended that they made me watch a perfectly good trumpet get smashed to smithereens like it’s no big deal. Why would they torture me like this? Second of all, what is the message here? No, not that “the most powerful iPad ever is also the thinnest,” as the voiceover artist states in the last few seconds of the clip. I mean: what is the message? Ostensibly, pulverizing children’s toys, arcade games, architectural models, and ceramic Angry Birds into a paste implies something like “We’re taking all the best of humanity; all the collective works of Western Civilization, smashing it into pieces and putting it inside this remarkably thin device so you can have all of it in the palm of your hand.” But my oh my, is there an elephant in this room… he’s hiding behind the monstrous destroying machine. Did anyone inside Apple realize that everyone outside Apple will recognize this imagery in a metaphorical sense, but not the one Apple intended? We don’t see a crushing machine gently consolidating the greatest output of all our artistic endeavors, simply reformatted for a digital age and consumed by everyone with instant, fingertip access. We see what is painstakingly obvious to us, and the timing couldn’t possibly be worse. We see a giant, soulless machine consuming our work in a very different way. Right now, AI models are training themselves on our intellectual property and even our very own personally-identifying data. We aren’t the ones doing the consuming. We’re the ones being consumed. The tech industry has become one massive gaping maw, opening wide and swallowing everything in sight, chewing it up into little bits and pieces of comminuted waste, like a paper shredder or a garbage disposal. It’s destruction in its most literal form. And for what? For a newer version of the iPad that is only slightly thinner than its predecessor? For an only marginally improved version of Apple’s tablet device that has been around for 14 years? For increased profits? This is a terrible look for Apple. They may as well be saying: “All your work are belong to us.” Personally, I am a fan of artificial intelligence. I am eagerly embracing our robot overlords and I welcome our new CSV god (as the actual developers of AI models like to say). I look forward to the freedom and innovation that will come as a result of humanity augmenting our intelligence with AI like a force multiplier on a battlefield. But if Apple has the same perspective I do, they’re selling it in the worst possible way. When I see this video, I see that Apple is definitely crushing something… but I’m not sure what. -Crushing small companies that develop apps for the extremely heavy-handed App Store, which imposes byzantine restrictions on what they can and can’t do with their own apps? -Crushing competitors by limiting what they can do on the iOS and MacOS platforms with arbitrary and capricious rules about enabling functionalities that Apple doesn’t like, even if users do? -Crushing publishers and content creators with a punitive 30% fee on all subscriptions and in-app purchases? -Crushing choice and competition by not allowing app makers to make apps and programs that do the same thing that native apps already do, even if they do it better? -Crushing all human creativity and innovation by automating and systematizing everything? In the early days of the “Google vs. Apple” fight over the web and app stores, I was really concerned that Google was becoming way, way too powerful. Specifically, in 2015, when Google came up with “app streaming,” they announced a desire to form a “web of apps.” This was concerning. Especially when coupled with Google’s efforts to steal content from other websites and provide it to users via the “knowledge graph” results, ending up with the creation of “zero-click” search results pages, which absolutely punished website owners and content creators. By taking the most valuable content off a website and showing it to Google users without them needing to click through to the website itself, Google had essentially stolen everybody’s intellectual property with only the most minimal attribution possible (to fend off lawsuits no doubt, but with no intention of users actually visiting the website in question anymore). “Google is eating the internet,” I thought, and said out loud, (although I probably wasn’t the first person to use that phrase) But what I meant was purely an analogy. It was vague and ambiguous, almost silly. Maybe I was wrong, though: maybe it’s Apple that’s doing the eating. Maybe Apple is not only gobbling up everyone else’s work, but also homogenizing it—and us—and forcing us to use their platform, pay their fees, abide by their rules, and constantly keep upgrading, upgrading, upgrading, to an ever-thinner iPad in order to use it. Watch the video again. This is the stuff of nightmares. To be perfectly fair, even if I were to take the commercial at face value and ignore it’s off-the-charts creepiness and just stick to its one stated claim—that the new iPad Pro is thinner—it still fails as a commercial. Why? Because nobody cares how thin an iPad is. Seriously. I’ve owned an iPad since 2010: that means I’ve carried around a version of Apple’s already-thin tablet every day for over a dozen years. Never once have I said to myself: “You know what improvement I’d really like to see in this thing? I wish it were thinner.” Never. That thought has never crossed my mind, even once. You know what has? -Better battery life. -I’d like my iPad to not get hot to the touch when I use the Apple Pencil to take notes. -I wish it wasn’t so fragile: I dropped my brand-new iPad 2 back in the day when it slipped out of the arm-hold I was carrying it in, it bounced on the pavement, and the screen shattered into a thousand pieces, making it unusable. -I wish it had more storage. -I wish Apple would stop changing the type of cable connector it uses: I’ve gone from the original 30-pin connector to the Lightning connector, and now to the current USB-C/Thunderbolt connector. -I wish I could view the screen in direct sunlight. -I wish it wouldn’t overheat and turn off automatically when I use it outdoors in the summertime. Those are announcements I would welcome in a new iPad Pro commercial. None of this “now even thinner” nonsense nobody needs or cares about. So, back to the commercial. In my opinion, whoever made this ad should be fired. I almost never say that about other companies, especially for good-faith marketing efforts gone wrong… those of us who work in marketing make mistakes sometimes, and we learn from them. But cases like this warrant a special exception. Marketing and advertising are designed to make people want to buy your products. This commercial doesn’t just not make me want to buy Apple’s products. It makes me not want to buy Apple’s products, which is something altogether different. It turns me from someone who likes iPads into someone who is almost rethinking iPads entirely. That’s not just a bad advertisement; it’s a harmful advertisement. Apple’s usually known for great commercials. The legendary 1984 Super Bowl commercial was, of course, their best. I thought “Hello, I’m a Mac” was absolutely brilliant. They have made some missteps along the way, but this one is really bad. Not even their nauseatingly preachy and woke “Mother Nature” ad from a few years ago was this bad. Steve Jobs once said, “Technology alone is not enough—it’s technology married with liberal arts, married with the humanities, that yields us the results that make our heart sing.” My goodness, that last line alone is poetry itself! This ad seems to be Apple signaling that they don’t believe in that anymore. And I don’t think all this handwringing is an overreaction to where you could say “Oh, c’mon, it’s just a commercial! What’s the big deal?” It is a big deal. It tells you about the values of the company, and what they intend to communicate. Really, how is this the same company that used to sell iPhones by showing grandmas using FaceTime to connect with their baby grandchildren from afar during the holidays? Everything about it is wrong: even the thumbnail they chose for it (the bulging-eyed smiley face) and the fact that they gave it the title “Crush!” It was fun to see the reactions to the video online today. I find it fascinating that Apple shared it on YouTube but turned off the comments. On X, Tim Cook shared it Tuesday, and the video, which so richly deserves to be mocked, is getting it in spades. Some people are calling it “anti-art.” One user called it “soul-crushing,” which was about as literal and logical a response as you’d expect. It turns out Apple actually made an announcement about the commercial. In response to the (apparently unexpected) poor welcome it got, Apple wrote: “We missed the mark with this video, and we’re sorry.” Lame response from a tone-deaf tech behemoth, but still, they hopefully got the message. C’mon, Apple. I have seen the future, and this ain’t it.](https://image.24vids.com/tw-1788740167194579387/media/GNLjSOOaEAAZ6VT.jpg)
