Mitchell says TG's case "rests on a conspiracy" akin to "the Kennedy assassination."
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Read the whole story
Twin Galaxies says Billy Mitchell “flirts with perjury” in high-score case
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As I note in the story, Mitchell is saying he lost $200K in appearance fees as a result of the reputational damage from TG's decision.
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I'd say it's a fair argument that he has lost the appearance fees due to being a weapons grade douchebag.
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I'm not sure it rises to a valid defamation case since they were basing it on video alone, but that's a lot of eyewitness evidence there.
Wonder what the truth is.
Wonder what the truth is.
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To those who ask why is such silliness being written about-
We need silly and we need distractions from Real Life now more than ever.
A guy wearing a costume who felt wasting his valuable and limited time on this planet proving he can be adept at scoring highly on a video game over and above mere mortals and then (apparently) cheated (depending on who is telling what version of events today) and now wants his day in court to (probably too late) clear his good (?) name, is what we need right about now. Considering the clowns and jokers affecting our lives in reality, a little diversion is helpful. (At least to me, anyway.)
We need silly and we need distractions from Real Life now more than ever.
A guy wearing a costume who felt wasting his valuable and limited time on this planet proving he can be adept at scoring highly on a video game over and above mere mortals and then (apparently) cheated (depending on who is telling what version of events today) and now wants his day in court to (probably too late) clear his good (?) name, is what we need right about now. Considering the clowns and jokers affecting our lives in reality, a little diversion is helpful. (At least to me, anyway.)
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Gern Blaanston
Ars Scholae Palatinae
But we do not need the silliness clogging up our courts. If Billy Mitchell and Twin Galaxies were slugging it out in a forum somewhere (or here on Ars) it would be mildly entertaining.
But, this case is a perfect example of something that should be immediately thrown out of court as a frivolous lawsuit.
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Completely agree and I thought of making that distinction. However, this is the system we have so I'll look past that flaw for the sake of cheap entertainment.
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I think all of these asshats deserve flaming bags of poo on their doorstep, weekly.
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This, lets put them in an arena and make them settle it with a Rochambeau contest, or 10.
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I read the whole thread over at the tg site a month back. Great read if you have a week or so.
https://www.twingalaxies.com/showthread ... -1-062-800
https://www.twingalaxies.com/showthread ... -1-062-800
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I am sure that Billy Mitchell stands to lose a substantial amount, if not all, of his income if he can't clear his name. I assume that his only income comes from generating high scores and then going on press tours, appearances, movies, etc..
So yeah, he will spend whatever money he needs to in order to make sure his name is cleared.
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Mitchell is saying Twin Galaxies defamed him by ruling he cheated and and took away his record score on their publication thus ruining his reputation.
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For those of you who don't know what SLAPP is, it stands for "Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation."
If that still means nothing to you, this page describes it in English:
https://www.medialaw.org/topics-page/an ... nt&print=1
If that still means nothing to you, this page describes it in English:
https://www.medialaw.org/topics-page/an ... nt&print=1
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My favourite case is Lenny Dykstra. His defamation lawsuit was tossed because he is such an unbelievably toxic piece of shit that a judge ruled that, as a matter of law, it is not possible to libel Dykstra because his reputation simply cannot be harmed. You can't actually make him look worse than his own actions already have.
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From a legal perspective, this case is a slam-dunk for Twin Galaxies. To defame a public figure, like Billy Mitchell you must:
1. Make a statement of fact which is verifiably false
2. with actual malice
3. and either:
A. you knew it was false, or
B. you made the statement with reckless disregard for the truth.
(Sometimes 3(B) is phrased as, "you should have known it was false.")
Anyway, if you take 3(A) and 3(B) together, you get the rule that a statement can't be defamation if you had some reasonable reason to believe the statement to be true. TG had such a reason: they had a report from an expert that it must have made using MAME. That expert opinion was extra reasonable because the expert explained and documented his method for determining that it was MAME, which was being able to reproduce a particular visual artifact with MAME easily, and being unable to reproduce it using original hardware even with a great deal of trying. Sounds like a pretty reasonable reason to believe the statement was true to me. Interestingly, it doesn't matter if the statement was true or not, just that they had a good reason to think it was true. (Although, if the statement is true, then they win no matter what, but it's always good to have multiple lines of reasoning to back up your positions.)
1. Make a statement of fact which is verifiably false
2. with actual malice
3. and either:
A. you knew it was false, or
B. you made the statement with reckless disregard for the truth.
(Sometimes 3(B) is phrased as, "you should have known it was false.")
Anyway, if you take 3(A) and 3(B) together, you get the rule that a statement can't be defamation if you had some reasonable reason to believe the statement to be true. TG had such a reason: they had a report from an expert that it must have made using MAME. That expert opinion was extra reasonable because the expert explained and documented his method for determining that it was MAME, which was being able to reproduce a particular visual artifact with MAME easily, and being unable to reproduce it using original hardware even with a great deal of trying. Sounds like a pretty reasonable reason to believe the statement was true to me. Interestingly, it doesn't matter if the statement was true or not, just that they had a good reason to think it was true. (Although, if the statement is true, then they win no matter what, but it's always good to have multiple lines of reasoning to back up your positions.)
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Wow, fancy being the poor judge who has to sit through and listen to all this crap.
Talk about first world problems!
Talk about first world problems!
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When you say good money, what kind of money are we talking about? This suit can’t be cheap and I can’t imagine a DK record holder is commanding appearance fees in the thousands of dollars. Maybe hundreds or even a thousand and a catered lunch.
Although, I suppose that is still hundreds to a thousand and a lunch more than a branded cheater would get.
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As it should be. The willingness to cross the line into cheating casts a doubt over all previous achievements, no matter what the field of endeavor. Did they cheat earlier and just not get caught out?
This whole mess just reads like a petulant man-baby throwing a petulant man-baby-sized tantrum. What I find hilarious about it is he could have just invested the money and effort into re-doing the score run on a certified machine in front of trusted auditors and the whole mess would have gone away without leaving the tarnish all over him.
I am aware that it's a bit of a marathon to do but it has to be easier and cheaper than all the lawyer herding.
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Yeah maybe, though I've found whenever you go super deep, even on an ostensibly bad game, if you allow yourself to get drawn in there's usually a lot of nuance and skill to learning any game - or anything - "perfectly."
I experienced this first hand with Resident Evil 6. That game sucks - but I somehow stumbled into just how deep and powerful the whole movement system is, you can do all kinds of wild moves that are gunkata/matrix adjacent and for a couple weeks or so I was really into it and it was fun while it lasted. Still don't want to go back and play it now though hahah.
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Sorry, only 2/10 on the Prenda scale. But maybe I am a generation too old to care. Or maybe Mango sucked all of the oxygen out of that particular egomaniac cage.
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I disagree.
First, just about every contest of skill has random components to it. For example athletic sport has environmental conditions.
Second, part of the achievement of a high score in video games that have a lot of random components tends to be the ability to "play the game at the peak of their abilities" a significant number of times. Except for the most extremely random games, any player able to sustain peak output over a sufficient number of runs will be able to get their highest potential. Imagine a physical competition where the goal was to roll a 50 pound 6 sided die as frequently as possible and get the highest total in a 5 minute period. Sure there's a random component, but that random component necessitates multiple attempts at the goal thus making any record achievement more impressive than just the record for most number of rolls in 5 minutes.
Third, even if it were "stupid" that doesn't make it unenjoyable, doesn't make it useless, doesn't make it harmful, doesn't make it wasteful, doesn't make it unfulfilling, doesn't make it uninteresting. The "stupidness" of a given activity is IMO irrelevant to its value.
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I sincerely doubt he has ever been paid that much to appear anywhere. Now if you told me he was paid to go away...
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He apparently has a 7 figure net worth so yeah, next life be a d list celebrity.
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What the fuck is this loser trying to say? That the Kennedy assassination itself was a conspiracy? That you automatically win if you smile and glad-hand enough idiots to create an echo chamber repeating your bullshit? The complexity of your deceit, by itself, does not counter video evidence.
Probably could have used another pass at that bit.
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Billy Mitchell: "These people agree with me, thus your evidence doesn't matter. Nyah!"
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Prenda remains the legal corruption clusterfuck against which all others should be judged. Not even the mighty SCO v. IBM is in the same class, though it was far far more important.
I mean - extortion, porn, identity theft, multiple bench slaps from multiple Federal judges (including the epic Star Trek-themed one), disbarment, and a 14 year Federal sentence are just some of the highlights - it’s a high bar to clear.
And who can forget “govern yourself accordingly”???
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For a smaller-scale story of someone with Prenda-level acumen, there's Richard Liebowitz
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It doesn't. It's a statement of opinion based on disclosed facts. The opinion is "Billy Mitchell cheated." The disclosed facts are the video of his million-point Donkey Kong game and the analysis of it.
Even if that analysis were flawed -- I don't think it is, but even if it were -- that still wouldn't make Twin Galaxies' opinion defamatory. They've made their case and they've laid out their facts. Those facts are, so far as anyone can tell, accurate. You can disagree with their conclusions, but defamation requires a false statement of fact (and, in the case of a public figure -- which Mitchell certainly is in this context -- also requires that the false statement of fact be knowingly false or made with reckless disregard to its truth or falsity).
They're under no obligation to recognize Mitchell's scores, or anyone else's. They're certainly under no obligation to acknowledge his various sworn statements about all the times he didn't cheat as evidence that he's not a cheater. This suit is absurd nonsense scrawled in crayon. Have you tried to read his evidence package? I made it through about 10 pages of his poorly-spelled ravings. Of 156.
The allegation is that he save-scummed to rig the RNG. There's not really any way to do that by accident.
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As well-intentioned as your post is, I think trying to keep that word associated with genuine learning disabilities does more harm than good. I'd rather let the word continue drifting toward being another synonym for general stupidity than try to preserve its association with learning disability. I'd argue that trying to preserve its association with learning disability only serves to make it a more powerful insult as well as act as a stigma for those with learning disabilities. I'd be far more offended to hear a health-care worker use that word to describe a person with an actual learning disability than I would be to hear the word used as an increasingly meaningless insult. There are better terms to use, as evidenced by your own post.
I don't see any reason to give any disadvantaged group of people an easily-weaponized label.
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Using Todd Rodgers as a witness to claim that Mitchell didn't cheat is one thing about this whole thing that makes me shake my head.
Rodgers' cheating and lying is even more demonstratable than Billy Mitchell's. At least Mitchel actually DID set some of the high scores he gained fame for. It boggles me that they'd put Rodgers on any sort of witness list when he has zero credibility due to the mountain of evidence that shows he has none.
Rodgers' cheating and lying is even more demonstratable than Billy Mitchell's. At least Mitchel actually DID set some of the high scores he gained fame for. It boggles me that they'd put Rodgers on any sort of witness list when he has zero credibility due to the mountain of evidence that shows he has none.
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