#Maximizing the number of likes and the interaction

[asimali301]

Here’s the Short Guide to Acquire More TikTok Likes Within A Short Time

It goes without saying that TikTok is very popular and growing fast, and it is even letting content creators connect with millions in an unprecedented manner. But uploading videos is just the beginning, as one will also have to put in a fair bit of effort in getting those likes and building a substantial presence on TikTok as well.

It is also important to realize that engagement is the name of the game, and grasping the tactics that augment it can be the game changer for you. In this piece, we shall discuss how to get more tiktok likes and why buying TikTok views would also be a beneficial strategy. Get creative and produce content that is hard to ignore   Because TikTok is visual, people's content quality will influence hundreds of likes on that specific piece of content. Use appropriate lighting and high-quality cameras, and edit your videos professionally so that they can come out quite appealing.

Clips that are creative, informative, or emotionally charged will encourage users to like and share your clips. Don’t forget to jump on the latest trends, but with a personalized approach to differentiate yourself from the competition.

Tweak posting hours for improved engagement rates   It’s all about timing on TikTok. Posting your videos when there are more users can significantly increase the engagement. Make use of TikTok analytics to find out times when the largest part of your audience is online. Through effective planning of posts at these hours, you have higher chances of receiving more likes and interaction.

Utilize Some Trending Hashtags In Order To Gain More Visibility

One of the most fundamental things that if you wish your content to come up on TikTok is to add hashtags. Search the niche to find some of the most trending tags that you can add to your new post. Do not stuff captions with too many tags; try to limit yourself to the most appropriate ones only. Used correctly, hashtags can easily expand your content reach and multiply your chances of likes and shares.

Purchase Boosters to Buy TikTok Views Marketing Strategies

One of the straightforward methods of enhancing interaction on TikTok is through the purchase of TikTok views. The more views a video receives, the more likely it is to appear on the app’s ‘For You’ page. This implies that there are higher chances that your content will be seen, appreciated, and shared throughout a much larger audience. The buy tiktok views will ease the initial stage of the advertising campaign and assure that your impressions will soon begin to engage viewers at random.

Work with Popular Figures and Other Creators

More recently, influencer marketing has become one of the largest trends and has successfully carried over to TikTok. One method of contacting their followers is through working with influencers and/or creators that are already within the same genre as the creators are. This allows for increasing the chances of appearing on the relevant profiles and stimulating the audience to act. Working with prominent persons on the other hand enhances the reliability of the profile and broadens the range of content being showcased.

Motivate Users With Engaging Clusters of Actions   Your followers are more effective in making a move when they have been guided towards doing so. Ask them to perform an action at the end of the video: “Like if you support this,” “For more, double-tap,” and “Follow if you would like to see the second part.” At the same time, have challenges and pose questions for them to motivate them to participate, which in turn increases engagement and likes.

Final Thoughts   Maximizing the number of likes and the interaction of users on videos on TikTok, although it may be a little strenuous and combine efforts from posting quality content and proper timing of broaching topics, among others. When the view or impression count goes up, it means chances of coming across and gaining natural activity also go higher. If you initiate all these well, it will become easy to give the TikTok audience an engaging experience. Not only will these boost the number of likes, but it also creates an interactive audience for the content. 

[etirabys]

something that peeves me in fiction – in a setting where society that hasn't mostly eliminated scarcity, anyway – is when someone really kindhearted takes in a near stranger in need (e.g. orphan, ex slave) and that person is their only project to whom they can give a lot of care. irl I feel like everyone who's exceptionally nice, or at least bad at drawing a line for their own health, has a full case load and is close to burnout

I don't mind this at all when there's a good plot reason for why X should be helping Y in particular and isn't already overbooked; I feel some ugh when X is depicted as someone who'd always help people in Y's shoes but has mysteriously evaded all other supplicants.

I'm pro-fantasy but this kind of moral fantasy strikes me as a bit uglier than the others: you can be a nurturing figure who gives unconditional help without running something so unphotogenic as a vetting interview or cost/benefit analysis, but you'll never be overwhelmed, either

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Surveillance pricing

THIS WEEKEND (June 7–9), I'm in AMHERST, NEW YORK to keynote the 25th Annual Media Ecology Association Convention and accept the Neil Postman Award for Career Achievement in Public Intellectual Activity.

Correction, 7 June 2024: The initial version of this article erroneously described Jeffrey Roper as the founder of ATPCO. He benefited from ATPCO, but did not co-found it. The initial version of this article called ATPCO "an illegal airline price-fixing service"; while ATPCO provides information that the airlines use to set prices, it does not set prices itself, and while the DOJ investigated the company, they did not pursue a judgment declaring the service to be illegal. I regret the error.

Noted anti-capitalist agitator Adam Smith had it right: "People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices."

Despite being a raving commie loon, Smith's observation was so undeniably true that regulators, policymakers, and economists couldn't help but acknowledge that it was true. The trustbusting era was defined by this idea: if we let the number of companies in a sector get too small, or if we let one or a few companies get too big, they'll eventually start to rig prices.

What's more, once an industry contracts corporate gigantism, it will become too big to jail, able to outspend and overpower the regulators charged with reining in its cheating. Anyone who believes Smith's self-evident maxim had to accept its conclusion: that companies had to be kept smaller than the state that regulated them. This wasn't about "punishing bigness" – it was the necessary precondition for a functioning market economy.

We kept companies small for the same reason that we limited the height of skyscrapers: not because we opposed height, or failed to appreciate the value of a really good penthouse view – rather, to keep the building from falling over and wrecking all the adjacent buildings and the lives of the people inside them.

Starting in the neoliberal era – Carter, then Reagan – we changed our tune. We liked big business. A business that got big was doing something right. It was perverse to shut down our best companies. Instead, we'd simply ban big companies from rigging prices. This was called the "consumer welfare" theory of antitrust. It was a total failure.

40 years later, nearly every industry is dominated by a handful of companies, and these companies price-gouge us with abandon. Worse, they use their gigantic ripoff winnings to fill war-chests that fund the corruption of democracy, capturing regulators so that they can rip us off even more, while ignoring labor, privacy and environmental law and ducking taxes.

It turns out that keeping gigantic, opaque, complex corporations honest is really hard. They have so many ways to shuffle money around that it's nearly impossible to figure out what they're doing. Digitalization makes things a million times worse, because computers allow businesses to alter their processes so they operate differently for every customer, and even for every interaction.

This is Dieselgate times a billion: VW rigged its cars to detect when they were undergoing emissions testing and switch to a less polluting, more compliant mode. But when they were on the open road, they spewed lethal quantities of toxic gas, killing people by the thousands. Computers don't make corporate leaders more evil, but they let evil corporate leaders execute far more complex and nefarious plans. Digitalization is a corporate moral hazard, making it just too easy and tempting to rig the game.

That's why Toyota, the largest car-maker in the world, just did Dieselgate again, more than a decade later. Digitalization is a temptation no giant company can resist:

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c1wwj1p2wdyo

For forty years, pro-monopoly cheerleaders insisted that we could allow companies to grow to unimaginable scale and still prevent cheating. They passed rules banning companies from explicitly forming agreements to rig prices. About ten seconds later, new middlemen popped up offering "information brokerages" that helped companies rig prices without talking to one another.

Take Agri Stats: the country's hyperconcentrated meatpacking industry pays Agri Stats to "consult on prices." They provide Agri Stats with a list of their prices, and then Agri Stats suggests changes based on its analysis. What does that analysis consist of? Comparing the company's prices to its competitors, who are also Agri Stats customers:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/04/dont-let-your-meat-loaf/#meaty-beaty-big-and-bouncy

In other words, Agri Stats finds the highest price for each product in the sector, then "advises" all the companies with lower prices to raise their prices to the "competitive" level, creating a one-way ratchet that sends the price of food higher and higher.

More and more sectors have an Agri Stats, and digitalization has made this price-gouging system faster, more efficient, and accessible to sectors with less concentration. Landlords, for example, have tapped into Realpage, a "data broker" that the same thing to your rent that Agri Stats does to meat prices. Realpage requires the landlords who sign up for its service to accept its "recommendations" on minimum rents, ensuring that prices only go up:

https://popular.info/p/feds-raid-corporate-landlord-escalating

Writing for The American Prospect, Luke Goldstein lays out the many ways in which these digital intermediaries have supercharged the business of price-rigging:

https://prospect.org/economy/2024-06-05-three-algorithms-in-a-room/

Goldstein identifies a kind of patient zero for this ripoff epidemic: Jeffrey Roper, a former Alaska Air exec who benefited from a service that helps airlines set prices. ATPCO was investigated by the DOJ in the 1990s, but the enforcers lost their nerve and settled with the company, which agreed to apply some ornamental fig-leafs to its collusion-machine. Even those cosmetic changes were seemingly a bridge too far Roper, who left the US.

But he came back to serve as Realpage's "principal scientist" – the architect of a nationwide scheme to make rental housing vastly more expensive. For Roper, the barrier to low rents was empathy: landlords felt stirrings of shame when they made shelter unaffordable to working people. Roper called these people "idiots" who sentimentality "costs the whole system."

Sticking a rent-gouging computer between landlords and the people whose lives they ruin is a classic "accountability sink," as described in Dan Davies' new book "The Unaccountability Machine: Why Big Systems Make Terrible Decisions – and How The World Lost its Mind":

https://profilebooks.com/work/the-unaccountability-machine/

It's a form of "empiricism washing": if computers are working in the abstract realm of pure numbers, they're just moving the objective facts of the quantitative realm into the squishy, imperfect qualitative world. Davies' interview on Trashfuture is excellent:

https://trashfuturepodcast.podbean.com/e/fire-sale-at-the-accountability-store-feat-dan-davies/

To rig prices, an industry has to solve three problems: the problem of coming to an agreement to fix prices (economists call this "the collective action problem"); the problem of coming up with a price; and the problem of actually changing prices from moment to moment. This is the ripoff triangle, and like a triangle, it has many stable configurations.

The more concentrated an industry is, the easier it is to decide to rig prices. But if the industry has the benefit of digitalization, it can swap the flexibility and speed of computers for the low collective action costs from concentration. For example, grocers that switch to e-ink shelf tags can make instantaneous price-changes, meaning that every price change is less consequential – if sales fall off after a price-hike, the company can lower them again at the press of a button. That means they can collude less explicitly but still raise prices:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/03/26/glitchbread/#electronic-shelf-tags

My name for this digital flexibility is "twiddling." Businesses with digital back-ends can alter their "business logic" from second to second, and present different prices, payouts, rankings and other key parts of the deal to every supplier or customer they interact with:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/19/twiddler/

Not only does twiddling make it easier to rip off suppliers, workers and customers, it also makes these crimes harder to detect. Twiddling made Dieselgate possible, and it also underpinned "Greyball," Uber's secret strategy of refusing to send cars to pick up transportation regulators who would then be able to see firsthand how many laws the company was violating:

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/03/technology/uber-greyball-program-evade-authorities.html

Twiddling is so easy that it has brought price-fixing to smaller companies and less concentrated sectors, though the biggest companies still commit crimes on a scale that put these bit-players to shame. In The Prospect, David Dayen investigates the "personalized pricing" ripoff that has turned every transaction into a potential crime-scene:

https://prospect.org/economy/2024-06-04-one-person-one-price/

"Personalized pricing" is the idea that everything you buy should be priced based on analysis of commercial surveillance data that predicts the maximum amount you are willing to pay.

Proponents of this idea – like Harvard's Pricing Lab with its "Billion Prices Project" – insist that this isn't a way to rip you off. Instead, it lets companies lower prices for people who have less ability to pay:

https://thebillionpricesproject.com/

This kind of weaponized credulity is totally on-brand for the pro-monopoly revolution. It's the same wishful thinking that led regulators to encourage monopolies while insisting that it would be possible to prevent "bad" monopolies from raising prices. And, as with monopolies, "personalized pricing" leads to an overall increase in prices. In econspeak, it is a "transfer of wealth from consumer to the seller."

"Personalized pricing" is one of those cuddly euphemisms that should make the hair on the back of your neck stand up. A more apt name for this practice is surveillance pricing, because the "personalization" depends on the vast underground empire of nonconsensual data-harvesting, a gnarly hairball of ad-tech companies, data-brokers, and digital devices with built-in surveillance, from smart speakers to cars:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/03/12/market-failure/#car-wars

Much of this surveillance would be impractical, because no one wants their car, printer, speaker, watch, phone, or insulin-pump to spy on them. The flexibility of digital computers means that users always have the technical ability to change how these gadgets work, so they no longer spy on their users. But an explosion of IP law has made this kind of modification illegal:

https://locusmag.com/2020/09/cory-doctorow-ip/

This is why apps are ground zero for surveillance pricing. The web is an open platform, and web-browsers are legal to modify. The majority of web users have installed ad-blockers that interfere with the surveillance that makes surveillance pricing possible:

https://doc.searls.com/2023/11/11/how-is-the-worlds-biggest-boycott-doing/

But apps are a closed platform, and reverse-engineering and modifying an app is a literal felony – several felonies, in fact. An app is just a web-page skinned with enough IP to make it a felony to modify it to protect your consumer, privacy or labor rights:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/07/treacherous-computing/#rewilding-the-internet

(Google is leading a charge to turn the web into the kind of enshittifier's paradise that apps represent, blocking the use of privacy plugins and proposing changes to browser architecture that would allow them to felonize modifying a browser without permission:)

https://pluralistic.net/2023/08/02/self-incrimination/#wei-bai-bai

Apps are a twiddler's playground. Not only can they "customize" every interaction you have with them, but they can block you (or researchers seeking to help you) from recording and analyzing the app's activities. Worse: digital transactions are intimate, contained to the palm of your hand. The grocer whose e-ink shelf-tags flicker and reprice their offerings every few seconds can be collectively observed by people who are in the same place and can start a conversation about, say, whether to come back that night a throw a brick through the store's window to express their displeasure. A digital transaction is a lonely thing, atomized and intrinsically shielded from a public response.

That shielding is hugely important. The public hates surveillance pricing. Time and again, through all of American history, there have been massive and consequential revolts against the idea that every price should be different for every buyer. The Interstate Commerce Commission was founded after Grangers rose up against the rail companies' use of "personalized pricing" to gouge farmers.

Companies know this, which is why surveillance pricing happens in secret. Over and over, every day, you are being gouged through surveillance pricing. The sellers you interact with won't tell you about it, so to root out this practice, we have to look at the B2B sales-pitches from the companies that sell twiddling tools.

One of these companies is Plexure, partly owned by McDonald's, which provides the surveillance-pricing back-ends for McD's, Ikea, 7-Eleven, White Castle and others – basically, any time a company gives you a hard-sell to order via its apps rather than its storefronts or its website, you should assume you're getting twiddled, hard.

These companies use the enshittification playbook to trap you into using their apps. First, they offer discounts to customers who order through their apps – then, once the customers are fully committed to shopping via app, they introduce surveillance pricing and start to jack up the prices.

For example, Plexure boasts that it can predict what day a given customer is getting paid on and use that information to raise prices on all the goods the customer shops for on that day, on the assumption that you're willing to pay more when you've got a healthy bank balance.

The surveillance pricing industry represents another reason for everything you use to spy on you – any data your "smart" TV or Nest thermostat or Ring doorbell can steal from you can be readily monetized – just sell it to a surveillance pricing company, which will use it to figure out how to charge you more for everything you buy, from rent to Happy Meals.

But the vast market for surveillance data is also a potential weakness for the industry. Put frankly: the commercial surveillance industry has a lot of enemies. The only thing it has going for it is that so many of these enemies don't know that what's they're really upset about is surveillance.

Some people are upset because they think Facebook made Grampy into a Qanon. Others, because they think Insta gave their kid anorexia. Some think Tiktok is brainwashing millennials into quoting Osama bin Laden. Some are upset because the cops use Google location data to round up Black Lives Matter protesters, or Jan 6 insurrectionists. Some are angry about deepfake porn. Some are angry because Black people are targeted with ads for overpriced loans or colleges:

https://www.theregister.com/2024/06/04/meta_ad_algorithm_discrimination/

And some people are angry because surveillance feeds surveillance pricing. The thing is, whatever else all these people are angry about, they're all angry about surveillance. Are you angry that ad-tech is stealing a 51% share of news revenue? You're actually angry about surveillance. Are you angry that "AI" is being used to automatically reject resumes on racial, age or gender grounds? You're actually angry about surveillance.

There's a very useful analogy here to the history of the ecology movement. As James Boyle has long said, before the term "ecology" came along, there were people who cared about a lot of issues that seemed unconnected. You care about owls, I care about the ozone layer. What's the connection between charismatic nocturnal avians and the gaseous composition of the upper atmosphere? The term ecology took a thousand issues and welded them together into one movement.

That's what's on the horizon for privacy. The US hasn't had a new federal consumer privacy law since 1988, when Congress acted to ban video-store clerks from telling the newspapers what VHS cassettes you were renting:

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

We are desperately overdue for a new consumer privacy law, but every time this comes up, the pro-surveillance coalition defeats the effort. but as people who care about conspiratorialism, kids' mental health, spying by foreign adversaries, phishing and fraud, and surveillance pricing all come together, they will be an unbeatable coalition:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/12/06/privacy-first/#but-not-just-privacy

Meanwhile, the US government is actually starting to take on these ripoff artists. The FTC is working to shut down data-brokers:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/08/16/the-second-best-time-is-now/#the-point-of-a-system-is-what-it-does

The FBI is raiding landlords to build a case against Frontpage and other rent price-fixers:

https://popular.info/p/feds-raid-corporate-landlord-escalating

Agri Stats is facing a DoJ lawsuit:

https://www.nationalhogfarmer.com/market-news/agri-stats-loses-motions-to-transfer-dismiss-in-doj-antitrust-case

Not every federal agency has gotten the message, though. Trump's Fed Chairman, Jerome Powell – whom Biden kept on the job – has been hiking interest rates in a bid to reduce our purchasing power by making millions of Americans poorer and/or unemployed. He's doing this to fight inflation, on the theory that inflation is being cause by us being too well-off, and therefore trying to buy more goods than are for sale.

But of course, interest rates are inflationary: when interest rates go up, it gets more expensive to pay your credit card bills, lease your car, and pay a mortgage. And where we see the price of goods shooting up, there's abundant evidence that this is the result of greedflation – companies jacking up their prices and blaming inflation. Interest rate hawks say that greedflation is impossible: if one company raises its prices, its competitors will swoop in and steal their customers with lower prices.

Maybe they would do that – if they didn't have a toolbox full of algorithmic twiddling options and a deep trove of surveillance data that let them all raise prices together:

https://prospect.org/blogs-and-newsletters/tap/2024-06-05-time-for-fed-to-meet-ftc/

Someone needs to read some Adam Smith to Chairman Powell: "People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices."

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/06/05/your-price-named/#privacy-first-again

Image: Cryteria (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HAL9000.svg

CC BY 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en

[oh-sofarfromhome]

Watch Your Mouth

CEO Harry

summary: an employee makes an rude comment to YN, not knowing who she is

warning: swearing, implied smut

—

YN steps into the conference room with her head held high, confidence radiating from her despite her fashionably late entrance. The sound of her red bottoms clicking against the marbled floor draws everyone’s attention to her, jaws dropping and eyes shamelessly trailing down her body and then back up to her face, in awe of her beauty.

Harry’s usually permanent scowl drops from his face and is replaced with a look of fondness for his wife, kicking the man beside him out of the seat to free up space for her to sit.

The man who he kicked out, Jason, was livid as he found another seat, far away from the CEO. He’d planned to suck up to him the entire meeting, but it’s kind of hard to do so from the other side of the room. He’s a new employee that’s only just started a few weeks ago, not having met YN yet.

As soon as she’s seated comfortably, Harry resumes the meeting, going over the company’s numbers for the quarter as well as discussing bonuses and answering questions for those who have them.

“This quarter’s numbers were down 7.4% compared to the last, so I’m sure you can see where my anger stems from,” he states angrily, his voice booming throughout the silent room, the air thick with tension.

Everyone looks at him silently, except for one person, his wife. “Sorry to interrupt, but I’d also like to add that, compared to last year, we are nearly double where we were, but given the time of year, it is not uncommon for our numbers to trend downward. I do believe that if we maximize all of our income for the next three weeks or so, we should be able to match last quarter, maybe even exceed,”

Harry goes on to agree with her when he hears a scoff from the other side of the room. He looks over to see Jason with an irritated look on his face, but before he can address him he’s speaking.

“Dumb bitch,” Jason mumbles, but in the silence of the room, every single person in the room whips their head to him, eyebrows raised at their oblivious new coworker. All of the employees are holding their breath, awaiting the storm that is bound to come.

“Is there something you’d like to share with all of us, Mr. Hall?” YN’s authoritative voice booms throughout the room before Harry has the chance.

“Yes, I do actually,” he states,

“You’re just a woman anyway, what do you know? I wouldn’t be surprised if you didn’t even get through college on your own, wouldn’t be surprised if you used your body to get to the top,” he finishes, gasps ringing through the room.

“Jason Hall, your very new contract has now been terminated,” Harry grits out, trying to calm his anger. When Jason’s face fall and he questions why, he is quick to explain.

“I do not tolerate discrimination in my workplace, nor do I tolerate disrespect toward authority figures. You have been here a short time, Jason, but that time is up. Human Resources is located on the 12th floor, I suggest you stop there on your way out,” he hisses, watching Jason’s face crumple as he realizes what he’s done.

“Anything else you’d like to add, Mrs. Styles?” Harry questions, turning to his wife before cutting his eyes back to Jason to see his reaction. He chuckles quietly when he watches the color drain from his face and he starts stuttering out excuses.

“Mr. Hall, I advise you to learn from your mistakes, and learn from them quickly with how difficult it will be to find a job once word of this interaction gets out. Quite frankly, you do not know who you just fucked with. I have connections in every state in this country, and nearly every country in the world. I hope you have a fantastic time learning how to cook at the Burger King down the road. Meeting dismissed,” she replies, her tone firm and unforgiving.

Everyone files out of the room, laughing under their breath at the look on their ex coworker’s face. When everyone is gone, she finally turns back to Harry, a laugh of disbelief leaving her lips as she takes in his blown pupils and heavy breathing, her eyes trailing down to his crotch to see an unmistakable bulge there.

“Really, Haz? I’ve just chewed out one of your employees and you’re turned on right now?” she laughs, the sound being cut off by a desperate kiss being pressed to her lips.

“You’re just so undeniably sexy when you take control. A stark contrast to when we’re at home and I eat you out until you’re crying an-,” he’s cut off by her hand being placed over his mouth.

“Shut up and get on your knees,” she demands, and he’s quick to comply, letting her take control of him as well.

—

[capt-vejigante]

Since your requests are open for maxime art is it possible you could draw maxime x Valentina if possible! I wish the movie explored there romantic relationship more 🙏.

I wanted more from their relationship too! I really think them having cuter interactions would’ve done a number on me! Thanks for the ask,

For this sketch, I’d like to think Valentina finds Maxime’s insect traits curious and cute! And Maxime gets flustered by this.

Valentina : “Oh! You’re such a cutie Maxime, Come over here!!”

Maxime : [flustered] “Valentina…”

[felixcloud6288]

Biggest problem with using an algorithm to decide what appears on people's dashboard is the algorithm will always be tuned to maximize "engagement". For Tumblr, I'd assume that means number of likes and reblogs.

The very negative effect of this is our dashboards would then be filled with posts that already have a high number of notes and people with a history of high "engagement" posts will get far more visibility while people with little interaction will be strangled in their crib.

The cool thing about Tumblr is that the setup it has gives room for new and small blogs to have their piece alongside the giants.

Also, "engagement" focus will cause a lot of angry and toxic discourse. There's currently a war going on over whether Dutch people ought to be wearing bike helmets. We don't need to have that kind of stuff being forced upon people who don't want it. And it only gets worse when we talk about actual politics.

And "engagement" will kill much of the site's culture. People are encouraged to post whatever silly, insightful, dumb, or wild things because it can always find an audience that likes it (or hates it) and posts can have long shelf lifes or randomly recirculate. If "engagement" is the only thing that matters, anything that doesn't immediately get everyone's attention will just die off and any big post that loses traction will be thrown away.

The only engagement I want is to make some random post and then see it blow up two weeks later.

Signed, A Reddit refugee

@staff

[terramythos]

Anyway here's my breakdown of the ffxiv jobs, my opinions on playing each, and the tier rank of how good their story was

TANKS

WARRIOR - warrior is so fucking funny why did they make it able to solo heal itself and the entire party in 90% of the content in the game. Raw Intuition/Bloodwhetting is so broken in dungeons its hilarious. And then they have like 3 additional healing skills on top of that. And they kept buffing it throughout Endwalker. So it is currently the easiest to play, does the most damage (i think...?), and has the best healing of any of the Tank jobs. 2nd fave probably.

Story Tier: C, it's ok, Curious Gorge is a good name. i have like nothing to say about it it's a generic AF story

PALADIN - I used to hate PLD but I think the partial rework they got halfway through Endwalker helped it a lot. It's much less clunky now. Probably still my least favorite Tank though Hallowed Ground is fun and it's pretty close to Gunbreaker for me.

Story Tier: F, this is the worst class storyline in the entire game. It's so stupid. The writing is so bad the writers acknowledge it makes no sense at all and I'm like. Yeah, thanks, I am experiencing this shit. Perhaps write a story that makes sense next time instead of pointing that out.

DARK KNIGHT - Unfortunately this is my favorite Tank 🫡 which is rough since it has the worst survivability out of any of them. But I love how you use MP and the silly number of OGCDs. The Blackest Night is such a fun ability and it's a crime that it's not a baseline skill you get from the start. Why do they have so many DRs that only cover magic damage. I must ask.

Story Tier: S, there's a reason it's the most popular and well regarded class storyline. It's really good, also the only questline I know of that uses the quest log text as part of the narrative. Outside maybe a few of the very late Endwalker quests. And, well... same writer lmao

GUNBREAKER: I think GNB looks cool as fuck and I like that it has 2 DPS rotations. The Gnashing Fang combo is so fun. Superbolide memes are always fun. My main issue with it is a skill issue because I am just constantly misaligning its burst windows.

Story Tier: C. It has some interesting lore but I found it pretty forgettable as a story.

HEALERS

WHITE MAGE: I hated White Mage for a while but something clicked and now I totally get it. I find it fun in dungeons cause you get to Holy spam and stun lock everything. As uh. The healer. That's fun. Once you get Afflatus heals (and then Afflatus Misery) it clicks. It's fun maximizing damage and playing chicken with the tank's HP.

Story Tier: B, you get a lot of lore around the Padjal, and I think the Stormblood story where you find a padjal living in hiding with her mother is pretty good! Also it's not technically the job storyline but there's a WHM side quest to get a unicorn mount? i guess it's technically a CNJ quest but same diff. no one else gets that shit. so that's cool

SCHOLAR: probably my least favorite of the healers... it just feels super clunky. You can tell a bunch of different design philosophies went into it over the years and none of them mesh very well. They've made it so the Fairy Gauge controls literally one spell. Why have the gauge at all? It's also a huge missed opportunity that there's no tie in or interaction with the fae in Shadowbringers. I love the idea of a battle tactician healer but I think it needs a rework.

Story Tier: B+, I liked the characters and its the main way to get backstory and lore on what happened with Nym.

ASTROLOGIAN: While I think AST has a similar issue to SCH (lots of different design philosophies over the years) I find it way more fun to play. I like the card mechanic and how it interacts with the rest of the party. AST is basically the only job that has its own like. Minigame? As part of its rotation. And I know a lot of people don't like the RNG for it but personally I find it fun. I know AST is getting a redesign in Dawntrail so hope it's good.

Story Tier: C? I think? I'll be honest I don't remember it super well but I didn't find anything objectionable about it. And I like the tarot aesthetic and lore and how it's healing based on manipulating luck.

SAGE: I think SGE is tons of fun, I'm not sure if I like it or WHM more. I love all the skills SGE has for preventing damage and the gimmick where your DPS heals someone in the party. Visually the hi-tech laser shooting healer is a lot of fun. IT HAS A GAP CLOSER. The only thing i wish was it wasn't so MP negative and that it did more damage. It's a little sad its DPS output is so low compared to the other healers (even AST when you factor in how it buffs the party). Since SGE is supposed to be a healer that heals through damage it's silly its damage kinda sucks.

Story Tier: A, I loved this storyline. Both the Endwalker job stories are very self contained and interesting. While the twist is pretty obvious it's still an interesting exploration of uh. Scientific ethics. Yeah

PHYSICAL MELEE DPS

MONK: I've probably played MNK the least of the phys melee but I like the whole adaptable combo thing. Not much else to say since I have played it so little. Might bring it back out and try again. It DID have the funniest guide in the Balance discord for a while.

Story Tier: D. I think? I remember thinking it was dumb, lmao. Sorry.

DRAGOON: MAN I wished I liked DRG more. It looks so fucking cool and I like how it interacts with the dragon lore. But I find it very punishing to play. To do good damage you have to align so many different cooldowns... and snapshot your DOT correctly... and screwing one thing up just fucks your DPS output forever. Like AST I believe this is being reworked in Dawntrail so I hope it feels better to play.

Story Tier: C+. I think it starts strong since you get to meet Estinien pre-Heavensward and it melds nicely with that story. But I found it pretty directionless post-HW which is a shame.

NINJA: I remember finding this one fun. I like that there are different combos you do that have varied finishers depending on the situation. I am just... bad at remembering which combo to use to get which finisher, lol. So I haven't played it as much. NIN gets a lot of flavor other jobs don't get with their unique run and jump animations. And you get a Bunny of Shame on your head if you fuck up a combo, which is incredible.

Story Tier: A. The Rogue story is probably the most memorable of the basic class quests. Ninja just has great characters and a fun story. What is with that one guy. Karasu? If you know you know. I also like how the Rogue characters show up later in the Ninja story. That's fun.

SAMURAI: I had a similar experience to WHM here because I initially hated it then really came around once it clicked. SAM seems very complex, it has a ton of buttons and different combos. But it is actually quite intuitive once you figure out the general pattern. And it does INSANE damage. I think it's the highest DPS output in the game? I love building the combos and then doing a huge finisher for a bajillion damage. The guaranteed crits and constant OGCD weaves make me feel unstoppable. I think this is tied with RPR for me.

Story Tier: B+. I found the exiled samurai character and his journey toward redemption very compelling. I won't spoil beyond that. However it does fall apart a little in the second half. Still fun but not as good.

REAPER: I love RPR, the teleportation is a lot of fun, and I love finally unleashing the demon form and going ham on the enemy. The weapons are the coolest looking in the game. Every scythe design hits. I probably played this the most in Endwalker. My main critique is the Death's Design mechanic. I hate having to keep a stupid debuff on the target to do damage. It's like a dot but without the optimized snapshotting. If they want to keep this idea i think it would feel better to change it into something like SGE's Kardia where you apply it to one enemy to do increased damage to it without having to worry about reapplying it. not sure how they would balance this for aoe but that's not my job. But even with that caveat I still really enjoy the job.

Story Tier: A+. While it doesn't reach the highs of DRK's story it comes close. I love the badass old lady main character. Her hunting a voidsent that possessed her grandfather would be cool enough but making her a Garlean exile in hiding who grudgingly agrees to train you just adds an extra cool factor. I really enjoyed this story. As a bonus theres a lot of incidental dialogue in the post-6.0 Endwalker story if you completed the RPR story because it ties in a lot.

PHYSICAL RANGED DPS

BARD: It's a bit clunky, its got some outdated design elements, it has one of the lowest damage outputs in the game... and i LOVE IT. this was technically the first job I ever played? totally different character like 8 years ago. and i was so so bad. I think i am actually pretty good at current BRD. the animations look cool. i like that it's a class you really need to work for and optimize to eke out that last bit of damage. and boosting everyone else's damage by existing is kinda neat.

Story Tier: B. I'll be real I barely remember this but I do remember it was gay as fuck so immediately gets an extra tier for that.

MACHINIST: MCH is really funny right now because like. It's phys ranged, right. The design behind phys ranged is you have 100% uptime cause you can freely move around and not have to worry about cast timers or melee range or anything. So the trade off is that they do less damage than other classes. Endwalker MCH did not get the memo and does insane damage anyway. My controversial opinion is that it has similar burst DPS to RPR. No i will not elaborate. I'm also bad at doing good damage on MCH which is impressive since it is easy.

Story Tier: B+. Some Ishgard noble's gay son wants to build machines instead of killing dragons the good old fashioned way and has to prove himself to get taken seriously. A tale as old as time. See I haven't done this quest in like years but I still remember it. He is a memorable character. It's just not like. knockout wowza compared to the A tier stories.

DANCER: Dancer is the second easiest DPS job in the game behind SMN. So if i am sleepy it's the one I like playing. You play simon says. you do a lot of damage when you play simon says then do almost no fucking damage otherwise. I think it's the lowest direct damage in the game? for a dps i mean. You have high stakes sexual tension with a DPS of your choice via Dance Partner. I wish other DNC players knew how Dance Partner works. YOU CAN DANCE PARTNER ANOTHER DANCER. THE BUFF STACKS. BUT YOU CANNOT DANCE PARTNER THE SAME PLAYER AS ANOTHER DANCER. THOSE BUFFS DO NOT STACK. ok i'm good. anyway

Story Tier: C. there's some shit about negative emotions and purging them? in theory i think this has some interesting implications with Endwalker lore considering Dynamis and its role in the story. Very similar mechanically to what's going on with the DNC story. but i really don't think the writers made the connection so it's like pure speculation and not the actual story. It's meh. fine i guess. i did like all the flashy dancing sequences.

MAGICAL RANGED DPS

BLACK MAGE: I am so so so so so so so bad at BLM. i pull up the guide. i read the guide. it all makes perfect sense. i go into a dungeon or trial or something. somehow i always get like Zeromus or some shit. and i drop Enochian or something and everything goes to shit and i'm yelling and i'm not even like slide casting or teleporting or anything i just run around crying. then i remember i have like 10 more buttons i haven't been pressing and oh god the dot fell off. people play this? for fun? i admire it. apparently they do a ton of damage if you can play it. could not be me.

Story Tier: B? There's some voidsent and Thirteenth lore. all the black mage characters are Lalafell because it's funny i guess. OH YEAH it has like the one named male Keeper of the Moon Miqo'te NPC in the entire game and he's fun. look at this twink:

sorry i don't have anything to say about BLM i am bad at it

SUMMONER: easiest DPS job in the entire game. they redesigned it for Endwalker so it is practically a new job. i have no idea how it played before. but it is super streamlined. maybe too streamlined? it's another one to play if you want to turn your brain off. i like that at 90 you summon The Actual Primals instead of little representations of them. and i like the way your burst phase switches between Bahamut and Phoenix. it all looks very cool. they should add Leviathan as a summon in Dawntrail.

Story Tier: C.. i don't remember a single thing about this questline except you interact with Y'shtola's half sister. i think you go to Cartenau at some point. idk

RED MAGE: RDM is one of those jobs that looks really complicated when you start then you actually play it and it is just super super easy. that being said i think it's really fun. I like balancing the white and black magic gauges. Dualcast is a great gimmick and it feels cool to lob two big spells in a row at something. Dualcast Verraising a chain of dead players is so fucking funny. it's a shame that the existence of Verraise means RDM does shit damage to compensate for its utility. It and DNC just sit at the bottom with BRD barely scratching ahead of them. i think? i don't remember LOL

Story Tier: A, I really like the story and characters. I like that you have a middle-age world weary catboy (catman) as your mentor. and i like that he canonically trained Alisaie too and you chat a little about that. it's a fun story!

BLUE MAGE: what the fuck is a blue mage

Story Tier: ???

[entropy-game-dev]

Phylogenesia Automatorum is out!! A roguelite / incremental / life simulation hybrid

Download it here!

Over the past couple of weeks I've been working on my entry for the New Years Incremental Game Jam 2024, and I finally submitted it late last night.

It's a silly little game where you tend to your garden of digital plants, hoping to generate enough Life and Death points when they spawn/die respectively, in order to buy more plants, mutate their characteristics, and expand the field in which they live.

Mutations and field properties will directly (and indirectly) change the plants' behavior on both a local and global level, with some very interesting and unexpected results. Numbers going up isn't always better either too, as, if you upgrade their stats too much, you might make a superplant that chokes the life out of the rest of your simulation and other plants!!

(Oh, and my friend did the music for this game, and it's awesome - each plant as their own instrument/track and they layer on top of each other as you buy more!)

It's a roguelite in the sense that each run you will be choosing between random upgrades, plants, and field tiles with various effects between simulation runs in order to try and maximize your point gains and stay ahead of the reset cost. It's not totally balanced (as it was whipped up in 2 weeks), but with a bit of knowledge and juuuust a hint of luck, you can make almost any run pop off! The goal is to buy all 10 plants and have them all produce points within a single run (representing a diverse garden or something, rather than a monocrop).

As I mentioned previously, it's based heavily on Conway's Game of Life, as I am a huge sucker for incrementals with hypnotizing visuals that change and evolve as you interact with the various systems at play. I took this idea, added a bunch of plants that are variations on the standard ruleset, and went from there.

You might also notice that I used some assets from Stellar Terminus, namely, the 3 sound effects, fonts, color palette, and, retro computer theming. I swear I can do other styles, just, er, not in 2 weeks when I already had quite an ambitious idea!

Over the coming days I'll post some more about the development of it, how I implemented certain systems, and a post mortem. You can probably imagine how datastructures-heavy this game was. In the end I had 1 object that ran the entire simulation, 1 that displayed the breakdown of how each plant was doing, and like 20+ objects for UI...

For now though? I'd love for you to try it out, play a few runs, and hear your thoughts on it!!

[tokiro07]

Undead Unluck ch.231 thoughts

[Do You Remember~ The 17th Night of November~]

(Topics: criticism - pacing/narrative focus, character analysis - Gina/Feng/Julia/Billy, speculation - Soul/Ruin)

Juggling Glass and Rubber

Damn, Tozuka, you weren't lyin', that Unjustice can sweep the Master Rules!

I'll admit I am a little disappointed by this turn of events because, like I was saying the last several weeks, I expected there to be an extra wrinkle that kept Unjustice from trivializing all of the MR fights, especially the ones that hadn't actually happened yet!

Yusai I was always pretty shaky on, and since she never got much characterization going in, I'm not exactly surprised, but the rest were definitely bummers

I've said before that I'm fine with skipping the Sick fight since Rip and Latla's climax already happened, but it's not like there was nothing to be done with it, like focusing on Sick's desire for revenge or having Rip look back on the mistakes he made in L100

Same thing with Billy and Tatiana's reunion - technically the climax of their joint arc was at the end of L100 when they promised to stay by each other's side until death, but I always thought of that as the setup to an upcoming payoff, not the payoff itself. It's definitely still salvageable here, but I think having Tatiana come in to save Billy when he's having trouble would have felt a lot more cathartic if it was focused on and analyzed rather than just...happening. Some insight as to why Billy was having trouble using Unjustice, like perhaps being overloaded with too many new Rules or reconciling with the choices he'd made, would have given Tatiana something internal to save him from as well as something external

I guess my issue here is that we're not really getting to see the effects that Remember is having on the cast as a whole, which I think would have better served as the focus here. I don't know if it's that Tozuka has been given a set number of chapters to work with by Jump or what, but it seems likely that Tozuka had ideas for how he wanted to execute everyone's arcs and fights but had to prioritize who to give the lion's share of the focus to for the sake of maximizing narrative impact

Case in point, the characters who he did manage to analyze here each had a pretty unique interaction with Remember

Remember Who You Are

Despite how brief their scenes are here, I do think that Gina and Feng's moments illustrate Remember's value remarkably well

Gina starts referring to everyone by the old nicknames she used for them in L100, only to amend "L'il Lucky" back to just "Fuuko," directly demonstrating the mental gap between the present and past. Gina naturally picks up her old habit, but isn't restricted by it. The respect and love she has for Fuuko goes beyond what can be expressed by a cute nickname, and those feelings were forged through L101 Gina's relationship with Fuuko. It's subtle, but it's a nice little cherry on top of Gina's arc

Feng, meanwhile, is noted to be getting stronger as Time ages him. This could be taken two ways: either he's stronger because of Remember and Time misread the situation, OR because Feng knows that he would have spent his time training and improving, his body, mind and soul are developing proportionally rather than being aged in a vacuum. The latter is thematically appropriate to countering Time's philosophy that age's function is to weed out those who have outlived their usefulness, while the former is a direct result of all of Feng's accumulated years across loops compounding simultaneously. Could be a little of both, honestly

What's even better about Feng's moment, though, is what he says in response to Julia's help: "I'm not deserving of your charity." In the past, Feng definitely would have been mad about getting help, resenting the idea that anyone thought he couldn't hack it on his own, but that's not what he said here. He believes he's done nothing to earn Julia's aid, that whatever Time was going to do to him, he had coming, and this is certainly because he remembers what he did. All of the people that he's ever killed, the lives that he ruined, especially his own son's, he now knows and can look back on from the perspective of having just abandoned the mentality he had back then

If Feng still believed in individual strength before receiving Remember, he probably would have looked back on the failures of his past as the results of his own physical weakness, not because of a flawed philosophy. Instead, Feng has already proven that he's stronger now after learning the true value of his age and legacy, so while he can still improve thanks to the lessons he can learn from his past self, the current Feng is able to retain his new outlook because he has an objective point of comparison that this was the farthest he ever made it

These are the sorts of subtle advancements I wanted to see from the whole cast, and again, while we still can see them, I think having a chapter dedicated to showing each little vignette would have been more effective than either breaking them up like this or showing such a notable imbalance between them

At the very least, though, even without being the primary focus of the chapter, Julia's interaction with Remember is far and away the most interesting one

Welcome Back, Juiz

Julia's behavior just before and after Fuuko actives Remember easily provides the most contrast of everyone and best demonstrates the tremendous growth rate that Remember allows

Prior to Remember, Julia was only able to use Unjustice involuntarily. To great effect, mind you, but still by accident: first when she stopped Soul's attack, and (seemingly) second, when she used it to reduce the damage of Soul's attack and ride it back to the surface. It's not explicitly stated that that's what happened here, but if Soul's intention was to kill Julia with that, he really dropped the ball, so I choose to believe that his bloodlust was negated by Unjustice

Afterwards, Julia was using Unjustice like a pro. She dropped War down a phase, got Time to bring Feng back to his prime, and even got Death to take out Luck, a feat that Fuuko objectively wouldn't have been able to accomplish with Unluck alone since Luck would have been able to avert Death's inadvertent attack with his good fortune. The most impressive part to me, though, is that she was able to channel Unjustice into her soul!

By putting Unjustice in her saber, Julia effectively injected Unjustice directly into Change's body, ensuring that she couldn't live by her own philosophy of constant change, even if Julia wasn't physically there to make visual contact. Juiz never learned soul manipulation, and Julia only just now mastered Unjustice thanks to her memories, so the fact that Julia was able to integrate those two abilities into such a high level technique is proof that her current self has in no way been overtaken by Juiz's memories, the most major worry that everyone had for Remember's use

That's not to say that none of Juiz's experiences made it to Julia, she still did remember Juiz's entire life after all. Beyond just Juiz's techniques and physical abilities, Julia went from panicking over Soul's attacks and Victor's injuries to calmly and confidently taking out the MRs one by one. She knows now what she's capable of and the weight that she carries, and she remembers what kind of relationships she had with everyone else. This is likely why she went to Billy first - both to give him access to Unjustice to make him stronger and to remind him that, despite their pasts, they aren't enemies anymore

The look of shock on Billy's face suggests that he was paralyzed by the realization of his past actions, and it's Julia's words that snap him back into the present and bring a smile back to his face. That's really what I was talking about earlier; giving Billy an internal conflict with his memories would have provided an angle that no one else really had while also allowing him a stronger character moment with both Julia and Tatiana

Still, even if it's a weaker moment than it could have been, I do appreciate Julia's direct acknowledgment of Billy as an ally, as it at least subtly harkens back to their previous encounter. Where previously Billy stole Unjustice and lost the ability to use it after Juiz had some time to think about his motivations as an enemy, this time Julia is willingly entrusting Unjustice to Billy as an ally

Actually, I wonder if perhaps that's why Tozuka had Billy fail to use Unjustice on Sick, because he is still fighting that internal conflict...for now, I'll choose to believe that Tozuka has that in his back pocket, but I won't be redacting any of my criticisms until he makes good on that, as this review is based on my immediate interpretations and I don't want to erase all of this and redo it...

Along the same lines, not only does Tozuka still have a backdoor for analyzing Billy, he also still has one for giving us some more cool moments for the rest of the Master Rules as well

Put Me Back in, Coach!

Despite one-shotting seven MRs all at once, Julia didn't actually manage to clear the field. The Union's gearing up to face Sun, but they seem to be forgetting: they didn't actually beat Soul. He's still in the Roundtable Room, and he's undoubtedly more pissed than ever

I'm not sure if I would have caught this on my own before seeing their post on this, but Webmantis on twitter pointed out that the MRs' souls must all have been sent to Subspace, the cosmic waiting room that all souls go too between loops. They note that, since Soul hasn't entered Phase 3 yet, he'll most likely be able to bring everyone back

However, they also note that doing so would be an odd narrative choice, as it would make Julia's steamrolling seem kinda pointless. Why bother killing off a bunch of characters just to revive them in the next chapter?

Fortunately, I think I've come up with the perfect answer to that very question!

Firstly, it's to show off Julia's post-Remember Unjustice; we were promised a sweep, and Tozuka made good on it in spectacular fashion. Second, and more importantly, their deaths are necessary for Soul to reach Phase 3

Fuel for the Fire

You may recall from a few weeks ago that I described the mechanism that the MRs use to reach Phase 3 is absorbing their Rule directly: Change absorbed the change in her shape when she was cut in half, Time absorbed Shen's lifespan, War absorbed Billy and Tella's violence, Justice absorbed Yusai's resolve, etc. This is why Death only just now reached Phase 3, because no one was dying the entire battle until she was forced to personally kill Luck, and Luck was likely being prevented from absorbing any fortune by Unluck

So now that all of the MRs other than Soul are dead, their souls are free of their vessels. I don't know if their vessels were actually preventing Soul from accessing their souls, but since he seems to consider the others his friends, he probably didn't want to resort to absorbing them either way, but now? It doesn't matter if he could or couldn't before, now he has to, otherwise it's all for nothing

Now, the question may be how he'll be able to reach them. Webmantis' proposition was that reaching Phase 3 would give Soul access to Subspace, but I'm saying that he won't be able to reach Phase 3 without the souls that are there - that's a pretty clear logical paradox

Well, not to speculate too much, but I think we already have our answer to that one too: Soul's finally going to change

Another topic I've been going on and on about lately is the stagnation and inflexibility of the Rules, the most notable being Soul's rejection that souls are connected. However, Soul saw that new facet of his Rule be added in real time, by Negators that aren't even his vessel. The only one who should have control over his Rule is himself, and yet he's seen others interact with their souls through reinterpretation time and again (Andy vs. Ghost, Gina vs. Change, etc.). In other words, he should know full well by now that his Rule isn't as set in stone as he once thought, and if everyone else can control their souls through their perspective, then why couldn't Soul himself?

With the lesson that Julia just taught him about souls, Soul can connect himself to his fallen comrades and drag them back from Subspace (or prevent them from reaching it in the first place), and achieve Phase 3 by adding their souls to his own. Whether this would mean gaining power over their Rules or reviving them is another question, but at the very least it would show tremendous growth in his character

I'll go into more detail on this if it comes to pass, but Soul learning to change his perspective on his Rule would make him more like the Negators, more like a human. This would also make him the most well-rounded and developed UMA to date, which I think would more than make up for any loss of characterization among the rest of them

Now, I would definitely prefer that he brings back the MRs, if only so we can see Luck's Phase 3 (c'mon, he's Fuuko's foil for cryin' out loud!!!), but even if he just integrates them into himself, I think that would create the perfect parallel to give the final member of the Union a chance to demonstrate his growth

The Man Who Would be King

While fighting Soul, Sun and Luna are all clearly the most important boxes to check off right now, there's still one more that Tozuka alluded to in this chapter: Ruin's return

How Remember will affect him exactly, I won't speculate on, but I think it will give him the final push he needs to join the Union and help fight God. If my previous speculation about Soul comes to pass, then that would make Soul the ideal matchup for Ruin

Not only would they have the parallels of being "multiple souls in one body," it would also be the ultimate payoff to Ruin's designation as The King of Negators. If Soul is Master Rule #1, then it's Ruin's destiny as the Negator King to negate all of the Master Rules in his reformation and rebellion against the God he so thanklessly devoted his life to

This would also present the opportunity for Ruin to reform the MRs too and unify both Negator and UMA as I've speculated on before, but again, I don't want to go too far into it here. As it stands, this is just me making things up, and I don't want to either raise my hopes too high OR preemptively run out of things to say, but the parallel is so interesting that I can't help but get excited by the possibility

Conclusion

As always, it's entirely possible that I'm wrong about all of this. Maybe Soul's gonna try to go Phase 3 and self-destruct because of Unjustice; maybe Soul is gonna fuse with Sun in Phase 3 and they'll become "SOL;" maybe Kururu's going to use Unchaste to aggro Sun into shooting Soul dead. I don't know. There's always a chance that what we get isn't as interesting as what we envision; the best we can do is be open to what we do get rather than insisting it has to be the way we want

If there's one thing I hope I've gotten across with this review, it's that I don't want to get hung up on the negatives, but I also don't want to just ignore them either. I am disappointed that certain plot points are being glossed over, and that's a valid response for any of us to have, but I'm not going to go so far as to say this was a bad chapter because of it. Good things definitely still happened within this chapter, and there's plenty of chance that good things will come out of what this chapter set up

As I said, all there is to do now is be patient and open-minded. If this ends up just being a lull in an otherwise fantastic finale, so be it. If it ends up being the start of a rushed mess, so be it. The only way to know is to be there to see it

Until then, let's enjoy life!

[rideboomindia]

Certainly, here are more detailed instructions on earning and redeeming RB Coins within the RideBoom app:

Earning RB Coins:

Complete Rides: Each time you take a ride using the RideBoom app, you'll earn a certain number of RB Coins based on the distance, duration, and other factors of the trip. Refer New Users: When you refer friends or family to sign up for the RideBoom app using your unique referral code, you'll earn RB Coins for each new user that completes their first ride. Participate in Promotions: RideBoom periodically runs special promotions and challenges that allow you to earn additional RB Coins. These may include things like achieving a certain number of rides in a week or completing specific in-app activities. Engage with the App: Performing certain actions within the RideBoom app, such as leaving reviews, updating your profile, or interacting with the app's features, can also contribute to earning RB Coins. Redeeming RB Coins:

Pay for Rides: You can use your accumulated RB Coins to pay for all or a portion of your ride fares. During the checkout process, simply select the "Pay with RB Coins" option and the app will deduct the necessary coins from your balance. Obtain Discounts: RideBoom may offer exclusive discounts or special offers that can be redeemed using RB Coins. These could include percentage-based discounts on rides or access to premium features. Exchange for Other Rewards: In the future, RideBoom may introduce the ability to exchange RB Coins for other types of rewards, such as gift cards, merchandise, or even cash-back options. To view your current RB Coin balance and transaction history, access the "Wallet" section within the RideBoom app. This will give you a clear overview of how you've earned and utilized your RB Coins.

Let me know if you have any other questions about the RB Coin system and how to maximize your earnings and redemptions within the RideBoom app.

[number1villainstan]

Making a JJK/RGU Crossover for Fun and Profit

Assumes working (but not in-depth) knowledge of both RGU and JJk.

Content warnings for anything that applies to either RGU or JJK (so discussions of abuse in general, sexual abuse specifically, rape, incest, death, gore, body horror, unreality, w/e). Ohtori Akio and Ryomen Sukuna are their own warnings.

Warnings for major JJK manga spoilers up to chapter 263 and for major RGU spoilers if you haven't watched the show.

Disclaimer for RGU fans: This isn't gonna be an in-depth analysis of either work. Or at least that's not the focus. There may be some of that in the body of the work, but if you're here for insightful commentary, this is not the post for you. However, if you're here for taking a dumbass idea way too seriously (for fun), then this is exactly the post for you.

And with those out of the way, let's get started, shall we?

What kind of crossover?

There are several different ways you can combine elements from two or more different stories, but you often end up having to throw away or twist certain elements to fit the other world/story, because lore (or magic system or a character's backstory) from one story may conflict with lore from the other story. You end up getting setups like characters from one story acting out the events of the other story, or characters living out a version of their own stories but in the other story's setting, or characters from both stories interacting in a setting separate from both stories.

However. Every once in a while, there's a combination of stories that allows you to preserve both settings, while having them be in contact with each other, and RGU and JJK is one such combination.

This lies in the enclosed nature of Ohtori (the setting of RGU) and the nature of cursed energy and techniques (part of the setting of JJK). When you combine these aspects of both stories, you end up with the crack crossover theory that Akio is a cursed spirit, and Ohtori is his domain expansion. It's a shockingly tight explanation for why Ohtori is Like That, especially coming from a work in a different genre and that is not in conversation with RGU at all (so far as I know). It explains how the world of Ohtori can be so unconcerned with physical laws, such as "there's no way for the pillar and stairs to support the dueling arena's weight" or "there's no topologically valid way to get from the forest to Akio's living room on those stairs" or "Ohtori's not by the ocean, so Ruka can't be both on campus and overlooking the ocean on a bench"; how illusions and tricks of the mind are so prevalent; why the dead can cheat death, if not forever; how Akio can be aware of nearly anything that happens at Ohtori; why time is so incredibly fucking weird (implying temporal/spacial manipulation cursed techniques on Akio's part); why Ohtori is practically fine-tuned to maximize misery in the long term.

Ohtori being a domain meant to capture teenagers and feed off their cursed energy not only provides another explanation for what Ohtori is, it fits very neatly into RGU's themes of abuse and how to break away from it, adding an extra layer onto Akio's ability to control everything about Ohtori. Akio being a cursed spirit also fits his backstory--if we take the flashbacks as indications of what happened, although not True Narratives, we can imagine Dios as a jujustu sorcerer who played the hero too much and ended up dying from exhaustion, with Akio being the cursed spirit that was his resurrection (much like how Sukuna is canonically a resurrected sorcerer). This also implies that Anthy herself may be a sorcerer, one who was likely thrown to the wolves (the cursed spirit that was Akio) upon his death, and who Akio has been imprisoning inside his domain since said death.

Unfortunately, this explanation isn't quite as tight as I would like it to be. There are several wrinkles to consider. Number one is that multiple characters leave and return to Ohtori over the course of the story, while domains are meant to be incredibly difficult to break out of given the barriers necessary to uphold them. Ryomen Sukuna and Fushiguro Megumi both demonstrate barrier-less domain expansions, but Megumi uses natural barriers (such as the inside of a warehouse), and Sukuna's usage of a barrierless domain expansion is seen as "divine". However, if we expand the boundaries of the hypothetical Ohtori domain expansion to include the town surrounding campus, and posit that there must be a second school there, we solve this problem by providing a place to go for Saionji when he's expelled, for Wakaba to go grocery shopping off-campus, for Ruka to be in the hospital, and for Shiori to attend school before transferring back to Ohtori, without them actually exiting Akio's sphere of influence, and furthermore

This is where we run into problem 2: keeping a domain expansion as big and as complex as Ohtori active for at least several months, for likely decades or centuries, requires an insane amount of cursed energy, and that we've never seen a domain expansion that large in JJK canon. Even Sukuna's 'divine' domain expansion in Shibuya, although he covered several city blocks, was a very simple domain, and wasn't as large as both Ohtori and its surrounding area. Furthermore, making Akio extremely powerful is a thematic sacrifice I don't want to make--part of what makes the finale so powerful is that Akio ends up posing less of a threat to Utena and more of an annoyance, although he's more powerful in Adolescence. (Some fans may say that I've already made a thematic sacrifice in making Akio not human, because part of the message of RGU is that normal, well-liked human beings can abuse other people without not being human, and their abuse may even be enabled by being well-liked and socially cushioned. To that I say: you are correct, but unless you have a smoother way to integrate the settings of RGU and JJK it was a necessary thematic sacrifice for this thought experiment. Also that I'm not all that interested in stories about humanity, being only technically human myself.) This is why I've made references to Akio siphoning off the cursed energy of those attending Ohtori, because it works both practically and thematically--this way Akio gains the cursed energy necessary for maintaining such a complex domain expansion by sucking it out of the students he's trapped inside, and it's a commentary on the soul-sucking (hah) nature of school and abuse and on how cultural systems of oppression and abuse need people to uphold them because they have no power on their own. But I doubt that Akio would get enough cursed energy from simply a bunch of non-sorcerers, which implies that there must be at least several sorcerers (or just people with abnormally high amounts of cursed energy) attending Ohtori; it would also make sense to say that Akio would keep these deeper energy reserves (so to speak) closer at hand than the rest of the student body. Yes, I'm going there: the Student Council + Utena are likely sorcerers themselves who haven't realized it yet, and Anthy is likely the most powerful sorcerer of anyone there, which would be part of the reason why Akio keeps her so close (and why she's implied to be able to do things like influence the arena and set all of those animals loose on Kiryuu Nanami). However, they would likely be unable to access any cursed techniques of their own, because Akio's influence would siphon away so much of their cursed energy.

So, to recap: Akio is a vampiric curse and Ohtori + the surrounding area is his domain expansion, and he feeds off the misery of the students he has trapped inside his domain; in addition, Anthy, Utena, and the Student Council all have sorcerer levels of cursed energy, along with potentially a good portion of the "unspecial" population, but in most of their cases have functionally the same power levels as normal people due to Akio's vampiric nature.

Okay, but so what?

Having a setting like this is very fun, but it can't reach the level of story as it is; currently it's just a crack crossover theory/headcanon. In order for this to become a story of its own, we need characters and we need a plot. Given how character-driven RGU is, and how the world of Ohtori responds to its characters' emotions, most of the plot can be extrapolated from our choice in characters and from how the world of Ohtori is set up. The main thing we need, besides choosing which characters, is an inciting incident. I have a simple one ready: whoever monitors these things in the jujutsu world has received reports/evidence of high levels of cursed energy where Ohtori is, and sends in our characters to investigate, thinking it would be a normal mission, and they end up entering the domain expansion and becoming students at Ohtori.

But who are the characters?

We've got several options for characters or character groups to send in to Ohtori, and we can safely assume that the RGU characters will start fundamentally the same as they are in canon, only changing in response to the actions of the JJK characters introduced to their environment. I also strongly doubt that any of the JJK characters we would introduce would have a rose crest ring, or come in with Akio's approval--in other words, they broke in, and they start as "unspecial". It would also make the most sense storywise to send in teenagers (or those who look like them); adults would likely be stonewalled out of getting close to Ohtori campus. That being said, let's go over some options and their consequences/implications:

The First Year Trio

The protagonists of the show: Fushiguro Megumi, Itadori Yuuji, and Kugisaki Nobara, with Ryomen Sukuna tagging along with them. You could do a Junpei Lives AU and include him as well, but I won't, since I'm focusing on bringing together both canons, which means Junpei is fucking dead. Let's go over each of the characters:

Kugisaki Nobara:

potential for Weird Sibling Shit: none, unless she has a sibling we never hear about in canon.

potential for Sunlit Garden Shit: low to medium. It's implied that she doesn't miss her country upbringing, and she talks about a girl she admired being bullied away by unsympathetic folk in her neighborhood, but nostalgia has a way of twisting the truth, so it's not impossible.

potential for Shining Thing Shit: low to medium. If Maki enters with her, then she may end up having her as a shining thing; however, there's not any one specific person or ideal that she tends to fixate on.

is she Stuck In Her Coffin: I'd say no. She's very assertive and seems not to care about what others think, and she's unafraid of interacting with the world.

Kugisaki Nobara would hate Ohtori. Loudly. And violently. Despite being mostly gender-conforming appearance-wise, her personality directly contradicts Ohtori's 'ideal woman', and she'd likely draw scorn from the general population. She'd probably make a fascinating parallel with Saionji; her violence is usually played for laughs at the other person's expense, or for making herself look badass, while Saionji's violence usually makes him look like a dick or earns him a trip to Clown Town. (Some of this difference is in what they direct their violence at, of course, but not all of it.) They're also both incredibly stubborn, unlikely to go along uncritically with tradition, extremely direct, and often eager to throw the first punch, so to speak. She'd also probably outright refuse to talk to Akio on the basis that he has "bad vibes", and if she ever hears about the shit he pulls with other teenagers she'd (attempt to) put a nail through his skull.

Fushiguro Megumi:

potential for Weird Sibling Shit: medium to high. We likely wouldn't see his older stepsister Tsumiki come back to life like Ruka, but healing Tsumiki is a main motivator of Megumi's actions in canon, and she was the one who took care of him after both his dad (her stepdad) and her mom (his stepmom) abandoned them (or died, in Toji's case, but Megumi doesn't know that). Strong case for Weird Sibling Shit even if Tsumiki doesn't show up.

potential for Sunlit Garden Shit: low to medium. He did NOT have a happy childhood, and he hates his dad. The only thing he would want to go back to the past for would be to see Tsumiki awake again (which would tie into Weird Sibling Shit). But, like I said with Kugisaki, the memory-warping effects of nostalgia cannot be underestimated.

potential for Shining Thing Shit: low to medium. Probably his 'shining thing' would be Tsumiki.

is he Stuck In His Coffin: Honestly, probably. At the beginning of canon he has hangups about his own power and self-worth, and struggles with expressing himself openly and honestly. (Actually, I don't think he gets better at expressing himself over the course of canon aside from whaling on curses.)

Fushiguro Megumi is probably the character who's most susceptible to Ohtori's emotional manipulations out of the whole JJK cast. His personality is most similar to Juri's, I think, in the way he's emotionally constipated and finds it difficult to express his feelings to other people. Thankfully he doesn't have a Shiori, both in the sense of being hurt and of hurting someone else from stonewalling them (unless you count Sukuna, but we all know Sukuna can take it and also deserves it). Given his relationship with Gojo (his main parental figure), he may be somewhat more vulnerable to Akio's manipulations, or he may be much less vulnerable given how much he rags on Gojo.

Itadori Yuuji:

potential for Weird Sibling Shit: none. He's canonically an orphan and an only child (iirc).

potential for Sunlit Garden Shit: high. He is not doing well--he's been possessed by a demon, slated for execution, his grandpa is dead, and his pre-canon friends are in the hospital. There's no way he doesn't wish to turn back the clock in some ways, to go back to when life was simple and safe.

potential for Shining Thing Shit: low. He doesn't have anything specific he obsesses over, although you could argue that he could obsess over the goal of beating Sukuna, especially in the late stages of the manga.

is he Stuck In His Coffin: No. He's much better at making connections and expressing emotion and vulnerability than someone like Megumi, and he's shown in canon to be respectful of others (aside from like. Sukuna and Mahito, who both deserve the disrepsect) no matter their gender.

Yuuji isn't as vulnerable as Megumi to Ohtori's emotional manipulations, but that isn't to say that he isn't vulnerable at all. He's a lot like Utena herself personality-wise, and I think he's vulnerable in similar ways as well, especially in a desire to go back to a time when life was simple and safe and guaranteed. His attachment to Gojo may also make him especially vulnerable to Akio's carefully-cultivated aura of "coolness".

Ryomen Sukuna:

potential for Weird Sibling Shit: none, unless he has a sibling that survived the Heian Era as a curse (highly unlikely) AND he's actually attached to that sibling (even more unlikely). The only time Sukuna mentions anything like having siblings it's to say that he ate his twin in the womb, I don't think he puts much emphasis on family of any kind

potential for Sunlit Garden Shit: none. Man's out here living his best hedonistic curse life all day every day; anything that might trigger Sunlit Garden-type nostalgia in someone else (like being stuck in Itadori's body or having to deal with Akio's siphoning his cursed energy away) he views as an annoyance or a threat, but not as evidence that the Past Was Better.

potential for Shining Thing Shit: none. He's practically his own shining thing.

is he Stuck In His Coffin: lmao no he got out a long time ago just cuz he decided it wasn't comfy in there

Sukuna is, hilariously, the JJK character with the most comedic potential in this situation. There's two ways he could go, with him either being stuck in Yuuji's body the whole time (which confines him to being a menace to Yuuji) or, my own preference, him getting his own body at Ohtori, which allows him to go off on his own and do weird shit, which I like too much to not do. Watch as he makes all the right logical steps as to why Ohtori Bullshit is Wrong Actually and then his conclusion veers so hard to the side that we end up in territory that is maybe actually Even Worse. "This whole Dueling Game thing is bullshit" yes "Anthy should have way more agency" yes "the kids should be fighting proper death battles cuz they value the thrill of the fight" nO. His reaction to Akio would literally just be "you need to learn how to respect your betters". He's utterly impervious to Akio's and Ohtori's emotional manipulation and yet he keeps Missing The Point. Everyone else is Suffering(TM) and he's just off doing hot girl shit with Nobara or trying to figure out how to get his cursed energy back. Ohtori may be Hell but Sukuna is literally a demon.

Bonus Characters

My original plan was to go through a lot of different JJK characters/character groups, but it's late and I want to be done with this so those will have to wait until a reblog. But to wrap up quickly, I'll do Maki&Mai and Uraume.

Zen'in Maki and Zen'in Mai:

potential for Weird Sibling Shit: very high. Not only are they twins who have been split apart by jujustu society, Mai ends up dying to 'free' Maki, and there's one panel where it looks like one of them is kissing the other one (who's unconscious) on the mouth. Yeah. They're up there with Miki and Kozue for Weird Twin Sibling Shit.

potential for Sunlit Garden Shit: medium to high. Some of the flashbacks for them heavily imply that there were some very high-nostalgia-potential moments in their childhood, before they realized their inequality.

potential for Shining Thing Shit: low for Maki (who doesn't care anymore), high for Mai (who would idolize Maki in some sense, or at least desire that Maki come back).

are they Stuck In Their Coffins: Mai yes, Maki no. Maki's already decided to leave the Zen'ins behind when canon starts, but Mai is still trapped in her own desire to go back to the way it was ('won't you stay at the bottom with me?' iirc).

Maki and Mai would be hard-pressed to survive in Ohtori's environment. Mai's something like Shiori, methinks, while Maki's just trying to get out again. They already have a deeply fucked up relationship, and Ohtori would probably just warp it further and drive them apart even more.

Uraume:

(This entry is formatted a little differently.) Uraume is an interesting character, especially with the implication that they and Sukuna genuinely enjoy each other's company. Their gender, or lack thereof, would also become much more important in RGU's story, despite being mostly just a side note in JJK's. It would be more difficult to get them in, because they don't have anyone around to order them inside, but if they got word that Sukuna was potentially lost inside a rogue curse's domain expansion they'd have a personal motivation to enter the story.

Pros of having Uraume in this story:

A straightman (straightperson) for Sukuna's bullshit to play off of, like in a comedy duo

Interesting parallels and contrasts between Uraume's serving Sukuna because they genuinely like him and Anthy's whole Rose Bride stuff, especially in the third(?) episode when she claims she wants to be the Rose Bride

Would force interesting questions and developments in the narrative of the crossover story, in the world of Ohtori (how do they deal with someone who isn't gendered if they have no information on which box to put them in?), and in certain RGU characters (Saionji: "are you a boy or a girl?" Uraume: "I'm neither" Saionji: "oh i see" Uraume internally: three. two. one. Saionji: "WAIT YOU CAN DO THAT?").

Cons of having Uraume in this story:

their no-gender swag is too powerful, if they stepped foot on Ohtori campus the whole school would spontaneously combust

[wildflowerluver]

HI I LOVE YOUR WORKS AND YOURE AWESOME !!! some of my fav hotch fics ever for real <3

if you’re still looking for ideas for the aaron hurt/comfort idea you posted about i thought i'd try to supply you with inspo ! maybe reader is an anxious overthinker (couldn't be any of us hotch stans wdym) and is feeling really anxious bc they feel like they made a friend mad/upset for some reason bc the friend seemed a little off + hasn't replied to readers messages. so poor reader is just so concerned and scared they did something wrong and on top of that they're tired, stressed, and overall overwhelmed so they just CRYYY and ofc hotch comes along and does his comfort thing and reasons through it with them. and then reader's friend texts them back like hey sorry i was really busy today but yeah! we should definitely go out more, i had a ton of fun today!! bc we need closure here LOL and then reader can cuddle and fall asleep with hotch to get out any lingering anxiety and take care of that sleepiness fr

THIS IS SO LONG IM SORRY MY BRAIN WAS TRYING SO HARD TO COME UP WITH SOMETHING AND IT TRIED A LITTLE TOO HARD I THINK LMAO hopefully this sparks something for you tho ! of course feel free to do what you wish with this, change it around, whatever it may be there's always no pressure !! happy vibes for you <3

(ria!!! thank u for ur request ily <33) fem!reader, anxiety, mentions of past friendship issues, hurt/comfort vibes, 1k words

ʚ♡ɞ

you had a natural tendency to overthink.

every interaction, big or small, seemed to replay in your head for hours. had you said something off? did that person see something strange about you?

you were terrified to tell aaron about your struggles with anxiety and overthinking. it hadn’t gone well in the past several times and you didn’t want aaron to leave too. but, he didn’t. it never even crossed your mind.

aaron collected you in his arms, squeezing you tightly and thanking you for telling him. he asked what you needed from him.

“reassurance,” you spoke tentatively. not once had a previous partner asked how they could help. “and maybe a kiss.”

his laugh was full-body, lips upturning. “i think both of those can definitely be arranged.”

___

aaron hadn’t been home a lot recently.

he was away on a case down in texas, then swarmed with meetings and paperwork, another local case, and more paperwork. the absence of him was starting to impact you severely.

just in the way you were open about your anxiety, he was open about his job and the time aspect of it. he called or texted, reassuring (like he promised), that he would be home soon or the timeframe of the case. you just couldn’t help your intrusive thoughts from creeping up. 

you tried to fill his absence in a productive way, maximizing the time you had outside of work by reaching out to some friends to hang out. your friend B and you set up a lunch date. she was a close friend and you knew being in her company would help your mood.

usually when you’re with her, time seems to go by fast and conversation flows easily. this time was the opposite. you had met for lunch downtown and expected it to be like it always was. instead, it felt so forced it was almost uncomfortable. naturally, your brain had drifted into believing it was something you had said.

you were on autopilot going home, brain reeling at lunch. you wanted aaron. he always knew what to say or do and was your number one comfort. but he wasn’t here. 

you trudged into the house, haphazardly dropping your bag. you sat in front of the fireplace, it wasn’t warm but in your mind it was. 

it was the first time in weeks you felt like you had a moment to stop. 

the tears came hot and fast.

you buried your head in your knees, arms wrapping around your legs as your body shook. everything felt wrong and you were so terrified you had hurt B.

you were exhausted. 

the back door open and closed. you hardly took notice. your head was pounding.

“honey!” aaron’s voice rang through the home. “i’m home!”

his voice only made you cry harder, though you kept your sobs muffled by the fabric of your pants. it was early, he shouldn’t be home yet. why was he home?

“honey?” he called again. “i got off early today, sent the entire team home early too. figured we all-”

he stopped dead in his tracks when he entered the living room and his eyes fell on you. “oh, honey.”

in an instant, aaron was kneeling down at your side. the second his hand touched your back, you broke. you threw your body into him, needing to feel him close. he held you while you cried, hand rubbing up your back. he didn’t shush you or help you calm down just yet. you just needed to cry.

after a few minutes aaron pulled back, hands reaching up to cup your face. he thumbed away a few stray tears that continued to roll. 

“what’s hurting you?”

you took a deep breath before explaining. it was always easy with aaron to be honest. you rambled about his absence, how you missed him, how work had been a little tough lately, lunch with B, how you feel like you said or did something that made it feel off. everything.

though aaron had sat back on the carpet, your hands remained interlocked. he squeezed them occasionally throughout your words.

he collected you in his arms when you finished. “i’m so sorry about being away. i shouldn’t be going anywhere for awhile. i’m sure B is okay. you didn’t say anything off. maybe she was just having a bad day.”

your phone dinged on the table.

aaron picked it up, features softening at the text. perfect timing.

‘hey! so sorry if i seemed a little off at lunch today - work has just been super crazy and i got an email right before about a deadline being pushed up so i was distracted. it was still so so nice to get together, we should definitely do it again sometime soon!!’

he showed you the text B just sent. his hand fell to the small of your back again, finding the patch of exposed skin and leaving his hand there. 

B’s text eased your anxiety. you didn’t do anything wrong. she was just having an off day.

“do you feel better? about B at least?”

you hummed. “a little, yeah.”

you slumped into aaron’s side. “can we go lay down for a little?”

he kissed your cheek. “absolutely.” 

aaron guided you upstairs, stopping though to put his work things away though he motioned for you to head into the bedroom to get settled.

you kept the lights in the room off before crawling into bed. physical and mental exhaustion was clouding your brain.  

aaron padded in a few seconds after you, quickly changing out of his work clothes and into soft sweatpants and a shirt. he stopped at the edge of the bed, eyes peering down at you.

“how are we doing this tonight?” he motioned toward the bed with his hand.

“can you just hold me?”

he smiled softly. “of course honey.”

aaron slid under the covers beside you. he raised one arm, an open invitation for you to curl up. you did, sliding over and tangling your legs with his. he, in turn, tucked you under his chin and brought his arms to cocoon around you.

“it’s gonna be okay, i promise.”

he sealed his words with a strong kiss to the crown of your head. 

somehow you knew it would.

[thepastisalreadywritten]

(CNN) — Jack Latham was on a mission to photograph farms in Vietnam — not the country’s sprawling plantations or rice terraces but its “click farms.”

Last year, the British photographer spent a month in the capital Hanoi documenting some of the shadowy enterprises that help clients artificially boost online traffic and social media engagement in the hope of manipulating algorithms and user perceptions.

The resulting images, which feature in his new book “Beggar’s Honey,” provide rare insight into the workshops that hire low-paid workers to cultivate likes, comments and shares for businesses and individuals globally.

“When most people are on social media, they want nothing but attention — they’re begging for it,” Latham said in a phone interview, explaining his book’s title.

“With social media, our attention is a product for advertisers and marketers.”

In the 2000s, the growing popularity of social media sites — including Facebook and Twitter, now called X — created a new market for well-curated digital profiles, with companies and brands vying to maximize visibility and influence.

Though it is unclear when click farms began proliferating, tech experts warned about “virtual gang masters” operating them from low-income countries as early as 2007.

In the following decades, click farms exploded in number — particularly in Asia, where they can be found across India, Bangladesh, Indonesia, the Philippines, and beyond.

Regulations have often failed to keep pace: While some countries, like China, have attempted to crack down on operations (the China Advertising Association banned the use of click farms for commercial gain in 2020), they continue to flourish around the continent, especially in places where low labor and electricity costs make it affordable to power hundreds of devices simultaneously.

‘Like Silicon Valley startups’

Latham’s project took him to five click farms in Vietnam.

(The click farmers he hoped to photograph in Hong Kong “got cold feet,” he said, and pandemic-related travel restrictions dashed his plans to document the practice in mainland China).

On the outskirts of Hanoi, Latham visited workshops operating from residential properties and hotels.

Some had a traditional setup with hundreds of manually operated phones, while others used a newer, compact method called “box farming” — a phrase used by the click farmers Latham visited — where several phones, without screens and batteries, are wired together and linked to a computer interface.

Latham said one of the click farms he visited was a family-run business, though the others appeared more like a tech companies.

Most workers were in their 20s and 30s, he added.

“They all looked like Silicon Valley startups,” he said. “There was a tremendous amount of hardware … whole walls of phones.”

Some of Latham’s photos depict — albeit anonymously — workers tasked with harvesting clicks.

In one image, a man is seen stationed amid a sea of gadgets in what appears to be a lonely and monotonous task.

“It only takes one person to control large amounts of phones,” Latham said. “One person can very quickly (do the work of) 10,000. It’s both solitary and crowded.”

At the farms Lathan visited, individuals were usually in charge of a particular social media platforms.

For instance, one “farmer” would be responsible for mass posting and commenting on Facebook accounts, or setting up YouTube platforms where they post and watch videos on loop.

The photographer added that TikTok is now the most popular platform at the click farms he visited.

The click farmers Latham spoke to mostly advertised their services online for less than one cent per click, view or interaction.

And despite the fraudulent nature of their tasks, they seemed to treat it like just another job, the photographer said.

‘There was an understanding they were just providing a service,” he added. “There wasn’t a shadiness. What they’re offering is shortcuts.”

Deceptive perception

Across its 134 pages, “Beggar’s Honey” includes a collection of abstract photographs — some seductive, others contemplative — depicting videos that appeared on Latham’s TikTok feed.

He included them in the book to represent the kind of content he saw being boosted by click farms.

But many of his photos focus on the hardware used to manipulate social media —webs of wires, phones and computers.

“A lot of my work is about conspiracies,” Latham said. ” Trying to ‘document the machines used to spread disinformation’ is the tagline of the project. The bigger picture is often the thing we don’t see.”

Click farms around the world are also used to amplify political messages and spread disinformation during elections.

In 2016, Cambodia’s then-prime minister Hun Sen was accused of buying Facebook friends and likes, which according to the BBC he denied, while shadowy operations in North Macedonia were found to have spread pro-Donald Trump posts and articles during that year’s US presidential election.

While researching, Latham said he found that algorithms — a topic of his previous book, “Latent Bloom” — often recommended videos that he said got increasingly “extreme” with each click.

“If you only digest a diet of that, it’s a matter of time you become diabetically conspiratorial,” he said.

“The spreading of disinformation is the worst thing. It happens in your pocket, not newspapers, and it’s terrifying that it’s tailored to your kind of neurosis.”

Hoping to raise awareness of the phenomenon and its dangers, Latham is planning to exhibit his own home version of a click farm — a small box with several phones attached to a computer interface — at the 2024 Images Vevey Festival in Switzerland.

He bought the gadget in Vietnam for the equivalent of about $1,000 and has occasionally experimented with it on his social media accounts.

On Instagram, Latham’s photos usually attract anywhere from a few dozen to couple hundred likes.

But when he deployed his personal click farm to announce his latest book, the post generated more than 6,600 likes.

The photographer wants people to realize that there’s more to what they see on social media — and that metrics aren’t a measurement of authenticity.

“When people are better equipped with knowledge of how things work, they can make more informed decisions,” he said.

“Beggar’s Honey,” co-published by Here Press and Images Vevey, is available now.

[govindhtech]

Obsidian And RTX AI PCs For Advanced Large Language Model

How to Utilize Obsidian‘s Generative AI Tools. Two plug-ins created by the community demonstrate how RTX AI PCs can support large language models for the next generation of app developers.

Obsidian Meaning

Obsidian is a note-taking and personal knowledge base program that works with Markdown files. Users may create internal linkages for notes using it, and they can see the relationships as a graph. It is intended to assist users in flexible, non-linearly structuring and organizing their ideas and information. Commercial licenses are available for purchase, however personal usage of the program is free.

Obsidian Features

Electron is the foundation of Obsidian. It is a cross-platform program that works on mobile operating systems like iOS and Android in addition to Windows, Linux, and macOS. The program does not have a web-based version. By installing plugins and themes, users may expand the functionality of Obsidian across all platforms by integrating it with other tools or adding new capabilities.

Obsidian distinguishes between community plugins, which are submitted by users and made available as open-source software via GitHub, and core plugins, which are made available and maintained by the Obsidian team. A calendar widget and a task board in the Kanban style are two examples of community plugins. The software comes with more than 200 community-made themes.

Every new note in Obsidian creates a new text document, and all of the documents are searchable inside the app. Obsidian works with a folder of text documents. Obsidian generates an interactive graph that illustrates the connections between notes and permits internal connectivity between notes. While Markdown is used to accomplish text formatting in Obsidian, Obsidian offers quick previewing of produced content.

Generative AI Tools In Obsidian

A group of AI aficionados is exploring with methods to incorporate the potent technology into standard productivity practices as generative AI develops and speeds up industry.

Community plug-in-supporting applications empower users to investigate the ways in which large language models (LLMs) might improve a range of activities. Users using RTX AI PCs may easily incorporate local LLMs by employing local inference servers that are powered by the NVIDIA RTX-accelerated llama.cpp software library.

It previously examined how consumers might maximize their online surfing experience by using Leo AI in the Brave web browser. Today, it examine Obsidian, a well-known writing and note-taking tool that uses the Markdown markup language and is helpful for managing intricate and connected records for many projects. Several of the community-developed plug-ins that add functionality to the app allow users to connect Obsidian to a local inferencing server, such as LM Studio or Ollama.

To connect Obsidian to LM Studio, just select the “Developer” button on the left panel, load any downloaded model, enable the CORS toggle, and click “Start.” This will enable LM Studio’s local server capabilities. Because the plug-ins will need this information to connect, make a note of the chat completion URL from the “Developer” log console (“http://localhost:1234/v1/chat/completions” by default).

Next, visit the “Settings” tab after launching Obsidian. After selecting “Community plug-ins,” choose “Browse.” Although there are a number of LLM-related community plug-ins, Text Generator and Smart Connections are two well-liked choices.

For creating notes and summaries on a study subject, for example, Text Generator is useful in an Obsidian vault.

Asking queries about the contents of an Obsidian vault, such the solution to a trivia question that was stored years ago, is made easier using Smart Connections.

Open the Text Generator settings, choose “Custom” under “Provider profile,” and then enter the whole URL in the “Endpoint” section. After turning on the plug-in, adjust the settings for Smart Connections. For the model platform, choose “Custom Local (OpenAI Format)” from the options panel on the right side of the screen. Next, as they appear in LM Studio, type the model name (for example, “gemma-2-27b-instruct”) and the URL into the corresponding fields.

The plug-ins will work when the fields are completed. If users are interested in what’s going on on the local server side, the LM Studio user interface will also display recorded activities.

Transforming Workflows With Obsidian AI Plug-Ins

Consider a scenario where a user want to organize a trip to the made-up city of Lunar City and come up with suggestions for things to do there. “What to Do in Lunar City” would be the title of the new note that the user would begin. A few more instructions must be included in the query submitted to the LLM in order to direct the results, since Lunar City is not an actual location. The model will create a list of things to do while traveling if you click the Text Generator plug-in button.

Obsidian will ask LM Studio to provide a response using the Text Generator plug-in, and LM Studio will then execute the Gemma 2 27B model. The model can rapidly provide a list of tasks if the user’s machine has RTX GPU acceleration.

Or let’s say that years later, the user’s buddy is visiting Lunar City and is looking for a place to dine. Although the user may not be able to recall the names of the restaurants they visited, they can review the notes in their vault Obsidian‘s word for a collection of notes to see whether they have any written notes.

A user may ask inquiries about their vault of notes and other material using the Smart Connections plug-in instead of going through all of the notes by hand. In order to help with the process, the plug-in retrieves pertinent information from the user’s notes and responds to the request using the same LM Studio server. The plug-in uses a method known as retrieval-augmented generation to do this.

Although these are entertaining examples, users may see the true advantages and enhancements in daily productivity after experimenting with these features for a while. Two examples of how community developers and AI fans are using AI to enhance their PC experiences are Obsidian plug-ins.

Thousands of open-source models are available for developers to include into their Windows programs using NVIDIA GeForce RTX technology.

Read more on Govindhtech.com

[biromanticacemess]

ok new favourite episode holy shit that was amazing

basically all interactions between VR-LA and Maxim were so good and cute and JAKSGDJAJC

also have to agree with Noir that "Yes, me." from Maxim is hot

Dani's design is not allowed to change by the naritive it's so funny also VR-LA not being the funny number in height anymore is sad

Kyana once again is stuned in combat for multiple rounds I feel so bad for she can never just hit shit

also just Vhas trying to talk Vlaakith down from attacking them like damn

[luizsiqueiraneto]

The true desktop metaphor is macOS

Since its initial classic version, macOS (originally called Macintosh System Software) has adopted a graphical approach that prioritizes consistency and user integration with the digital environment. The concept of operating with a single visible application, characterized by a fixed menu at the top of the screen, distinguishes macOS from many other operating systems that were inspired by it. This menu remains stable regardless of the number of open windows, establishing an intuitive relationship between the user and the system. This design harkens back to systems with interfaces exclusively based on text, where only one application was executed at a time, maintaining control at a fixed point and reducing confusion, thereby promoting an organized workflow.

With the introduction of multitasking, Apple decided to preserve the paradigm of one application at a time on the screen, later allowing the viewing of background application windows while working in the focused application. To this day, it is possible to completely hide background application windows in macOS; to do so, simply press the Command key along with the H key (Command + H), making only the active application's windows visible.

To differentiate its system from macOS, Microsoft chose to display each application in a window instead of occupying the entire screen like macOS, which gave rise to the system's name: Windows. However, this choice created a challenge: if applications are in windows, where could users manipulate documents? To address this issue, Microsoft adopted the concept of Multiple Document Interface (MDI). This approach significantly deviated from the cohesive logic of macOS and broke the paradigm of the workspace.

MDI example

In an MDI environment, multiple document windows could be contained within a single "parent window." Although this structure provided a solution for document management, it also introduced unnecessary complexity, making it difficult to manage each document individually. For users, the presence of multiple "child" windows under a main window created a confusing and fragmented semantic experience, distancing them from the direct and intuitive organization of the interface and compromising the use of the workspace as a support for activities.

The gradual abandonment of MDI by Microsoft helped resolve some of this confusion but brought forth a new problem: high memory consumption. In Windows, each open document began to require its own instance of the application, significantly increasing resource usage. In contrast, macOS maintained a single-instance approach: one application could manage multiple documents without creating new instances for each one. This optimizes memory usage and contributes to more efficient performance. In macOS, there are no copies of the same application running; there is only one instance, resulting in greater efficiency for the system and clearer user experience.

Mac OS Classic

Another essential aspect that differentiates macOS's philosophy is the "desktop" paradigm. Since its early versions, the desktop in macOS has functioned as a natural extension of physical workspace. Users could drag and drop texts, images, files, and other objects directly onto the desktop for temporary storage and later use. This model directly reflects a physical desk where items being worked on can be left while another task is performed, allowing for easy retrieval later.

For this reason, it has never been truly possible in macOS to make a window occupy the entire screen; doing so would compromise the idea that the desktop is more than just a background. It allows users to interact both within the application window and with objects arranged on their workspace. Thus, the Zoom behavior—clicking on the Zoom Box in classic macOS or double-clicking at the top of a window—does not maximize the window on-screen; instead, it seeks to adjust it to optimize content presentation while allowing manipulation of objects on the desk.

This philosophy continues today in macOS Sequoia; even with the adoption of “Snap,” which automatically organizes windows on-screen, they do not touch each other or the screen edges—reinforcing thus the paradigm of windows on a workspace while preserving original language intact and coherent. The red button on windows aims to emulate iPadOS and iOS functionality, facilitating adoption by users already familiar with these systems.

To accommodate iPadOS and iOS paradigms—which lack a workspace—macOS employs the concept of Spaces introduced alongside Mission Control. This concept allows for multiple applications and distinct workspaces within their own spaces. The first workspace always contains a desktop area, thus prioritizing classic window and workspace paradigms.

In Windows, users tend to maximize application windows, rendering workspace use ineffective. When an application is maximized in Windows, it emulates total focus on that application—similar to what occurs in macOS—but renders workspace use impossible. Over time, Windows completely abandoned this area; it became primarily a location for program shortcuts.

The ability to drag and drop objects in macOS reinforced a strong focus on "drag-and-drop" interaction, creating a more immersive experience for users. This behavior was inspired by earlier systems like Xerox Alto and Xerox Star that explored graphical interface concepts with direct object manipulation. macOS enhanced this idea by offering an interface where digital components could be dragged and intuitively manipulated like physical objects.

NeXTSTEP

This paradigm transformed user experience into something more cohesive; the desktop was not just a place for application shortcuts but an extension of ongoing work. The influence of NeXTSTEP—the operating system developed by Steve Jobs after leaving Apple—reinforced this design philosophy. With concepts like object-oriented development introduced by NeXTSTEP, significant advances were made in macOS's structure and usability.

The Dock, for example—one of macOS's most iconic elements—originated from NeXTSTEP and provides quick access to applications and documents in a single accessible visual line. Additionally, NeXTSTEP introduced advanced frameworks that enabled more modular and interactive applications. These technical details reflect coherence and elegance in macOS's interface.

The system is designed not only to execute specific functions but also to provide intuitive integration between user and machine, promoting a work semantics more aligned with what is natural in graphical environments. While Windows and other operating systems have attempted to emulate parts of this unique macOS experience, many concepts remain unmatched within this system.

Over decades, this approach to graphical interface has solidified as a reference for coherence and functionality; drawing inspiration from past systems (like Xerox Star and NeXTSTEP) while remaining true to its clear user experience vision. This established continuity and simplicity in interactions that contribute even today to perceiving macOS as more than just an operating system: it is seen as a natural extension designed to work harmoniously with its user beyond superficial appearances.