gattsuru
3hr ago
I will give caution that I've had some mixed results from TP-Link. The worst problems have involved their routers, which you're skipping, but their access points and especially management were pretty flaky the last time I tried them (admittedly, 2023), especially with mesh mode problems or multiple wifi network configurations. Doesn't matter a ton for the switch, but you may want to consider stepping up to UniFi.
((Or if you have concerns about China... uh, gfl.))
Get a bigger switch than you think you need. You're looking at one port for the router, three ports for the access point, one for the dedicated home server... and that just leaves three for end users. That's probably enough right now, if you don't do a lot of high-quality media streaming to televisions or want dedicated lines for a desktop computer, but it's not a lot of excess. Especially if you might want a security camera system or have a lot of PC gamers, those three remaining slots can fill up faster than you'd expect, and WiFi that works fine today might struggle when a couple more devices are all stomping the same SSIDs.
Get a box (with a fan) for the switch if you're putting it in the garage, or keep it in the house. You would be amazed how quickly these electronics pick up dust, mouse crap, sawdust, dead leaves, and insects. I'd favor keeping as much electronic equipment inside the house's vapor barrier as possible.
When you pull the coax, both tape (ideally gaffer, if not duct) and tie a good series of knots, and pull a poly line with the cat6. If you're dealing with conduit, I'd argue just pulling a poly-line run alone first, but for normal residential you shouldn't see conduit for coax.
Consider a small APC for the router, switch, and server. Less because of the uptime -- you're buying maybe 15 minutes for any not-ridiculous APC -- and more for the device protection. Voltage transients in particular are murder on single-power-supply servers, and it's as often the mainboard that dies as the psu.
gattsuru
6hr ago
Unfortunately, this is the sort of lawsuit that takes ten thousand bucks for a trivial chance of actually being made whole (and mostly in a settlement), a large chance of getting a useless judgment on a defunct or judgment proof target, and a larger chance of just never having a conclusion that’s mostly a shrug.
Doesn’t make the Reckless Ben response good…
gattsuru
10hr ago
BAM claims in court filings that they only allow consignment with express written consent, and while they seem to be overstating the degree it's explicitly prohibited by their franchise agreement, it seems pretty plausible in practice. Consignment is a weird model for a lot of this class of shops, and the threat goes away for sales that are cash-on-hand.
((Conversely, reading between the lines, BAM's management of franchisees seems somewhere between 'poor' and 'actively promoting bad practices', so that could scare people off more than the sale risk. "We couldn't get into the POS system for a franchisee for over a year" is the sort of thing that should have you running for the hills.))
gattsuru
1d ago
It wasn’t until Christianity spread through the region that modern notions of “privacy” became a thing to the region.
I'd quibble that a lot of these norms remained even after Christianity entered the space, and even after it popularized among the common man. The mainstream academia overstates the 'invention of privacy' as a thing, but various levels of invasive 'bedding ceremony' or tolerated prostitution remained in a lot of Christianized spaces up until the 1600s. Increasing quality of life making modern privacy possible rather than consisting of stolen moments seems to have had some impact.
((I'm not sure on anal sex. It seems like it should have had massive problems, since between the lack of antibiotics and the cost of oils it gets unpleasant fast, but there's a lot of records that seem to heavily treat a lot of nonreproductive sex in the same category, and handjobs and blowjobs get really outsized focus even as they may have been less prone to UTIs than PIV.))
gattsuru
1d ago
Ah. I'd read that more as modifying "consent", rather than modifying "consent or knowledge", but that's probably an artifact of how poly people treat it and may not be an issue for the overwhelming majority of respondents here.
gattsuru
1d ago
The "Mr." Brightside chorus pretty heavily genders it, but it genders it male, and most women don't mind singing from a generic male perspective.
Although its actual relationship to homosexuality gets weird if you look at it from the right lens. The song's about Flowers actually seeing his girlfriend getting kissed by another man and then spiraling -- there's no ambiguity there, he's answered interview questions spelling it out -- but the lyrics are bizarrely compatible with the singer being jealous of the woman and being cheated on by the man. And that's separate from the male-worshipping tones a lot of cuckolding picks up.
((Though actual gay cuckolding looks hilariously different.))
My answers are not likely to be useful and my concerns about most of the questions probably don't generalize...
(eg, what does "without your knowledge or consent" mean in an open relationship, where I might well consent to broad ground rules without needing or wanting to know about every ERP partner? I put that down as "no" under the spirit of 'infidelity', but by the strict text? On the other hand, most social conservatives would see the actual open-relationships as infidelity with more steps... or hot, given the natal sex of the partners involved.)
That said, "What kinds of romantic relationships have you had?" could probably use a 'mix of above' answer before Other. I would be genuinely surprised if there were as many people who'd only had poly relationships as who have had a mix of poly and mono ones.
((I don't think jealousy is strictly universal, but its absence is closer to a form of damage than a strength; even in poly relationships, people like the underlying relationship claim that it represents. The extent cuckolding as a kink tends to be a marmite -- normal people either absolutely hate it or really like it -- suggests at least the fear of infidelity is extremely common.))
gattsuru
2d ago
Probably more incapability than insincerity. I'd give a rough BOM cost under <10k USD to build a functional prototype with that design and core capabilities at unit size one, probably three or four times that in compliance costs, quadrobic 12-dof motor control is (very) annoying math and tuning but well-solved in the open-source world. And while they're choosing a stupid way to solve a bunch of random problems -- selling to .gov sources is basically impossible for a startup this shape so they're trying to sell to randos, but selling to end-users has some major political risk so you get an intentionally-bulky robot -- they're at least some problems that already exist like 'I have to cut a fallen tree apart and I don't want to lose a leg to a chainsaw'.
But they've been around over a year, have a lot of renders, and no actual action shots. Or pretense of action shots, which is what makes me think it's not self-aware enough to be satire.
But the complete lack of social media presence or public push does leave satire on the table.
gattsuru
2d ago
I'm... skeptical of the strong form of this thesis.
There's a trivial version where yes, getting off every night means you're not going to get the early Spring 'holy shit I need to be in someone' rush, or where people in relationships have less sex if one or both watches a lot of porn, or it slightly impacts where 10/10 on a scale falls or what an ideal date night looks like. That's clearly true, but it's not very interesting, doesn't change depending on type (or, frankly, amount) of pornography, and doesn't result in people unable to fuck women.
If you're working on those concerns, I'd probably say the anime/hentai/furry side has more of an impact? AI-generated human-like people might be unnaturally perfect, but human neurology seems to map from unnatural perfection to normality fine. Reading into non-photorealistic-human shapes involves rewiring yourself to see those shapes as people. I'd expect that to have a bigger impact.
The strong form, where smut messes with your head so seriously you might not be able to be attracted to actual people, is a meaningful and different category. And there are examples of people who've ended up here. I'm most familiar with some of those people from the furry fandom -- either because they look at humans and don't get the frisson without a muzzle or tail, or because they've gotten wrapped up into kinks like vore or snuff that can't be executed in real life. But it can happen in other environments: the trans 'chaser' that couldn't form a relationship with one and won't leave the concept alone, the supermodel obsessive who will never meet a woman he'd score above a 3/10 and wouldn't date anyone who would give him a second glance, or the kinksters who've obviated the sex itself.
Yet actually looking into what happened or happens with specific examples throws a wrench into the theory. There's people who's FA pages are walls of overly-detailed mouths who still desperately want a boyfriend or girlfriend, or get one. Same for latex fetishism, or (for a women's example) obsession with guys in masks. Hell, even extreme denial kink tends to go that way, and there not getting fucked is the whole point. Charitably, that emotional and social connection just becomes too important too quickly. Less charitably, computers can't yet replace a warm hole or warm pole, nevermind the warm body and cuddling that comes with them.
gattsuru
3d ago
The steelman is that two- or even three-year delays between initial arrest and actual trial are common for any nontrivial crime, especially in Blue Tribe spheres; that restricting bail makes arrests into a serious punishment, sometimes even the full breadth of any plausible punishment, and thus police officers into judges; and turns the jails into psuedo-prisons and final adjudication of charges into advisory opinions.
I'd argue that's more of a reason we should fix the fucking trial system, or, failing that, do a better job of separating dangerous alleged criminals from nondangerous ones than a judge squinting. But it's not a fake argument.
gattsuru
3d ago
t's a top two election (nobody's getting 50%), and unless something disastrous happens, the chances of her finishing third are slim to none. She's going to have to run against somebody in the fall, and Pratt is probably an easier win than Raman.
Trivially, Raman booting Pratt out makes sure there's not a Republican in the actual election, because California's Top Two is a joke, and there's a wide variety of political positions that Raman and Bass overlap precisely on and Pratt does not.
I don't think the evidence for the fraud theory has been demonstrated, and it might not exist even presuming it was correct, but paeans to motivation fail when there's tons of motivation available.
gattsuru
3d ago
That’s a less denying the charges and more admitting to them. I’d also point to the increasing redefinition of “assault rifle” — which does have a technical meaning
((It’s also just nakedly not true: the organization would spin in its grave rather than recognize how Red Tribers use a disputed trans-adjacent word.))
gattsuru
4d ago
A lot of 'objectification' discourse is just a political weapon -- as you say, ideologues uncomfortable with sexual desire who turn to any argument against it -- or the Dworkin-style criticism of industries that doesn't meaningfully discuss or respond to specific acts or creations.
Unfortunately, the Dworkin/MacKinnon-style one is what's present here, and in a lot of youtube content dating back to Sarkeesian, so that doesn't help. Because it's supposed to be a criticism of broad structures rather than specific acts, it's largely not interested in specific acts... and coincidentally is largely unfalsifiable, up to and including handwaves when confronted with increasingly broad spectrums of pornography that either don't fit its model definition (femdom, gay porn) or do fit its model definition but don't actually objectify (women's erotica, woman-to-consumer sales, the growth of parasocial porn). The waiter counterexample just gets a 'mu' here: it's just not a relevant question to their framework.
But there is a meaningful steelman (and not some recent or made-up one) that's worth keeping in mind if you every write smut or romance (or even 'normal' stories that feature romance).
There is a difference between treating people like tools or toys, and sexualizing them or making them targets of sexual desire. It's the line between a character that's sexy, and a fleshlight with a smil. You can treat a tool well, or a person poorly, just as being a target of desire can be humanizing or not depending on framework, norms, and reciprocity of interest.
For an extreme (and het) example, look at het free-use style BDSM.
In writing, erotica or pornography with more of a story, that can be more varied. A lot of less experienced writers will try to make sex scenes so low-friction that the sub does nothing but sit there, look sexy, and maybe squeeze a little. But there's a lot of mileage in highlighting the sort of pinch points that show up in real sex. Overstimulation and 'forced' orgasms are kinks of their own for a reason. A sub finding a position uncomfortable and wanting to swap, or needing a different tempo or some time to adjust to the big dick in them, or wanting more foreplay before penetration, can be a great pacing tool. Someone using a safe word because they can't physically bend that way is a perfect tool to make clear that they are comfortable with or at least enjoying everything else, or act as a scene break. These inevitably inject questions about who can make what call and how those desires are negotiated, even if the writer ultimately wants to just to treat them as one-liners.
Now, I'll make the separate argument that objectification isn't always bad. The counterargument to objectifying a waiter ultimately ends up asking a lot of emotional labor from someone who, in reality, just wants you to leave a tip and get out of here so the table's clear. In sex, a significant portion of women (... and some men) like smut that objectifies the character they're projecting themselves into, because of that objectification. It gives them a vehicle to see their desires instantiated, without having to replace an existing character's conflicting desires and feelings, or require that projection to vocalize and admit their own desires. That's a particularly big deal for people who've been raised to stigmatize or hide overt expressions of their sexuality: denying the interior experience of 'their' character may be the only way they can really come to grips with it.
The steelman of the feminist argument is that objectification can be dangerous, even for the people who get the most out of it. Some men like the woman-as-sex-toy framework because it does make it easier to think about sex as solely about 'their' own pleasure, up to and including at the expense of what their partners want or what their partners are comfortable doing. Some women who need objectification as a way to bypass their shame do so to their own detriment, either ignoring or refusing to use environments where they could admit to their desires safely, or by internalizing the self-abnegate to destructive ends.
I don't buy that as a common concern, but I don't think it's a non-existent failure mode, either. The academic research is bad, since it's mostly revolving around priming effects with little pre-registered study and even fewer direct replication, and a lot of signal only shows up if you divide 'violent' (mainstream) porn from general porn, which doesn't encourage about direction-of-causation or salami-slicing-reasons. Still, unless it's entirely fraudulent, there's some level of signal, and if so the pro-sex side's larger population-scale data is partly recognizing other variables.
Your own example of leaked nudes is a central version: you weren't restricting her rights or opinions, but you weren't recognizing them as matters to care about either. That's why the objectification theory uses that word, not just to smuggle emotional loading from the Dworkin version: you don't deny the rights or opinions of tissue paper, after all, but you still treat it as an object. I'd guess that she didn't want her nudes to be present everywhere on the internet, and legally she might have had a cause of action against the leakers and redistributors.
((caveat: I don't follow celebrities, so if she's separately a well-known exhibitionist, objection withdrawn.))
gattsuru
4d ago
There's some conflict between 'only mention that which is important' and 'create a realistic world'. Screenplay tends to be heavier on the former, but the underlying principles show up to a lesser extent in written form and even fairly expansive worlds. An RPG sourcebook is expected to be filled with piles of random junk... and it's also random junk that you should be able to use in a scene.
On the flip side, going too extreme towards minimalism or functionalism risks making the puppeteer's strings too obvious. Minor details and background characters that are inexplicable are a good way to make the world seem larger than your main characters.
But was it portrayed as actually happening within the storyline, or was it a dream or hallucination? (I haven't seen the show.)
At least from a google search, it's a daydream that's supposed to parallel the character's growing and destructive popularity as both an onlyfans and right-wing influence. Because subtly is for cowards.
gattsuru
5d ago
Injunction still active after today's hearing. The judge and threatened contempt for any further violations, but no contempt finding. VCheck has supposedly removed the requirement.
Depends heavily on the couple and your relationship to them, along with the question you ask. A rando is going to feel like oblivious or even like an attack; a distant coworker or friend-of-friend is going to seem invasive and maybe clueless; and close friend, happy family, or long-time near coworker I’d expect all but the most cautious to find just awkward rather the mean… but it even then, there’s polite forms and less polite forms.
I’ll start with the caveat that for gay men, they might not know. There are some pragmatic arguments for certainty, but there’s social and relationship arguments for specifically obfuscating it even from yourself.
For most of the gay guys who get into surrogacy, be aware that ‘bio dad’ is entirely different a question than who’s the ‘real father’. Even for couples who did only use one semen source or where the parentage is going to be obvious, both guys are still dads, and that’s an important part of the mental framework. Anything that scrapes it is going to be much more unpleasant or unintentionally cruel than just the awkward normie question of ‘how they decided the genetic donor’.
Under that, be aware you’re asking about people’s reproductive lives. There’s a joke in straight comedy that congratulating a guy on his wife’s pregnancy is just a less crude way of brofisting and saying ‘nice creampie’. You’re not quite doing the same thing, because jerking off into a jar (usually) not part of their sex lives, but it’s still not something you should ask in a crowded space, in mixed company, in a business environment, or in front of kids, no matter how clinical you name it.
And the answer might well be either “none of your business” or two proud gay guys who have way more info than you wanted to know.
For lesbians it’s a little easier. Asking who carried isn’t actually the same thing as who is the biological mom, since lesbian ova transfer is a thing, but it’s a lot less loaded a question. Still not something I would ask random strangers at a Pride event, though.
… and I’ll also caveat that even today, a nonzero part of gay and lesbian couples with kids have them from past heterosexual relationships, or adopted the kid. So be aware that the answer could well be ‘neither’, or an entirely different minefield than the expected one.
gattsuru
6d ago
I will try to respond to this more in depth later, but :
In Virginia you have 10 days to respond to a motion.
Where are you getting this rule? The only place I can find 10 days specific isthe Virginia Supreme Court; this case is operating at the Lynchburg Circuit court level, and Virginia circuit courts look to range from having long periods or depending on hearing days or both for normal rulings (eg 14 days before the next hearing Friday for Fairfax) , and then high-complication ruling schedules are entirely up to the judge since they can set a response schedule of their own.
When the state filed their motion to vacate on May 4, they took the position that the order was already mooted by intervening legislation and that they were only filing the motion out of an abundance of caution
This seems wildly incompatible with Walker v. Birmingham. Doubly so when a) the new law hasn’t gone into effect yet, and b) it literally said to enforce the enjoined statute, but even presuming it did genuinely moot the case, that still doesn’t automatically invalidate an injunction.
gattsuru
6d ago
LibreOffice has the best direct VBA support, but it is still limited and partial and unlikely to get drastically better. OnlyOffice has an LLM-assisted translation, but I wouldn't recommend it for production services.
If you're really all-in on UI (and don't hate post-2007-Microsoft), OnlyOffice. It's pretty explicitly trying to emulate Microsoft Office and to minimize on-boarding issues. Performance is comparable to MSOffice, one of the better PowerPoint equivalents.
LibreOffice is the most powerful and performant, but the UI looks like it came straight from 2003. That can be a plus, and is for me, but most won't like it. It does have the strongest Excel competitor if you're doing a lot of spreadsheet work.
I will generally discourage OpenOffice (effectively dead since Sun abandoned it, minimal updates) and Google Docs (usable for basic collaboration, but Google will bite you and it struggles badly as use cases get complicated). WPS Office had some trouble (Chinese ownership, censorship scandal), but I haven't used it so I can't comment deeper.
gattsuru
7d ago
One way is that the court order never actually said something to begin with.
The order is here, the motion and relevant exhibit here.
Another way is that they simply try to achieve the same or similar goal using a different method that is not ruled against.
HB1525 specifically spelled out : "That the Department of State Police shall administer, enforce, and otherwise implement § 18.2-308.2:5 of the Code of Virginia from the effective date of this bill." The final judgement from the court specifically said : "The Virginia Department of State Police, and all law enforcement divisions, agencies, and officers within the Commonwealth, to include their successors or replacements in office, are hereby permanently enjoined and prohibited from administering, enforcing, or otherwise imposing upon any person the requirements of, the Act (Va. Code 18.2-308.2:5)." The state is administering the act, and informing businesses using VACheck that they must comply with the law.
A third way is that the case is in appeal and there's a stay...
There is no appeal; the case reached final judgement, despite Jay Jones' best efforts to illegally intervene before his term began.
Most likely you just don't understand the situation well and there is nothing to update on like basically every accusation that happens in this manner.
How convenient that you never have to even examine claims that might possibly challenge your priors.
If/when the courts actually start to bring up charges for disobeying an order ...
What an absolutely fascinating and specific phrase to use, when you specify charges. Is the principle here that the judge would have to use criminal contempt -- the thing he wouldn't be able to enforce against state police administration if Jones is backing them -- rather than civil contempt, before you think it's defiance of a court order? Or that a finding by the court that the state was violating the injunction doesn't count?
gattsuru
7d ago
VCDL has filed the motion to rule to show cause for violation of the court order. The evidence is damning, complete, and undeniable. The VSP implementation can't even depend on the new statute, because it hasn't gone into effect yet and can't constitutionally go into effect until July 1st. Though the state's politicians and stenographers are going to pretend it does anyway, since they didn't amendment out the "emergency status" text of the statute that they didn't get the votes to support.
It also doesn't matter.
VCDL's pleading is open-ended enough that it could be asking that Jeffery Katz and Jay Jones face criminal contempt, and the judge could theoretically pass such a recommendation to the local prosecutors or appoint a new one -- and it's not going to happen, full stop, period, it's like shouting about 18 USC 242 or promoting citizen grand juries where even talking about it just marks you as a crank. There's just a
Optimistically, the best-case scenario for VCDL is a declaration that the injunction wasn't dissolved yet, and that Virginia owes them reasonable fees. Aka, the state gets to enforce a law illegally for a few days or weeks, the taxpayer pays a trivial fee, and VCDL only loses time but not money. Maybe the Virginia State Police even comply, rather than just thumbing their noses and pretending a minor tweak or disclaimer and doing the same thing anyway is enough? Not like it'll cost them anything if they don't. And it's just a plausible that the court (or appeals, because sanctions and contempt findings are appealable orders) finds that the injunction was going to be dissolved eventually, and that the value of the intervening weeks is zero.
gattsuru
7d ago
the bigotry of low expectations is basically default now and low brow behavior like name calling and insults doesn't even get noticed anymore but it's getting increasingly more true.
Jay Jones has directed Virginia State Police to violate a standing court order. Do you have an update? Can you give an example of a high-profile Democratic speaker that cares?
gattsuru
8d ago
There's a genuine tendency to use it as an excuse, in the same way that postmortems sometimes devolve into 'our systems weren't sufficiently hardened against threats'. And there's a worse tendency to use it as a handwave, where genuine disagreements are just thrown away as insufficiently explaining or incompletely persuading people of The One Truth -- this latter option is both common to HR and to a certain browbeating political speaker.
But there is a steelman where a frustrating number of system failures occur despite the information existing, and even being recorded, but not being available or visible to the people who need it. The aviation contexts are the best-known: you get someone helping out and being interrupted half-way through and a few screws get left unturned and then everybody's dead, or where a big gradient in pilot experience leaves a first officer unwilling to challenge a pilot even if there's something clearly wrong. It pops up at smaller scales and dumber directions nonetheless. I've spent three hours in a meeting trying to figure out who owned a specific firewall, and the problem was that half of the people in the meeting didn't think we were even trying to identify the owner, but instead trying to go through the process assuming someone else owned it and they were being consulted about security ramifications. That is a thing that happens, pretty often.
But you can't just motion around More Communication if it also means just assuming people will just agree with you if you shout at them more.
Another variant of the "paved with good intentions" problem is what happens when the underlying technology just changes. Minecraft's server infrastructure has been undergoing a pretty wide variety of modifications, sometimes for good reasons (proper user IDs), sometimes for more mixed ones (chat reporting as an anti-grooming... and anti-privacy matter), and sometimes for bad reasons (pushing toward the Bedrock model). Do the old versions count as meaningful different products? There's enough of a 1.7 following (and even a Zontargs beta 1.2 following) that it's happening, but that's unique to Minecraft's scale, and I'm not sure it's meaningful as a legal scope to care about. In turn, though, it's not hard to imagine bigger differences that would undebatably matter.
Sometimes, the seller legally can't release server binaries, for IP reasons I don't really understand (the client code has third-party libraries, why is the server code different?).
Server infrastructure licensing tends to be a nightmare. I've had specific database implementations that were licensed per-core, per-developer, and prohibited redistribution of executable code. I even had one case where the license didn't transfer with a disk drive replacement, though I think that company's gone under or been bought out since. It's become less common, thankfully, but it's a far cry from the typical library file where you're typically only charged per-developer or a single fixed cost.
That's not insurmountable, and City of Heroes was very infamously leaked multiple times, and ended up getting a weird level of permission to operate, but it's a big hurdle. Even if the source code for Tabula Rasa fell out of the sky -- and NCSoft has very strong reasons to not want that to happen -- I wouldn't expect it to have enough of a following to become active again.
I'm... skeptical about crediting the duty of candor to the court too heavily. There's a lot of things that courts seem perfectly fine with that normal people would call lies, and a lot more than can be done by implication.
In particular, specifics like a lock able rather than locked cabinet, or Chrystal supposedly using parentheticals in a phone call that BAM quotes (and, while not as prohibitive, referring to themselves as "they"), or the 80k-no-60k-no-30k valuation, are not the sort of things that make me trust the complaint as being deeply honest. Doubly so where these are core to the claim, rather than incidental. The parenthetical in particular is very much core to bringing the RICO claim, bolded, and afaik, not written as an insertion by the transcription, and just not a believable thing for even a pretty dumb criminal to say.
Maybe those are all real and supported with strong evidence, or maybe they're the client's claims rather than the lawyer. But they're not written like it.
And there's some weird errors. Did Brandon start the 300k USD valuation in February of 2026, or in "early 2025"? One of these is a factual claim (90) and one is a legal predicate (172), and they seem to both be talking about the same incident.
Similarly, the >$200k USD number seems to have come from previous marketing material from the store, and while some of that's probably puffery and none of it can attribute to either BAM or Josh, it also seems to be matched by third-party estimates of the value of the whole original consignment. Some of the disparity comes because the majority of the value was in the minifigs, not the sets, which the pleading very carefully occludes in the valuations even though it highlights Chrystal's alleged taking (but not theft?) of a Boba Fett figure. (no, I don't know why people pay so much for the minifigs)
It's possible that Chrystal/Gorman sold a large portion (or even Brandon took it back without notice to BAM/Josh) and Brandon's just doing a scam artist routine, although BAM having access to the POS system this long and not knowing or providing evidence one direction or the other raises serious doubts that direction.
That doesn't make Chrystal, Gorman, and Bryan in the right: this very much looks like a 'pox on all their houses' situation.
Yeah, if BAM's version is true, BAM was either blameless and legally not-at-fault or at worst ethically negligent about management, and Bryan was screwed. Even more so than the BAM pleadings admit -- Chrystal's partner dirtbag-left'd his way out of the country and near-certainly would have most of the money, in a way that would make recovering funds even more impossible than the normal judgement proof version -- so there's even a good explanation why Bryan might have felt like he had no option but to team up with Chrystal in the hope of getting some questionable settlement from an innocent part to get him to go away.
It would be really weird if Chrystal had control of the consignment for nearly a year and didn't sell anything from it.
But honestly, I think it's pretty serious risk even if the current franchisees did have possession of (a large portion of) the goods when they took the store and sold them, either not knowing or not caring about the complicated ownership. It's not the most likely situation, but it's not impossible or improbable one. Still, shops like this aren't going to have a ton of cash-on-hand, they'll liquidate the value of property trying to fight the case, and they've got logical reasons to fight rather than give a token settlement because of the tight financial situation to start with. BAM is a more tempting legal target, but in turn it has a ton of (legitimate!) doubts about actual liability.
There's a bit of a survivorship bias, here. Attorneys also refuse to take suits on contingency that are worth a lot more, either because the defendants are judgement proof, they think the odds are low, or just because it'll take so long that any victory won't be worth the sauce.
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