#Do and should I read wiki to actually get accurate info?? Yes. But what's the fun of that being 100 accurate??

[the--firevenus]

Atla OC mini ramble cuz I miss my gurl! (and I get to draw again YIPPE)

I decide to made Hikaru age being 14 when they finally found out they are an airbender, also in the time of PRE-100 WAR timeline cuz I like the idea she's aang old friend like bumi and kuzon (which I'd ramble that later))

Basically to say her discovery of her own bending is late, playing into the idea of late bloomer bender and since her childhood mainly took place in the fire nation with no connection to the spiritually like the air nomad normally would, she's not connecting to that side of her origin hence its manifest quite late than normal.

I'd imagine the time before the air nomad genocide, things already tense up between all the nations, especially fire nation and the air nomads, (because war propaganda, sozin planning, colonialism etc etc) so it'd be extra difficult for her to even began, yet she still tries anyways.

In my sketch sheet of her, I add that she has a hot temper (like her mother) thus makes her airbending learning even more difficult cuz she's always soo angry and easy to upset that it became uncontrolled at times 😭😭 (like a storm or tornado), playing into idea how the air nomad people always seem so free and happy (due to their upbringings, surrounding and teaching are not up tight) contrast to how Hikaru was brought up back in her homeland, will she grow out and let go of those emotions? Idk

[answersfromzestual]

I want to talk about something today. Something very important for younger people and newer people coming out.

Research with legitimate sources, aka scholarly articles and medical journals/studies. Wiki is not a good source, people can change info at any point true or untrue.

We want to look for articles with medical and area professionals clearly placing their name in and on the article, or the most reliable sources are called scholarly articles and medical journals/studies, also some gender affirming clinics lay out a lot of information on their websites, most clinics dont mind answering your questions or concerns via email or phone (they may get back to you at a later date). When looking for information, you want peer reviewed medical information. Google has these features that can help narrow down your search for more accurate results. Using quotes around exact words or phrases is a trick to narrow down to more on topic search results.

Also, use Google Scholar (just type "Google scholar" into the search bar to find only actual medical articles and studies. Even lawsuits.

This is the google search bar for scholarly information below:

****READ THE ARTICLE FROM START TO FINISH OR AT LEAST THE PART(S) THAT PORTAIN TO YOUR RESEARCH!(some articles can include more than one study)****

Don't only use one source for your information, find as many as you can until you feel confident in the field of medicines and your concolusions about them. Information you use should be verified by several responsibly written articles, journals, and/or studies.

Call surgeons' offices, ask questions.

Research doctors in your area or a doctor you really like, again don't be afraid to call or email clinics!

When it comes to surgery and your body, if you have a bad feeling, any bad gut feelings before they put you under, about the surgeron or their methods, even team. You can back out until you are knocked out. You can say no as soon as you walk into the surgical suite. You worry about you.

Please, when going onto transgender groups (facebook and stuff), that not everyone is being genuine with you. People can be anything or anyone on the internet, behind that screen. I see trans people spreading anti-transtional propaganda (not on purpose), and they don't notice or know better. The negative people tend to pick out their victims early, cling onto someone newer in transitioning or even just joining the group. They probably try getting chummy really fast, getting into a lot of detail very early. They will start bringing up [negative] transitional things when they have nothing to do with the conversation you are having. It's a red flag when you can't talk about anything but "transitioning," and its a sign you need to block if all they say are negative, things. Life happens, but you don't need to drown yourself in negativity. Beware of people on the internet. Their intent is not always good, anyone can lie, anyone can find fake pictures for their profile, anyone can pretend to be someone they are not. Some of us should know that well as trans folk. Some people are even legitimate and are perhaps mad/ unhappy about their results and tend to use way overly dramatic words to describe their results, these people usually aren't telling you the whole truth. People also tend not to want to put any blame on themselves. If you aren't being honest yourself about your results and what and where things went wrong thats not okay. That,or telling someone not to do something that prevents transitioning or calming their dysphoria, that's considered transphobia.

It's important to also know that Facebook, Twitter, etc. are often looked at by employers, so many people will not use their own profiles to be a imaginary person.

Edit: Yes, transgender people can be transphobic as well. Look up Caitlin Jenner and what she's said and tried to do. Let me tell you now, she said transwomen should not be allowed to compete in sporting events, claiming "allowing transwomen to compete destroys women's sports" . So please, if you use that card, put it back in the deck. It's not true, and it's just a wrong blanket statement altogether. There are people who finish their transition and forget they had the rights they want taken away.

I want you to know and it's important to know many end results almost solely rely on the person and how they take care of themselves pre-op and post-op (yes taking care of your body before matters for optimum results). If you are heavier, your body has a harder time healing. This can cause complications and less favorable results because of those complications. I do have a post on being larger and surgical complications that are involved with that. (Here are some links about plus sized risks and general risks: plus size, general risks)

From Dad Shadow: Remember, don't tell anyone online personal information, even if you have been talking for years. Also, do not place yourself (ex. "Im gunna to go to the Starbucks on fifth around the corner from my house." this is especially bad if they may know your partial location) Someone can figure out your identity/location. Don't reveal anything you'd be asked to use as an account recovery question. When I was a younger adult, I saw someone post an image of a girl he met on 'Omegle', saying, "They accidentally got disconnected." Within two hours, everything about this girl was on this thread... from her name, where she was attending school, her personal address, her Facebook. All of it. It was more than one person looking and posting as well. People can be like this... I know you know, but the Dad in me wants to remind you. Browse safely!

I hope you read this and found it helpful everyone. I felt this is a need and it doesn't need post secondary education classes to teach you how to properly find sourced information for reports (same as your knowledge on the subject you are talking about).

P.s keeping your skin elasticity is very important, so mosturize your pecks, let it dry, then put on your binder.

Stay Golden Everyone ✌️ 💙 💜

[kimyoonmiauthor]

“Monkeypox comes from gay sex”--an examination of the original paper.

So some background, because clicking sometimes is too hard and reading a profile takes time: I have a background in Anthropology. I also tend to data mine for origins of things out of habit--maybe because of Anthropology and because of my childhood of being lied to about Korea. “The US ‘rescued’ Korea” being a huge lie that the US likes to float around while say, ignoring the treaty of 1882, etc.

Other data mining projects have included, but are not limited to: 

Trying to find the origin of the Asian eye pull and why it’s in Kindergartens.

Trying to find Social justice actions between People of color where it had a positive effect.

Looking at the original paper about “Author’s Block”

The retconning of 3/5 act into place as the “best” one as well as where did the conflict narrative come from? (Ans. 1921 Percy Lubbock, who was then retconned froma  ton of credit, including, but not limited to, Death of the Author.).

Looking at the origin of “Character-driven” v. Plot driven.

Trying to data mine the origin of the East Asian 4-act, etc.

You might also be thinking: “Anthropologists don’t read scientific papers.” Oh, yes we do. We read scientific papers all the time on things like human biology. ‘cause what? Anthropology is the study of humans, so we need to know wider things like genetics. Besides, I actually paid attention in science classes on what a Scientific study entails. So... when I saw, “Monkeypox is spread through gay sex” Ohhh... as a Queer person, I wanted to see the origin of that and see what I could do to read it through and datamine on how accurate this could be.

So come with me as I explore and read through the paper, ‘cause apparently people don’t know how to read through scientific papers and this one has a lot of errors that could be present and I’ll illustrate why along the way.

Let’s get a few things out of the way first: https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2207323

This is the link to the original study.

Is the New England Journey of Medicine peer reviewed and usually reliable? Yes. Is the scientific studies going down the drain because of the pressure for money and sensationalism over rigor? This is also true. There’s a Ted talk, but kinda difficult to dig for... Anyway, back on subject. Let’s go over this and go over what we should expect in a scientific paper. So the thing that people are reading is the abstract and nothing else. This is problematic. But let’s go over the abstract:

People are like Oh No, Gay disease. --;; OK, but did you read the data collection part?

Collected from where? SHARE. OK, then a reasonable person would ask: Who is SHARE and why isn’t this outlined in the paper? https://www.qmul.ac.uk/share/

Oh, SHARE is what?

“SHARE has been established in the heart of east London where many minoritised communities have been disproportionately affected by HIV and poor sexual health. “

Two huge clues for you right there. Why isn’t this outlined in the paper as part of the possible data skew? Did you notice this part in the abstract: “41% had human immunodeficiency virus infection” You think an HIV org might have a skew like that? 41% had HIV. So what population are we looking at? Think through this: East London’s demographics: https://www.plumplot.co.uk/East-London-population.html

The average age is 34, which is also the age of the mean in East London, and *gasp* what is found in the study.

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

The majority are white... and East London is famous for being a poor area, unless you forgot East Enders. So a huge skew in the data. But let’s continue.

So they are required to list the questions used and how the data was collected.

https://www.nejm.org/doi/suppl/10.1056/NEJMoa2207323/suppl_file/nejmoa2207323_appendix.pdf They said two key things: It was voluntary. And if you look at the PDF, it’s specifically goes over HIV positive info.

You might be going: Why does this matter? HIV had a huge scare and was traced mainly to white gay communities, so white gay communities tend to be more aware of it. (Was it true, no, not really. But is it more of a concern in those populations, thus they are more likely to be tested? Yes.)

The study should have noted who was filling out the surveys and the control population.

So who goes to SHARE? What is their base population?

Oh look, no control group. Hmmm... How can you do data collection without a control group and why pair with an HIV organization rather than wide clinical practices? This isn’t outlined well in the paper. So what is the base population of SHARE? No idea. Maybe they also concentrate more on white gay men. We have no idea.

Thus the skew here:

We have no idea who is visiting SHARE and neither does the paper’s authors because they have no access to that data. There should also be a section for “Ethical Concerns” on data collection, etc, but it’s missing. Why? Why is it missing?

Science Class 101 goes over: You need a control group in order to make conclusions. But if your control group has a skew, say, towards white gay men, like this one does, your results will be skewed. But if you’re given no control group, as here, how can you trust the results? Especially with an org that’s skewed towrds HIV positive cases, which isn’t really outlined in the study well. There isn’t a base population to work on and there are no outlined ethical concerns. Further, the questions have a huge, huge skew towards HIV collection and nothing on general monkeypox.

But did people read the paper and look for basics like skew and controls and ethical concerns? No.

Do we need more than East London statistics? Absolut-fucking-lutly.

Conclusion:

So stop spreading around oh, Monkeypox is a gay disease and read that paper I linked. And then groan at the lack of control info. Who is exactly visiting SHARE anyway and does this info apply to the entire world when they are in East London? Think hard on that. I linked up Skews of East London alone.

Also to the lazy ass medical community quoting this verbatim from only the abstract: !@#$ing seriously? Did you read the effing paper? Why aren’t you screaming, where is the control group?

[precuredaily]

Precure Day 175

Episode: Yes! Precure 5 27 - “Rin-chan’s Date with a Handsome Ghost!?” Date watched: 24 March 2020 Original air date: 12 August 2007 Screenshots: https://imgur.com/a/7vdwVuj Transformation Gallery: https://imgur.com/a/6k6SzS0 Project info and master list of posts: http://tinyurl.com/PCDabout

not pictured: a handsome ghost

Are you ready for more summer vacation antics? How about some ghost stories! No, not the gag dub kind, I mean actual ghost stories. Yes, tonight the girls decide to poke around an abandoned wing of their school and wind up in the middle of something bigger than themselves. Let’s dive in!

The Plot

All the girls are gathered around a table in the dark as Komachi tells them the story of Count Rosett, who used to live in a mansion behind the school with his girlfriend, until she died in a tragic accident. The count lived out the rest of his days in sadness and now his spirit returns to the school on the anniversary of her death. Nozomi, Urara, Milk, and Coco are all a little scared by the story, Karen and Nuts seem indifferent or even bored, but Rin is scared out of her mind. So naturally they go check it out.

Over in Nightmare, Kawarino himself summons Arachnea to the office and tells her that while her work is good, if she instills fear into her opponents, then they’ll expend all their energy. Sound advice honestly. With that in mind, she sets off, and begins to haunt the girls on their ghost hunt. How timely! Arachnea plays her card very quickly by bringing a skeleton to life, which makes itself known to Rin and only Rin, so she bolts off down the hallway away from the other girls. Suddenly she runs into another shadowy figure.... who reveals herself as Masuko Mika, who is inexplicably here at the same time with the same objective of finding the ghost and reporting on it.

or they’re doing the fusion dance

Nozomi, Urara, Komachi, Karen, and the fairies continue exploring the school building, trying to find Rin, and end up in a pitch-black classroom. Karen bumps into something, and when they shine the light on it revealing it to be a large statue of a man, she finally gets scared and screams. After Karen calms down, Komachi deduces that this must be Count Rosett, and then they see a large portrait on the wall of a woman who looks a lot like Rin.

or more accurately the animators drew Rin’s head on this random portrait

Rin and Mika continue wandering around until the skeleton reappears and starts chasing both of them. Rin trips and falls but Mika doesn’t stop, so Rin scrambles into a nearby classroom to hide and the skeleton passes her by. This time, though, she comes face to face with yet another specter, as a large shadowy figure reaches for her, and this one isn’t a student.

She freaks right the fuck out and loses consciousness. When she comes to, the other girls are surrounding her and asking what happened. When she explains, Komachi puts the pieces of the puzzle together and deduces that this was Count Rosett, the portrait was of his deceased girlfriend, and he was trying to give Rin a gift for his girlfriend. They convince her to try to meet him again and resolve his centuries-old suffering by accepting the gift. She really does not want to but they beg and plead her and she begrudgingly agrees to try it. Once again she enters the room and lo and behold the shadowy figure reaches for her. However the girls suddenly finds themselves in broad daylight in the courtyard of the school building and adjacent mansion, with a handsome man standing in front of her. He greets her and presents her with a rose-shaped hairpin, but before Rin can explain that she’s not his lover, the sky turns purple and Arachnea makes her appearance. She gloats about this excellent terrain and turns the wandering skeleton into a Kowaina, which is just a giant skeleton with a Kowaina mask on its forehead. Rin and the other girls quickly transform. 

The monster wreaks havoc on the mansion, which Rouge takes special exception to on behalf of the Count, and Arachnea retorts that it doesn’t matter anyway since this is a false world, before reminding Rouge that she had just been deathly afraid of the Count’s ghost mere moments ago. Rouge exclaims that her fear went away when he communicated his feelings and the girls all go on the attack. Mint and Aqua and then Dream and Lemonade perform a nice one-two combo on the monster as Rouge declares that she won’t forgive Nightmare for wrecking the Count’s house, even in an illusion world, and then her brooch glows and she summons her new weapon, the Rouge Tact. She uses it to perform a powered-up version of her finisher: Rouge Burning

The items should have been called Rouge Torch and Dream Tact but what do I know

This attack utterly destroys the Kowaina, and the mansion returns to its former beauty. The girls detransform and Count Rosett once again tries to give Rin the hairpin. She tells him she isn’t the girl he was waiting on, but he responds that she fought so hard for his sake and he just wants her to have it. She smiles the biggest smile and then the Count and the scenery fade away, leaving the girls back in the school building, with Rin still holding the hairpin. As they leave the building, Nozomi teases Rin about possible latent feelings for the Count, and then Mika reappears screaming about how she was chased by a skeleton. Komachi suggests they go back inside and get pictures, but Mika is too afraid to see any more ghosts. However, Rin states that ghosts are just like people, they experience normal feelings and once those feelings are communicated there’s no cause for fear, a marked change from her earlier behavior.

The Analysis

It’s shameless summer filler and it is EXCELLENT. This is how you do low-stakes. It’s fun! It’s a great character spotlight! It takes us new places! It ties into typical summer activities! This plays out like an episode of Scooby-Doo, with a shoujo bent. It’s comedy gold from the very beginning, when Komachi tells a ghost story and the others are varying degrees of afraid and all the way through the episode when Rin is the only one being haunted, either by Arachnea’s interference, classmates, or actual ghosts. The poor girl can’t get a break. But the comedy is done excellently, and the episode is positively filled with wonderful facial expressions (which is why my gallery ballooned to 132 images, a record for a non-movie or finale episode, so check that out).

I love how Karen and Nuts are just so over it all, while Komachi is too excited about the mystery to be scared. It makes sense given her affinity for literature, she’s heard it all before and she just wants to see if there’s any weight to the rumors. Nuts, being well-read and also generally apathetic, is probably just not spooked by ghost stories period. But back to Rin: Nozomi explains how she’s positively terrified by ghosts, and so of course she’s the one that ends up seeing them all, and ultimately meeting Count Rosett in the flesh (sorta) teaches her a valuable lesson that hey, they’re not so bad if you can reach an understanding. I don’t believe this has any lasting impact on her character but I might be wrong. I hope we see some hint of this going forward.

As I said, while Rin is scared out of her wits, the other girls are far from unshakeable. Even Karen, who spends about half of the episode acting bored, finally flips when she bumps into what she thinks is a person in the dark.

Nuts is still unimpressed though

Nozomi and Urara are scared when they start but everyone’s animosities fade away once they find the portrait of Count Rosett’s presumed girlfriend, and all they can think of is trying to get him to meet Rin and put him to final rest.

This and the next episode have really made me realize a problem to the show at this point, however. Since they got rid of Girinma, Nightmare’s only grunt is Arachnea, while Gamao is still wandering around as a free agent, and the two basically alternate episodes. Bunbee is going to dip his toes in the water again in episode 29 but it’s kind of a slog on the villain side until episode 31 when Hadenya and Bloody show up. Gamao is completely unlikeable and Arachnea has all the personality of a loaf of stale bread. Her attempt at being scary here consists of chasing Rin with a skeleton in an already haunted setting. That’s all she can muster. I’m very reticent to give Smile Precure credit for anything but they definitely had a better haunted school episode.

During the battle, Rouge accesses her portion of the Symphony Set for the first time, which is called the Rouge Tact. “Tact” is of course a name that will be reused for various Precure baton weapons in the coming seasons. The wiki says that it’s derived from the German word “taktstock”, which refers to a music conductor’s baton. As for its design, it is a large leaf shape with a handle on one end and an extension on the other which lights on fire. As I quipped above, I think it should have been called “Rouge Torch” while Dream’s baton should have another name, but oh well. The way she uses it is interesting, as you’d expect her to use it to launch a fireball directly at the enemy but she doesn’t. During her normal Rouge Fire attack, she creates a burning butterfly from the back of her hand and then palmstrikes it into the monster. Here, instead, she ignites the tact, then in a single motion she swoops the flame in front of her as the butterfly separates from her hand, she releases the tact and grabs it with her right hand as she pulls back with her left for a palmstrike and the burning butterfly shoots towards her enemy. A lot happens in a short time but the effect isn’t dramatically different from her normal attack, and rather than shooting a stream of fire directly from the tact she just uses it like a lighter. Once again, it suggests the staff weren’t sure how to incorporate the Symphony Set into the show.

I appreciate them remembering that Masuko Mika exists but it’s a really big coincidence that she’s here on this night. The script didn’t make it clear whether the ghost was spotted on one night every year, or every month, or just randomly. If they had clarified that, it may have made more sense for her to appear. I’m glad they’re trying to incorporate her but all she really does is scare Rin, sneak around, and then run off at the first sign of actual spookiness. Bring her into the group dang it! Make her a friend of the precures. Minor complaint.

From a cinematorgraphy standpoint this episode has some really cool camera shots. My absolute favorite is this zoom back from the abandoned wing of the school:

And later on the inverse: a zoom in and tilt upwards to look at the portrait of the lady that resembles Rin:

These scenes help to breathe some energy into the episode and provide atmosphere, enhancing the creepy and mysterious mood of the place.

Then there’s this sequence where the girls are trying to convince Rin to go find Count Rosett again, where the camera dollies back in stages and then shifts right to look at Karen.

I don’t remember seeing complex camerawork like this in previous episodes so to have so many of these unique shots in one episode is really cool and it makes me want to see more of it.

Finally, while this isn’t a very complicated shot, I like this bit from the fight where Dream and Lemonade perform a double kick in perfect sync.

I’m a sucker for cool fight choreorgraphy and this fits the bill. Sure, we’ve seen other more complex fights in this season alone but I like to call them all out when I find them.

(reminder: you can find higher resolution copies of these gifs in my gallery, I have to keep them under 2 MB for Tumblr)

All told, this episode is a fantastic summer ghost story. It balances comedy with an interesting mystery and provides Rin with just enough character growth to justify her unlocking her new finisher. It’s got some wonderful facial expressions that you can find in my gallery and it’s only brought down a little by its unerwhelming villain.

Next time, another summer staple: it’s time for a festival! Look forward to it!

Pink Precure catchphrase count: 0 kettei!

[tilde-he]

What is the “Expected Value of Sample Information” of reading the newspaper?

Ok, so, first, a side note: The thing I described in previous post https://tilde-he.tumblr.com/post/617574359179165696/how-to-evaluate-how-informative-we-expect-an-expirament-to-be turns out to (approximately) just be the result of applying the idea of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expected_value_of_sample_information with the idea of a scoring function for a probability distribution. So, as I expected/hoped, the idea I described in that post was correct instead of being novel, much better than the most likely alternative of being novel but wrong.

The main point of this post is the question in the title.

When we read a newspaper, we obtain evidence about the world (and, I suppose on the rare occasions in which a newspaper reports on some math research, we may also learn about other things), and we update our beliefs based on that. Having a more accurate understanding of the world may allow us to make better decisions, producing results which are more to our liking. The question is, before we have read the newspaper, how much should we expect (on average) the improved understanding we would/will learn from the newspaper to improve outcomes by improving our decisions? (Alternatively, how much do we expect outcomes to be improved due to the people who decide in a similar way to how we decide, all reading the newspaper?)

Early reporting on things like diseases and such (such as the current one) seems clearly potentially very valuable.

Also, it appears that conversations with peers benefit from having read about recent events, and so this is, in a sense, also a way in which the newspaper improving one’s understanding of the world allows one to choose better actions. However! This case seems a bit, less connected to the things in the newspaper actually being true. If the things in the newspaper were fabrications, but neither you nor your peers were aware of this, then it seems that the benefits to socializing by talking about them would still be present (so long as none of you later found out that they were fabrications). So, in this case, it seems like this benefit may be more from having a common source of narrative development than having accurate information? Hm.

Ah, but that argument makes certain questionable assumptions about what is valued in such conversations! If the thing which is valued is purely based on the feelings of socializing with peers, then it follows, but if one inherently values sharing truths with others, then learning truths rather than fictions-that-one-believes-to-be-truths, better allows one to share truths with others. And in this case, this would, I think, count as value from the sample information. (technically even the fictions case would count in some sense, in that one gains accurate information about the common narrative, even if one is missing the information that said common narrative was based around false info. Note!: Here I would like to clarify that I am not making any accusation about newspapers printing falsehoods to “construct a narrative”. I am just talking about a hypothetical in which they do, in order to try to better understand the type of value that newspapers (and similar products) provide.)

Suppose we assign a dollar value to the expected value of sample information of reading the newspaper. As in, how much would one be willing to pay for purely the improvement in one’s decisions that one would get from the information in the paper. (Yes, having this choice available is a rather absurd hypothetical. Please go along with it anyway?)

For some reason, I feel like this value would likely be substantially less than the amount that newspapers cost, and that the value that people are paying for is substantially from entertainment + valuing the existence of the newspaper + other stuff ?

Which, may be largely “Hey, turns out that humans aren’t robots. We’re dealing with Homo sapiens, not Homo economicus. News at 11.” ?

I feel like in order to answer the question of “What would be a socially good model for how news reporting-and-such gets funded?” requires a reasonably precise answer to “Hey so, what form does the value of the news-and-such take, anyway?”. In order to try to get the most good at the least cost, we have to have a decent understanding of what things give more or less good. (Of course, the value of a product is generally subjective, but it would still be helpful to know if the (subjective) value is from positive externalities or not. Also, if someone has meta-preferences, and their preferences aren’t in-line with their preferences, such as is often the case with drug addiction, (and perhaps also with clickbait?), then, uh, it may be appropriate to choose public coordinated-decisions such that incentives are such that people’s preferences aren’t caused by something external to deviate from their meta-preferences.)

In conclusion: I don’t have an answer to this question, but I think it may be an important question.

I feel like I didn’t write this very well, especially seeing as I largely did not go back and edit any of the previous parts. If you would like to suggest organizational, formatting, or wording improvements, please do so. Or just any improvements to the post. Or, “Pull requests welcome” :P

[sciencography]

Long overdue update!!

At long last the much promised and oft delayed blog post update that I've been promising off and on for MONTHS. Going to cover a huge range of topics here, therefore nothing that I cover will get extensive depth or attention. Will cover the App Store status, nControl, chimeraTV, electraTV, uicache / ldrestart recent changes / snafu, DalesDeadBug update, cycripter and any known issues that are occuring with any of the above. Will also include a link to a handy tutorial for saving OTA blobs for the 4K AppleTV, just in case we find a way to make them useful!

Saving 4K OTA blobs covered by idownloadblog:

nitoTV App Store

This is several months behind schedule, and at this point its pretty much entirely my fault. I still need to do some payment processing work on the amazon front regarding declined cards / failed payments, etc. Im going to be looking into this immediately after i finish writing this post. 

If you hadn't noticed the new nito.tv website launched at the same time chimera(TV) did. You may have also noticed a beta code for people to help beta test it before i finally launch it, there is no way to get this code yet, not until i finish the payment work I mentioned above. Off the top of my head, this is the only thing holding us back anymore. 

nControl

Obviously nControl was released a few months ago, to resoundingly positive response (thank you!) It's available on chariz repo for 10$ and is currently my only source of income, so all purchases are greatly appreciated! If you need any additional details about nControl in general I kindly redirect you to the exhaustively documented wiki page that I maintain on the subject: https://wiki.awkwardtv.org/wiki/nControl

The tvOS version is only available through patreon and i'd actually prefer that people no longer go that route, patreon makes it WAY too much effort to get the money they owe you so I massively regret doing that in the first place, just didn't want to launch iOS and tvOS separetely and honestly thought the store would wrap up shortly thereafter.

chimeraTV

For the first time (potentially ever) the tvOS jailbreak was released in tandem with the iOS version of the Electra Teams *OS 12 jailbreak. This was a momentus occasion and was a large source of me being delayed from focusing on completing the nitoTV App Store. Its a rock solid jailbreak (especially with latest release) and I'm quite proud to maintain the tvOS version of it. It covers 12.0 - > 12.1.1 on tvOS, this is due to the fact the Apple staggers version numbers between iOS and tvOS for some unknown and maddening reason. For instance (12.1.2 on iOS == 12.1.1 on tvOS). It drives me just as mad as it does the rest of you, but it's been like that since the beginning of ARM based AppleTVs (send gen +) So I doubt it will ever change.

Candidly it was a bit of a challenge to get AppleBetas awesome UI to cooperate on tvOS but i'm glad iIforced myself to use the same code as much as possible (lots of ifdefs), since its written in Swift you can imagine the fight I put up to avoid using the same code base for the UI stuff. Eventually I acquiesced (yes I do make concessions!)

electraTV

Wow it's really been a long time since i've updated this blog (sorry!) electraTV was released several months before chimera (well the initial versions were, the 11.4.1 iteration wasn't THAT long ago) The electra jailbreak covers ALL versions of 11 (11.0->11.4.1) In its latest jailbreakd2 based iteration it is incredibly stable and reliable. Not much else to say about it!

uicache / ldrestart changes

I wasted most of last week fighting against issues with ldrestart. If you aren't familiar with ldrestart it is responsible for running after jailbreaking or loading any new Tweaks to make sure anything they may inject into gets restarted. With the older version of jailbreakd (in backr00m & versions of electraTV that supported 11.2.1->11.3, but not 11.4.1) couldn't handle the speed at which all the daemons get reloaded by ldrestart, this would lead to a lockup that would result in the system eventually rebooting (after being locked up for several minutes).

ldrestart has actually always been an issue, even when i used a kpp bypass in greeng0blin (Im fairly certain thats accurate!) So as a workaround i used to 'killall -9 backboardd' That would respring enough different things (PineBoard, HeadBoard et al) that i would be sufficient for the things i most commonly injected. Obviously this is a hacky stopgap, and uicache used to also kill a variety of other processes to cover them as well (lsd, appstored, etc) to help cover things like DalesDeadBug. 

After coolstar re-wrote uikitools (including uicache) i decided it was probably a good time for me to take a look at uicache again. If you want to know how much of a hassle and challenge uicache was in the earlier days (pre APFS) read some of the older posts on this blog. It's history is covered ad naeuseum.

Since we no longer need to load from /var/mobile/Applications, a lot of the extra hurdles in uicache have ceased to be necessary, essentially all that is really needed is [[LSApplicationWorkspace defaultWorkspace] _LSPrivateRebuildApplicationDatabasesForSystemApps:YES internal:YES user:NO]; + tweak to force App states to return TRUE for isEnabled. 

In the course of thinning down uicache I decided it'd be a good time to try and get ldrestart working on tvOS. After battling with it off an on all last week I came up with something that appeared to work pretty consistently on tvOS 12. Instead of being thorough and testing on 10.2.2->11.4.1 as well I hastily released it. This lead some people to get stuck in respring loops / lockups that eventually restarted the device. This was due to the fact that uicache:restart in postinst scripts would trigger ldrestart instead of uicache in nitoTV. 

In the older version of uicache there was an issue that existed once our new apps were loaded in the UI, a respring was never "required" but if it didn't occur all applications would exhibit weird behavior where they wouldnt launch, or wouldnt exit once launched, etc, to "fix" that I made it always kill backboardd as a compromise. Since this was also no longer necessary I made uicache killing backboardd "optional" by appending -r. Lack of forsite here, the old nitoTV wouldn't know backboardd wouldn't respring anymore, nor to run ldrestart when finish:restart was received, this lead to people getting stuck with a red progress indicator forever when trying to update to latest (at the time) version of nitoTV.

Due to the depth and gravity of the issue I sidelined getting ldrestart working in backr00m (one of the only places it has show stopping issues still) I reverted to uicache always respringing until I have time to revisit the issue.

In conjunction with deciding I was pouring too much time into this issue Chimera 1.0.6 was released the other night with massive stability improvements. Libtakeover & related injection was stripped out into inject_criticald  which provided massively stability improvements for the jailbreak, this made focusing on getting that out a few hours after the iOS release a very high priority.

The big takeaway from all of this:

* uicache run by itself (no arguments) is sufficient to gets apps loaded / removed after installing them into /Applications.

* ldrestart is part of uikittools on tvOS now and should be safe to run on latest electraTV release and chimeraTV release, but won't work at all on backr00m.

if you have installed a tweak and it doesnt seem to be working, try running ldrestart, it should help.

sleepy/wake

Part of the uicache update came the addition of 'sleepy' and 'wake' binaries. Use them from the command line to sleep or wake your AppleTV.

DalesDeadBug

This was recently updated to spoof newer versions, if you can't seem to get it working after installing it, prime candidate to run ldrestart after installing or making changes to that don't seem to be propogating. It works to get SteamLink installed on tvOS 10.2.2, but crashes immediately, not sure if im going to be able to fix it. It won't be possible to make that a priority (I looked into it briefly, thats the best I can do for now). 

If you need more info on what DalesDeadBug does, please read the wiki page: https://wiki.awkwardtv.org/wiki/DalesDeadBug

Cycripter

If you didn't notice, yesterday I decided to take one more brief detour to rectify a glaring deficiency in recent jailbreaks, inability to use cycript. I might have my differences with saurik recently, but this is still one of the most amazing projects he ever undertook and gifted to us. 

cycripter / CycriptLoader.dylib have been updated and open sourced to make it easier to use cycript on iOS or tvOS. All details necessary can be viewed on the wiki and the git.nito.tv repo. 

More Details: https://wiki.awkwardtv.org/wiki/Cycript

Known Issues

I havent kept a very exhaustive list of these, so I'm only going to cover two that I can think of right now.

* Infuse doesn't work on chimeraTV. 

Try launching infuse before running the jailbreak (so if you are currently in a jailbroken state, reboot first) 

if you run the jailbreak after Infuse has already been open it will work. I don't think it is necessarily any jailbreak detection, but it may be some kind of a protecetion from code injection, im honestly not sure.

* Music app doesn't work

Try updating to the latest version of chimeraTV on https://chimera.sh it didn't work in the prior version for me either, but after the latest install it started working.

Wrap-up

That's it for now, my core focus after this post is going to be to wrap up work on my long delayed tvOS App Store. I really hope to get it wrapped up this week or next. Stay tuned! And if you made it down this far, thanks!!

[canaryatlaw]

okay, so today was overall pretty good. I woke up at 8:55, got ready, and then ubered to that thing I said I’d tell you about. So I’m in this online program that’s a child defender fellowship ran by the children’s defense fund, and it’s all about educating and equipping people to make a difference in children’s issues in their community, and as part of it they wanted us to reach out to a local child focused group and kind of chat with them about some stuff, so I contacted the local children’s advocacy center because I was familiar with them based on my work at the public guardians office. They’re basically the place families go when there’s been an outcry of sexual abuse and in some cases physical abuse in very young children. It’s largely focused on what’s called victim sensitive interviews, which is a specific interviewing method that works to get an accurate account of what happened out of the child without retraumatizing them, and to have a solid statement in order to avoid having the child have to repeat the story over and over again, which is not only traumatizing, but can lead to inconsistencies that a defense team could use against the child in any sort of court proceeding that results from the incident. So the work they do is very, very important. I’ve viewed some video tapes of VSI’s while at OPG and they’re very good at getting info out of children in a calm and organized fashion. I know when the child death case I worked on came in to the system, they interviewed the siblings there, and there account were crucial in securing the arrests of the two responsible parental figures, because the kids told them everything, not sparing any details as to exactly what was going on in that home, and it was really what built the case against the parents. That case has been on my mind a lot lately, as yesterday (the 28th) was the one year anniversary of me arguing the motion in court. Feels both like it was yesterday and that it was forever ago. I know I’m never going to get the resolution I want on that case, and that’s something I’m going to have to deal with. I didn’t expect this case to change me, but it did, in so many ways. I know it has made me a stronger advocate for children and given me even more of a passion to keep children safe. I can’t look at the picture of the sweet little boy who was taken from us that’s hanging on my wall without feeling a fire inside me that will only be satisfied with a lifetime spent fighting to save all the other sweet little boys and girls who are in danger. Rest in peace, Manny. I may not have ever met you, but you’ve changed me so much. Sigh. Anyway. I was kind of anxious going into the meeting because I really didn’t know what to expect, but it actually went really well. I met with someone on their prevention team, which is a relatively new division, and they work on training people to spot the type of behavior that can be indicative of sexual abuse starting and to stop it before it happens, which is of course incredibly important work. So we talked about what they did and I asked about how they felt the foster care system was failing children who were sexually abused, and what she would like to see done about it. Then we went on a tour of the facility, which is really a very well built center, lots of different departments and a focus on children, with brightly painted walls, toys, and even a full scale playground. So I left quite happy with my experience there. I did a shared Lyft home because it was cheapest, but it ended up being a bit of a pain because it took so long to get home. I had debated just going over to school since I was already downtown and just hanging out there, but I didn't actually have that much schoolwork I could do and didn’t feel like sitting around in an empty office while I could be doing other things. So I got home and made some lunch, then tried to get to work on editing my legal drafting assignment that was due tonight. I looked it over and changed a handful of minor things, but for the most part left it as it was. At this point I’m just going to believe that I can’t tell whether my work is good or not because I’ve clearly been mistaken on the subject before, so while I think what I wrote was largely crap, who knows, it might be just what they’re looking for. Guess we’ll see. I then spent quite a while fighting with Word about formatting issues, because it all has to be very particular for legal drafting, and I had used one of the forms off the cook county website because that’s what we were supposed to have, but then I had to convert it to a Word file and figure out how to add the academic integrity page, which turned out to be much more difficult than it had any right to be, and I had to scrap it and start over like 3 or 4 times. Eventually I got it to a point where I was satisfied enough with it, so I left it there. After finishing that I spent about an hour doing some of the dishes because our sink is once again overflowing with dirty dishes, which tbf is mostly my fault because I do so much cooking but don’t always feel like cleaning. I got through approximately half of the stuff, and I was gonna keep going by my back was hurting me and I was tired, so I decided to stop there and instead did the online forms for the child defender fellowship regarding meeting up with the children’s advocacy center. Then I printed my legal drafting assignments and made sure they were properly submitted online before heading over to school. I stopped at the library on the way up to use their stapler, because I don’t have my own damn stapler, then went up to class and turned it in. Class was short, it was about interviewing children which is of course something I already knew about because I’d already gone through the interview children and have in fact interviewed many children in these situations. So I took notes and paid attention, but it wasn’t really anything I didn’t already know. We got out at around 6:40 (class is supposed to go to 7:20), so I headed home and got back in time to watch Arrow. I think it was probably one of the better episodes of the season so far, though that’s not really saying much because I haven’t been terribly fond of this season. My girls though, they really stole the spotlight in this episode and their stuff was so great. I hardcore need this redemption plot for Black Siren, and I’m gonna be so ticked off if they screw it up. And Dinah, man, she is one intense lady and she’s pretty damn fierce. So I guess I enjoyed the episode for the most part. After that was over I went to watch the last episode of the first season of Game of Thrones, lots going on there. I have been informed that Ned Stark does indeed stay dead, so that’s unfortunate. I hate Joffrey so freaking much, stupid little brat that he is, and someone needs to save poor Sansa from where she’s practically being held captive in that castle. Arya, my sweet murder child, who is now so freaking traumatized from witnessing her father’s death, and then has to take up the life of a street urchin to keep herself off the radar of the crazy royal people who would very much like to capture her. I absolutely adored the moment where the two boys are ragging on her and she pulls the sword on them and is like “I’ve already killed one fat boy. I’m good at killing fat boys. I like killing fat boys” and I was just like YES ARYA BBY YOU’VE COME SO FAR and I’m just so proud of her and her little murderous soul. I’m still not entirely sure what’s going on with the other Lannisters and such, other than they seem to be plotting to take Joffrey off the throne, which I’m clearly all for. And Jon Snow is out somewhere with some sort of army doing something. Then there’s my girl Daenerys, who’s just like it’s chill guys I’m just gonna walk into this funeral pyre for my dead husband while it’s one fire and emerge unscathed with three baby dragons because she’s the MOTHER OF DRAGONS, DAMMIT and I can’t wait to see what she does with them next season (I mean, I read her character breakdown on the GoT wiki, so I know some of it, but I’m looking forward to seeing it happen on my screen). After that I watched an episode of The Royals just for the heck of it, which I suppose is a fairly entertaining show, I’m just not very invested at this point and haven’t really found a reason to be. Oh well. After that I started getting ready for bed and now I’m here. Tomorrow I have PT in the morning, then I’ll probably do some grocery shopping and try to work on my civil rights midterm essay, and then at night I have small group, and I think we’re going to a Thai restaurant, so that should be good. Pretty tired now being that it’s 1 am, so I will bid you goodnight here. Goodnight my loves. Happy Friday.

[fair-fae]

You know, I'm not a drama person, I don't like it, but it came up on my dash so much that I kind of had to read it. All of that nonsense could've been avoided if you didn't even take it to the public. Judging people for THEIR characters that THEY made and can do WHATEVER the hell they want with them? Oh woo ho good job, you're so popular for taking the "barrage" of it. No. all it did was prove that you're a D-bag and I've got a nice, long list of people to block now and avoid contact with.

Okay, anon. I haven’t bothered setting the record straight with most of this shit, because I know folks like you will continue to believe what you want to believe and hear what you want to hear, just like you’re doing now. But I’ll bite. You’d think all of you getting onto your soapbox about how you shouldn’t judge or attack others wouldn’t keep talking shit about a situation you know nothing about and/or are terribly misinformed about. So I’ll enlighten you with what actually happened.

A while back, the person in question got into an argument with some people on the RPC, trying to tell them that their interpretation of the lore was wrong. Rather than leaving it at that, when he effectively got shut down there, he proceeded to take a screenshot of the conversation and post it on his tumblr, complete with a rant about the people who disagreed with him, their opinions are so wrong and awful, how dare they disagree with him, etc. essentially playing the victim when he was the one to try to badger them for their opinions in the first place. He also left their names, icons, signatures, etc. in full view.I responded and told him he probably shouldn’t be trying to harass any other people about the lore considering his own character concept (thus, you would think, making my opinion on his character pretty clear). Why? Because it’s fucking true.I don’t give a shit about the lore or whether anyone follows it. Probably every single one of my own characters at least bends the lore. But at least have the self-awareness and respect for your fellow role-players to say “yeah, my character breaks the lore” or not get your jimmies rustled every time someone says “oh, yeah, his character is lore breaking.” You wanna break the lore? Cool. Own up to it. And if you do break the lore, don’t try to force everyone else into following it–especially when you can’t even admit you break lore and instead stretch the lore to try so hard to justify your entirely lore-breaking character concept. Don’t try to heckle people for presumably doing what you do but won’t admit. Granted, these people weren’t even breaking lore anyway, which makes his insistence that they were even more ridiculous.So after some excuses about how he was trying to start some intellectual discussion or something and not just drag these people despite featuring their identities and primarily just complaining about them throughout the post, he admitted he should have at least edited out their names and apologized. Great! You’d think that should be the end of it. I didn’t have anything against him at that point, but also had no desire/reason to associate with him, so I didn’t. A couple months go by. Some post comes across my dash. A girl in the community is doxxing her online ex-boyfriend in a callout post about him for unexpectedly breaking up with her because she “thinks” he was lying to her about serious issues and “believes” he was cheating on her. Because I’m a loud and opinionated person, and because that’s some heinous thing to do, I spoke out against it (via a post on my own blog without naming names, mind you, because I’m not going to hijack someone else’s post with negativity or call them out by name). The girl found it, assumed it was about herself, flipped out, and then of course I was the bad guy for saying doxxing isn’t okay. And then the person in question joins in. Not even to discuss the topic at hand, but to dredge up the old drama about how I was so mean to him and he did nothing wrong, etc. A pretty crappy 180 turn for a person who apologized and made it seem like there were no hard feelings, but whatever. Someone saw that he obviously didn’t like me, and seized the chance to try to talk shit and spread rumors because they knew he’d give them the platform. They sent him some anon about how I hate women (lmao). And of course, he published it, with no skepticism or disagreement, only more commentary about how I’m mean and awful. I went to respond, only to find myself blocked. So I went on about my life because it’s not that big of a deal, but hey. The moment you talk shit about me, especially in a venue where I can’t respond, especially facilitating some lies and BS rumors, especially after leading me to believe we’d made amends–you aren’t off limits. You don’t get spared niceness and politeness. Is that mean and petty? Probably.¯\_(ツ)_/¯ I’ve never claimed to be a nice person.Now, to the horrible, awful thing I did to make this “public.” Fast forward to yesterday. I’d kept my mouth shut and left him alone. In a section of the RPC that doesn’t get a ton of traffic, largely because you have to make an account on the website and then manually opt in to this specific forum, several of us were discussing an absolutely awful person which is an unrelated story I won’t get into. Someone asked something along the lines of, “Are you guys talking about Underaged Looking Allagan Voidsent Chimera Demon Guy?” I responded with basically “No, we’re not talking about Underaged Looking Allagan Voidsent Chimera Demon Guy.” And that was it. We moved on with the conversation because he wasn’t who we’d been talking about. His name, tumblr, server info, in game race, class, etc. was all never given. No identifiable information beyond a very brief and tongue-in-cheek description of his RP character comprised of words taken directly from his own wiki, tumblr info, talk of his own character and RP posts.Someone saw the conversation, and based on our intentionally shitty description, was able to accurately guess who we were talking about and send him an anon to tell him about it. You’d think that would be pretty telling about his own RP, and this anon’s interpretation of it. He answered the anon in a long rant about me that featured both my in game name and my tumblr handle. In case you need me to spell this out for you, he went public with it first. I’ll also remind you that I was blocked, so I wasn’t/couldn’t be following him, and I was not properly @tagged in this rant, so I never would have seen it unless someone told/linked me, or someone I follow eventually reblogged it. And I honestly can’t imagine the level of narcissism it takes to write a long personal post full of wangst and victim-playing every time you hear a person had something negative to say about you or your RP character (not even by name–and by picking words from his own descriptions of his character), especially a person you have had issues with in the past and who you openly shit-talked yourself prior. Who does that? Lord knows my blog would be overflowing. Not everyone will like you, especially not people you jabbed at first. Especially not with an off the wall RP concept. Especially not with you trying to pass that concept is lore abiding and just “unusual.” Especially not with you trying to tell other people they’re “wrong” about the lore. Especially not with your character being a squicky, walking fetish and immortal jailbait. And that’s not even touching other things people have told me about this person that rubbed them the wrong way. Move on with your life.However, I found out about the post thanks to the OP himself when he unblocked me just to send me the link to the post and then before I could even read/respond to the post, sent me a barrage of IM’s still playing the innocent victim which is grating enough on its own but also included him straight up lying about ever posting/saying anything about me, insisting he’d done nothing to me, had nothing against me, this was so out of the blue and uncalled for, etc. When I pointed out this wasn’t the case, that I had seen and read the posts firsthand because blocking me doesn’t prevent me from seeing his posts, he began to lie instead about the contents of said posts and pulled some gaslighting bullshit about how I had just “misread” them, all the while either willfully or coincidentally not seeming to understand anything I said to him (I mentioned him publishing the anon about how I hate women at least twice and the response was always “I never said you hate women!!” Well no shit). He kept insisting that I had “gone behind his back” and that if I had a problem I should “say it to his face” despite the fact he’d had me blocked and that I’m not a douchey enough person to try to contact him despite that, and despite the fact that he had “gone behind my back” and not “said it to my face” twice now prior, and had done just that with his post about the folks from the RPC as well.He also insisted that the tumblr post was meant just to innocently “bring the issue to my attention to clear things up” despite me having no way to see it on my own unless by coincidence, and despite him proving to be willing and able to send me IM’s instead, which you’d think could render the need for a public post moot. When I pointed this out, he promptly deleted the post, lest anyone else see through his bullshit to what he was really trying to do.After my initial response to his wall of IM’s, he sent another wall this time with more insults and accusations, and promptly blocked me so I couldn’t respond. So yes, I made a vaguepost, I know, how awful, how dare I. A vague post vague enough that only someone who had seen his post, or who heard about it from him otherwise, would know who and what it was referencing. Until he responded to it himself, that is and unblocked me again to send me more angry messages to which I responded by permanently blocking him instead because this game of blocking and unblocking sure was getting old.Cue his charming friends sweeping in to tell me to eat a dick, making false accusations against my RP partner and I, sending me threats on Discord, telling people I flashed my breasts for money, etc. And the other person? The one who brought him up in the first place who I had only been responding to? Whose name he was given, was aired in the same public post on his blog as mine? As far as I know, she hasn’t gotten any hate, probably not a single message. And I’m glad, because she shouldn’t get any, she doesn’t deserve it. But at the same time, sure seems sketchy that the person who did the same exact thing as me–and who did it first–has not provoked anyone’s ire, not even been messaged. The public post in reply to the anon who named her, even, was aimed 100% at me. Now isn’t that funny. It’s almost like this was an excuse for people who already had beef with me to try to take shots at me and pretend it was justified. It’s almost like all you anon keyboard warriors don’t even know how this started or what actually happened.And now I’m going to talk about something else. You cannot do “whatever the hell you want” with your character. RP is a two-way (or more) street. There is a real person behind each and every character. These people are looking for fun just like you, and are every bit as deserving, and your fun shouldn’t impede on theirs. We are all allowed equal parts of fun.So when people play their weird ass lolicon/shotacon/pedobait characters, who is having fun? What if the other person in the RP was sexually abused as a child and you’re dredging up terrible old memories for them and making light of their pain? What if they’re a parent worried for their child, or worse, the parent of a child who’s already been abused? What if they’re an actual pedophile and seeing you RP this is tempting them, making them think they’re desires are normal and okay? Hell, what if they’re a goddamn ordinary person who finds it creepy and uncomfortable?What if the fetishized, futa ERP avatar is interacting with someone who is trans or nonbinary or intersex IRL? What if it’s triggering them (in the genuine, real sense of the word)? What if the walking affront against the lore character talking about being an Voidsent Half-Primal Garlean Spy in the middle of the Quicksand is ruining everyone’s immersion–particularly when they refuse to play along as others respond realistically IC and try to kill them or arrest them or kick them out? What if the OP af infinitely-stronger-than-everyone-else-around-him character is making the RP unfun for every other RPer involved because their characters can’t do anything but get beaten up or bow to his whims unless they stoop to godmodding or suddenly beefing up their own character?People can and will judge your character. Those judgments are usually best left kept themselves or quietly shared between trustworthy friends. But when your character trespasses on the OOC fun of the role-players around you? Sorry, my guy, people have every right to speak up. And all this nonsense? All this nonsense was a small handful of people who were already pretty nasty showing their true colors and getting told to pipe the fuck down. A pretty good outcome, if you ask me. So, please, block me, anon. My life will be better without idiots like you in it, and the same probably goes for anyone else you intend to block. Your nameless, ignorant, anonymous presence will not be missed–or noticed, for that matter.