#ajit pai

[7grandmel]

Todays rip: 25/08/2023

A New Threat

Season 4 Episode 1 Featured on: FIRST STRIKE ~ SiIvaGunner: King for Another Day Tournament Original Soundtrack VOL. 1

Ripped by Sarvéproductions

I think its really interesting to see how, despite being set up to be entirely derivative in nature, so many SiIva events end up spawning original characters in their own right. Wood man is the posterchild for this obviously, having changed so far from his source material as to become a fully unique character tied specifically to SiIvaGunner, but it happens even more than you'd think.

One of the most inspired examples of this is Ajit Pai, introduced as one of the first contestants for Season 3's King for a Day tournament. The real-life controversy regarding Ajit Pai overturning Net Neutrality in 2017 was still fresh in a lot of viewer's minds, as he'd effectively made himself public enemy number one to the internet. SiIva played into this by making Ajit Pai the "joke" fighter, with a pretty vague list of games to be ripped from of "games with bad internet" and "the harlem shake". He got matched against Thanos in the first round, and rather than being eliminated he got full-on snapped out of existence in the fallout of his loss. He was a funny meme with like, two tracks made for the tournament, and sort of faded from memory after a while. That was, at least, until the King for Another Day Tournament a year later.

Ajit Pai's in-canon "death" of being snapped into ashes was remembered, and used as a springboard to buff the character for his return. Every character from the last tournament was set to return in some way for the new one, and Ajit Pai was no exception - his new ashy state became part of his new form as a mecha, with an insane original design made just for this event. Metal Ajit Pai features all the stuff from his old sources with the huge addition of mech-franchises such as Gundam and Armored Core, giving his rips a surprisingly heavy sound overall. A New Threat debuted as Metal Ajit Pai's own personal theme - a fully original composition taking cues from the sounds of internet services like AOL as well as the sounds of various mecha anime and media. Despite not having much of a nostalgic or recognizable hook, it made such a striking impression back in the day - it truly sold home just how far Ajit Pai had come from being a joke contestant. Its a fantastic composition that's stuck with me since its release, as it feels almost like a time capsule for that specific kind of hype that was going around - hype for the strangely epic resurrection of an FCC chairman.

#todays siivagunner #season 4 episode 1 #siivagunner #siiva #Sarvéproductions #king for another day #kfad2 #kfad #king for a day tournament #harlem shake #ajit pai #metal ajit pai #Youtube #Bandcamp

[kp777]

#fcc #u.s. senate #gigi sohn #joe biden adminsitration #net neutrality #ajit pai

[thatnerdwitchmarcy]

Honestly Idk how I expected Anish Kapoor to look like but anytime I hear his name the mental image of Ajit Pai pops into my mind

#anish kapoor #ajit pai #idk

[mindrat]

tech bro trump is gonna make rednecks turn out in record numbers if he doesn't accidentally disenfranchise them first

#ramaswamy #big forehead #ajit pai #dinesh d'souza #wise words

[southernsolarpunk]

YOOOOOO

#get bent ajit pai #net neutrality

[businessbigwigs]

Net Neutrality in CA Still Law

Broadband Companies Threaten Stronghold of Net Neutrality in California

Net neutrality won’t be challenged in California, according to the U.S. Court of Appeals on April 20th. Net neutrality is the stance that internet service providers (ISPs) cannot discriminate between the content users choose to access via their services. On a net neutral internet, ISPs can’t redirect traffic to websites that pay them to do so, can’t charge more to access some content than others,…

View On WordPress

#9th Circuit court #ajit pai #California #FAA #net neutrality ISPs

[fitscientist]

These are all totally genuine questions, I'm not trying to be rude or snarky at all, just trying to clarify and learn! This subject has always kind of confused me... But just curious about your tag about the last time net neutrality came around - wasn't it kind of always around unofficially/there were no rules really before being solidified in 2015 and then they repealed it a couple years later? Do you mean you lost 3k followers in 2015 or when it was repealed? And how does net neutrality make you lose followers - isn't it basically just about all sites being treated without discrimination by internet providers? Again, genuinely asking!

Hi anon - you haven't followed me long enough have you? hahaha :) I don't want to talk too much about it (especially since, well, I lost a lot of followers, the most I ever had in my life), but I will answer, since I think it's an important topic and that well, it brings up an important discussion about what content is "allowed" by the masses especially when you're a blog that isn't fandom or random.

TL;DR is that when Net Neutrality was threatened (idk, 2017? 2018? can't remember, it's late at night here so I can't be bothered to google when exactly, but you get the gist), I posted a lot about it, trying to bring awareness and showing that YES this is an important topic and people should be aware - I don't want to pay a premium internet service to get on Facebook, or have my connection drop because I want to go to tumblr and tumblr didn't make an agreement with my internet company to provide faster service. This was especially important for me, since I was long distance with my boyfriend at the time-now husband, and the only way to connect with him (for free, as you know long distance calls - phone calls - are insanely $$$$ and I was a poor grad student) was over the internet - we used Skype and Facebook and I couldn't imagine being in a position to have to pay extra to access the websites I used to connect with him. I did post a lot about it. Unfortunately, and obviously, that didn't go over well, because I'm a Fitblr™ who is only allowed to post Fitblr™ Things™. I'm not a person, only a curator of Aesthetic™. So, yeah, LOTS of people left and unfollowed me around that time. 3k worth. In fairness, I did post quite a bit (well, I was anxious about it! I'm sorry!), but it wasn't more than a few posts a day for a couple weeks? Idk. Didn't seem like a lot at the time, but perhaps it was. Since I wasn't a random blog, I had a Blog Theme™, and in hindsight that's definitely why people unfollowed - they didn't want to see or hear anything that wasn't my theme- fitblr. They wanted fitness and health and food content, they didn't want to see some political(?) BS. I don't blame them at all, yet on the other hand I guess people have to realize the people running these different themed blogs are... people? And at the time, it was absolutely an outlet for my anxiety and stress. I was being overworked and burned out in grad school, and the thought of losing access to my person - was unbearable. And the way to feel more in control? Post about it. I couldn't donate money, and I didn't want to protest or sign petitions (shit, I didn't have time tbh), but at the bare minimum I could post about it on my blog to gain awareness.

I was being snarky the other day when it was trending again, so obviously I needed to reblog the Destiel meme and add my snark tags because, that's how we tumblrians do it. Because, well, good riddance, people suddenly agree five years later it's an issue and are suddenly actually in support of net neutrality!!! I was mad so the snark came out, and honestly I shouldn't have posted that. But I was snarky. Good riddance. I was right all along. And, I'll even say that in the body, not the tags.

#anon #I WAS RIIIIIGHT #personal #my post #tumblr lore #answered #fitscientist lore #i did gain back those 3k and more but definitely took a few years #about me #EDIT TO ADD: FUCK AJIT PAI FUUUUUCK HIM #EDIT ONE MORE TIME TO ADD: THIS IS WHY I DONT POST MORE SCIENCE STUFF :(

[crystallinebarbasol]

happy black history (month)

#you see the joke here is that the song is an arrangement of black history from turn a gundam and february is bl—wh-why arent you laughing #kfad #kfad2 #siivagunner #metal ajit pai #gundam #turn a gundam

[vivian-at-home]

Eat it Ajit

Never should have been done, now watch them howl in anguished greed

#f*&^ Ajit Pai

[7grandmel]

Todays rip: 29/12/2023

Totally Shaaking Out Right Now

Season 6 Featured on: The Harlem Shakeover

Ripped by Myeauxyoozi

Well, I've coincidentally been covering a lot of corners of the King for a Day Tournaments recently - so I figured it best to wrap this whole thing up with something I've been waiting to write about for a while. We've seen the winners and losers, the happenstance heroes and the shining stars, and all the different emotional reactions that the tournament's contestants gave us. All except one - one I've only previously alluded to with Shaky Mountain and later A New Threat. It's about time we look at the last remaining piece of the King for a Day Tournament. The Disaster.

As part of the initial 16-character roster of Season 3's King for a Day Tournament, Ajit Pai was immediately recognizable as a complete joke inclusion to most viewers. His source list was pretty shallow compared to a lot of other contestants, and he only got a single rip to promote his potential - the forebodingly titled Harlem Shakeover. It wasn't long until he was defeated at the hands of Thanos, turned to dust to float away in the wind, seemingly destined to forever remain a one-off joke amidst a sea of other figments on SiIva. Yet as I covered in A New Threat, the King for Another Day Tournament aimed to actually bring Ajit Pai back as a serious contender for the top, with a buffed source list and an actual twist to his character - reincarnated within a suit of armor, clinging for life after his defeat at the hands of Thanos.

After all of that, after going from joke, to actually trying, to losing and sitting the entirety of Season 5 out - it came as a complete shock to see Ajit Pai return for Season 6, and for him to bring his long-promised Harlem Shakeover with him. Yet I think there's something really poetic to be mined from it, story wise - there's something to be said thematically about someone like Ajit Pai just refusing to let go of life on SiIvaGunner despite having so little to actually offer, such a small fanbase to appeal to, and simply refusing to move on with life. Coincidentally already happening in Season 6, the Season all about grief, loss, and the need to move on, Ajit Pai's 10-day Harlem Shakeover was a great change of pace with a lot of levity, yet still left me with far too much to think about. The guy is canonically literally just ashes, and gave us 10 days of LITERALLY JUST ONE SINGLE JOKE to be repeated into the ground - yet still refused to move on. In a way, it prepared us all for what would happen by the end of the Season - the end of the SiIva AI itself.

Anyway, yeah, uh, sorry about all that - Totally Shaaking Out Right Now is fucking great, as are tons of the other rips from the Shakeover. I covered it in Shaky Mountain, but rippers like Myeauxyoozi really did work their asses off to ensure that these 10 days of torture were as impressively varied as possible within the constraints they worked in, and showed so many fascinatingly good examples of how to use the meme in. Inbetween the joke rips and shorter gags, there are rips like the two mentioned in this paragraph that just genuinely lend themselves fantastically to the wub-wub sound of the Harlem Shake.

#todays siivagunner #season 6 #siivagunner #siiva #Myeauxyoozi #harlem shake #yiik #yiik a postmodern rpg #bandcamp #yiik iv #toby fox #toby fox music #utdr #undertale #deltarune #utdr music #undertale music #ajit pai #Youtube #Bandcamp

[callmearcturus]

“I think our new threshold, frankly, should be 100Mbps. I think anything short of that shortchanges our children, our future, and our new digital economy.” That’s what FCC commissioner Jessica Rosenworcel argued nine years ago — now, it’s finally happening.

Today, the FCC has changed its definition of “broadband” to mean download speeds of 100 megabits per second and upload speeds of 20 megabits per second. It had been stuck at 25Mbps/3Mbps since 2015. As recently as 2021, outgoing FCC chairman Ajit Pai claimed we still didn’t need more than that.

...

The new definition was pushed through by the FCC’s Democratic majority, something it hasn’t had for the majority of President Biden’s term in office. The FCC spent years completely deadlocked without its full five commissioners, until Anna Gomez was finally confirmed by the Senate last September.

Anyway, vote blue, it actually fucking matters.

#us politics

[fandommemequeen]

PARDON????????

#KINDLY: WHAT THE FRICK DOES THIS MEAN #WHICH 'HE' ARE WE TALKING ABT HERE #AJIT PAI? HALTMANN?? SOMEONE ELSE??? #WORST PART IS THE VIDZ GONNA PREMIERE DURING MY ENGISH CLASS SO IM GONNA HAVE 2 W A I T UNTIL AFTER CLASS 4 ANSWERZZ #gamer rambles abt siivagunner

[post-leffert]

For An Anarchist Radio Relay League

A free zine about amateur radio for anarchists.

For an Anarchist Radio Relay League (0.24.1.1)

For an Anarchist Radio Relay League (0.24.1.1) -booklet

However, in a time when the United States government is fighting tooth and nail for the preservation of its own legitimacy while simultaneously eviscerating community services by way of privatization (Health Care, Postal Service, Public Land, Public schools, you name it), it is as important for the anti-authoritarian Working Class to learn about the science and art of radio communication as it is to learn how to grow food and shoot straight. (read "Factories, Fields, and the Firearms to Defend Them" by Hybachi LeMar )

In fact, in October of 2020, Ajit Pai's* FCC** ordered amateur access to the 3.5GHz band to be "sunset" (http://www.arrl.org/news/fcc-orders-amateur-access-to-3-5-ghz-band-to-sunset ) so that the frequency space can be sold to private companies to expand the new 5G mobile network. While this isn't exactly disastrous for anyone other than a specific sub-set of Hams***, it is par for the course for this early half of the 21st Century that the government would sell off public property to the highest bidder so that private companies can sell it back to "Consumers" and lock poor people out of access to something as ubiquitous as air or water. Sound familiar? (https://iaffaiorg.wordpress.com/2020/10/11/skills-for-revolutionary-survival-5-communications-equipment-for-rebels/)

#anarchy #anarchism #radio #radio waves #ham radio

[sapphicmoonlightlilith]

so i had a dream last night that the new tumblr meme™️ was to reblog a completely unrelated post with "ajit pai ghostwrote this"

if you don't know who ajit pai is, hes the guy who made the weird net neutrality video with the fidget spinners and nerf guns dressed as santa? it was so long ago i can barely remember but yeah

#ajit pai ghostwrote this #weird dreams #dream tag

[lytefoot]

This is actually huge you guys. It's amazing how much this will reduce the internet's slide into Just Three Web Sites.

Genuinely this is going to hurt Alphabet more than the antitrust proceeding.

#news #technology

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Big Telco’s fury over FCC plan to infuse telecoms policy with facts

I'll be at the Studio City branch of the LA Public Library on Monday, November 13 at 1830hPT to launch my new novel, The Lost Cause. There'll be a reading, a talk, a surprise guest (!!) and a signing, with books on sale. Tell your friends! Come on down!

Reality has a distinct anti-conservative bias, but conservatives have an answer: when the facts don't support your policies, just get different facts. Who needs evidence-based policy when you can have policy-based evidence?

Take gun violence. Conservatives tell us that "an armed society is a polite society," which means that the more guns you have, the less gun violence you'll experience. To prevent reality from unfairly staining this pristine ideological mind-palace with facts, conservatives passed the Dickey Amendment, which had the effect of banning the CDC from gathering stats on American gun-violence. No stats, no violence!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dickey_Amendment

Policy-based evidence is at the core of so many cherished conservative beliefs, like the idea that queer people (and not youth pastors) are responsible for the sexual abuse of children, or the idea that minimum wages (and not monopolies) decrease jobs, or the idea that socialized medicine (and not private equity) leads to death panels:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/26/death-panels/#what-the-heck-is-going-on-with-CMS

The Biden administration features a sizable cohort of effective regulators, whose job is to gather evidence and then make policy from it:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/23/getting-stuff-done/#praxis

Fortunately for conservatives, not every Biden agency is led by competent, honest brokers – the finance wing of the Dems got to foist some of their most ghoulish members upon the American people, including a no-fooling cheerleader for mass foreclosure:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/03/06/personnel-are-policy/#janice-eberly

And these same DINOs reached across the aisle to work with Republicans to keep some of the most competent, principled agency leaders from being seated, like the remarkable Gigi Sohn, targeted by a homophobic smear campaign funded by the telco industry, who feared her presence on the FCC:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/03/19/culture-war-bullshit-stole-your-broadband/

The telcos are old hands at this stuff. Long before the gun control debates, Ma Bell had figured out that a monopoly over Americans' telecoms was a license to print money, and they set to corrupting agencies from the FCC to the DoJ:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/11/14/jam-to-day/

Reality has a vicious anti-telco bias. Think of Net Neutrality, the idea that if you pay an ISP for internet service, they should make a best effort to deliver the data you request, rather than deliberately slowing down your connection in the hopes that you'll seek out data from the company's preferred partners, who've paid a bribe for "premium delivery."

This shouldn't even be up for debate. The idea that your ISP should prioritize its preferred data over your preferred data is as absurd as the idea that a taxi-driver should slow down your rides to any pizzeria except Domino's, which has paid it for "premium service." If your cabbie circled the block twice every time you asked for a ride to Massimo's Pizza, you'd be rightly pissed – and the cab company would be fined.

Back when Ajit Pai was Trump's FCC chairman, he made killing Net Neutrality his top priority. But regulators aren't allowed to act without evidence, so Pai had to seek out as much policy-based evidence as he could. To that end, Pai allowed millions of obviously fake comments to be entered into the docket (comments from dead people, one million comments from @pornhub.com address, comments from sitting Senators who disavowed them, etc). Then Pai actively – and illegally – obstructed the NY Attorney General's investigation into the fraud:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/05/06/boogeration/#pais-lies

The pursuit of policy-based evidence is greatly aided by the absence of real evidence. If you're gonna fill the docket with made-up nonsense, it helps if there's no truthful stuff in there to get in the way. To that end, the FCC has systematically avoided collecting data on American broadband delivery, collecting as little objective data as possible:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/05/26/pandemic-profiteers/#flying-blind

This willful ignorance was a huge boon to the telcos, who demanded billions in fed subsidies for "underserved areas" and then just blew it on anything they felt like – like the $45 billion of public money they wasted on obsolete copper wiring for rural "broadband" expansion under Trump:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/02/27/all-broadband-politics-are-local/

Like other cherished conservative delusions, the unsupportable fantasy that private industry is better at rolling out broadband is hugely consequential. Before the pandemic, this meant that America – the birthplace of the internet – had the slowest, most expensive internet service of any G8 country. During the lockdown, broadband deserts meant that millions of poor and rural Americans were cut off from employment, education, health care and family:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/02/12/ajit-pai/#pai

Pai's response was to commit another $8 billion in public funds to broadband expansion, but without any idea of where the broadband deserts were – just handing more money over to monopoly telcos to spend as they see fit, with zero accountability:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/05/26/pandemic-profiteers/#flying-blind

All that changed after the 2020 election. Pai was removed from office (and immediately blocked me on Twitter) (oh, diddums), and his successor, Biden FCC chair Jessic Rosenworcel, started gathering evidence, soliciting your broadband complaints:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/03/23/parliament-of-landlords/#fcc

And even better, your broadband speed measurements:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/14/for-sale-green-indulgences/#fly-my-pretties

All that evidence spurred Congress to act. In 2021, Congress ordered the FCC to investigate and punish discrimination in internet service provision, "based on income level, race, ethnicity, color, religion, or national origin":

https://www.congress.gov/117/plaws/publ58/PLAW-117publ58.pdf

In other words, Congress ordered the FCC to crack down on "digital redlining." That's when historic patterns of underinvestment in majority Black neighborhoods and other underserved communities create broadband deserts, where internet service is slower and more expensive than service literally across the street:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/06/10/flicc/#digital-divide

FCC Chair Rosenworcel has published the agency's plan for fulfilling this obligation. It's pretty straightforward: they're going to collect data on pricing, speed and other key service factors, and punish companies that practice discrimination:

https://www.fcc.gov/document/preventing-digital-discrimination-broadband-internet-access

This has provoked howls of protests from the ISP cartel, their lobbying org, and their Republican pals on the FCC. Writing for Ars Technica, Jon Brodkin rounds up a selection of these objections:

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/11/internet-providers-say-the-fcc-should-not-investigate-broadband-prices/

There's GOP FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr, with a Steve Bannon-seque condemnation of "the administrative state [taking] effective control of all Internet services and infrastructure in the US. He's especially pissed that the FCC is going to regulate big landlords who force all their tenants to get slow, expensive from ISPs who offer kickbacks to landlords:

https://www.fcc.gov/document/carr-opposes-bidens-internet-plan

The response from telco lobbyists NCTA is particularly, nakedly absurd: they demand that the FCC exempt price from consideration of whether an ISP is practicing discrimination, calling prices a "non-technical aspect of broadband service":

https://www.fcc.gov/ecfs/document/110897268295/1

I mean, sure – it's easy to prove that an ISP doesn't discriminate against customers if you don't ask how much they charge! "Sure, you live in a historically underserved neighborhood, but technically we'll give you a 100mb fiber connection, provided you give us $20m to install it."

This is a profoundly stupid demand, but that didn't stop the wireless lobbying org CTIA from chiming in with the same talking points, demanding that the FCC drop plans to collect data on "pricing, deposits, discounts, and data caps," evaluation of price is unnecessary in the competitive wireless marketplace":

https://www.fcc.gov/ecfs/document/1107735021925/1

Individual cartel members weighed in as well, with AT&T and Verizon threatening to sue over the rules, joined by yet another lobbying group, USTelecom:

https://www.fcc.gov/ecfs/document/1103655327582/1

The next step in this playbook is whipping up the low-information base by calling this "socialism" and mobilizing some of the worst-served, most-gouged people in America to shoot themselves in the face (again), to own the libs:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/12/15/useful-idiotsuseful-idiots/#unrequited-love

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/11/10/digital-redlining/#stop-confusing-the-issue-with-relevant-facts

Image: Japanexperterna.se (modified) https://www.flickr.com/photos/japanexperterna/15251188384/

CC BY-SA 2.0: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/

--

Mike Mozart (modified) https://www.flickr.com/photos/jeepersmedia/14325839070/

https://www.flickr.com/photos/jeepersmedia/14325905568/

https://www.flickr.com/photos/jeepersmedia/14489390566/

www.ccPixs.com https://www.flickr.com/photos/86530412@N02/8210762750/

CC BY 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/

#pluralistic #reality-based community #willful ignorance #digital redlining #telecoms #isps #cable company fuckery #net neutrality #network neutrality #fcc #monopolies #market failures #musketfuckers #ammosexuals #guns #race #reality has an anti-conservative bias #dickey amendment #policy based evidence #facts don't care about your feelings