[Das Jax]

What's your Twitter name MD? I notice you don't list your plays in the forums much.

[MD]

What's your Twitter name MD? I notice you don't list your plays in the forums much.

I barely list them on Twitter any more. I bet big volume (at least by my standards, doubt I'm touching some of the other guys here [unless they're Frank Mir]), so I generally just arbitrarily choose 2-8 of my favourite bets on the card and assign them a unit value based on how much I recommend betting, though I note that often I cannot get that percentage of my bankroll down myself, especially with props, due to limits, but I'm probably betting more on those lines than anyone tailing me, so whatever.

Twitter name is now: https://twitter.com/NakedGambling

You reminded me that I needed to change that. It was originally "@NakedGambler", but that just didn't sound right to me.

[Vaughany]

I barely list them on Twitter any more. I bet big volume (at least by my standards, doubt I'm touching some of the other guys here [unless they're Frank Mir]), so I generally just arbitrarily choose 2-8 of my favourite bets on the card and assign them a unit value based on how much I recommend betting, though I note that often I cannot get that percentage of my bankroll down myself, especially with props, due to limits, but I'm probably betting more on those lines than anyone tailing me, so whatever.

Twitter name is now: https://twitter.com/NakedGambling

You reminded me that I needed to change that. It was originally "@NakedGambler", but that just didn't sound right to me.

Hehe

[marzwoody]

So this is real you MD? interesting. you seem to be an anthropomorphic chicken. possible former KFC mascot perhaps? i must dig deeper to find out some dirt on you.

[MD]

Finished down slightly tonight; called that Weidman fight to a tee, though. Said a few times that I figured Weidman would show a revamped kicking game, and would open Lyoto up with body and leg kicks, then use them to set up head kicks and punches.

Happy with that.

Don't even have words for that Rousey fight. Unreal.

[marzwoody]

Finished down slightly tonight; called that Weidman fight to a tee, though. Said a few times that I figured Weidman would show a revamped kicking game, and would open Lyoto up with body and leg kicks, then use them to set up head kicks and punches.

Happy with that.

Don't even have words for that Rousey fight. Unreal.

Unlucky for you maybe you shoudent bet on brazillian bums who think "wrestling" is that thing on TV with chairs and a steel cage.

[MD]

Headstrong 2 Take on Anyone

[Bumdeal]

I almost pulled the trigger on White -110 between 2nd and 3rd round.

Thank baby jesus for a small amount of discipline

[MD]

I almost pulled the trigger on White -110 between 2nd and 3rd round.

Thank baby jesus for a small amount of discipline

I pulled the trigger on White +100 at that exact time; thought Martins was done. My mistake.

On another note, I avoided re-betting Lara at something ridiculous (+800ish) live the other day, because I knew in my heart of hearts that Canelo was, for sure, getting the decision. Something about that irks me, though; trusting my gut over my logic (that +800 on a fight that could easily be scored for Lara in a fair world is insane value) is something that I pretty much never do. I felt like I had made a good decision and saved money in the end, but in my mind, I can't stop thinking that there must have been some value. The same situation will arise again, and I'll probably be faced with the same choice. Fukcing boxing.

[Bumdeal]

I was extremely surprised to see Lara at those odds on live bet, I didn't touch it simply because I don't understand boxing all that well though. I figured I was missing something.

[Vaughany]

Headstrong 2 Take on Anyone

[MD]

Disagree with the stoppage by the way, he was still intelligently taking on anyone.

[Vaughany]

hehe

[mirinquads]

Headstrong 2 Take on Anyone

Headstrong 2 take on a life of feeding tubes and dementia. Didn't think it was possible to make Martines look good, but you managed Alex. You managed.

[MD]

Conor McGregor is the truth. Made me legitimately proud to be Irish, and very few things do that.

Finished up 6u tonight, but lost 8u last weekend, so still got a lot of work to do. Been having an atrocious year, my worst ever, and I can pinpoint it all to mistakes that I've made. Time for some beast mode overtime handicapping boiz. I got dis.

[Beelzebubzy]

Conor McGregor is the truth. Made me legitimately proud to be Irish, and very few things do that.

Finished up 6u tonight, but lost 8u last weekend, so still got a lot of work to do. Been having an atrocious year, my worst ever, and I can pinpoint it all to mistakes that I've made. Time for some beast mode overtime handicapping boiz. I got dis.

Are you doing better than Gabe though?

[MD]

Are you doing better than Gabe though?

I hope not.

[Beelzebubzy]

I hope not.

Sell bouncy castles

[MD]

Sell bouncy castles

BRM, son. Pretty sure I'll be avoiding the dark side for a while longer.

[MarkWoodstick]

Headstrong 2 take on a life of feeding tubes and dementia. Didn't think it was possible to make Martines look good, but you managed Alex. You managed.

At least we get a chance to fade this penetrating guy when he actually fights someone legit

[MD]

Listen to this classic, you punks, and pay attention the lyrics. Fock I love music.

[Vaughany]

[marzwoody]

[JIBBBY]

Is this a music thread now???

I love music myself.. Can't live without it... I got one.. A true classic...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lf5y0HAzg3w

[MD]

For those of you who didn't watch this, it's the best fan Q&A of all time:



Most of the questions are fans pitching their ideas for FOX shows to Dana.

One guy who claims to be a ring announcer asks Dana if he'd consider doing The Ultimate Fighter, but for ring announcers.

[MarkWoodstick]

In honor of your avatar I'm going to leave the best focking scene from that damn good show

[marzwoody]

^ You got that right cant wait for the next season.

[MD]

Luke Rockhold apparently just inadvertently gave out his Twitter password at the fan Q&A. He was tweeting "this hot girl on #kik wants to talk to you..." to media members within about a minute.

[MD]

Salaries:
Lawler: 105k/105k
Brown: 46k/46k
Nog: 114k/74k
Johnson: 53k/53k
Bermudez: 24k/24k
Guida: 50k/50k
Thomson: 85k/13k
Green: 21k/21k

[MD]

If Josh Thomson were to bet his purse on Bobby Green at +235 (work with me, it's a hypothetical) and lose, he'd make around 285K. If he beats Green, he'll make 98K.

[Beelzebubzy]

If Josh Thomson were to bet his purse on Bobby Green at +235 (work with me, it's a hypothetical) and lose, he'd make around 285K. If he beats Green, he'll make 98K.

Imagine if mighty mouse did that.

[MD]

Imagine if mighty mouse did that.

Especially because of PPV points. The big selling point of a championship contract are those sweet, sweet PPV points, and Johnson will likely never on his own break the buy threshold required to actually collect those points. Certainly not with this next shitty card, 177 is terrible.

[MD]

Posted plays for this card so far:

Bermudez -140 4.5u
Not Jedrzejczyk KO -407 4u
Not Means ITD -168 4.5u

[Vaughany]

Interesting....




This Lovecraft historian drops an atomic bomb in this article claiming in excruciating detail that your beloved Nic Pizzolatto cribbed Rust Cohle's dialogue straight from weird fiction writer Thomas Ligotti. There's even a video at the start of the link showing lines from the show next to lines from Ligotti's books.


Quote:
Like many fans of weird fiction, I was overjoyed to discover HBO’s True Detective. But as the season progressed, I became increasingly uneasy. It seemed to me that True Detective writer Nic Pizzolatto was “borrowing” words and phrasing from other authors, especially Thomas Ligotti. Recently, I expressed my concerns on one of the Lovecraft eZine video shows and was then contacted by Jon Padgett, the founder of the website Thomas Ligotti Online.


I’d done a little research to satisfy my curiosity, but Jon had done a lot… and the results of that research were disturbing.


The University of Cambridge defines plagiarism as “submitting as one’s own work, irrespective of intent to deceive, that which derives in part or in its entirety from the work of others without due acknowledgement.” The article goes on to point out that plagiarism isn’t always simply quoting another author verbatim without credit. It includes “paraphrasing another person’s work by changing some of the words, or the order of the words, without due acknowledgement of the source” and “using ideas taken from someone else without reference to the originator.”


As I reviewed Jon’s research, and did more of my own, any doubts I had about plagiarism disappeared. It became obvious to me that Pizzolatto had plagiarized Thomas Ligotti and others — in some places using exact quotes, and in others changing a word here and there, paraphrasing in much the same way that a high school student will cheat on an essay by copying someone else’s work and substituting a few words of their own.


And I asked myself if Nic Pizzolatto had given Thomas Ligotti “due acknowledgement”. Unfortunately, there appear to be only two instances where Pizzolatto has mentioned Ligotti at all. Worse, to date Pizzolatto has only acknowledged Ligotti when he is directly asked about him — in other words, when he has no choice. On the DVD commentary, there is not one word about Thomas Ligotti. Pizzolatto mentions that Matthew McConaughey’s character sometimes borrows philosophical ideas from Nietzche, the 19th century German philosopher, but there is no mention of Ligotti.


Writers work hard to produce original ideas, stories, and dialogue, and it is unfair for another writer to pawn off those ideas as their own. Mr. Pizzolatto has been nominated for an Emmy for writing True Detective, while Thomas Ligotti labors in near obscurity. Though I have agonized over whether I should write this article, in the end I felt that morally I have no choice.
Quote:
Recently, I interviewed Jon Padgett via email:


Mike Davis: You contend that Nic Pizzolatto, the writer/creator of the HBO series, True Detective, appropriated a significant amount of intellectual content and language from The Conspiracy Against the Human Race, a nonfiction book by Thomas Ligotti. You claim that what Pizzolatto didn’t lift whole cloth from that book, he paraphrased—mostly as dialogue for the show’s central character, Rust Cohle. Is there any proof that this is the case?


Jon Padgett: Ample evidence, all of which you can read/see/hear is unmistakably evident below. (Watch the video at the beginning of this article, and/or read the quotes below; the article continues after the quotes.)


COHLE: We became too self-aware. Nature created an aspect of nature separate from itself. We are creatures that should not exist by natural law.


“We know that nature has veered into the supernatural by fabricating a creature that cannot and should not exist by natural law, and yet does.” (CATHR, p.111)


COHLE: … we are things that labor under the illusion of having a ‘self’…each of us programmed with total assurance that we’re each somebody, when in fact everybody is nobody.


“And the worst possible thing we could know — worse than knowing of our descent from a mass of microorganisms — is that we are nobodies not somebodies, puppets not people.” (CATHR, p. 109)


“Everybody is nobody…” (CATHR, p. 199)


“…our captivity in the illusion of a self—even though ’there is no one’ to have this illusion…” (CATHR, p. 107)


“…the illusion of being a somebody among somebodies as well as for the substance we see, or think we see, in the world…” (CATHR, p. 114)


COHLE: I think human consciousness is a tragic misstep in evolution.


“…human existence is a tragedy that need not have been were it not for the intervention in our lives of a single, calamitous event: the evolution of consciousness—parent of all horrors (CATHR p. 15)


“…the evolutionary mutation of consciousness tugged us into tragedy.” (CATHR p. 54)


“…our captivity in the illusion of a self… the tragedy of the ego.” (CATHR, p. 107)


COHLE: The only honorable thing for our species to do is deny our programming, stop reproducing and march hand-in-hand into extinction.


“…the human race will never do the honorable thing and abort itself…” (CATHR, p. 138)


“To end this self-deception… we must cease reproducing.” (CATHR, p. 29)


“And how many would speed up the process of extinction once euthanasia was decriminalized and offered in humane and even enjoyable ways?” (CATHR, p. 29)


COHLE: I think about the hubris it must take to yank a soul out of nonexistence into this meat… Force a life into this thresher.


“Whatever else we may be as creatures that go to and fro on the earth and walk up and down upon it, we are meat.” (CATHR, p. 165)


“Why should generations unborn be spared entry into the human thresher?” (CATHR, p. 74)


“…nonexistence never hurt anyone and existence hurts everyone.” (CATHR, p. 75)


“Every one of us, having been stolen from nonexistence, opens his eyes on the world and looks down the road at a few convulsions and a final obliteration.” (CATHR, p. 167)


“…this new Adam and Eve are only being readied for the meat grinder of existence…” (CATHR, p. 164)


COHLE: It’s all one gutter, man. A giant gutter in outer space.


“…in the black-foaming gutters and back alleys of paradise, in the dank windowless gloom of some galactic cellar, in the hollow pearly whorls found in sewerlike seas, in starless cities of insanity, and in their slums . . .” (“The Frolic,” Thomas Ligotti)


COHLE: And other times I thought I was seeing straight into the true heart of things.


“…horrible ‘inner Truth’ of things.” (CATHR on Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness”, p. 108)


COHLE: So my daughter, she spared me from the sin of being a father.


“…non-coital existence… the surest path to redemption for the sin of being congregants of this world.”(CATHR, p. 34)


Are we truly expected to believe that all of the above is pure coincidence? (And if that’s not enough, see the end of this article for quotes from the original script followed by quotes by Thomas Ligotti.)


MD: Most of the show’s material, though, is more or less original to Pizzolatto. Why is this a significant instance of plagiarism – one worthy of anyone’s time and attention?


JP: For a number of reasons –


The most egregious instance of Pizzolatto’s plagiarism involves some of the most captivating and most quoted of all the scenes from the series: namely, the car ride in episode one in which Rust Cohle outlines his pessimistic, anti-natalist worldview definitively and powerfully. It is a fact that (in that crucial, character-defining scene) almost every one of Rust’s infamous lines is either taken word for word or is a paraphrase of Ligotti’s distinctive prose and ideas from The Conspiracy Against the Human Race. Bear in mind as well that this scene is the lynchpin of Cohle’s character – and it is the scene in which True Detective goes from being just another cop buddy procedural to something different, something of exceeding interest to HBO’s audience and a credit to the writer who created Rustin Cohle. It is that difference—along with randomly used red-herrings from Robert W. Chambers’ The King in Yellow, to which Ligotti refers in The Conspiracy Against the Human Race—which set True Detective apart from more generic shows. In no uncertain terms, the pessimism and anti-natalism of Rust Cohle as articulated by Ligotti is the hallmark element of the show and sets up Cohle’s change of heart, so to speak, on which True Detective closes. Take Rust Cohle’s Ligottian worldview and the weird fiction references away, and you lose what makes the show special.
Quote:
HBO was sold upon reading the scripts for the first two episodes of the show – the episodes in which the lifting from Ligotti’s work is by far the most common. In fact, the drafts of the script they saw were often even more rife with plagiarism of Ligotti’s work than even the final product was (see quotes at the end of this article). It seems unlikely, unless HBO was as familiar with Ligotti’s work as Nic Pizzalotto was, that they had reason to believe Rust’s dialogue came from any other imagination than Pizzolatto’s, nor is there any reason to believe that the writer presented it any other way to them. In essence, he may have sold HBO and the star-actors (and, afterwards, the viewing audience) goods under false pretenses. Take what star, Matthew McConaughey, has to say about his decision to play Rust: “’I read the first two episodes, and I said, ‘I’m in.‘” Interestingly, Pizzolatto admitted in this interview that he “…wrote the first two scripts before we cast the guys, then rewrote them…”


Noted instances of plagiarism in the literary world far less offensive than Pizzolatto’s have resulted in lawsuits and public humiliation directed at the guilty plagiarist. Plagiarism has also been in the news lately in connection with politicians like Joe Biden and Rand Paul, among others, who have lifted material from various sources without attribution. These instances of plagiarism are reported as scandals in their respective political careers. When the likes of David Simon, Moira Walley-Beckett, and David Milch are writing TV scripts often as good as any literature being written today, why should screenwriters be held to a lower standard than their literary peers, or politicians for that matter?


A quick word about The Conspiracy Against the Human Race. It is part philosophy, part philosophical criticism and response, part literary criticism, part metafictional expression of horror – I’ve never read anything like it. Its singular nature is one of the reasons that it’s so easy to detect when another writer uses Ligotti’s expressions and ideas (word for word or in paraphrase). This fact renders moot any argument that philosophical works can be held to a lower standard of literary ethics than other literary forms (an argument that is unlikely to have many serious supporters in any case). Significantly, Ligotti is meticulous about citation in The Conspiracy Against the Human Race—always giving appropriate credit to the writers and philosophers whose work he discusses and analyzes and synthesizes at length.

[marzwoody]

^ He probably did. show sounded like it ripped all its clever one liners right out of a book. it was a good show but there are better out there that don't rip off fiction, and rely on the acting strenghs of its two leads.