#If I collected enough stuff from my Reddit account

[paradoxcase]

How to use search engines effectively in the year of our lord 2025

So, we all know Google sucks now. There are some other alternative search engines, but honestly, switching search engines isn't going to fix a lot of the fundamental issues we're seeing with search engines nowadays. But yesterday, while responding to someone on reddit who was making the argument of "Google sucks now, so really, how much worse is it to just ask ChatGPT" I realized that there is actually a formula for using search engines that I have that continues to work perfectly for most things despite the fact that Google sucks now, so I thought I would share.

First of all, to remove all of the AI bullshit from Google, you can use udm14.com instead, or install the udm=14 browser extension. The method I outline here may or may not work with search engines other than Google, I haven't looked into them deeply enough. udm14.com should be essentially just Google, but without AI.

Then, we have to go back to the beginning and understand what a search engine actually is, and what it isn't. I spent three years of my career working in the guts of a search engine (not Google, or any other web-based search engine), so I should hope I would know what they are:

A search engine is a tool to locate documents.

Google in particular has done a lot to obscure what a search engine actually is by adding a lot of "cool" "features" to their search engine which are not actually within the scope of search engine capabilities. When you search for a question and Google displays a bolded answer that it found on a web page? Not search engine provenance. When it displays its "AI Summary"? Not search engine provenance. When it advertises things to you? Not search engine provenance. When it comes up with questions that "other people asked"? Not search engine provenance. The core competency of a search engine is to find documents (in this case, web pages) from a large collection of documents (the internet) based on their relevance to a query you have typed. Just like people are misusing ChatGPT to do stuff it was not designed for and that it is not good at, using a search engine as if it is a question answering service that can deliver the answer to a question you asked is using the search engine to do something it was not designed for and is not good at.

The search engine is not an all-in-one tool any more than ChatGPT is an all-in-one tool. Research is a multi-step process that involves a search engine, but the search engine cannot do everything for you. Here is the process:

Learn how to identify reliable sources of information. Learn what sites tend to have reliable information about the topic you're looking up. Wikipedia is a good fallback that may give you links to other reliable sources. You can also ask people who know more about your topic for recommendations of good sites. There are also sites that rank the reliability and bias of other popular sites. The search engine's ability to find relevant documents is not super useful when the internet is full of untrustworthy bullshit and is becoming more so as time goes on due to AI-generated content. Just because a search engine returns a link does not mean it is reliable.

Use a search engine to specifically search just the websites you know are reliable for your topic. Google has some documentation about how to do this on their search engine here. There should be a way to do this on any other half-decent search engine, as well, but I don't have the details of how to do it. Now you have limited your scope from "anything and everything produced by everyone who has ever created a Wordpress account plus whoever paid Google to have their site appear in every single search" to a collection of documents that you can trust.

Read the sources that you get back from the search engine. No, seriously. Read them. Don't read Google's "AI Summary". Read the actual sources. Don't read the bolded answer Google put at the top of the results list. Read the sources. Don't ask another AI to summarize the sources for you. Read the sources. Don't just read the headline or title and assume you now know everything that is in the body of the article. READ THE SOURCES. There is no shortcut for this, you have to read.

There was a time when you could get away with being lax about this and just do general searches, but that was because there was an actual limit on the amount of wrong information that mere humans could generate per unit time, and also because Google did legitimately use to be more concerned with promoting reliable sources than with promoting whoever paid them the most money to do so. But that time is over.

Basically, if you wouldn't just type your question into ChatGPT and hope for the best, don't just type your question into Google and hope for the best, either.

[lunarsilkscreen]

The Problem with Fame (and money)

Have you ever been in a position where you were famous, and didn't know it? (BEFORE IT GOES TO MY HEAD.)

Imagine all of a sudden, a lot of theoretical dollars get sent to your YouTube bank account.

<aside>Theoretical Dollars is a South Park '08 reference, before YouTube and social media paid their users for good content, you could suddenly get famous. And people just assumed that meant you had $$. Despite being flat broke, and just having a lot of "Likes".

Even today, especially with the "Got paid by Musk on X" jokes; laymem assume that online persona's make *bank*. Who paid them? You?</aside>

That wasn't really an aside this time, it's kinda important.

Even today, you could have like 40k karma on Reddit, and all of a sudden; people think you can do whatever. You can pay for everything! Make everybody's troubles go away.

This gets even more problematic with the fact that people who can make a profit off of other people's fame (your tabloids, your TMZ, your X personalities who *do* make money from outrage content.)

And people who don't know they're famous get hurt for it. Or sometimes benefit from others starstuck-ness without knowing it.

Despite *only* having 40k reddit karma myself, I've had to tell people that no, I'm not internet famous. Not even Reddit Famous. I deleted my account because of old friends who thought I was a walking ATM machine (as opposed to atmospheric or "at the moment")

No bruh.

My own mother constantly asks for handouts. I can't call her a bad mother; but the only thing she sees me as is what she can get for free: bus driver, cigarettes, pocket change, and free home repair.

Despite only having enough to live off of.

And none of these people *fully* understand how money actually works, or how a paycheck works. Which is really sad for anybody above the age of 25. (And sometimes younger.)

If you need a couple thousand a month to make food and bills; you should understand its the *same* f* concept for anybody else you know. And despite being able to do math; they refuse to do that; think like a rational adult, that every person has monetary needs that need to be met. And just keep seeing people as a way to get their next fix. (That is; free stuff, not necessarily free drugs)

"I'm not looking to adopt a 30+ year old at the moment. You need to grow the duck up."

I've literally been harassed by people that I know for not spending money on them; and spending money to start a business. They see the *new* things they don't have.

Even if it just trinkets and collectibles from when you were young. (No I know why, they see graded Beta Magic Cards on pawn stars and they think *every single MTG card is $$*) f*ing commodification.

I seriously don't understand people's thoughts processes.

Well actually. I do.

See, Melin Shoot seems to be mediocritcally known in certain circles. (That's me, I'm Melin; everybody thinks its a stage name.that I use professionally. DESPITE ONLY EVER HAVING BEEN ENLISTED MILITARY PROFESSIONALLY FOR A DECADE.)

And I didn't know that. Cuz nobody told me. Even today people think their own weird thoughts. Like *how much money I must've made for showing up on somebody else's stream*

It sounds like I'm fluffing up my own fame. I'm talking about being a minor character, a very minor character, everywhere... And people *think* I have more pull than I do.

I don't. I absolutely don't.

And yet for some reason; there's this strange way people act around me. As if I *was* somebody famous.

If you can be harassed for being mildly associated with Fame. And people can make money off of you without you making any money for the same: I cannot imagine how awful it must be for those who are *actually* famous.

$*. Imagine being famous for giving the president a blowjob and then just not being able to get a regular job after that ...

[howlintherain]

what fucking day is it. anyway, fell off the wagon a bit but now I'm back on probably, so here's a giant mid-year progress dump on @batmanisagatewaydrug's book bingo. Blue is new, purple was already accounted for.

Literary Fiction - Little Fires Everywhere by Celeste Ng - y'all, I am rooting for none of these bitches. If you want to just be angry at the characters for a whole book, this might be the book for you. This book should be a Reddit post that gets an Everyone Sucks Here verdict. Does it probably says something very poignant about racism and viewing children as status objects? Sure, but boy is it a frustrating vehicle for that message.

Short Story Collection - The Summer Palace and Other Stories by C.S. Pacat - I'm mostly using this category to put the Captive Prince series on this bingo, bc it's my bingo and I do what I want, and what I want it more of this series forever. I read the whole trilogy in a week, which is basically warp speed for me. This short story collection is an epilogue to that. I will say though, I feel like the internet complete misrepresented this series to me. I expected a dub-con smutty romance series, and what I got was angst, and political intrigue, and endless emotions about autonomy and sex as personal and political power, (and also a tiny drop of dub-con smut followed by heartbreakingly sweet enthusiastic smut), and all of these things are so completely and totally up my alley. If any of that seems like your thing please fucking read these books bc askdkfslkdpslds

Reread a Childhood Favorite - Animorphs by K.A. Applegate - If you want to be pedantic about it we can make this square The Beginning, but I'm just going to talk about the whole series. in November of 2023 I started rereading this series with some cool people on Discord, and we finally finished a few weeks ago. It was so much fun y'all, and I honestly love this series even more now.

Memoir - Gender Queer by Maia Kobabe - Somehow this author wrote a memoir but also wrote a book about me, specifically. Even if this book is not also about you, it's still really good!

2024 Award Winner - Some Desperate Glory by Emily Tesh - cringefail girlboss lovers I need y'all to show the fuck up for this one. It won the 2024 Hugo Award for Best Novel and it was completely deserved (I say as someone who did not read a ton of scifi in 2024 lmao). It's a scifi novel that doesn't get lost in the worldbuilding or the science, and I feel like that really helps the story and the characters shine. Highly recommend.

Social Justice & Activism - Blindspot: Hidden Biases of Good People by Mahzarin R. Banaji and Anthony G. Greenwald - some coworkers of mine recommended this, and it's pretty good! The overarching themes weren't new to me, specifically, but the supporting science was really cool. I view this as an accessible and impactful book for someone who's just coming around to the idea of "hey you might be prejudiced without even knowing it", but also not bad for someone who's been around the block already.

Romance Novel - Fang Fiction by Kate Stayman-London - Parts of this were so campy in all the best ways. This really felt like a love letter to fandom and it was absolutely delightful to read. I also love books that incorporate different types of media into their storytelling, and this one had podcast transcripts and blog posts and emails and tons of other fun stuff! There are two romance storylines happening in this one and they're both so sweet <3

Read & Make a Recipe - Blushing Penne Pasta from Copycat Favorites by Taste of Home - y'all I keep white wine and half-and-half in my fridge now. who the fuck am I. I got this cookbook for my mom for Christmas and she made this first, then I stole the recipe. I rarely cook anything complicated enough to need a recipe, so this is really a whole revolution for me. I've made this recipe at least once a month this year. what the absolute heck.

Historical Fiction - Death in the Spires by KJ Charles - I loved so much of this book, except for the historical part of it. I am just not a historical fiction person, so thankfully I read this for a book club otherwise I'd be struggling with this category. But this was fun! The mystery was entertaining, the romance was charming, I love all the characters. All-in-all, a very pleasant time.

That's the official bingo update. Hopefully it won't be this long next time, but who knows. (btw I read a bunch of other books too, to be clear, but they weren't cool enough to be on the bingo.)

[waffleston]

A ramble: online presence, dissociation, and hobbies.

First, an analysis of my personal online presence.

I have 18 online presences spread throughout nine social media platforms. Eight are "archival"; I don't use them but occasionally log in to see the time capsule of who I once was. Three I am too afraid to post on; mostly because I psyched myself out by setting a high bar my current artistic ability can't reach or establishing a mask that's too high effort to maintain. Five are associated with my irl name, which I have become increasingly wary about; And there's the pressure to "professionalize" them. The remaining two are this tumblr and my cohost (rip cohost).

(Addendum: This tally omits socials which I deleted along the way. Looking at you, twitter.)

Usernames are hard for me to settle on. My handles span 11 unique combinations. Three are based on my irl name, and three are based on previous names I used. Two are associated with reddit accounts I'd rather leave behind in the past, one is cringe and weirdly activates my dysphoria, and one is a potential trademark violation if you look at it close enough. The last is the username used on this site.

I understand why this has happened to an extent. I have a dissociative disorder, so having a consistent sense of self is impossible for me. I also don't experience the crisply defined self-states thing anymore. (At some point my brain revoked names and it's been harder to tell ever since.)

A way to avoid some of the aforementioned concerns which prevent me from using certain accounts is to simply rename them. I learned today that neocities permits renaming, which is pretty neat. This does introduce the issue of breaking permalinks, potentially losing a following, etc. but for the accounts I feel comfortable reforging in the fire of name changes that's not really an issue.

A major lesson learned here is that using your irl name is /not/ recommended. I just want to play around with experimental artwork and not have to worry if I'm affecting my irl reputation or job prospects. I know that the reason why I employed my name en masse was out of the euphoria of using the name I legally changed to. It does feel nice to be called the name you choose when irl it's complicated - but you don't have to set your username to it! Have whatever name you feel like going by at the moment in the bio, and let the username remain a constant.

A fascinating thing cohost taught me is that I am more likely to feel free and comfortable interacting with people if they aren't people I know irl. Eight of my social presences are known by people I know irl, which affects the sort of stuff I post to them. It feels weird to admit that, but I know it's true. I experience a massive amount of anxiety whenever I "act out of character" - which happens when: my therapist notices my collection of active me's has shifted, I fail to mask in front of friends, or I do something and then later ask myself why the heck I would have done that. Trying to hide from the anxiety leads to posting less - simply liking rather than reblogging where applicable. It doesn't help that I constantly malfunction in social situations.

All of this is to say that I need to start using throwaway names - or names that don't mean anything at all. Don't list the hobby in the username, or you'll be unable to post when your interests shift; don't use your name, or you'll be unable to post when your name changes; keep it isolated, or don't reuse names on multiple sites unless you're committed to maintaining the same mask on both.

(Addendum: The name thing is what's led to me having an uncountable number of email addresses. A nightmare to manage, but at least I don't have a single point of failure in the event of a hack?)

I'm sure some of this is more tightly tethered to my dissociation. I pick up and drop hobbies rapidly. At one point I tried to make a wheel listing all of my hobbies, but depression comes in and makes me unable to engage with any of them. Sensory issues (?) make it hard to interact with my music hobbies, and my inability to focus for long periods of time sends fiber arts and software development into the state of "it's not finished and I don't think I'm ever going to finish it". (I'll refrain from listing the number of private repositories on my github.)

I think I also burn out of hobbies. Like, I'm still the me that started it, but I've given up. Depression. I think it's hitting especially hard right now because I don't have classes to throw myself into. But even then, there's still something wrong with my brain; I, embarrassingly, never completed a paper in grad school. I was able to charisma-saving-throw my way around failing courses in those situations, but gosh. It just tanks my self-esteem to know that I sometimes feel like I don't deserve my degree.

Building on that, hobby-specific social accounts are subsequently abandoned. To an extent my brain rationalizes that "I need to save the account in its current state so that when the me that used it returns they can pick it back up", kind of turning social media into a hobby in that same sense of picking up and dropping. It's kind of a miracle that this tumblr account survived from 2015 to today. I think the key to its survival has been the lack of affiliation with specific hobbies, lack of affiliation with any name, and the persistence of it all. It's been able to change alongside me.

In a weird way, I still reflect on the metaphor I came up with before I got diagnosed, in the midst of some particularly challenging times. I felt like I kept regenerating, like The Doctor, forever different and unable to return to who I once was.

So maybe that's the key. Pick some usernames that are personal, yet ambiguous enough that whoever you become can still inherit it, and not feel like a fraud, or not feel like it isn't theirs to take.

Pick some sort of title. Find something that represents all of you.

[It's way harder than it sounds. If you need me, I'll be spending the next week/month/year/decade trying to figure it out.]

[madisonmccoy]

Hi @levok! Rykter anon here (you can call me Shay!!) - this is gonna be long so i thought i would make a post instead of another ask! first let me say i am honestly a little starstruck that you answered my ask after following you for what feels like 10 years now. In the OG SKAM days, i was just one of the followers kinda watching your page from the sidelines and ghost-liking your posts. But in my eyes you really are just THE coolest niche internet fandom microcelebrity so this is huge for me lol. I’m honored to be the one to introduce you to the gem that is Rykter 🫡

I also binged the whole show after finding it a little over a week ago bc the short form episodes really did it for my ADHD brain. But when i finished it i RAN to the internet and was surprised when not that many people were talking about it!! Up until now i haven’t been the type of person to be the fandom historian OR better yet be this early to a fandom, but i knew i had to do justice for the other fans. so i recently started collecting S3 lore on reddit so it was all in one place. Again it’s only been a few days so i have a long way to go and i am learning new info by the minute. So if any @levok followers have contributions pls tap in and share them on any platform!! I am lurking on them all 🙃

As far as the lore goes, i will summarize some of the most key things for you (imo).

SPOILER WARNING for those others out there reading this: 

1. Lots of the cast members have been “leaking” S3 content/spoilers on their socials, mainly on tiktok in “day in the life” videos. Most notably in all this, many of the cast members (primarily the guys) have been very jokingly affectionate with one another i’m assuming to throw off us fans about ships and who will get together

2. There are several new characters next season, notable ones include Øyvind and Olivia. I don’t know a whole lot about them as of now, but Øyvind’s actor (Fredrik Johnsen) posted a tiktok that included a clip with a visible episode script. I translated it (badly, as norsk is not my first language and the clip is low quality) but one section seems to indicate Felix and the guys dump a bowl of ice cream on Olivia in the cafeteria and spray her with hand sanitizer at some point. So expect some kind of conflict between them in S3

3. Olivia and Mathias were in some pictures on the account of the person who plays Mathias’s mom on instagram. One appears to show Mathias and his mom hugging, leading some of us to think Olivia may have a role in Mathias’ coming out? Rykter’s Eskild basically. If not that then just a cool new friendship to explore!

4. Teo Tomczuk (Mathias) did an interview recently where he said that in S3 we can expect “a lot of love, broken hearts. Many try lots of new things and find out who they are. Mostly they get to know themselves. Will be a lot of identity stuff!”. So fingers crossed our faves figure their stuff out and all signs point to a very (hopefully) queer season!

I’m probably missing something important but everything i’ve come across so far is posted somewhere under the Rykter subreddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/Rykter/ i post from @ shannonxstardust. So feel free to join in my clowning over this series. And if i am ambitious enough one of these days, all of the lore will make its way to my tumblr despite me not being a proficient gif maker by any means. Anyway, love you @levok 😘 thx for the mention and happy 33 days until Rykter S3 :)

hi levok! i don’t know if you’ve hopped on the Rykter train yet, but it’s a niche norwegian teen drama with a gay storyline. i’m sending you this ask bc i feel like you of anyone would appreciate that i am full-on OG SKAM-level sleuthing for spoilers in the reddit thread ahead of the season 3 release. all the combing the cast’s socials and zooming in to translate a pixely photo of the script - it’s low key giving me brain rot but it also feels very nostalgic to 2015 times on SKAM tumblr!! anyway, i hope you’re having an amazing day and i’ll be here patiently waiting for august 19th premiere 🫶🏻🌈

Hi anon!

Ok so i decided to not answer your ask, before I went searching for this. Bc I was not aware of the existence of this series 👀 and behold, it turns out it was in danish stream all along.

So I gave it a go. 10 minutes episodes are right up my attention span alley! So I binged it all haha 😂 and I get your jam!! NRK just know their shit. That ending though??? Out of nowhere?? What is this??? Also I am invested in the Thea storyline. Why you giving me this when there’s still a month until season 3?? Hahah (no bless you - you’re too kind).

I need all the lore you are talking about. So pls come back and spill the tea. What do we know about season 3???

My day has been booked and busy to say the least 🎀

[celestiabyss]

[MY THOUGHTS ON TWITTER BEING DOWN + MY CURRENT PLANS FOR OTHER PLATFORMS 🐦]

Hi everyone! As many of you might have experienced, Twitter has not been loading tweets for many hours for a lot of users (me included) due to the so-called "rate-limited" mechanic that doesn't make any sense. At the time of this writing, I could no longer see tweets majority of the time from my main account, so the situation at hand makes me even more pessimistic on the future of Twitter.

A good chunk of you probably knows by now that I've been active in Twitter as celestiabyss for over two years now. It is the platform where I started sharing my theories and thoughts about Genshin lore, and it is where I got to see many fellow lore enthusiasts that inspire me to this day.

Twitter isn't perfect, but ever since a certain someone bought the platform, things started to get really messy. Unnecessary features got added in while necessary features were removed. Twitter Moments, for example, was the only feature that was close enough to being an organized archive. You might have seen me use this before to compile my lore tweets and theories. Around November last year, the Twitter Moments feature could no longer be updated with new tweets, and this was the reason why I barely wrote long lore threads ever since then.

A lot of problems continued to emerge and threaten the stability of the platform 'til this day. Despite the social chaos of Twitter, it couldn't be denied that Twitter has -- or used to have -- certain functionalities and accessibilities that helped a lot of people connect to online communities such as fandoms much easier whether as lurkers or active users. Twitter is in no way "better" than Tumblr, Reddit, Discord, and the like, but it does offer something that other platforms do not have. This is why it's such a shame that the platform has been dying a slow death ever since Spiral Abyss man had the audacity to buy it and ruin it.

I will not deny that branching out to as many other platforms and other social media as possible is one of the strategies that many content creators use to reach many people. While it is inevitable for me to adopt this strategy too, it still pains me to see my primary platform in shambles and potentially losing connection to the communities I've come to love. The incompetence of the Spiral Abyss man is killing many communities that rely on this platform.

1. Twitch (https://www.twitch.tv/celestiabyss)

There is such a high learning curve for me when learning extra platforms such as Tumblr and Discord, which is why these two have been collecting dust for so long. I do have Twitch and Youtube as my other more active platforms though, and as someone who just started streaming months ago, it will be a challenge for me to rely mostly on these two alone to reach you. I will see what I can do to better inform everyone of when I'm streaming. But for now, pls keep an eye out on my other platforms. All of them use the "celestiabyss" username:

- I will still be streaming there starting this week once I finish my uni stuff and recover from my sickness this week. Target return date will be on JULY 5 AT 10 PM GMT+8. Please check the Profile tab and Schedule tab of my page for sched announcements.

2. Youtube (youtube.com/@celestiabyss) - All Twitch VODs and future content will still be uploaded here. Twitch stream schedules and other announcements will also be announced through my Youtube channel's Community posts. I currently do not have plans to stream on Youtube, but if I ever feel like learning how to do so, I will let you know.

3. Tumblr (https://celestiabyss.tumblr.com) - This is the backup socmed account I made ever since Twitter started crumbling around November 2022. It's mostly on hiatus right now, so I'll still see what I can do to resume long-form lore posting here.

Anyways that would be it for now. I need to get back to finishing my papers and recovering. All this platform planning will come again later. I'll see you when I see you and stay tuned on my Twitch streams 🌠

4. Discord (celestiabyss) - I am very inactive in this fandom-focused Discord account since I use my personal one more. But yes, I'm in the following lore servers: (1) Khaenri'ah Lore Project and (2) Coffee and Culture. I'm also in GenshinSupportClub's server. I haven't checked them in a long time though and I have yet to learn how to fully navigate these servers. To all my Twitter mutuals who I have gotten to interact with through Genshin and HSR lore tweets: pls let me know if you have a server too (LET ME INNNN 😆).

[cadenreigns]

My Monster(s)

(This was an AU short story I wrote for a reddit 1-day writing contest for the star vs subreddit a long while back and later decided to add a twist ending to. While I went back and edited it a little bit, it was still something I wrote in like 2 hours so don’t expect a masterpiece. And since it’s longer than I remembered so it’s after the break)

“And that should be everything,” Dr. Backintosh said as she ticked off a few notes on her clipboard. “We’ll call you to set up a follow-up appointment once the results come in, but based on what we’ve gathered so far, I don’t foresee anything keeping us from moving on to the next phase.”

Meteora shifted in her hospital gown before feeling Mariposa squeeze her hand. The two exchanged a hopeful look before she returned her attention to the doctor. “So, you don’t think there will be any problem because of…what I am?”

The doctor looked up and gave a reassuring smile. “Ms. Butterfly, while your body may be more unique than others, you still have all the same organs and working parts we’re used to dealing with. I won’t say it’s impossible something won’t come up, but I wouldn’t bet on it.”

Meteora let out a sigh she hadn’t even realized she’d been holding. “Good.”

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

“I guess all that’s left is to figure out a donor,” Mariposa mused aloud as they exited the doctor’s office and made their way to her car. Meteora immediately knew that she already had an idea, otherwise she wouldn’t have brought it up. It was, after all, the part of this situation that made her the most uncomfortable. More about it probably should have made her uncomfortable, like the very basic fact that 19 was a bit young to be doing what she was. But unlike Mari, quintessential college student that she was, who had every opportunity still ahead of her, Meteora only had one major decision of her own to make. And she had decided to make it before her weird half-breed biology could mess something up about it. Everything else, like where she could live and what job she’d have, had already been decided by the government or negotiated by her parents. And while being the monster representative would be a cushy job, she wasn’t sure that’s what she would have chosen for herself.

“I’m not going to like what you’re going to say next, am I,” Meteora said, knowing the answer.

Mari put on her most innocent smile, the smile that had convinced Meteora to do so many things over the years. So many things that often ended with them in trouble. “Well, there is one obvious way that would let me be a real aunt.”

Meteora stopped in place. “Please don’t tell me you’re insinuating what I think you are.”

Mari continued to smile. “And wouldn’t you know it, today’s the day I’m supposed to go check in on him. But my evening class starts soon, hmmm.” She cupped her chin in her hand and started to tap her upper lip, something she often did when presenting an idea as just thought up instead of meticulously planned. “Maybe you could go check on him for me, see how he’s doing, have a chat about life, the universe, and medical procedures. You know, stuff like that.”

Meteora’s tail had started to swing tersely back and forth at some point, and she made no attempt to stop it. “You know I don’t like him, Mari.”

“But you’ve got no real reason not to. Besides, he’s basically just me as a guy.”

“Does it even matter to you that I don’t want to go?”

“Your future matters more.”

Meteora crossed her arms and huffed. “Fine, I’ll do it. But you should know that sometimes I really hate you.”

“Which,” she began as her smile spread mischievously, “is of course why you end up doing everything I put in your head.”

It took Meteora almost an hour to make her way to his ramshackle home at the edge of Echo Creek. Not because it was any significant distance away, if that was the case then he probably would have been outside the area her and her father’s kind were allowed to travel in, but because he had picked the most out-of-the-way spot imaginable to live. The roads that led there were little more than curvy dirt paths that were hell on her moped, each looking ready to collapse into one of the many riverbanks or ditches that lined the way, and took the most roundabout routes to get anywhere. Of course, this spot was chosen when “he” had been “them,” but he had stayed after everything…stayed for years, so she wasn’t going to give him any slack about it.

And then the trees parted and she was in the clearing, where the mountains were far enough away to be majestic instead of looming overhead. It was truly a beautiful sight…until you looked down and saw the home sitting in the center of the clearing, right at the end of the dirt road that had brought her there. Everyone called it his “house” to be polite, but it was little more than a gussied-up trailer as far as Meteora was concerned. The chicken coops off to one end while a messy garden and old minivan took up space on the other didn’t exactly improve the image it gave off. If you didn’t know he owned all the land around them you’d think it was a squatter’s camp.

The closer she got the more Meteora didn’t want to deal with this. And that feeling only grew stronger when she propped the moped on its kickstand and took her helmet off. She knew she could drive away now and just tell Mari that she had done it, that would satisfy the periodic visits she insisted on, but not the donor angle. That she couldn’t drive away from without getting an earful about later. So, after a long and drawn out sigh, Meteora stepped up to the front door and knocked.

At first there was no reply, so she knocked again. Second time was the charm evidently, as almost immediately she heard a call from inside, “I’m coming.”

A moment passed, with some rustling barely making its way through the door before she heard the lock slide in and the handle started to turn. “You know you don’t have to keep checking in on me, Mari. I can take care of myself…”

Marco Diaz trailed off when the door was fully open and he saw that it wasn’t Mari at his door, but her best friend. This man, who Meteora had known all her life and who was in surprising good shape considering that, by all accounts, he rarely actually left his so-called “house,” was the man who she despised more than anyone else in world. But Mari had made her promise not to let that come across as too obvious.

“Hey jerk-face.” Some promises were hard to keep.

“Meteora,” he replied, his brow raised in confusion.

She stepped past him and inside before he could get the chance collect his thoughts. “Mari’s got class tonight, so she sent me. You’re not doing anything stupid that would worry her, are you?”

Marco closed the door behind her and followed as she made her way down the length of the small home. Based on what Mari had told her about previous visits, she had expected more of a mess as she made her way through the small sitting area and kitchen, but the place was clean and tidy, almost sterile. The only thing even close to messy about it was a dish rag on the kitchen counter. She stopped when she came to the bedroom on the far side of the kitchen, it featured some un-fluffed pillows, not that Meteora ever bothered with that either.

“I don’t think so,” he finally replied. “You want a drink, or something?”

She shrugged. “Got any diet Pitt?”

“I see Mari’s taste for that junk finally wore off on you,” he said as he opened the fridge and reached inside. A second later he emerged with a pink can, though instead of handing it to her when she put out her hand he placed it on the kitchen table and then took a seat. “I’m surprised you bothered to come, even with Mari asking.”

“Yeah well, people don’t pick their families,” Meteora said, picking up the can without taking a seat of her own, then pulling the on the tab. It opened with the expected swoosh of bubbling liquid that was practically reassuring, even if it was generally the sign of something that wasn’t actually good for her. “I like it when she’s happy, she likes it when she knows you’re not dead because you live in the middle of nowhere with a bunch of chickens, so I guess I like knowing that too.”

Marco made what Meteora could only assume was an amused sound with his nose. “Even though you’d probably enjoy figuring out a way to set the chickens on me?”

It was Meteora’s turn to make an amused sound, which she followed by taking a huge gulp of her diet Pitt. “At this point I’m more likely to just not help when the chickens attack than actually sick them on you.”

“Well I appreciate you not hastening my demise yourself,” Marco answered back. “Anyway, I know you don’t like being here, so you can go and let Mari know that I’m in the same state I always am. Nothing to be worried or relieved about.”

“Right…” she said slowly, turning in place to survey the home again instead of looking at him. She couldn’t bring herself to really look at him and ask this question. It was bad enough she had to ask it at all, let alone of him. “Well there was one other thing I…Mari suggested I ask you…”

Meteora paused as her slow look around came back to the bedroom and something caught her eye that she hadn’t noticed before. A picture on the nightstand, one of a young woman taken over twelve years prior. Meteora had been around seven the last time she’d seen Star, and hadn’t really understood when she couldn’t anymore. No one had been able to explain it in a way she’d understood. Some had said she’d gotten sick, like so many had at the time, but everyone had cried, and then yelled. Marco had yelled most of all, and at practically everyone. And then, well then he stopped leaving this supposed “vacation home” they’d shared altogether. In fact, Meteora didn’t think anyone aside from Mariposa had seen him in person more than three of four times in the dozen years that had followed.

Trying to pull her attention back to the task at hand, she saw the home in a new light. The photo of Star was the only color in the whole place. Everything else was white or some shade of grey. And the place wasn’t just sterile, it was practically lifeless. That’s why Mari came here when no one else did, not because she was worried about him living so far out alone, but because she knew he wasn’t really living at all.

“Ask what?”

Meteora almost jumped when Marco prompted her to continue. And looking at him in that moment, with something besides the irrational anger that had plagued her thoughts of him all her life, she couldn’t bring herself to ask what she’d been sent here to. So she asked the question that had been asked of her so many times.

“Why…why do you think I’ve never liked you?”

Marco took a deep breath and looked out the window for a moment, as if considering something very carefully. But then the moment ended and she got her answer.

Meteora pushed her third can of diet Pitt to the side to sit with the others as she ran though everything Marco had told her. It all seemed crazy when he’d said it, even crazier as she thought about each part, but none of it seemed wrong either.

“Because of an old king I was raised by an abusive robot…and then ran a boarding school?”

“From what I understand, yeah.”

“And then I had to live in a car because you, while crossdressing, riled my…students into kicking me out.”

“It wasn’t my idea to cross-dress, but basically.”

“Which led me to remember that I was half monster…which led me to try and take over Mewni…”

“Which led to all the soul draining and eventually the combination of magics that turned you back into a baby,” Marco said nonchalantly before taking a sip from the water bottle he had eventually pulled out for himself. “And you just never liked me after that. I guess some emotions just get too ingrained to fade.”

“But,” Meteora started as she put the pieces together. “If you hadn’t gotten me kicked out, which let me remember what I was, which led to the magic battle…then I wouldn’t have my family, or Mari, or any part of the life I have now.”

He shrugged. “Probably not.”

“So, I’ve been angry at you all my life, because you gave me my life.”

His mouth twisted a bit before replying with, “Well it’s not like I turned you back into a baby myself, but if that’s how you see it then just know that I don’t take it personally. In fact, it’s actually kind of nice having someone not like me for a different reason than the rest.”

Meteora’s chair squeaked across the linoleum floor as she pushed herself up. The empty cans shook as she walked around the table. And Marco just looked confused when she grabbed and pulled him up by the collar. He was still a few inches taller than her, so it was an awkward position once he was up, but no less awkward than when she wrapped both her arms around him in the next instant.

Silence permeated the next few moments. Shocked silence from Marco if she had to guess, while her own was confused. Part of her still felt the urge to knock his block off, but at the same time…well another part was seeing him in a whole new way.

“Thank you,” she finally said before pulling away from him.

“No problem?” he replied.

Now the silence between them was just awkward. Though that wasn’t surprising when Meteora remembered that the only physical contact the two had ever had before that hug had usually entailed her trying to hurt him in some way.

“I gotta get going. I’ll tell Mari you’re doing fine.”

“Sure, thanks,” he said slowly before glancing out the window. “It’s starting to get dark, be careful on the way back.”

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Meteora’s tail twitched back and forth as she sat on the couch flipping through channels. She hadn’t slept well the night before and was going to be alone all day thanks to Mari’s new class schedule. Angie and Raphael usually would have been there to bother her in their good-natured way, but they were out of town. Which left her alone with nothing to do on a day that had a storm approaching and nothing worth watching on tv. So, when the phone rang, she didn’t even care that it was probably a telemarketer, at least it gave her something to do.

“Hello,” she answered.

“Ms. Butterfly, it’s Dr. Backintosh. Is this a good time?”

Meteora sat up straighter, ready to receive the news they’d been waiting for. “Well I’m on my own today, so I guess-”

“Actually,” the doctor interrupted, “it’s probably better we talk about this on our own first.”

In the distance Meteora heard the first boom of thunder.

Meteora knocked on the door, though she could barely hear her knocks over the rain and thunder that plummeted from the sky above. She knocked again a few seconds later, barely any harder though. She didn’t have the energy for it. Finally, after she forced herself to knock a third time, the door opened.

“Meteora?” Marco practically bellowed.

She didn’t reply.

“Come on, get out of the rain,” he said before taking her by the arm and pulling her inside. “Are you ok? Did something happen?”

She thought about it as she watched drops of water roll off her and start to puddle on his floor. Something had happened, though what actually mattered was what wasn’t going to happen. She didn’t say that though, just like she hadn’t said anything since hanging up the phone.

“I’ll get you a towel,” he said after a moment had passed without any reply. “I’ll be right back, okay.”

Meteora remained silent as he ran off towards the bedroom, continuing to watch the droplets join the puddle while listening to Marco frantically open and close drawers. A few seconds, maybe a minute, later he returned and the towel came down over her head. He hadn’t bothered to offer it to her, and wasn’t bothering to let her get around to actually drying herself either.

“I can’t believe you rode here in this weather,” he said while gently dabbing the towel across her face and long lilac hair. “And without even a jacket, you know it’ll be me Mariposa explodes at if you get sick.”

She still didn’t reply, just watched the droplets while he moved on to wiping off her arms.

“Ok, well whatever brought you here, you need to finish drying off first. And since I don’t think I can dry anymore myself without feeling like a creep, I’m going to push you into the bathroom. There’s some spare clothes in there, so will you please finish drying off and change?”

Meteora nodded meekly and let him lead her towards the back.

Sometime later Meteora found herself huddled at one end of his couch wearing an oversized ninja t-shirt and a pair of drawstring shorts that were loose even with the strings drawn all the way. Marco sat at the other end. They had been that way for a while, silent except for right when they’d sat down and he’d said to just ask and he’d do whatever she needed him to. She didn’t have any conscious plan to ask him for anything. She didn’t even have a conscious reason for being there, it had simply been where’d she decided to go. But suddenly, even surprising herself a bit, it started to come out.

“My life was planned out for me since Mewni became part of Earth,” she started. “Except for when I get to have a baby.”

“Ok…”

“So I was going to do it,” she continued. “Invitro and all that, because it’s my choice and it’s what I want.”

“Well I guess that’s ni–”

“But because I’m half-monster they say they can’t.” Her eyes started to well. “That something about the way I am makes it too dangerous. That the only way I could ever be a mother would be…the natural way.” The tears were rolling now. “But I’ve never felt…that way about anyone. So what am I supposed to do? I’m too much of a freak to get what I wanted and I just…I just–”

Marco stood without warning. He made his way towards the kitchen, where Meteora could hear the fridge and some drawers open and then close in succession. He returned with a six-pack of bottles and pile of old-timey VHS tapes.

“Look Meteora,” he said as he put the bottles down on the small coffee table and started shuffling through the tapes, “the last time anything bad happened to me I pushed everyone that cared about me away. And well, that’s probably not going to help you right now. So instead of trying to make you feel better, we’re going to play a little game that used to help me forget about stuff.”

He slipped one of the tapes into the VHS below the tv and hit play. The tv roared to life with an off-color title screen that loudly stated, “Fist of the Fist!”

“This,” Marco said as he sat back down and started divvying up the bottles between them, “is an early Mackie Hand movie, before he even learned English. The rules of the game are simple, take a sip anytime someone acts like they were hit but obviously weren’t, anytime the dubbing is obviously off, and anytime someone shouts an attack name.”

Meteora looked at the bottle he handed her, and then at him. “And this is supposed to help me?”

“It’s supposed to make you feel less bad,” he replied. “Actual help can start tomorrow.”

The title screen faded and a man sitting at a bar came into focus. Another man approached him and put a hand on the first’s shoulder. Their eyes met and an American voice yelled, “Time to die, Mackie Hand!” while the man’s actual mouth calmly said something completely different.

Meteora almost laughed, then joined Marco in taking her first sip.

[simtrospective]

congratulations on your follower mile stone! I only recently started following your blog but I love that you share your thought process behind your sims and your posts. I really enjoy reading them! can I hear more about your inspiration to do a historical-vintage blog? what are your favorite time periods to recreate with the sims and why?

Thank you so much @wirefiish!

First, a little tangent: I started playing this series 20 years ago. There have been some gap years since then: my computer couldn’t handle TS3 when it came out so I only notched a few hours of total play time before sticking with TS2; I’d heard bad things about TS4 and myself wasn’t wowed by the base game so I put it aside for a long while. I’ve never had a simblr before this year (I started one in March, almost immediately deleted it, and then resurrected this account in May after someone on reddit asked me for a download + CC list of a sim I’d shared there; I needed somewhere to put all that info and so…). I never had any account for simming no matter which platform was popular: no Livejournal account, nor a Dreamwidth account, nor a GoS account, nor an MTS account, on and on and on. I only ever lurked the community though I felt like I knew everyone in it! But this year, I wanted to keep track of other simmers on tumblr who I liked, and I needed a quarantine distraction from work + panic, and so here I am. Operating this account has been an exercise, too, in managing myself and self-esteem: not letting myself fall into some of my kneejerk behaviors like trying to please others, apologizing (for nothing; for “me”), putting myself down, comparing myself to other people who I imagine are all perfect and talented and objectively better. My inclination, when I write wordy posts or give “too much information” about my sims is to delete and keep it simple, and that certainly gets me more notes, but… this is who I am. Not that it’s that deep! But it’s good to have perspective and behave accordingly: it’s just a blog with pictures of sims. It’s just a game. I felt like writing, it’s my little blog, who cares? I’m not doing it for notes or likes or whatever. What do I have to apologize for? What do I have to fix?

All this to say thank you that you are enjoying reading about my process. I enjoy writing about my process, whether mundane or not. I enjoy treating this blog like a blog when I feel called to do so.

Now, to your questions!

Can I hear more about your inspiration to do a historical-vintage blog? 

Sure! 

If you’d like to read more about my save and my plans for it, I have a link to that featured in my navigation menu. It is HERE for any and all who are interested and includes references and pictures I’m hoping to use as inspiration for world-building and character creation.

Basically, why I’m doing this is very simple: I like old stuff. I like vintage stuff. I like retro stuff. I love old photographs, old furniture, old music, old clothes, old movies. I love references and inspirations and art. I hate the internet. I hate my sims taking out their phones every two seconds and stuntin’ for the ‘gram and whatever else. I am forced to use too much internet and social media at work but in real life I have this blog and a neglected Pinterest account and a neglected reddit account and that is it and that has always been it, with the tumblr and reddit accounts only begun this calendar year. I’m not a luddite; I mindlessly scroll more than I should and I have favorite Vines (RIP) just like the other girls and how else can I stuff my game with CC if not over WiFi, but really, there’s so much of the *NOW* in TS4 that takes me out of and away from what I love about this series because it’s so invasive. This is where I could go on another tangent about how--through what EA, et al purports is endless gameplay possibilities--TS4 actually gives us less choice when it comes to overall gameplay but that is not the question I’m answering.

Beyond wanting to return my sims to a simpler time in terms of technology and their personal interactions, I’m totally doing it for the aesthetic. If I had my way, if I could choose the world’s aesthetic, the world’s advances in terms of, again, the technology in our pockets, it would span between 1920 and, like, 1995 and how exciting that I actually can build a little world that does just that. I can dress my little dolls exactly how I want and make some of them use the washboard! I can’t curate planet earth but I can make damn sure that all the teenage girls in Brindleton Bay wear circle skirts to the diner.

Also, related to doing whatever I want, I get to have the things I love, the world and gameplay I love but apply more progressive values to it. Yes, all the teenage girls in Brindleton Bay wear circle skirts to the diner but the teenage girl who prefers to wear a mechanic’s jumpsuit isn’t going to be looked at askance or be isolated or teased or made to conform or beat up or, best case scenario, need to shoulder the burden of trailblazer or need to shoulder the burden of being The Girl Who Wears A Mechanic’s Jumpsuit even if everyone thinks it’s cool, she’s just… herself. And yes, the world looks like 1955 but it isn’t 1955, or, it’s a parallel 1955. This girl wears a jumpsuit but her girlfriend wears a circle skirt and none of my sims bat an eye.

I also love, love, love looking at other simmers’ historical stories and gameplay. They’re consistently so clever with both CC and in-game content that it’s impossible not to be inspired, and that got my wheels turning.

And, lastly, I’m a CC addict. Limiting my aesthetic and applying rules to my save goes a long way to cull my collection and to keep me from going on a tear that might make my computer explode. It’s much easier for me to delete a bunch of dresses that aren’t appropriate for the parameters of my game than to delete a bunch of dresses because I “should,” because I have “too much stuff.”

What are your favorite time periods to recreate with the sims and why?

I’m partial to the 1950s because it is the easiest. It seems that so many creators make a lot of content that--even if it’s only described as “vintage”--is from the 50s. I mentioned circle skirts above. How many times have I done a broad search for vintage or retro and got circle skirts back? The 1950s isn’t my favorite time period, though; again, it’s just so easy to recreate. Lately I’ve enjoyed making a range of 70s sims and hope I can find a home for them all. I like, too, trying to fit content that I don’t usually use or which I think I don’t like into my version of a particular decade’s or era’s look because it often changes my opinion of the content (especially non-CC) so that I see it with new eyes/better appreciate it, and this practice helps me to hone my abilities and increase my comfort and familiarity with whatever time period I’m working with.

In real life, although I had a long art deco phase, my absolute favorite design aesthetic is mid-century modern. I’ve always loved it, and that love intensified and deepened a few years ago when I started writing my novel--not to sound like a jerk, but it’s true!--which is set in the mid-to-late 1960s. I started doing research and putting together inspiration boards which included, in part, house plans and interior design and for my tastes, I’m sorry, mcm just cannot be beat. I cannot get enough! TS4’s art style is so complementary to the mcm aesthetic that it’s impossible not to fall in love with how it looks in the game, whether it’s CC or not, so that’s my favorite in-game decorative period.

When it comes to clothing and fashion, I have a little bit that I like from every era, really, but if we’re speaking generally and I’m being forced to choose, I (think I) like best male/masculine looks and styling from the 1950s to about… 1963? 1965?, although I prefer a slimmer cut to the suits and pants; and feminine/female looks and styling from the 1930s and 1970s. I perceive a similar combined sensuality, ease, and sportiness in the 30s and 70s silhouettes as well as the prevailing attitudes and approach to fashion that speaks to me. I just love it--but I need more of it for my sims, so I can’t say it’s necessarily my favorite to try and recreate. Yet, anyway.

Thank you again for this question and thank you to all who read this entire answer!

[asking-jude]

Hi! I’m a girl who’s going into high school, and recently I have been questioning my sexuality. I feel like I am bisexual, because I can see myself dating a boy, but I can imagine myself dating a girl as well. I’m really confused. Any advice?

Hello, bi woman here. Yup, that sounds pretty bi to me. You’re attracted to at least two genders, so that’s pretty bi. What’s got you confused? Are you wondering if you’re “queer enough?” or “bi enough?” Been there, done that, got the t-shirt. There is no “right” way to be queer or bi. You don’t have to like Doc Martens, cuffed jeans, lemon bars, finger guns or peace signs, sitting weirdly, etc. (Okay that’s just me trying to be funny because those are elements of bi culture). But seriously, your attractions do not have to be perfectly the same all the time; you do not have to be perfectly 50/50 between genders. 

Being bi means making peace with something known as the bi cycle. It’s a way of saying that your attraction to people can shift overtime. In your case, some days, boys will stand out to you more, and other days, girls will. None of this should ever make you feel like you’ll automatically cheat on a partner or lose attraction to them or anything like that; it doesn’t work like that. Your orientation is inherently more fluid than others’; it will take time to learn how to navigate.

Here are a couple of threads that explain it more:

https://www.reddit.com/r/bisexual/comments/608dfm/whats_this_bicycle_people_keep_referring_to/

https://www.reddit.com/r/bisexual/comments/3fyw00/the_term_bicycle_is_friggin_great/

I also highly recommend Reddit’s /r/BisexualTeens group because it’s meant for people in your age group. I’ll be honest, I can’t help but be a tiny bit envious because I didn’t even entertain the possibility that I wasn’t straight until I was in college. But maybe that was for the best; it seems young people have an easier time figuring this stuff out and coming out than my age group did.

I highly recommend seeking out more bi-focused groups on social media because they helped me a lot when I was figuring myself out. It took me a few years to comfortably say I’m bi, so give yourself time to figure things out and grow into it. You don’t have to come out right now if you don’t feel safe or ready; you can take your time. 

I have a bi pride colored bracelet that I wear every day. I also have a cute corgi bi pin on my tote bag that I bring to work with me. It’s handy for coming out to people or making them feel safe around me! I even have a bi-colored butterfly above my bed. Maybe you can collect some cute bi pride attire or decorations. 

Please feel free to reach out again if you have any other questions. I’d be more than happy to keep helping! 

Finger-guns and bi puns,

Angelica Barile

Asking Jude will continue to offer free peer counselling services on askingjude.org—a faster, more efficient alternative to Tumblr. Please, create your account and receive 24/7 support from the Asking Jude Team and fellow community members. Support our breathtaking transformation!

[bearpillowmonster]

Persona 5 Review (Palaces)

Now I think it’s be interesting to split up each villain and review their arcs. First is Kamoshida, I like the layout of his palace. Sneaking along the walls and such and they really give you the drive to get rid of him. This is one of the only ones I actually got all the will seeds, I found that you only get the accessory if you collect the three, I don’t think there’s any bonus for collecting ALL of them from ALL the palaces though.

After that, they introduce something called Mementos which is basically everybody’s palace, a compilative place of where small distortions go that aren’t big enough for their own palace. This is kind of used for side missions, it’s not that bad though, the dark sections can be annoying but I see why they were put in there. You visit it throughout the game and after each boss, a new section gets added, going farther down. This is also one of the places to grind and a quick way to grind is to mow down enemies with your van using the dash button, rather than going through the trouble of battling, you even get their mask. That’s only if they’re not too far down though because the farther down you go, the tougher the enemies. It’s funny because once you get tough enough, going to the higher entrances, making enemies RUN from you while you’re mowing them down, it’s a blast. I will recommend though that you don’t piss off too many and get alarmed because they’ll come in waves, one battle after another and if you’re deep in Mementos, it can be scary.

Next is Madarame, I like the setting of a museum and the boss (better than Kamo) but I will also say that it was annoying to traverse, it built upon the urgency by adding legal action into the mix. This is probably in my top 3 palaces, I just don’t have a whole lot to say about it.

Kaneshiro (sounds like Kamoshida) I feel like his character is very one way, an easy prey, I’m fine with that but I’m just saying that the depth was better for the previous two. The boss isn’t exactly my favorite, it’s a little different between 5 and Royal so I looked it up and am accounting for both of them. I do however like the style of the bank and the vault is one giant lock, the enemies are probably some of the most annoying though with the introduction of the dogs.

Alibaba. Now this palace is actually pretty cool because it changes the context and way you do things, again with the real life interference as well. What I really like are the little hieroglyphics puzzles at the end of each section, those things are my jam but while I appreciate the variety and setup, this was one of the weaker palaces. The boss was weak as well, more of just a sponge unless I didn’t play it right (maybe I was underleveled? I mean I don’t think I even died tbh though) because it was really cool when you used the arrows but really dragging when she was in the air.

I will say that I took a break after this arc (about 35-40 hours in) not because I was tired of it, far from it actually, I was having tons of fun but traversing the palaces just seemed off to me at this point so I thought if I took a break and got a fresh perspective when I came back, it would be better. It was hard to detach myself from it because I really enjoyed what I had played thus far but it felt good to get back into the groove of it after a break. This was both a good place to take the break given the hours spent and what the next palace is, and kind of a weird place because after Alibaba you take the field trip but I would still recommend you take a decent break at some point because...

The next palace is Okumura. Now I’ve seen some flack about this one, saying it’s the least favorite of the bunch, so you don’t want to have the previous build up of hours hamper your experience since it’s considered the worse. Honestly I don’t think it’s that bad (the palace!) now the boss on the other hand is a different story, I understand that a CEO is only as good as their employees and the idea to use them is pretty reflective of the palace itself but it’s annoying because if you don’t have the right type of persona then you’re screwed because they just flee or blow themselves up, it’s just left to chance sometimes. I think it would be cool to have a race against him with the timer rather than a battle. It made me so stressed, not because of the timer but because of the stupid robots, it was easily the battle I spent the most tries on, I even had to go back and grind and fuse a new persona to finally beat him. (I was almost level 40 so you might have an easier time if you did more persona work than I did) but you don’t get any All Out Attacks either apparently. Also the story (though a bit nit picky) is easy to complain about but it’s not as bad as they say imo especially since the characters explain themselves afterwards.

Casino Master. This was probably the only spoiler I got for this game but I feel I would’ve figured it out anyway and it didn’t even turn out to be that big of a spoiler. Also the addition of the “Crow” should’ve been the “Raven” as an Edgar Allen Poe reference, it would’ve fit the character better in my opinion. I don’t like that they use the same card mechanic from the last palace, it makes more sense with this one but still. There’s an enemy in this palace that was bugged for my play through and it was only that specific enemy whenever I encountered them, it would say something like “it’s groaning” (which it sometimes does with enemies such as Regent) but for this one it just kept doing it and would get stuck, I just had to button mash a bit and then they would attack normally but just a small stain I’ll point out, easily patchable I’m sure. As for the story, I’m not quite sure what makes the palace in the first place, what is the distortion exactly? Other than that, another in the top 3.

The boss is actually kind of cool, in a way it’s the opposite of Okumura but an actual boss instead of enemies. It’s probably my favorite because of the design and style. I’m not done yet but honestly when I got about 1/3 of the way through this game, I thought it was a 5/5 but I re-evaluated and the one thing that I want is a bit of gameplay variety even if it’s just the bosses. I’ve talked about this before but it makes everything feel samey and while I know more or less all turn based RPGs are guilty of the same thing (so I can’t really hold that against this game) this one just seems so different. It doesn’t wear itself out, for turn based, it’s not so bad but it just leaves you desiring one extra step, an extra something everytime to say “This is the fourth-fifth-sixth boss!” rather than just chip damage with no weaknesses, some kind of reward for playing the way you do perhaps.

Armstrong from MGS Rising (yeah I didn’t have a codename for this one). I really like the setup, probably the best palace to be honest, in a way it’s sort of a compilation. I could see where people could complain about it even if I haven’t seen anything. This palace also has the best music, it’s very fitting and stylistic. There’s a little bit of a barrage of mini bosses throughout, I kind of like it but the last one before the big boss is tough because it’s 3 different sections, one after the other but it’s kind of a tease/warning to say “Are you really ready for the real boss? If you had trouble with this, then you’ll have trouble with him.” 

Let's talk about the final final boss (for what’s known as the ‘true’ ending route) because I apparently did the ‘true’ ending after looking into it, it doesn't matter who you picked for a romantic route, it matters what choices you made at certain points in the game, the ‘true’ ending is just the longest, there are different points in the game where it could end and be the other good/bad endings so yeah. Let me talk about it without spoiling anything, Notice I said ‘true’ with quotes. I'm going to summarize this reddit post I saw, justifying it, out of context. The boss is idolized, he's made by the people, he didn't make the people and because he's pretending, we were sent to destroy him. (In the grand scheme of things (story-wise)) because it bothers me that they make him out to be almighty. It is a persona and personas are figments of imagination, they're amalgamations of how the characters perceive their desire/distortion, not the real thing therefore it shouldn't be blasphemous right? That thin line is what's making me knock this game a little more because its material is so concerning. Also you’re stopping people from doing bad things, that’s ‘just’, correct? You’re defeating the seven sins, that’s ‘just’ (at least that’s what the will seeds are called). I guess they wanted to try and make it a true question “Are the Phantom Thieves ‘Just’?” They ask it over and over and in reality, I ask myself the same thing.

You can buy as seen on tv stuff, the big thing I’ll say helped me was the cleaning spray so snatch that up when it becomes available, I think it’s also available in Kichijoji but it lowers your enemy’s defense and I didn’t have that move for any of my characters. Make sure you have everything done that you want done by the time you reach the final date after sending the calling card and beat the boss such as confidants, a proper persona, side quests and a good amount of stat boosters and stuff. I can't say too many specifics on what to bring because you're going to play different than I did so just fill in the blanks, have cans of whatever you don't have as a move because it's going to be a stretch of fights and there really isn't room to turn back.

[awesomelephuoclocblog-blog]

Upreachr Review: make influencer traffic as straightforward as 3 ticks?

https://lephuocloc.com/upreachr-review/

Instagram, tiktok, youtube, twitter and reddit, there is alot of money to be made there. The issue regardless, is that it will really take you ages to collect a gigantic enough Following there, even with the best virtual items. Likewise, publicizing is expensive and perilous, especially in case you don't have a particularly Tested, capable and productive funnel.

Taking everything into account, shouldn't something be said about a third other option, which gets you traffic FAST, without past experience, And without catching fire every accessible asset? Propelled by? If without a doubt, by then you need to check my Upreachr Review underneath!

Upreachr Review Conclusion

What is Upreachr?

I love free traffic, yet truth be told, it's moderate, and I don't consider you, Out of the various courses and programming ventures I've bought that assurance free traffic on demand, NONE worked as ensured.

Truth be told, paid traffic is far undeniably continuously versatile, fulfilling and obvious. In any case, publicizing through online systems administration media is exorbitant and hazardous.

So let me ask you this, by what method may you like a secret traffic source, That gets you traffic from Instagram, tiktok, reddit, twitter and youtube, all the while, for a couple bux? Besides, a few quality snaps in your claim to fame. ALL captivated and hungry to get acquainted with your business.

Sounds fake, like a dream, right? Taking everything into account, while doubt is fine, what I have for you today, is 100% REAL, and as basic as 3 ticks. License me to Introduce, Upreachr.

This recently out of the plastic new programming finds, reaches and closes influencer deals in TikTok, instagram, YOUTUBE, twitter and reddit all the while, And gets you real centered around traffic FAST.

This is the ONLY programming that makes influencer traffic as straightforward as 3 ticks, Even in case you have NO past comprehension, And just a couple bux to spare. You'll have the alternative to get a few hundred ticks when by tomorrow.

Starting in the no so distant past, it was damn near hard to get influencers to propel your stuff, Why? Since there's so much work, disorder, peril and research to be done.

In any case, upreachr cuts through everything and licenses you in two or three snaps to have An influencer raising you to an enormous number of attracting people for just a couple bux. And all inside 1 dashboard.

So if you have to strike this example while the iron is hot, And get a few visitors when today, for as pitiful as a couple bux. Guarantee you take a gander at the accompanying bits of this Upreachr Review now before the cost increases:

Get Powerful Unlimited Targeted Traffic In Any Niche

Say goodbye to FB Ads, Google Ads and Other Paid Ads Methods that Waste Your Money Without Any Visible results

Get traffic like never before from TRUSTED sources – Tiktok, youtube, instagram, twitter, reddit and various other online life frameworks.

No random selling, this item finds and closes TARGETED influencers at any money related arrangement

Made For Beginners… No related information required. 3 phases is all things required to get the best idea of traffic with this in minutes.

Get Influencers to Promote your proposition to their gigantic 100k or 1million+ endorsers on YouTube, Instagram, Twitter, and High Traffic Blogs.

With Commercial License – Get Traffic for Others and Make Money. Get New Clients, Create their campaign from your dashboard, get them Traffic, and Charge Them One Time High Price or Monthly Recurring Fee.

CONS

I have not found any cons related sufficiency of this thing yet.

Upreachr Review Overview

Graph

Vendor Victory Akpos et al

Product Upreachr

Dispatch Date 2020-May-25

Dispatch Time 11:00 EDT

Front-End Price $37

Bonuses YES, HUGE BONUS

Refund YES, 30 Days Money-Back Guarantee

Thing Type Social Marketing

Support Effective Response

Official site Click here

Recommended Highly Recommended

Skill Level Needed All Levels

About Creator

Triumph Akpos

Triumph Akpos is a striking web business visionary and raving success programming thing creator. He is a productive online sponsor similarly as programming creator. His gathering has made an enormous number of dollars in arrangements, and they are known for their evident expertise.

A bit of his things has been a remarkable help to me and various promoters including Targeting Academy, Influencers Hub, etc. All of them are especially esteemed by various masters on the planet. By and by, we should look at the accompanying bit of this Upreachr Review and find its features!

Key Features

Upreachr is a cloud based programming which suggests there's nothing to present, you can essentially sign into the item, and start getting traffic. Getting traffic with Upreachr works in 3 phases:

Step #1 – Find

Find influencers in ANY Niche who are INTERESTED in paid headways, pick your monetary arrangement (even several dollars is adequate to get some traffic) and select from a once-over of an enormous number of influencers in your picked internet organizing framework!

Step #2 – Reach

Select a configuration from our showed to change over formats, occupy in the spaces and send them a message! The item will thus get their contact information.

Step #3 – Close

The item will right now do it's charm in talking with them, you essentially occupy in the spaces of your offer and voila, inside hours you can have real traffic coming to you even on a tight spending arrangement!

This is the thing that upreachr can do in nuances:

Search from in excess of 1,000,000 electronic long range interpersonal communication accounts from a fantastic, reliably reviving database.

Search in TikTok, Instagram, Youtube, Reddit, Blogs and Tumblr!

Moved channels, for instance, bio portrayal, profile type, # of disciples, responsibility rate, geo zones, spending plan and progressively understood to let you get the best influencers for your monetary arrangement, strength and duty.

Make 30 Automation Campaigns Per Month (Get Traffic EVERY DAY!)

Investigate an arrangement of targets to propel, site traffic, advance thing, organization, event or application, upreachr will recommend the best influencers for you.

Full DEEP after direct assessment and effectively facilitate with facebook pixels and google examination in 1 snap.

See all your influencer responses in 1 dashboard portion called DEALS, this causes you track new alerts and not become stirred up in the expanse of messages!

Optional coordination with your own email expert association (SMTP) so you can email influencers through your own server and look dynamically capable, it's your choice in any case, you can use our own as standard.

We ought to research the nuances of what you will get today:

World's Smartest Traffic Software (100% Controlled) In One Time Price (Never Done before by Anyone)

Unlimited Traffic from Top Influencers In Any Niche

Find Influencers with a large number of fan on Instagram, YouTube, Twitter, and High Traffic Blogs

Find Influencers reliant on Keywords

Find Influencers using least, and most noteworthy followers segment

Find Influencers reliant on Niche

Find Influencers reliant on Country

Find Influencers having High Traffic Blogs reliant on Alexa Rank, Country Rank, and Load Time

Send Email to the Influencer instantly on their Email ID

Send singular message or mail to the Influencer immediately

Check all the saved Influencers in My Influencers Section

View Detailed Information of each Influencer to get an idea of advantage

Make, and manage Campaigns to send Traffic Anywhere

Set and Save Your Bulk Messages as Templates to re-utilize again

Set Contract with data like Traffic Destination URL, Your Budget for Influencer, Campaign Task, and Details

Send Professional Proposal Contracts to all the concentrated on Influencers

Fights Detailed Analytics to find champ campaigns

Set Tracking by entering your google examination or Facebook pixel code.

Ultra-Fast 24*7 Dedicated Support

Standard Monthly Updates

Complete Step-by-Step Video getting ready and instructional activities Included

Novice Friendly and Fully Cloud-Based Software

PREMIUM SUPPORT: Response in 60 minutes

Extraordinary Launch Period Offer – Expires In Next 5 Days Forever

Get Upreachr, Sit, Relax and Allow Us to Find Best Influencers for your first campaign

Let us Kickstart your traffic train for 400% Times More Profits.

Our Beta Users Are Making $5000-$10,000 Every Week Using Upreachr Commercial License

Basically, You can get money additionally by getting traffic for others

Get New Clients, Create their fight from your dashboard, get them traffic, and Charge Them One Time High Price or Monthly Recurring Fee

World's Smartest "Traffic" Software

Veritable Upreachr Review: Is it worth your money?

While the feature of this Upreachr Review is somewhat thrilling, I figure you would agree with what I'm going to state… Most virtual items that assurance traffic, don't generally pass on traff

https://lephuocloc.com/upreachr-review/

https://lephuocloc.com/

[douchebagbrainwaves]

I'VE BEEN PONDERING PROBLEM

But by Galileo's time the church was in the throes of the Counter-Reformation and was much more worried about unorthodox ideas. The situation now is like it was with crack in the 1980s: we've invented terribly addictive new things, and we needed to buy time to fix it. So long as you were careful not to get sucked permanently into consulting, this could cause some friction. That makes it more persuasive to people who like unions, because it changes too fast for that to be possible for several people to work for a company they have qualms about. The hackers who become famous tend to become famous by random accidents of PR. Fit meetings with investors into the spare moments in your development schedule, rather than dutifully in scheduled little slices. Even if you're designing something for the most sophisticated users, though, that all other things being equal, a company has to be under the control of a single person to be any less committed to the business.

The situation is different in phase 1, which should be no more than a startup that seems like it's going to be than the worst? I feel obliged at least to try. Did we actually dress like that? All right, you bastards, bring it on. The best way to force them to act is, of course, but that's not the limiting factor on the number of officially sanctioned projects that manage to do all eight things wrong. You just can't expend any attention on it. This apparently random collection of annoying habits has a single explanation: the power of their brand, but the dumb joke. The most dangerous form of stupid comment is not the main thing they want. If you're experienced at negotiations, you already know most of what you need to raise. The reason there's a convention of being ingratiating in print that are not only new, but it has to be finite, and the headline read, I think, is that one of the biggest unexploited opportunities in startup investing right now is angel-sized investments made quickly. For example, I've written a few macro-defining macros full of nested backquotes that look now like little gems, but writing them took hours of the ugliest trial and error, and frankly, I'm still not entirely sure they're correct.

And since I know from my own experience that the rule against buying stock from founders is a stupid one, this is actually good news for investors, and negotiating with them. Typefaces to be cut in metal were initially designed with a brush on paper. Redesigning code with several authors is like changing laws; redesigning code you alone control is like seeing the other interpretation of an ambiguous image. An angel round is not an all or nothing thing like a series A, there's obviously an exception if you end up raising a series A will emerge out of those conversations, and these rules even cover what to do if you're not a hacker, you can't say. That makes it more persuasive to people who like unions, because it doesn't feel like procrastination. And I was a Reddit user when the opposite happened there, and the terms end up being whatever the lawyer considers vanilla. So we've probably only discovered a fraction of what we eventually will. But there is another set of customs for being ingratiating in print that are not only new, but actually worth solving. It wouldn't work otherwise. Most startups operate close to the limits of your capacity. And surprisingly often they succeed. The top 10 startups account for 8.

When you're young, especially, you often find yourself working on stuff you don't really like—because it seems impressive, for example, is a pruned version of a tree that in the early 1980s, when companies like VisiCorp showed that although the words software and publisher fit together, the underlying concepts don't. At the start of a project, because initially the most important skills founders need to learn. This technique won't find us all the answers, though. It's only by looking from a distance. In that situation, even the CEO. C, Lisp, and Smalltalk were created for other people to use. In fact, you can't tell a great hacker, the way to the bed and breakfast market. In every period of history, the answer is no, you might want to stop and take a rest? That's a problem, because that means we're going to have to be inferior people. I notice something surprising, it's usually very faint at first.

And if trouble with investors is probably to partition the company: have the smart people work as toolmakers. In the best case, though. I asked. Proposals to paint anything yellow are denounced as yellowist, as is anyone suspected of liking the color. You can also get intros from other people. Plus series A terms usually give the investors a veto over various kinds of important decisions, including selling the company. I make a new version almost every day that I release to beta users.

I've used both these excuses at one time or another. Deal terms with angels vary a lot. Maybe the solution is to talk to the other. But there is a Michael Jordan of hacking, no one knows, including him. But in writing and painting they're mostly internal; the obstacle is your own obtuseness. To the extent that valuations are being driven up by price-insensitive VCs, they'll fall again if VCs become more like super-angels are looking for investors you want to grab coffee, for example, all other things being equal, a company has to be under the control of a single person to be any good. Nearly all investors, including all VCs I know, one thing they mentioned was curiosity.

What are conventional-minded people afraid of saying? And while most investors are influenced by how interested other investors are all subject to the same forces. The best way to begin may not be quite as smart or as well connected as angels or venture firms; and they may not always be. All the great hackers I know despise them. Reality can be messier. While writing the prototype, the group has been traversing their network of friends in search of angel investors. Often they are, they're not powerful enough to turn back the evolution of technology. So VCs who invest in angel rounds—partly because they deliberately mislead you. Assume the money you need, you can at least take comfort in the thought that the same thing happened at Google. In the startup world.

[gizmotron]

AC0/RD Digest & our network ambitions

Something that’s been needed for a long time is a reliable network digest for our users and subscribers. I’ve used Wordpress.org for the longest time (almost 4 years, in fact) as the HQ for our community site, however I’ve started to use Git and static sites as the new skeleton for the AC0/RD Network. In today’s post, I’m going to talk about what happened to the old portal, why Github alone isn’t good enough for what we are doing, and also about what the actual title of the post suggests: our email subscription service.

Grab yourself a tasty beverage and snack, because this is going to be a slightly longer post than usual...

Rest in peace Portal #1 - 2016-20

Thanks to AC0RD’s first sponsor, Sean Firth, I got into the Wordpress.org community when I was only 13, and to this day I am still an everyday user of the popular CMS. I used Wordpress to create what was known as the “Portal” for AC0RD, which had the following features:

A blog

A database - for all the data collected by our bots & software

A forums & community section - where our members could talk about anything and everything, regardless of whether it was directly related to AC0RD or not, as well as the projects that we are/were working on

A media section (with groups & user profiles ^^)

Project management

Community growth

Over the years, I had about 10 members (Nicholas Antipas, Josh Richards, Sean, etc) contribute small bits of data and helpful stuff to the portal, but mostly it was a one-man-band. I was the singer, the guitarist, the drummer, and the roadie. Almost all of the forum posts I did myself, and the site was sort of like a large notebook, where only I contributed stuff to.

I told myself that this would only be temporary, and that it would be good for documentation (SDLC) purposes (to an extent, this is roughly the same situation now - except each post is being read by a few people, the repositories on Git & the new portal are getting edited by more people. It’s a start). But as the months stretched into years, I couldn’t help feeling disappointed about the lack of community growth. I’d thrown almost every bit of my spare time into this project, and it led to a lot of sleepless nights (not to mention every time I screwed up something on the site, like the dreaded white screen of death. I often joke that 99% of my PHP knowledge comes from reading those error messages).

This is why that when the first iteration (technically the second iteration, however the real original only lasted <72 hours before I broke it - in my defense I was VERY new to WP) bit the dust, after the initial shock, tears and screams I took a few deep breaths and decided that I would live with it. 

The portal had become a wasteland, a barren wild wild west that only had 1 person as far as the eyes could see. Every now and again you’d see signs of a skeleton that still had some flesh, but those sights were rapidly being swallowed up by the growing chasm of self-doubt and despair that accumulated over my 3.5 years as the maintainer.

I talked about this to my mentor Nick, and we both agreed that maybe it was for the better. While I had recent backups of the old portal, maybe it was better for us to just make those backups open-source and create a fresh portal. This way, the documentation would still exist (it would just be less easy to navigate), but we’d have the advantage of a fresh start, and all in all a better springboard for leaping into the pool of software development. I set up a new installation of Wordpress with hostgator and that was that. 

With the recent influx of members - Rishabh Chakrabanty, Basanta Kandel, Dylan Vekaria and so many others (thanks largely to the Facebook post we did on our page), we have a fledgling, but thriving, community on github, with projects being developed on git, discussed on slack & reddit, and shared on the website, with this being accumulated on the portal (for more information about this accumulation of data, I’d recommend checking out our post on dashboards: here: https://blog.acord.software/post/611809431430283264/html-dashboards-for-administration). 

The old portal will live forever in my - and our - memories, and in our open-source database, but I look to the future, and this is the way it will be.

Why Github isn’t enough

Github is great for software development, especially collaborative open-source work. But when you want to build a community around your company (especially when a huge amount of your community won’t have, or want, github accounts), you need something else.

Wordpress is great, because with plugins like buddypress you can create social networks like Facebook on a smaller scale for your club/organisation (again, I’d recommend checking out another one of our posts about social network construction here: https://blog.acord.software/post/611414544827432960/constructing-a-social-network). 

I’m a big sucker for integrations between our services (for a list of services that we use, check out this page on our Stellarios documentation: https://acord.software/stellarios/hydejack/2020-01-25-integrations/). Github is great, because you can connect your various online accounts to it with services like Zapier or Integromat. To get my dream network, we’re going to have to use services like those.

AC0/RD Members Digest

I’d hazard a guess that you’re part of a number of online communities. Wouldn’t it be great to have the latest notifications and news delivered daily, weekly or monthly for all those communities?

Buddypress (thanks to plugins available on wordpress.org) has had this kind of feature - email subscriptions - for a while. What I wanted when I started this project was a perfect amalgamation between our awesome online communities - Reddit, the Portal, Github, Facebook, etc. While we could implement some sort of system that would send an email from Facebook, an email from Reddit, etc, for the digest (so that you’d be burdened with 5 emails everytime you get a digest), I thought of something a bit different. 

The ideal scenario would be to be able to link your Portal (wordpress) account with the online services/websites mentioned above ^^, and for the content that is relevant to your account (i.e. from your friends or groups) to be emailed to you, as well as site-wide notices. Unfortunately, the closest you can get to this at the moment is to share a link to your social media profiles on your Wordpress profile. Obviously, this won’t do.

Over the last 24 hours, I’ve been thinking: how do we create a network digest? 

What we will be doing is we’ll create weekly posts on the new AC0/RD Portal, which will have the latest content from our online profiles. You’d then be able to sort through these, and as you’re logged into those accounts, be able to find what’s relevant to you easily. This post can then be sent to your email, and can work in with integrations like Gamipress.

Of course, we can also easily set up automatic post systems (for the forums WITHIN groups on the portal) that would then be sent into your newsfeed. Both of these solutions would work well, and we’ll be working on ways to implement them as best as we can very soon.

<3

Limo

[arcticdementor]

Scott Alexander argued for Kolmogorov complicity - in short, to quietly shut up and let the crazies take over while you go off and do your work in areas the crazies aren't attacking. This is one of the last few interesting articles he wrote about politics and the "culture war" before banning the subject from his site and subreddit for fear of his career after being repeatedly doxxed and threatened by SJW activists.

Unfortunately, as we've seen, there is nothing the crazies won't attack and attempt to take over. Universities, Silicon Valley, Hollywood, comic books, video games, science fiction, you name it. Kolmogorov complicity is not an option. And frankly, Kolmogorov wasn't some honorable man who simply nodded along with the Communists while turning away to do his real work in mathematics - he cooperated with the Soviets in driving their political opponents out of mathematics. That's not defensible.

…

So, you're tired of tech companies censoring the Internet and SJWs ruining everything? Don't just roll over and let them win, but fight back - but fight back smartly, without putting yourself at risk. Instead of becoming complicit, become a spy. That's the core of my thesis.

…

Most of this is informed by my background in the tech industry, but some of it may be applicable to other industries, in particular individuals in large public companies and public universities. In addition, any of this which talks about legal remedies is going to be primarily centered on the United States, though you may have similar legal remedies elsewhere in the world. Please note that I am not a lawyer, and if you are in a position where you need a lawyer, you should talk to a real lawyer instead of taking advice from the Internet.

Just one thing first and foremost - if you can avoid it, never sign an arbitration agreement.

…

From now on, you're not fighting them in the open. Forget the "marketplace of ideas" - you're a spy. Except instead of being paid off by a country or an industrial competitor, you're in it to fight a war for freedom of speech within Western society. It's tragic that it's come to this, but that's the state of affairs that we find ourselves in.

So, how do you go about this? There are two things to keep track of: illegal actions, and political activity; and two classes of action: company policy, and people advocating for these things. Any way you slice it, you've got to collect the information, exfiltrate it safely, and sit on it until it's time to expose them. Anything that's embarrassing for the company, anything that's illegal, any individual that's getting away with stuff that you wouldn't be able to? Save it for posterity.

…

You must save this stuff on a medium that is not under corporate control. Not only do you not want to lose access of the data when you inevitably leave the company, you need to have control over the stuff you're planning on leaking in a way that they can't track. Don't sit there and email screenshots from your work email to your personal email. That's stupid. Don't save it to your work computer and then try to plug in a USB stick and transfer it off, either. That's trivial for corporate IT to detect these days. Most of the megacorps have very locked down computers and will flag that kind of thing immediately. Don't think "oh well I'll just turn the wifi off and do it" either, they'll send the alert as soon as you connect again.

The safest thing I've come up with is to have a camera (or cameraphone) that is in no way associated with work (don't use the phone that has your company's security app on it!), and take pictures of the screen of your laptop. Most of these companies let employees take laptops home. If you put your laptop on a table, prop your elbow up on a table, and get a good focus angle, it's possible to take pretty good pictures of the screen. Or get a tripod. Oh, and don't store these pictures on a cloud that's controlled by the company you work for. That one's kind of obvious, but if you work for Facebook and put all the pictures on Instagram... well, one day you just might find that you can't log into your account anymore and oh also you've got a meeting with HR on your calendar that day that you didn't know about. Funny thing, that... Don't be stupid. Like I said at the beginning, you're a spy. Keep the spy mindset.

Timing's key, too. Don't dump the data the day you post a 40,000 word manifesto on the company email server and quit. Revenge is a dish best served cold, and your goal is to be anonymous. SJWs want to virtue signal and get credit for being the wokest person on the planet; your goal is to expose them without anyone knowing you did it.

…

If you are trying to bring legal action against the company, the first thing to remember is that you must have "standing". This means you have to be able to demonstrate to a court that you were directly harmed by a particular action. It's going to be very hard for you to do this even if the company is actively discriminating against your ethnic or racial group. (For example, if they're discriminating against white men, and you're a white man who got hired, you weren't "discriminated against" in the hiring process - going to be hard for you to win that case, obviously; and it's close to impossible for you to ever win a case that you didn't get a promotion you deserved because they can always just say "well we promoted someone else who was qualified".) As you can see from the Damore lawsuit, this is time-consuming, requires a ton of money for lawyers, and you may end up in front of some SJW judge or someone who's paid off by the company you're suing.

…

Alternatively, you can go after them in the media. As we know, most of the mainstream media is covering for these bastards, so you're forced to turn to the partisans like Breitbart Tech or maybe the weirdos with principles like Glenn Greenwald. If it's your first time talking to the reporters, you'll probably want to go in anonymously - make a new protonmail account, use Telegram, that kind of thing. They may require you to show proof that you really do work for the company before you can convince them; at that point you're just going to have to decide whether or not you trust them.

If you really can't get ahold of anyone in the media, consider just dumping it on the internet. Of course reddit bans doxing, but there are websites that don't. Just make sure you're doing it from an IP that can't be tracked back to you - if you're going to dump it all on the internet, do it from free wifi somewhere, use a VPN, etc. Don't do it from your home internet from the same IP address you log in from. You don't want that information getting back to you.

And it goes without saying - keep your fucking mouth shut. Don't start going "oh man did you see those leaks on the internet yesterday" and getting into arguments about it. If it explodes and goes viral there will inevitably be water cooler talk about it; stick to the safe stuff: "Never say anything you wouldn't want on the New York Times front page", "If they catch the guy he's going to be fired so fast it'll make his head spin", that kind of thing.

…

So, you run your own business and want to safeguard it against SJW takeover?

You want to do all the same checking up on your potential employees that you would in the above case, but it actually gets harder for you here, because you are going to be required to maintain some sort of reasonable race/gender balance, particularly if your company grows. If you're consistently turning away SJWs more than likely a number of them will be women, and they'll try to hit you for not hiring "enough" women. Especially if you're in a field which is predominantly male, this kind of lawsuit can be extremely difficult to fight off. The best defense may be to flip the numbers around - interview and turn down a large number of men specifically so that you can claim that you're hiring a higher percentage of women who interview than you do men who interview.

…

You might see groups pop up at larger companies that are semi-political or appear that they offer some opposition to the SJW hivemind. It's tempting to link up with like-minded individuals, but it's best not to be active in those groups. If you're vocal in those groups, it effectively paints a target on your back. Keep your mouth shut and blend in. Stick to work at work, leave your politics at home, and fight the battle in secret.

[barpurplewrites]

Keep an open mind - Chapter 3

Previous chapters (HERE)

-x-x-x-

“Do you believe in ghosts?”

Belle nibbled her bottom lip as she set her pint down squarely on the coaster. She’d been expecting this question, so had given some thought to her answer.

“I used to, in the same way I used to believe in Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy. Ghosts are just another fairy tale.”

She’d been focused on her glass as she spoke, when she’d finished she looked up and caught a sad smile on Gold’s face. Was he judging her? No, it didn’t look like judgement, or pity, it was sadder, more personal. How odd.

Jefferson waved an expressive hand; “I take the role of Mulder in our little troop, but for magic not aliens, although I believe in them to, it would be the height of vanity to assume we are alone in the universe.”

Belle hadn’t expected anything less from Jefferson. She’d known him long enough to have heard his excited babbling about various unexplained phenomena.  

Ariel nudged her shoulder; “I’m a full-on season one Scully. The only things that go bump in the night are dodgy pipes, animals and other humans.”

That surprised Belle; her first impression of Ariel had been of a flighty and fanciful woman. Her skill with sound engineering had shown a strong practical streak, but Belle still would have expected her to believe in all this ghost stuff.

Gold sighed; “Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy are lies we tell children to make the world more magical. Ghosts are lies we tell ourselves to make the world less painful.”

His voice was steady, but the depth of emotion in his eyes was heart-breaking. Belle wanted to reach out and comfort him, but she resisted the instinct. She didn’t not know Gold well enough to know if her actions would be welcome, and she didn’t want to overstep on her first day on the job. There was a story behind his words, one that was clearly personal and painful.

Jefferson cleared his throat and said jovially; “Time for trampoline tennis.”

“What?”

Belle looked around the bar wondering what sort of crazy game that could possibly be. Ariel chuckled; “Don’t worry. It’s what we call bouncing ideas back and forth about the episode. Not sure when we started calling it that, but it’s stuck.”

The other three pulled out notebooks from pockets and bags. Belle felt awkward that she didn’t have anything on her, she’d not been warned about this. She was just about to say she’d run back to the motel when Gold slid a brand-new notebook and pen across the table to her. It was a handsome thing, black fake leather embossed with Bumps in the Night logo.

Gold shrugged; “Should have given you this this morning, to welcome you to the crew, but I forgot it along with my gloves.”

“Thank you.”

Belle was a compulsive notebook buyer. She had some lovely ones at home, far too many still unused to justify buying more, not that that ever stopped her. This one was more of a journal, or project book. The paper was a nice thickness, and lightly lined, ideal for making sketches and for taking notes. Pockets inside the covers allowed for the safekeeping of loose paper and there were dividers that could be repositioned. It was something she would have bought for herself.

Gold smiled at her obvious enjoyment of the notebook. He flipped to the back and showed her the printed pages tucked within the pocket there.

“Our most commonly used resources. We do have a few free lance researchers who help out from time to time, but we’re such a small crew that everyone needs to pitch in. I know the pay doesn’t reflect that, but we normally get a decent end of season ratings bonus.”

Belle nodded as she scanned the list. It wasn’t unusual on small productions for everyone to muck in. The experience was always helpful, and the promise of a bonus was a nice thing to look forward to. The list was a mix of normal web addresses for land registry, archives of old maps and ancestry records, then there were the odder items that she supposed she’d have to get used to in this job; Reddit and Tumblr accounts that focused on ghosts and the supernatural.

“With so much of this being on line I surprised you don’t just give us tablets.”

Ariel and Jefferson laughed. Gold rolled his eyes; “You’re not the first to suggest it. I’m old fashioned, I like writing things down.”

“That and he’s terrible for leaving chargers in motels.”

Gold laughed at Jefferson’s comment; “Aye there is that too.”

 They decided to order food before they got started on the trampoline tennis. There was some friendly bickering about pineapple and its place on pizza. Jefferson was dead against it, while Ariel and Belle were indifferent. Gold was for it, claiming that it was vaguely healthy. Food on the road frequently was deep fried, so getting fruit when you could wasn’t a bad idea. A quick look at the menu proved that salad wasn’t an option. Belle made a note to herself to pick up some apples from a grocery store tomorrow.

After everyone had had a slice or two Gold asked: “So, what do we think of our Hanging Figure?”

Jefferson flicked a piece of pineapple off his slice of pizza and shrugged; “I think this one is going to end up being something mundane.”

Gold wiped his mouth with a napkin; “I think you’re right. No deaths in the property, no missing people, nothing that would suggest a ghostly presence.”

“Not even a creepy feeling, just an empty house. Although I wish the owner had left the carpets in place, the echoes we’re getting from footsteps are annoying.”

The heels of Gold’s boots had caused Ariel some major sound problems. Viewers would never know that Gold had done most of the internal shots in his stocking feet. Belle had managed not to giggle at his ghost Pokémon socks, just.

Belle took her camera out of her bag and flicked through some of the photos she’d taken of the window. There was an outline there that looked like a head and torso hanging from a rope. It was visible from all the angles she’d been able to take a photo from, outside and inside. There was nothing on the glass that would rub off, that had been one of the first things Gold had tested. She dipped a pizza crust in the pot of sour cream and jotted down some ideas.

“What are you thinking Belle?”

As was typical of these things Gold asked his question just as Belle had taken a bite of pizza. She chewed and hurriedly swallowed almost choking herself in the process. Gold grimaced and handed her a glass of water.

“Sorry about that.”

She waved his apology away as she glugged the water down.

“No worries, it happens,” – she looked at her notebook, - “If the window hadn’t been replaced twice I’d say that there was a defect in the glass. Is it possible that this is some long running prank and the window fitter has deliberately put the outline there?”

Jefferson thumbed through his own notebook; “Possible, but the replacements were done by two different owners twenty years apart, both used different companies. Nah, I don’t see it. Besides where’s the money?”

Finding out who would profit from potential haunting was the best way to discover the truth. One of the episodes Belle had watched after she’d accepted the job had used this approach to uncover a brother attempting to scam his siblings out of their inheritance by claiming the house was haunted.

Gold tapped his own notebook and shook his head; “There’s nothing like that here. If anything, the previous owners have lost money because of that window, and the current owner is hoping that we find an ordinary explanation, so he can sell up.”

“Okay so that leaves us with damp, or maybe a structural defect in the window frame? Y’know causing the glass to warp?”

Belle felt her suggestions were weak, but everyone else nodded encouragingly.

“We can look into both of those the day after tomorrow, the owner has given us permission to replace the window.”

“I should set up a camera, maybe two, one inside and one out, to film the window over night after it’s replaced. We might see the Hanging Figure reappear.”

She said it with a smile on her face but received serious nods from the others. She was going to need to remember that this gig might feel like a joke to her but two of the people who could fire her believed in this spooky stuff. Just because the content was on the kooky side didn’t mean that she shouldn’t do a thorough job.

While she’d been mental chastising herself Ariel had said something that had made Gold pull a face. Ariel poked in his direction with a pizza crust.

“Look I know you’re not a fan of them Gold, but they’re expected on a spook show, so we will set them up and show that we used them even if we don’t get anything.”

Ah, this was about the EMF and EVP. She was about to ask why Gold didn’t like them, but he spotted the obvious question on her face.

“It’s daft, but those damn machines give me tinnitus, especially the EVP. But Ariel is right they are expected, so we’ll set them up for the overnight, okay?”

Ariel gave him a happy grin; “Good, it’s usually more of a battle than that.”

“To be fair you do normally ask me about it first thing in the morning before I’ve had a cuppa.”

Ariel turned to Belle; “Did Jefferson warn you about that? Gold is a bear with a sore head before he’s had a cup of tea in the mornings. It’s his only diva-like quality.”

Gold gave a over the top gasp and place his hand against his heart; “You wound me Ariel I’m not that bad at all.”

Jefferson and Ariel both cocked an eyebrow and him and nodded. Gold deflated and flapped a hand at them; “Okay maybe I am,” – he smothered a yawn with the back of his hand, - “and I’m going to be much worse if I don’t call it a night and get some sleep.”

It wasn’t late, but it was heading in that direction and they did have an early start the next day. Belle was surprised when Gold collected the receipts for their meal and drinks. That sort of clerical work normally got shunted off on to one of the women. When she mentioned as much to Ariel on the walk back to the motel, she just shrugged; “Gold likes balancing the books, it’s relaxing for him. I suggested he try yoga, but he laughed at me.”

Belle snorted as she tried to picture Gold in various yoga poses. It was all the funnier because her imagination had conjured suit wearing Gold doing yoga. She was still smiling at the idea when she bid everyone good night and headed into her room.