#2018 Data Files

[sirompp]

im. animating something 😁

[walks-the-ages]

[ID: a link preview of a stock image coffee table with a laptop with the facebook logo on the screen with text on top that says 'anyone who used facebook in the last 16 years can now get settlement money. here's how." end ID]

-USA Residents Only-

Time Sensitive- Apply before August 25th, 2023 (8/25/23)!

Filing a claim takes less than ten minutes, and can be done HERE

Excerpt from article:

Anyone in the U.S. who used Facebook in the last 16 years can now collect a piece of a $725 million settlement by parent company Meta tied to privacy violations — as long as they fill out a claim on a website set up to pay out money to the social network's users. 

The settlement stems from multiple lawsuits that were brought against Facebook by users who claimed that the company improperly shared their data with third-party sources such as advertisers and data brokers. The litigation began after Facebook was embroiled in a privacy scandal in 2018 with Cambridge Analytica, which scraped user data from the site as part of an effort to profile voters.

Meta denied any liability or wrongdoing under the settlement, according to the recently created class-action website. However, the agreement means that U.S. residents who used Facebook between May 24, 2007, and December 22, 2022, can file a monetary claim as long as they do so before August 25, 2023. 

Please reblog to signal boost this! As many people as possible should know about this to make their claim, if you don't do anything you don't get anything. It takes less than ten minutes to file and pick your payment option including pay/pal and ven/mo .

-USA Residents Only-

This ended August 25th, 2023!

[batboyblog]

Things Biden and the Democrats did, this week #16

April 26-May 3 2024

President Biden announced $3 billion to help replace lead pipes in the drinking water system. Millions of Americans get their drinking water through lead pipes, which are toxic, no level of lead exposure is safe. This problem disproportionately affects people of color and low income communities. This first investment of a planned $15 billion will replace 1.7 million lead pipe lines. The Biden Administration plans to replace all lead pipes in the country by the end of the decade.

President Biden canceled the student debt of 317,000 former students of a fraudulent for-profit college system. The Art Institutes was a for-profit system of dozens of schools offering degrees in video-game design and other arts. After years of legal troubles around misleading students and falsifying data the last AI schools closed abruptly without warning in September last year. This adds to the $29 billion in debt for 1.7 borrowers who wee mislead and defrauded by their schools which the Biden Administration has done, and a total debt relief for 4.6 million borrowers so far under Biden.

President Biden expanded two California national monuments protecting thousands of acres of land. The two national monuments are the San Gabriel Mountains National Monument and the Berryessa Snow Mountain National Monument, which are being expanded by 120,000 acres. The new protections cover lands of cultural and religious importance to a number of California based native communities. This expansion was first proposed by then Senator Kamala Harris in 2018 as part of a wide ranging plan to expand and protect public land in California. This expansion is part of the Administration's goals to protect, conserve, and restore at least 30 percent of U.S. lands and waters by 2030.

The Department of Transportation announced new rules that will require car manufacturers to install automatic braking systems in new cars. Starting in 2029 all new cars will be required to have systems to detect pedestrians and automatically apply the breaks in an emergency. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration projects this new rule will save 360 lives every year and prevent at least 24,000 injuries annually.

The IRS announced plans to ramp up audits on the wealthiest Americans. The IRS plans on increasing its audit rate on taxpayers who make over $10 million a year. After decades of Republicans in Congress cutting IRS funding to protect wealthy tax cheats the Biden Administration passed $80 billion for tougher enforcement on the wealthy. The IRS has been able to collect just in one year $500 Million in undisputed but unpaid back taxes from wealthy households, and shows a rise of $31 billion from audits in the 2023 tax year. The IRS also announced its free direct file pilot program was a smashing success. The program allowed tax payers across 12 states to file directly for free with the IRS over the internet. The IRS announced that 140,000 tax payers were able to use it over their target of 100,000, they estimated it saved $5.6 million in tax prep fees, over 90% of users were happy with the webpage and reported it quicker and easier than companies like H&R Block. the IRS plans to bring direct file nationwide next year.

The Department of Interior announced plans for new off shore wind power. The two new sites, off the coast of Oregon and in the Gulf of Maine, would together generate 18 gigawatts of totally clean energy, enough to power 6 million homes.

The Biden Administration announced new rules to finally allow DACA recipients to be covered by Obamacare. Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) is an Obama era policy that allows people brought to the United States as children without legal status to remain and to legally work. However for years DACA recipients have not been able to get health coverage through the Obamacare Health Care Marketplace. This rule change will bring health coverage to at least 100,000 uninsured people.

The Department of Health and Human Services finalized rules that require LGBTQ+ and Intersex minors in the foster care system be placed in supportive and affirming homes.

The Senate confirmed Georgia Alexakis to a life time federal judgeship in Illinois. This brings the total number of federal judges appointed by President Biden to 194. For the first time in history the majority of a President's nominees to the federal bench have not been white men.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Boss politics antitrust

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/2024/11/12/the-enemy-of-your-enemy/#is-your-enemy

Xi Jinping inaugurated his second term with an anti-corruption purge that ran from 2012-2015, resulting in a massive turnover in the power structures of Chinese society.

At the time, people inside and outside of China believed that Xi was using the crackdown to target his political enemies and consolidate power. Certainly, that was the effect of the purge, which paved the way for reforms to Chinese law that have effectively allowed Xi to hold office for life.

In 2018, Peter Lorentzen (USF Econ) and Xi Lu (NUS Policy) published a paper that used clever empirical methods to get to the bottom of this question:

https://web.archive.org/web/20181222163946/https://peterlorentzen.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/Lorentzen-Lu-Crackdown-Nov-2018-Posted-Version.pdf

Working from the extensive data-files published during the corruption trials of the purged officials, Lorentzen and Xi Liu were able to estimate the likelihood that an official had really been corrupt. They concluded that overwhelmingly, the anti-corruption purges did target corrupt officials, some of them very highly placed.

But when they considered the social graph of those defenestrated officials, they found that they came from blocs that were rivals of Xi Jinping and his circle, while officials who were loyal to Xi Jinping's were spared, even when they were corrupt.

In other words, Xi Jinping's anticorruption efforts targeted genuinely corrupt officials – but only if they supported Xi's rivals. Xi's own cronies were exempted from this. Xi did use the anticorruption effort to consolidate power, but that doesn't mean he prosecuted the innocent – rather, he selectively prosecuted the guilty.

Donald Trump will be America's next president. He campaigned against "elites" and won the support of Americans who were rightly furious at being ripped off and abused by big business. The Biden administration had done much to tackle this corruption, starting with July 2020's 72-point executive order creating a "whole of government" approach to fighting corporate power:

https://www.eff.org/de/deeplinks/2021/08/party-its-1979-og-antitrust-back-baby

Trump will have to decide what to do about these efforts. It's easy to say that Trump will just kill them all and let giant, predatory corporations rip, but I think that's wrong. After all, the Google antitrust case that the DoJ just won started under the last Trump administration. Trump also sued to block the absolutely terrible merger between Warner and AT&T.

I think it's safer to say that Trump will selectively target businesses for anticorruption enforcement – including antitrust – based on whether they oppose him or suck up to him. I think American business leaders know it, too, which is why every tech boss lined up to give Trump a public rim-job last week:

https://daringfireball.net/2024/11/i_wonder

Trump killed the AT&T-Time Warner merger to punish CNN. He went after Google to punish "woke" tech firms. That doesn't make AT&T, Time Warner or Google good. They're terrible monopolists and the US government should be making their lives miserable.

Trump will not need to falsify evidence against corporations that are disloyal to him. All of America's big businesses are cesspits of sleaze, fraud and predation. Every merger that is being teed up now for the coming four years is illegal under the antitrust laws that we stopped enforcing in the Reagan era and only dusted off again for four years under Biden. They're all guilty, which means that Trump will be able to bring a valid case against any of them.

This will create a trap for people who hate Trump but don't pay close attention to anticorruption cases. It's a trap that Trump sprung successfully in his first term, when he lashed out at the "intelligence community" – the brutal, corrupt, vicious, lawless American spy agencies that are the sworn enemies of working people and the the struggle for justice at home and abroad – and American liberals decided that the enemy of their enemy was their friend, and energetically sold one another Robert Mueller votive candles:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/12/18/schizmogenesis/

Over the next four years, Trump will use antitrust and other corruption-taming regulations to selective punish crooked companies. He won't target them because they're crooked: he'll target them because they aren't sufficiently loyal to him.

If you let your hatred of Trump blind you to the crookedness of these companies, you lose and Trump wins. The reason Trump will find it easy to punish these companies is that they are all guilty. If you let yourself forget that, if you treat your enemy's enemy as your friend, then Trump will point at his political rivals and call them apologists for corruption and sleaze – and he'll be right.

It is possible for Trump to fight corruption corruptly. That's exactly what he'll do. But just because Trump hates these companies, it doesn't follow that we should love them.

[i-love-linux-and-reject-gender]

hey I've been considering downloading Linux for a while now could you tell me what about it is different from Windows?

alot of what I've been looking at has really just said that it's better without really saying why

1. there's a package manager:

you usually don't download software by going to a website, downloading a file and double-clicking it, you use something like an appstore (much much better than the microsoft app store). you can also just use the package manager (the software that installs and uninstalls software from the appstore) from the terminal. there you would run a command like "sudo apt install steam" to install steam. you can download almost everything you need using this.

2. it's free (also like in freedom)

linux is free and not in an ad-filled and selling your user data way. your operating system isn't telling you to buy it. all software in the appstore is also free.

3. it's (usually) more reliable

at least in my experience, windows is much more unstable than linux. the slowdown of your system after a couple months of usage doesn't exist. linux breaks less often, however when it does break and you are new to linux it can be more difficult to fix than windows (this changes over time in my experience). linux doesn't force updates on you, if you want you can just not update your system for years (not a good idea though). and updates are much less intrusive, you can run an upgrade in the background while not noticing everything, and reboots after upgrades don't take any longer than a normal reboot

4. performance

the system uses less resources. windows uses like 2-5 gigs of ram depending on the install just on the desktop, all of my linux installs use less than a gigabyte on the desktop. my linux laptop from 2018 is much more responsive in day to day use than my new windows laptop.

5. software compatibility

you can't run most windows software on linux

photoshop, microsoft office and stuff like that doesn't work

however, gaming usually isn't much of a problem (if you have your games on steam). steam has a linux compatibility layer for linux called proton, which allows you to run most games on linux. and that's the software shipped with the steam deck. in doubt, check https://protondb.com if your games are supported

please add anything else you might see fit, this is a quick list i made after waking up lol

[listentoace]

This will freak you out

... or at least I hope it does. Yes, I know most of the stuff I post on here is just kinky and horny talk and that's totally fine. By now, thousands of users have found their way to my blog and I'm very grateful for the support. I know I don't share much about myself, but the following will be about a more personal matter. I work in IT, or more specifically, with data. Lots of data. Being into data science, I am hyper-aware of the constant collecting and aggregating of user data. I know it's somewhat common knowledge that you're being tracked, but I want to take this opportunity to point out how bad the situation is and why privacy matters. I'll try to keep it as easy to follow as possible, so please bare with me!

The Trackers

Right now, you're on Tumblr. As you are reading this, your app connects to over a dozen servers that are not from Tumblr itself. They are from companies like Google, Amazon, Yahoo, but also lesser known companies such as Adjust and Moat. Within a single day, the Tumblr App sends about 5.000 tracking requests to the aforementioned and more companies, sharing your personal data. That's once every 15-20 seconds, regardless of whether you have the app opened or not. While I can't say exactly what data is being shared, it is likely that this is personal information that can be utilized to assume your opinions, target ads, or predict future behavior, as these are ways how companies will ultimately make money. Depending on what permissions you have granted the Tumblr app, it might also scan your gallery, your entire file system, access your call history, or your camera and microphone. By granting this permission, you are essentially giving Tumblr the keys to your phone on a complete "just trust me, bro"-basis. To me personally, that sounds scary.

But why do you use Tumblr yourself, then?

Very good and fair question! I actually am conflicted regarding using Tumblr, but I have put several security measures into place to minimize tracking potential as much as possible. While Tumblr can still see when I go online, read all the messages I send to others, know what content I view, like, comment on, and otherwise engage with, that is about it. Tumblr cannot acces my general file system, it cannot remotely access my camera and microphone, and even all the aforementioned trackers are blocked. I'll go more into this later.

"So what, I've got nothing to hide."

It's great that you think that! That's just what the big tech companies want you to believe. But answer me this: have you ever found it uncomfortable when a person next to you was reading all your texts, looking at your gallery, and just generally kept an eye on what you do on your phone at all times? Well, if a single person doing that is bothering you, how much worse must it be to know that several companies with thousands of employees spy on you for a living? Yes, they have seen your nudes, your breakup texts, your hours of Whatsapp calls with your best friend. It's literally a Big Brother Dystopia.

"Why would they be interested in me?"

I bet you have heard about the Cambridge Analytica (CA) scandal from 2018. Just to summarize: a data analytics company CA worked closely together with Facebook to target adds specifically tailored to users to manipulate them into voting for Donald Trump as President. If you are asking how specific this could be, just look at this demonstration by Signal, where their ads are extremely specific to a point where probably only a few thousand if not only hundreds of people would fit the description and just those exact people saw their ad.

"You got this ad because you're a newlywed pilates instructor and you're cartoon crazy. This ad used your location to see you're in La Jolla. You're into parenting blogs and thinking about LGBTQ adoption."

Facebook took it down within hours. But imagine you seeing this ad of a random company knowing this much and lots more about you. Note that Instagram and WhatsApp belong to Facebook/Meta, so even if you're not using Facebook directly, you're still being watched just as closely.

Knowing exactly what you like, dislike, fear, and love, strong emotions can be triggered for political or financial gain. You're into sustainability? Buy this product and we will retrieve one pound of plastic from the ocean! You are conservative and maybe slightly racist? Immigrants are taking over more and more healthcare jobs! You are scared by a possible nuclear war? Vote us for safety and peace!

This is how Cambridge Analytica managed to pull in millions of voters in the US and manipulate the election in a way that Donald Trump wouldn't have won without their manipulation. This is literally a threat to democracy. And as you know, my allegiance is to the Republic, to Democracy!

You might be aware of how right-wing and extremist parties all around the western world use very polarizing and emotional topics in their campaigns and are doing very well on social media. Often much better than more centered, leftist, or conservative parties, who tend to polarize less. This is not a coincidence. Not only is this because of customized, targeted content, but it's also because strong emotions generate more attention

Doom Scrolling & Dopamine

Social Media has had decades to perfect their dopamine lottery. The algorithms know exactly what you are into, no matter how much of a niche it might be. A good, user-oriented algorithm would show you a few posts, the best ones of the day, and then simply say "well, that's been all the good stuff. Wanna see the rest anyways?". But that's not how it works, is it? When opening an app like Instagram, TikTok, Tumblr, etc., you usually immediately land on a recent top-post. This is to give you the instant gratification and that sweet hit of dopamine.

Have you ever noticed how you had to scroll a bit before you got a post again that you really loved? That's by design. The mix of top-posts and mediocre ones is on purpose, to keep you waiting for more. You never know when the next super funny TikTok will come by. All you know is that it might be the next one. In-between top-posts, you're met with mediocre garbage and an add or two and just before it gets too boring, you hit gold again. The constant release of much higher than normal amounts of dopamine make your brain temporarily lose touch with what levels are normal. Why is it that you feel drained and tired after scrolling through social media for a few hours, even though you've done nothing but sitting around? You didn't think hard, you didn't move much, so what is it? It is the dopamine-rollercoaster that is mentally straining you. And there are tens of thousands of highly trained software engineers and corporate executives designing their platforms to keep you scrolling for as long as possible. If that little chiming sound increases your screen time by as little as 2%, it will be added. It is designed to suck your life away, chain your eyeballs to the content they want you to see, just so they can literally sell you to anyone who has the cash. You need that new gadget, visiting this country is an absolute must, this new sports competition is amazing, definitely vote for this cool party. Trust them. They know what you want. You don't know anything about them, but they know everything about you.

"What do I do now?"

Well, it is unlikely that you'll stop using social media at all. I mean, even I am still here. But there are things you can and should do for your mental and financial health, and for your own safety and protection against manipulation. Here is a list of things you should consider

Limiting social media to only a few apps you actually use and are interested in

Spend no more than 2 hours on social media per day

Meet friends irl instead of only texting

Stop sharing personal information. It is not illegal to enter false names, birthdays, etc into random sign-up forms! Protect your children as well!

Use privacy- & user-oriented platforms, such as Signal instead of WhatsApp, or Mastodon instead of Twitter. They finance themselves through volunteers and donations instead of by selling your data and lifetime to any buyer

Use privacy-oriented frontends (the visual interface and application you interact with), such as NewPipe or FreeTube instead of YouTube. You also won't be seeing any ads there

Don't buy anything impulsively. Take a week or two to think about whether you really need and want it.

Check facts, do your own research, use multiple sources, be critical

And in case you're interested in what I use:

I'm have an Android phone running /e/OS and a total of 5 computers/servers which run Linux and a Windows laptop for work. My phone block any trackers, fakes my GPS location (not VPN/IP) to where I am in Barcelona. All devices have a 24/7 encrypted VPN connection. I don't have WhatsApp, Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, or even a Google account. For personal use I have Signal, Element (Discord alternative), and Proton Mail. That's it. Every website or platform I have an account on has it's own, unique, single-use email, a randomized password and 2FA whenever possible. I use KeePass as my password manager, encrypted with a password, key file, and hardware key. I enter false data into any random form, use hardened Firefox browsers to resist fingerprinting and tracking, and back up all my data at home on a hard drive instead of using a cloud service. (Yes, there is much more)

For my content, I use Tumblr and a semi-active Discord account, Reddit accounts are banned.

For my professional life, I am forced to use Microsoft Teams and Outlook, yet I only use those on my work computer & phone.

Privacy = Freedom

Yes, I know my measures are far beyond average, but I wanted to present an example and hopefully inspire some of you to take back your online freedom and privacy! Because that's what it is! Privacy is Freedom!

I hope this inspired you and please ask any questions in the comments! This truly is a topic that means a lot to me so thank you for reading all the way through it. Please reblog to further share this important topic and encourage others to protect themselves!

- Ace

[wip]

Hello! Would you ever consider bringing back different post types, especially audio? I appreciate that audio posts now display the artist, song title, and album name, but unfortunately newer audio posts don’t play in Tumblr-based music players like egoisticalgoat.de or robinpx.github.io/boombox because they’re read as text posts. Thank you for reading!

Answer: Hey there, @stepintomusic!

Sadly, the answer here is no. We’ve been moving away from legacy post types and towards the Neue Post Format—a format that allows multiple types of media in the same post—for many years. The new features available in NPF basically guarantee that we won’t ever switch back to the legacy format.

(If you’re interested in peeking behind the scenes here, there are a few posts about NPF over at @engineering.)

Now, to get into the meat of the issue. While it would be amazing if we could support every third-party tool forever, the reality is that we can’t. We’re a surprisingly small team to begin with, and even if we weren’t, that support would come at a cost.

To start, there’s the development tax. Now, would it have been cool to ensure all third-party tools (and all custom themes) worked 100% perfectly with posts stored as NPF before releasing NPF to the public? Yeah, it would have been… for third-party tools and custom themes. For us, it would have meant delaying NPF (and all the features it brings with it) for months, possibly years. Imagine a 2023 where Tumblr still doesn’t have polls: that’s the alternate future we’re talking about here.

And then, there’s our maintenance tax. The engine that powers Tumblr themes is already incredibly complicated—complicated to the point that we’re already finding it difficult to maintain and add things like, as you mentioned, NPF audio metadata. If, every time we found some third-party tool that doesn’t play nice with the latest changes, we tried to make an affordance for it… the engine would just become even more complex. And it would do so quickly, and complex to the point of being impossible to keep up with as a maintainer.

There’s a great article here by a former Mozilla developer about the pitfalls of prioritizing a third-party ecosystem over your own software. Did you know that Firefox was essentially a single-threaded application until 2018? This meant it would still visually lock up when saving files to disk, or collecting crash data. Chrome launched in 2008 and was multiprocess from the start. But it took Firefox ten years to catch up because supporting all existing third-party add-ons was seen as necessary. (Spoiler alert: in the end, they had to drop support for those add-ons anyway.)

My own recommendation around third-party software like this is: get in contact with its developer! If something in their software isn’t working, there’s nobody more qualified to update it. (Or, if they’ve abandoned the project but had made it open-source, maybe someone else could step up to maintain it. Maybe you! You never know until you try.)

I talked about the maintenance tax from the first-party side, but let’s talk about it from the third-party side, too. As a theme author and add-on developer myself, I have long accepted that the cost of maintaining these things can never be zero. When your software interacts with an online service, and that online service is being actively maintained, your software also needs to be maintained.

I hope all this has been enlightening! Thanks for your question, and please, have a great day.

—April

[evidence-based-activism]

what do you think of this exchange? I find the 100% statistic and the claim that a male solder rapes a female soldier every 3 hours to be quite unbelievable https://www.tumblr.com/lickmybigfathairypussy/761526266679705600?source=share

I think the second poster is repeating misogynistic myths perpetuated by men's rights activists. The first poster (@hadesoftheladies) does a good job illustrating why he is wrong.

For the specific statistics you are interested in:

---

The claim "French men have sexually assaulted 100% of female users in public transport" appears to have been taken out of context. (Maybe this was the result of French-to-English translations?) There was a French report that found 100% of their sample of women reported sexual harassment while on public transportation ... but this sample was drawn from a poll about harassment on public transportation, so it's not representative [1].

I do not read French, so this was a difficult to research, but it looks like a better (but still imperfect) estimate is 87% [2]. I can't find any recent representative studies. (They are probably all in French, which I, again, cannot read.) What I can find all suggests that sexual harassment in France is already prevalent and becoming even more frequent [3].

---

For the one about American soldiers ("A US american solder rapes one of his female coworker every 3 hours."). To be clear for everyone, what this is saying is that every three hours, one male American solider rapes one female American solider. And it turns out you're correct, Anon, male American soldiers rape their female coworkers much more frequently than this [4, 5].

Specifically, in 2018, 6.2% of female active duty service members reported being assaulted. 92% of these assaults were by "men or a group of men". Given both formal and informal military culture around sexual assault and women, this is likely a severe underestimate. In addition, this is a prevalence rate not an incidence rate, so, for example, if one woman is actually assaulted on 5 different occasions, it would still only be recorded once.

But, going by just these values, it works out to at least 11,893 male soldiers having assaulted 11,893 women in 2018. That's about 33 every day or more than 4 every 3 hours. Even if you include only "completed penetrative" assaults (and assume the types are split evenly by perpetrator sex, which is extremely unlikely), that's still 2 every 3 hours.

And again, this doesn't take into account how many of these incidents had more than one male perpetrator, how many women were victimized more than one time, and how many more assaults went unreported in the survey.

---

Check out my male violence tag for more statistics.

References under the cut:

France 24. (2015, April 16). France: Women face harassment in the metro and on public transport. https://www.france24.com/en/20150416-france-women-harassment-metro-transport-rights

FNAUT. (2016). Étude sur le harcèlement sexiste et les violences sexuelles faites aux femmes dans les transports publics. https://web.archive.org/web/20210319070100/https://www.centre-hubertine-auclert.fr/sites/default/files/fichiers/etude-fnaut-2016.pdf

Sweeney, J. (2023, January 23). Sexism in France is alarming and getting worse, says report. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/jan/23/sexism-in-france-is-alarming-and-getting-worse-says-report

Prevalence of sexual assault in the military: Risk and protective factors, data sources, and data uses. (n.d.). https://www.rand.org/pubs/tools/TLA746-2/handbook/resources/data-on-sexual-assault-in-the-military.html

Breslin, R., Davis, L., Hylton, K., Hill, A., Klauberg, W., Petusky, M., ... & Office of People Analytics Alexandria United States. (2019). 2018 Workplace and Gender Relations of Active Duty Members: Overview Report.

[arlana-likes-to-write]

Family is more than Blood - Masterlist

You are the older sister of Natasha and Yelena, brought together by a Red Room Mission in Ohio. But to you blood doesn’t mean family and when the mission is over they are still your sisters. 

Main Story (2016 - 2018) 

Lean on Me by Bill Withers - Whispers of Natasha’s escape echo throughout the Red Room and you know it’s your chance to make a deal to ensure their safety. 

The World Turned Upside Down - Natasha and Yelena face the man that has destroyed the lives of so many young girls. They learn the things you had to do as part of your deal.  

Promise - As Melina goes through the data that Natasha took from Dreyokv, she finds your file and learns that your birthday is coming up. With the help of Natasha and the other Avengers, they try to give you a much needed break. 

What if I’m not needed? - Yelena wakes up from a nightmare and instead of going to Natasha she turns to you. 

Safe. You are Safe -  After returning to the compound from a solo mission to free a Widow, you are badly injured. But as a Widow injury means punishments and you can’t afford to be punished because who will protect your sisters if they kill you.

Patient - A higher level Widow is in NYC and you need your sisters help but when they can’t help you a new visitor to the compound may be the answer to your problems. 

A Helping a Hand - In 2013, Dreykov sends you on a mission that is a little below your skill level. But you don’t expect to run into the Avengers and your primary mission changed. 

Sugar Rush - Carol and you test the boundary of just being friends

You Have Yourself a Deal - Carol is worried when you don’t show up for your date and she has every reason to worry when Natasha and Melina get a link to a security feed of your torture chamber. 

Darkest Mind - Sometimes the voices and the guilt got to loud and the only way you knew how to quiet the world around you was through pain.

Accidents Happen - When Carol has a nightmare and hurts you with her powers, your sisters don’t take it to well.

Resolved - Forgiveness isn’t something easy to give but when your sister is taken it may be to late. 

At Your Back - Wanda needs a gentle reminder that she is not alone and she has gained another sibling at the compound. 

Resting on Your Shoulder - A trip to Iowa to met the Bartons is the perfect thing you need to rid your mind of Danie’s screams. 

Tiny Dancer -  After you and Natasha return to the compound, those closest to you know something bad happened. Carol learns another dark part of your past.

Mine to Protect - The Avengers capture a member of Dreykov’s second ring and he is asking for you.  

Drabbles

A Trip Back Home - visiting Ohio with your sisters  

A Black Widow Halloween - Celebrating Halloween with the Avengers, cause some unwanted memories to come up. 

Through Your Eyes - You are learning how to be a person and undo all of Red Room trauma 

‘What Ifs’ 

It’s okay. Let me Go - Natasha calls you asking for a favor when an off world threat comes to threatens half of the Earth’s population.

Letters to a Goodbye - These are the letters you wrote to everyone before the time heist. Part 2 of It’s okay. Let me go. 

Face to Face - When Alexei tells you that the mission is over you’ve made a decision to give Melina, Yelena, and Natasha a chance to run 

Trust is Earned - Melina has made it clear that she doesn’t trust you, what can be done to earn her trust back? (Part 2 of Face to Face)

[mariacallous]

On Tuesday morning, five days after Hurricane Helene ripped through Boone, North Carolina, David Marlett was on his way to the campus of Appalachian State University. The managing director of the university’s Brantley Risk & Insurance Center, Marlett was planning to spend the day working with his colleagues to help students and community members understand their insurance policies and file claims in the wake of the storm. He didn’t sound hopeful. “I’m dreading it,” he said. “So many people are just not going to have coverage.”

Helene made landfall southeast of Tallahassee, Florida, last week with winds up to 140 miles per hour, downing trees and bringing record-breaking storm surges to areas along the Gulf Coast before charging up through Georgia. But perhaps its most shocking impacts have been on inland North Carolina, where it first started raining while the storm was still over Mexico. At least 57 people are dead in Buncombe County in the west of the state alone. Communities like Boone received dozens of inches of rainfall despite being hundreds of miles from the coast. Waters rose in main streets, sinkholes and mudslides wreaked havoc, and major roads were blocked, flooded, or degraded by the storm.

Now, there’s a good chance that many homeowners in North Carolina won’t see any payouts from their insurance companies—even if they have policies they thought were comprehensive.

“The property insurance market for homes was already a patchwork system that really doesn’t make a lot of sense,” Marlett says. “Now you’re adding in the last couple of years of economic uncertainty, inflation, climate change, population migration—it’s just an unbelievably bad combination happening all at once.”

For North Carolinians, the issue right now has to do with what, exactly, private insurance is on the hook for when it comes to a storm. An average homeowner policy covers damage from wind, but private homeowners’ insurance plans in the US do not cover flooding. Instead, homeowners in areas at risk of flooding usually purchase plans from the National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP).

The way a hurricane wreaks havoc on a state is a crucial deciding factor for insurers’ wallets. Hurricane Ian, which hit Florida as a category 4 storm with some of the highest wind speeds on record, caused $63 billion in private insurance claims. In contrast, the bulk of the $17 billion in damage caused by 2018’s Hurricane Florence, which tore up the North Carolina coast, was water damage, not wind; as a result, private insurers largely avoided picking up the check for that disaster.

This breakout of flood insurance from home policies dates back to the 1940s, says Donald Hornstein, a law professor at the University of North Carolina and a member of the board of directors of the North Carolina Insurance Underwriting Association. Private insurance companies decided that they did not have enough data to be able to accurately predict flooding and therefore could not insure it. “In some ways, that calculation of 50 years ago is still the calculation insurers make today,” he says.

While the NFIP, which was created in the late 1960s, provides virtually the only backup against flood damage, the program is saddled with debt and has become a political hot potato. (Project 2025, for instance, recommends phasing out the program entirely and replacing it with private options.) Part of the problem with the NFIP is low uptake. Across the country, FEMA statistics show that just 4 percent of homeowners have flood insurance. Some areas hit by Helene in Appalachia, initial statistics show, have less than 2.5 percent of homeowners signed up for the federal program.

“Even in coastal areas, not many people buy that, much less here in the mountains,” Marlett says. “People have never seemed to fully understand that flood is a separate policy.”

Flooding is not unprecedented in the mountains of North Carolina: Hurricane Ivan swept through Appalachia in 2004, and flash floods from rivers are not unheard of. Purchasing flood insurance is mandatory with a government-backed mortgage in some areas of the country, based on flood zones set by FEMA. But the data is based on extremely outdated floodplain maps that have not taken the most recent climate science on record rainfall into account.

“The biggest non-secret in Washington for decades is how hopelessly out of date these flood maps are,” Hornstein says.

Even if water wasn’t the cause of destruction for some homeowners in North Carolina, the storm’s disastrous mudslides—another risk supercharged by climate change—may not be covered either. Many home insurance policies have carve-outs for what are known as “earth movements,” which includes landslides, sinkholes, and earthquakes. In some states, like California, insurers are mandated to offer additional earthquake insurance, and homeowners can purchase private additional policies that cover earth movements. But in a state like North Carolina, where earthquake risk is extremely low, homeowners may not even know that such policies exist.

It’s also been a tough few years for the insurance industry across the country. A New York Times analysis from May showed that homeowners’ insurers lost money in 18 states in 2023—up from eight states in 2013—largely thanks to expensive disasters like hurricanes and wildfires. Payouts are increasingly costing insurers more than they are getting in premiums. Homeowners are seeing their policies jump as a result: According to statistics compiled by insurance comparison shopping site Insurify, the average annual cost of home insurance climbed nearly 20 percent between 2021 and 2023. In Florida, which has the highest insurance costs in the country, the average homeowner paid over $10,000 a year in 2023—more than $8,600 above the national rate.

Florida has made headlines in recent months as ground zero for the climate-change insurance crisis. More than 30 insurance companies have either fully or partially pulled out of Florida over the past few years, including big names like Farmers’ and AAA, after mounting losses from repeated major hurricanes like 2022’s Ian, the most expensive natural disaster in the state’s history. Florida’s insurer of last resort, now saddled with risk from multiple homeowners, has proposed a rate increase of 14 percent, set to go into effect next year.

In comparison, North Carolina’s insurance market looks pretty good. No insurers have exited the state since 2008, while homeowners pay an average of $2,100 per year—high, but avoiding the sky-high rates of states like Florida, California, and Texas.

“What traditionally has happened is that there’s a rate increase every few years of 8 to 9 percent for homeowner’s insurance,” says Hornstein. “That has kept the market stable, especially when it comes to the coast.”

But as natural disasters of all kinds mount, it’s tough to see a way forward for insurance business as usual. The NFIP is undergoing a series of changes to update the way it calculates rates for flood insurance—but it faces political minefields in potentially expanding the number of homeowners mandated to buy policies. What’s more, many homeowners are seeing the prices for their flood insurance rise as the NFIP adjusts its rates for existing floodplains using new climate models.

Many experts agree that the private market needs to reflect in some way the true cost of living in a disaster-prone area: in other words, it should be more expensive for people to move to a city where it’s more likely your house will be wiped off the map by a storm. The cost of climate change does not seem to be a deterrent in Florida, one of the fastest-growing states in the country, where coastal regions like Panama City, Jacksonville, and Port St. Lucie are booming. (Some research suggests that the mere existence of the NFIP shielded policyholders from the true costs of living in flood-prone areas.)

Asheville, at the heart of Buncombe County, was once hailed as a climate haven safe from disasters; the city is now reeling in the wake of Helene. For many homeowners, small business owners, and renters in western North Carolina, the damage from Helene will be life-changing. FEMA payouts may bring, at best, only a fraction of what a home would be worth. Auto insurance generally covers all types of damage, including flooding—a small bright spot of relief, but not enough to offset the loss of a family’s main asset.

“People at the coast, at some point after the nth storm, they start to get the message,” Hornstein says. “But for people in the western part of the state, this is just Armageddon. And you can certainly forgive them for not having before appreciated the fine points of these impenetrable contracts.”

Marlett says that there are models for insurance that are designed to better withstand the challenges of climate change. New Zealand, for instance, offers policies that cover all types of damage that could happen to your house; while these policies are increasingly tailored price-wise to different types of risk, there’s no chance a homeowner would experience a climate disaster not covered by their existing policies. But it’s hard, he says, to see the US system getting the wholesale overhaul it needs, given how long the piecemeal system has been in place.

“I sound so pessimistic,” he said. “I’m normally an optimistic person.”

[ssspringroll]

ok time for an info post about my edited stuff folder and also some new additions to it

a lot of these are pyxis edits, but the others are also creators who dont seem to be active anymore. but if anyone is the original creator of one of the things ive edited and you're mad at me for posting my edit... sowwy. ill take it down if you ask nicely ♥

ssspringrollIntergalacticSpotsM.package

edit of: https://pyxiidis.blogspot.com/2018/02/intergalactic-supernatural-overlays.html

description: so it turns out all these years, the fem frame version of the intergalactic overlay was a little different from the masc frame and i never noticed. so i made a little add on edited version of the fem frame overlay so it fits the masc frame.

before -> after (there's shoulder spots now)

its available in all the original colors. theres 2 versions of each color though, since there were slightly different leg opacities for the masc and fem versions and i couldnt decide which one to go with. they are very minuscule differences, the shoulder spots are really the main event.

feel free to recolor this in other palettes, id appreciate it actually. took a lot of fiddling to get those spots to line up right, please! please use my edit and make recolors!

this shows up in cas (for m frame only, theres no point for f frame, they already have it) as a separate cas part. the thumbnail is the same as the original, except i slapped the word 'EDITED' over top in big red letters. hopefully you will see it.

ssspringrollPrettyVisitorsHeterochromia.package

edit of: http://pyxiidis.blogspot.com/2017/04/pretty-visitors-eyeset.html

description: heterochromia. the meshes are by me (not that i can take much credit for them, its an ea eyeball thats slightly larger than usual. thats it.) but there are L and R meshes for each age (infant to TYAE) feel free to recolor in other eye sets, the mesh follows my usual TOU. the textures, obviously, are not mine. i don't know if i managed to squeeze every swatch from the pretty visitors eyes in there, but i know for a fact all the human colors, the pooklet colors, and some other alien colors are in there. I did not do the vampire colors. sorry. maybe some day.

found in face scar and neck scar (in skin details) but feel free to re slot them to other categories for your convenience. left and right cheek might also be a good spot for them. there are two cas items, L and R, so i wanted them to be sort of close together, thats the only reason i picked the spots i did.

incompatible with glasses.

demondays

edit of: https://pyxiidis.tumblr.com/post/177241795736/demon-days-vampire-stuff-by-pyxis-some-things

description: the original texture of the gradient limb overlays was bleeding out of the leg area a little bit, which clipped into the texture area of some wicked whims body parts, making unexpected splotches. i just trimmed it back a little so it shouldn't do that anymore.

eyes

edit of: https://pyxiidis.blogspot.com/2017/11/arachnophobia-accessory-spider-eyes.html AND https://www.patreon.com/posts/29118520 (v2)

description: converted for all ages. the meshes are addons and should be installed alongside the originals, the arachnophobia overlays (PYXIS_Arachnophobia_SpiderEyes_FaceMarkingDetails_upperRightArmTat.package, etc.) are direct edits of the original package files. Delete the old packages with the same names and replace them with my edits, if you want the overlays to be available for all ages. You don't need the overlays for the meshes to work, though.

An additional slot has been made available for infants -> children in the eye details section. The meshes will not be found in that category for teens and up, just the tots.

Waay'los' folder

this sections formatted a lil different. dont worry about it.

PYXIS_Siren_MermaidGills

edit of: http://pyxiidis.blogspot.com/2018/05/siren-mermaid-accessories.html

description: edited warehouse data so that necklaces can be worn at the same time as the gills. the mesh has not been edited, so compatibility with very close-fitting necklaces like chokers is not likely (gills are bulky and will clip) but i figured thats no reason to close off the option entirely. so necklaces are allowed now. also, i changed the categories. the packages claiming to be necklaces are found in mouth scar and the ones claiming to be rings are found in face scar (skin details section, towards the bottom near acne)

⚠ NSFW [MiniGiles]LoveBelow SkyrimFantasies Reptilia Male

edit of: i dont think this ones available anymore i will be honest. i can't find a link

description: tweaked positioning of the mesh so it lines up a little better with animations. also tweaked the weight painting and uv map. it doesnt animate quite right all the time, but it gets the job done. should still show up in the ww body selector (does for me, anyway)

⚠ NSFW ssspringrollReptiliaOverlays.package

edit of: this ones original content

description: gradient overlays for the reptilia body parts in the same basic rainbow palette as my overlay minipack. found in body scar (right leg). really nothing fancy, just for a little bit of personalization. should be color slider mod compatible

no custom thumbnail

ssspringrollHorns

edit of: https://flapjack-sims.tumblr.com/post/114810983191/horns-for-sims-4-ive-noticed-the-lack-of-horns-in (MESH) https://cherryvanillasims.tumblr.com/post/163956398575/flapjacks-thicc-horns-forehead-in-noodles (RECOLORS)

description: moved the uv map and textures so now the horns are compatible with hats (and any other accessories that use the hat texture space, like lots and lots of the wing cc thats out there)

changed the category to acne. there's two packages of these horns, i think the textures are ever so slightly different between them, but its negligible. I'd recommend the ssspringrollHornsEditedForMyBoy.package version, if you don't want to grab both (which you can, they appear as two separate cas parts)

no custom thumbnail. i dont know if these require the mesh. i dont remember.

Disclaimers:

Just because I've edited these pieces of cc does not mean I'm adopting them. I cannot promise I will offer support if something breaks.

Lots of these are edits of my own personal package files, rather than edits of freshly downloaded versions. They may have been batch fixed, re-slotted, renamed, or otherwise edited over the years I have had them in ways I no longer remember.

Okay looks like thats everything for now.

I will probably add to this pile eventually, but until then, bye bye.

shoutout to @/occultradio for requesting most of the edits that aren't in the Waay'los folder. i straight up did not notice the shoulder spots until they pointed it out and likely wouldnt have done any of the other stuff either if they hadn't asked lol

[allthebrazilianpolitics]

The murder of priestess Mãe Bernadete and the rise of the ‘holy war’ against African religions in Brazil

Over the past two years, there has been a 45% increase in attacks fueled by religious intolerance. According to specialists, this is related to the surge of evangelical fundamentalism

Maria Bernadete Pacífico, 72, was an institution in Salvador de Bahía, in northeastern Brazil, where she was known simply as Mãe Bernadete. She was a respected quilombola leader (a community formed by the descendants of slaves who fled their masters) and ialorixá — a priestess of Afro-Brazilian religion Candomblé.

For years, Bernadete had been fighting for the territorial integrity of her quilombo, located on the outskirts of Salvador and coveted by loggers and land speculators. A few weeks ago, two gunmen invaded her terreiro — the sacred place where ceremonies are held — and shot her dead. Six years earlier, her son was killed. Investigators have pointed to the agrarian conflict as the main cause of the murder, but haven’t ruled out religious motives.

Crimes due to religious intolerance have grown in Brazil in recent years. According to the most recent data from the Ministry of Human Rights, cases have increased by 45% in the last two years. Last year, 113 complaints were filed, although the government acknowledges that this number may be higher, as many of these crimes are still considered to be fights between neighbors. The incumbent government also accuses the previous administration of Jair Bolsonaro (2018-2022) of dismantling the system that facilitated these types of complaints.

The crime of religious intolerance ranges from extreme cases — such as murder or daily assaults — to insults, threats and other types of discrimination for religious reasons. The latter offenses can result in sentences ranging from two to five years in jail. In Brazil, those who suffer the most from religious intolerance are the practitioners of African-based religions, such as Candomblé, Umbanda and Quimbanda.

Continue reading.

[kylesons]

Better Bee Boxes

I really like playing with gardening and farming in my saves, but with all of the micromanaging that comes with tending to chickens, cows, horses, plants, llamas, goats, and so on... I don't have time for my sims to keep trying to schmooze with the bee box over and over just so they don't get stung for daring to be in their proximity whilst the hive is vaguely irritated. Owch! There used to be a mod that sped up the bee bonding process, but it hasn't been updated since 2018... I looked into updating it myself, saw that it was rather easy, and added some of my own tweaks while I was at it. So here I present... Better Bee Boxes! Yay!

FEATURES

Instantly max friendship with bees — no more need to spam the interaction and get stung 500 times just to befriend bees. yeesh!

Instantly calm down bees when agitated — we're friends, quit stinging me and give me my honey!

Faster honey production — before, bee boxes would take around 8-10 sim hours to become full. with this mod, it takes about 2 hours to become partially full, and 4 hours until full. more honey, more fun!

Faster & more beeswax production — having to wait several sim days for one measly cube of beeswax seemed a little silly to me. I wanted to make this more viable for candlemaking, so I upped the production timer to 3 beeswax every 10 sim hours. a little less cheaty than the honey production, but makes things feel a little more streamlined.

Honey Please! cheat — just for fun. adds a cheat interaction to instantly fill bee boxes with the maximum amount of honey. why, you may ask? well, why not?

NOTES

All features are available as individual files, so you can pick and choose which ones you want! There's also an all-in-one file. Make sure you use one version or the other, not both! (Unless you're a fan of causing potential problems with your saves, then don't let me stop you...)

The "Honey Please!" cheat re-enables a maxis debug cheat to fill the bee boxes, and comes with a string override that changes the default "20+ honey" label for the interaction. It's only available in english for now.

No bees were harmed or exploited for their labor in the making of this mod. They were given proper compensation for their increased efficiency, as well as extra vacation days, professional massages, and a complimentary buffet.

DOWNLOAD HERE [google drive] (always free/no adfly!) ✅ Compatible with patch 1.108+ (8/8/24)

Compatibility notes & list of xml used available under the cut.

Compatibility:

This mod will probably conflict with anything that touches the tuning data for bee boxes. ‼️Calm Bees by LittleMsSam is technically incompatible, as this mod does the same thing, so don't use my mod alongside hers. Nothing catastrophic should happen to your game if you do, but some interactions may be missing. ‼️This mod requires the SEASONS expansion pack!

XML Used:

[boosqoowoo]

the full timeline of burning sun (and goo hara)

2015 - 2017 crimes committed pre-burning sun

13 december 2015: seungri throws a birthday party for himself in shanghai with his friends and investors. here, he requests for girls that "give it good" for his investors (bbc)

______________________________________________________________

2016 jung joon young (jjy)'s molka (secret recording) crime

january 2016 - jjy, choi jung hoon (cjh) went to a ski resort with 2 others. at 7.39pm, kim sent a video to seungri (who wasnt present) about sexually assaulting a victim at the resort (bbc) *note: seungri was in japan for the big bang made concert tour from jan 9 - jan 11

february 2016 - jjy's ex gf filed a police report about him secretly recording a sexual video of her

15 march 2016 - jjy, cjh, park and kim assaulted a victim in daegu (bbc)

16 march 2016 - jjy had a fan meeting, one day after assaulting a victim

22 august 2016 - police requested that the private forensics company write a report to the police that "jjy's phone is unable to be restored and there are no data recovered"** 23 september 2016 - exclusive article released by reporter park hyo sil about the crime. for the next 3 years, park hyo sil will be a victim of a public witch hunt, having 2 miscarriages from the stress

06 october 2016 - jjy was cleared on all crimes. public opinion was in favor of him.

**today, we know that the private forensic company had secretly recovered all the files from his phone, and kept in 3 USBs. it contains data from 2015 - 2016. in 2019, a female from the company dropped of the 3 USBs at an attorney's office, who later contacted reporter kang kyung yoon. this will be the break of the burning sun case in 2019

______________________________________________________________

9 december 2017 - seungri rented an entire resort for his birthday party in palawan, philippines. here, he invited investors that would help him in his opening of the burning sun club. (bbc)

23 february 2018 - burning sun opened

2018 goo hara's assault from her boyfriend

10 september 2018 - goo hara has lunch with her manager and a male colleague for an upcoming schedule, without informing her boyfriend, choi jeong beom (cjb). cjb was known to be very jealous and overprotective of goo hara meeting other men, even if it is totally platonic and for business

13 september 2018 - choi jeong beom assaults goo hara 12.30am: cjb enters goo hara's home, drunk, and assaults goo hara 1.26am: cjb emails dispatch to provide them with "goo hara tip" 1.39am: cjb's friend helps to move cjb's luggage out of goo hara's house 2.04am: cjb sends goo hara their sex tape 2.21am: goo hara kneels to cjb in front of her elevator 2.22am: goo hara follows cjb down to his car 2.23am: cjb sends goo hara a second video of their sex tape, while loading his luggage into his car 3.30am: cjb called the police and was dispatched 4.21am: cjb emails dispatch a 2nd time about this "goo hara tip"

______________________________________________________________

the rise and fall of burning sun

24 november 2018 - club-goer kim sang kyo was allegedly physically assaulted by burning sun staff members when he was trying to save a victim

28 january 2019 - news reports about the assault at burning sun are released

26 february 2019 - reporter kang kyung yoon releases the kakao chat messages between the perpetrators

14/15 march 2019 - goo hara privately contacts reporter kang kyung yoon, telling her that she wants to help with the investigation since she is a victim of revenge porn. goo hara calls choi jung hoon (cjh), who were close friends since their trainee days. she persuaded cjh to tell the reporter who the police officer that was covering up their tracks were. the police officer was revealed by cjh to be yoon kyu keun, who had worked in the president's residence. (bbc)

16 march 2019 - articles about police officer yoon kyu keun are released, less than 48 hours after goo hara called cjh

14 october 2019 - f(x)'s sulli, goo hara's close friend, commits suicide 24 november 2019 - goo hara commits suicide

14 january 2020 - someone steals goo hara’s safe in her house

jung joon young: 5 years of prison choi jung hoon: 2 years of prison seungri: 18 months of prison

______________________________________________________________

others related to this case

people that were part of the group chats and admitted to watching the videos illegally filmed, but had not actively sexually assault anyone

beast/highlight yong jun hyung

cnblue lee jong hyun

soloist roy kim

soloist eddy kim

hyuna and yong junhyung relationship

2009 - 2010: 4minute hyuna and goo hara became close friends while filming invincible youth 2011 - march 2013: yong junhyung and goo hara's relationship may 2016 - november 2022: pentagon edawn/dawn/kim hyojong and hyuna's relationship january 2024 onwards - yong junhyung and hyuna dating and getting married

[kittiesarecuter]

I hate the modern internet, I'm getting a fucking headache. I hate trying to find art archives or complete comics and everything is linked back to a dead mega upload or imgr file. I hate trying to find a specific artist from 10's deviantart or tumblr but the search functions and purges have made it near impossible to find anything. I hate having pintrest be one of the most reliable sources for finding tagged archived art even though it's always posted with zero sources or the ability to find more than one from a set.

Every day I miss how open and easy and creative and energetic those years were. Most of the time when I talk to someone about the fan culture of 2004 - 2018 they immediately start talking about how cutthroat the social scene was as if that was entirely unique to the time and place and as if it was unavoidable. I don't know where to find anything on the internet anymore and it kind of feels like the infrastructure that allowed that amount of art and writing to flow just doesn't exist anymore.

It was bittersweet to look through forums that had only a handful of new posts since 2012 but at least I could still read them. Some of them I even joined and talked with the last few old guard that still checked it every week. But when it comes to art, writing, and comics of the era I can barely find the abandoned accounts. Other people have put the whole "dead internet" talk in better words with the whole funneling the whole of internet activity through a handful of app services but this is personal to me. It is genuinely depressing to see things get so much worse in so many ways in such a short amount of time.

I genuinely think I need to start building a server and learning how to mass archive & then host data for others because I'm in part terrified of how many gigabytes of work we've already lost to the either. It might be fan work and silly oc's but people poured their heart & soul, skills & hours into these things that shouldn't be deleted or made inaccessible because a boardroom decided making internal search engines pull up weighted results from a fixed time frame instead of just a list of all results was somehow better for revenue.

[pcktknife]

you and me both going insane over dedf1sh

BUT HER NAME it looks like it's said "yacht" just spelled without the Y to me but i looked up the word acht and it's 8 in german WHAT DOES THAT MEAN??

it could mean something but it could also mean absolutely nothing and i wouldnt be surprised if its nothing bc everything in octo expansion had that 8 theming. its a whole thing so if theyre just naming ahato ''acht/eight'' because of that then thats what it is. however if theres something more well... (👁️_👁️)

OE's 8 theme. directly from the wiki 👇🏾

The number eight is a recurring theme throughout the expansion. For example:

Splatoon 2: Octo Expansion is eight syllables long.

Agent 8 (subject No. 10008) is the main protagonist.

The CQ-80 device is used to navigate Deepsea Metro.

Octo Expansion has exactly eighty levels. If the escape phases are counted, it has 88.

The tubes on the sides of the checkpoints resemble the number eight.

Each line of the poems on the mem cakes has exactly eight syllables.

Some levels require the player to push an 8-ball to a goal.

Track #8 regret plays during these levels.

Some levels require the player to collect eight data-points.

If the player goes through the lines in alphabetical order, the last thang is on the eighth line.

The escape has eight phases if the final boss fight is counted.

After the final boss fight, when Pearl uses the Princess Cannon against the NILS Statue, the turf covered for the "Good Guys" goes up to 888.8%.

The five music tracks from the Octo Expansion are numbered from 80 to 84 in Squid Beatz 2.

The locker that has Agent 8's memories in it, which are used to enter the secret boss fight, is locker #8.

In the Diaphragm Phase of the escape, eight locks need to be unlocked to get to the energy core.

The Squid Bumpers that appear at the entrances to the missions have eight stubs at the base, as opposed to the squid dummies in the Shooting Range which have ten.

The music files in Marina's chat room are saved as 'mp8' files as opposed to mp4.

There are eight main characters: Agent 3, Agent 8, Pearl, Marina, Cap'n Cuttlefish, C.Q. Cumber, Iso Padre and Commander Tartar.

The DLC was announced on March 8th, 2018, and released in 2018.

While Dedf1sh's songs are numbered, a few numbers appear to be skipped. These include numbers 3, 7, 10, 15, 17, and 18. When adding the numbers from the title of each song and then dividing the total by the number of songs Dedf1sh has composed (in other words, taking the average of the remaining numbers plus an extra 0 to represent Splattack! (Octo)), the result is eight.