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vhaos-chaotic-writing · 1 month ago

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Hi!👋, im back(again), sorry if im a little bit of an bother(english isn't my first language sorry😅), i want to have ANOTHER request of Yandere TFP ALL Autobots(poly pls🥺)with an same cybertronian s/o from my first request that is SUPER shy, easily flustered and hardly ever raises thare voice that comes out as VERY adorable whispers and thare...

🥰DROP🥰

💞DEAD💞

❤️‍🔥GORGEOUS❤️‍🔥

🥰🌌💗💜AND like my first request small scenario and headcanons💜💗🌌🥰

Hug🤗

YOU ARE NOT A BOTHER SHUT UP I LOVE YOU!!! (´▽`ʃ♡ƪ) And it's okay, english is also not my 1st language, but be patience and keep listening, reading and speaking it!! And you'll get the hang of it!

(〃￣︶￣)人(￣︶￣〃) Sending hugs too bestie!!!

(TFP) Yandere!Autobots w/ Shy Cybertronian!Reader (HCs & Scenario)

WARNING: Yandere behaviour, yandere harem, romantic relationships, overprotective and obsessive behaviour, soft kidnapping (?), typical violence from the series and a little bit more, Reader is gender neutral and in the Autobot faction. Long ass post ngl.

Don't worry guys I'm adding Ultra Magnus I ain't forgetting that fine mech again. And Cliffjumper, sorry baby I forgot you at first.

You were the little of hope the team protects dearly.

Everyone in the autobot team loved you so dearly and all of them had a little non-spoken vow: to protect and love you.

And how could they not do that? You were such a soft, spark-spoken bot, always trying to bring comfort to the others, never being too loud, supporting them and just being that light in the darkness they were in.

You arrived to earth with the original team - and if back in Cybertrone all of them were a little bit protective over you, being on a new planet it go 10 times more.

From the beginning after the autobots established on the base thanks to the human's militia and Agent Fowler, the team decided to forbid you from going on missions - you would have tried to gently speak in your defense of being able to fight alongside your friends, but after hearing the concerns of your teammates and feel as if their sparks would vanish at the mere thought of you getting hurt or... offlined by the Decepticons, it was more than enough to give in, smiling at them sweetly with a small 'I understand', deciding to become Ratchet's assitant.

All of them were so relieved - they didn't want to force you inside of one of the storages room and keep you there inside against your will. They were gonna do it to protect you! Alas, you were such a good, sweet bot that knew they were only looking after your well being! So good, so good!

The team cherishes every single little moment they have with you - every little smile, chuckle, conversation, inside-joke - anything became a dear memory within their softwares.

After Cliffjumper's death... the need to protect you grew, to the point the team started to develop such obsessive ideals about you.

Everyone's spark was clenching in pain, watching you cry your optics out while hugging Arcee, how was holding you closely and sobbing quietly, anger painted on her faceplate... she wasn't gonna let you get offlined like Cliffjumper did - no one was gonna let that happen.

You love dearly your teammates, and you know all of them love you! But... sometimes you feel like their love for you is too much. Sometimes.

Optimus Prime and Ratchet can be too overprotective, sometimes - You know they mean well, but sometimes you are mad at yourself for not telling them to chill. Optimus always remind you the promise you made to them before he leaves with the others for a mission - "to leave the base it is prohibited, even less if you don't have someone making you company." And you try to convice him, but his worried expression and your stuttering and passive behaviour always makes you close your mouth and whisper a "I'm sorry, I understand." It melts your spark at the sight of Optimus' soft, relieved smile and that forehelm gives you. And Ratchet, by Primus, he is always fretting about you - he is always checking on you even when you are on the same room, making sure you are well recharged and had your fill, always saying that "you are far more important than him" when you scold him for not having his fill of energon. You always remind him he is important too, but he is set on always prioritizing you over himself...

Your spark sinks a little at hearing Ratchet and Optimus speak quietly in the dead of the night - Ratchet was telling on detail everything you did on the day, as if it was a report. What it scares you is how precise his words and details are, it seems... obsessive, too obsessive. And Optimus thanks Ratchet for keeping you safe and sound, promising to keep fighting for a better world so all of the team and you could live happily back at Cybertrone... and you swear you felt Optimus' optics on you as you tried to recharge on your own berth, or heard Ratchet whisper sweet nothings to you as you recharged, too.

Bulkhead, Wheeljack and Ultra Magnus have silently vowed to be your guardians, your own personal wrecker-guards. Wheeljack is constatly flirting with you, as Bulkhead is the shy type to quietly give you small gifts like a small flower or pretty rock. Ultra Magnus always gives you praises and words full of - all three of them always get to make you blush. But lately, Wheeljack's flirting has become too... intense in your opinion. Bulkhead seems always too anxious whenever he gives you a small gift, fearing you are going to reject it. And Ultra Magnus seems to make his praise become worshipping, as if you were like Primus itself. You've also have started to notice how the three of them seem to always aim to get your favor, any kind of positive reaction - an approval from you, as if you were the one to have the last word and decision, like a god does. Wheeljack wishes for a flirt back, Bulkhead wishes for an approval, Ultra Magnus wishes your benevolence.

Bumblebee and Smokescreen can't never get enough of your affection and attention - like two young puppies. They also always try to have any kind of physical contact with you, which nearly always translates into hugs or servos holding. And these two are an intensified version of the three wreckers - Bee constantly seems to look after your approval, your words of affirmation and gentle praise. Smokescreen either flirts with you non-stop or spills too many worshipping praises like he did when he got to meet Optimus. But what makes them different is that they verbalize their protective promises. The two of them have said they are not afraid of ending any decepticon for the sake of keeping you safe and sound, to give you the Cybertrone you deserve so you can live happily and surrounded only by the bots that love you so dearly. And they promise this as they snuzzle gently their helms against yours, holding your servos softly... whispering their obsessive promises to your audials.

You know that, since the day Cliffjumper was killed, something inside of Arcee broke again. And thus, you became her light of hope, for whenever she was grieving or letting her spark poison with anger and a need for revenge, you were there to hug her or hold her servo, letting her cry on your shoulderplate. But she should be the one doing that! You cried and grieved the loss of Cliffjumper too! She is still has burn in her system the sight of you crying after finding out about the red autobot's murder. She was gonna avenge Cliffjumper (oh, how much he loved you - He would always tell Arcee everything he loved about you, and find such happiness at knowing Arcee thought the same) and keep you away from any danger. She wasn't gonna lose you. She was gonna offline anybot before that happened. She had become more touchy, overprotective, always seeming to act as a wall between everyone and you. "Cliffjumper always vowed to protect you... and I'll do the same - I won't let anything happen to you." She promised in a whisper as she hugged you. All you can do is hug her back, even when you were slightly... scared at how lost her optics seemed.

You love your teammates - you were so sure you wished to pass the rest of your life with all of them once the war was over, to bond with them and love them... but you've noticed how deep their feelings for you were.

Obsessive. Overprotective. Worshipping you as if you were like Primus. Promising to you with whispers about forever protecting you, about how important to them you were, that they were not going to be afraid to shed energon in your name if it meant to prove their love and devotion for you. Keeping tabs on you, whispering to one another everything about you, listening to you, watching you from time to time as you recharge, making sure you never leave the base.

You are their beacon of hope, the light in the darkness - Optimus and Ratchet are not afraid to taint their vow to not offline the enemy if it means to keep you safe and sound, keeping their optics on you. Bulkhead, Wheeljack and Ultra Magnus are ready to protect you from any danger as guardians and destroy anyone who tries to touch you. Bee and Smokescreen will keep giving you all the love and attention they can, promising you the universe and the stars. Arcee will make Cliffjumper's wish come true by keeping you away from danger and bring you the Cybertrone you derseve, just like the others aim to do.

And... there's nothing you can do about it.

All you can do is allow your teammates surround you as if the cocoon of a butterfly - keeping you warm, safe, loved.

Did my best!! Kind off felt like I didn't do good. (Uu￣ 3￣) Vhaos out!

#transformers #transformers x reader #transformers prime #yandere transformers #yandere x reader #transformers prime x reader #autobots x reader

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aeolianblues · 1 month ago

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‘Indie sleaze’ is not 2014, ‘Indie sleaze’ is not 2014, ‘Indie sleaze’ is not 2014, ‘Indie sleaze’ is not 2014!

It’s not tumblr-core and it’s not Lana Del Ray or 2013 AM, it’s not #girl interrupted, it’s not Ethel Cain (she literally is an artist of our time, what are you on about.)

It was 2001 with the Strokes on the cover of the NME every 2 weeks, it was cabaret night and English poetry with the Libertines in 2002, it’s those red and blue military jackets, it was the fucking grease in Julian Casablancas’ hair, it’s ’cocaine was the banker’s drug’ quoth Alex Kapranos, it was Don't Go Back To Dalston and the heroin, it was red and black horizontal striped tops and tight black shirts as evening wear, it was Russell Lissak’s mop top and a full page interview with London hairdressers in the NME in 2005, it was Jack and Meg’s saturated red and white dresses, it was cut-and-paste glitter on the cover of Santigold’s first album, it was the sleaze and the sex of CSS’s music, it was ‘cold light, hot night’, it was the anti-Bush and anti-war stances of the bands at the time, it was America by Razorlight, it was Popworld on telly and Simon Amstel being a little shit to musicians, it was Karen O defying death on stage nightly, it was throwing up in shitty nightclubs on god knows what drugs, it was the fucking danger knowing this could all collapse any second—and rightly, it should. It was the godawful egos at DFA, it was knowing that while you were lucky to be seeing these bands live, you’d fucking hate them if you had to spend even a minute in their individual company. It was Amy Winehouse telling the world to get the fuck out of her business, it was Leslie Feist and Peaches sharing a dilapidated flat above a sex shop in Toronto.

It was horrible camera flash and red-eye editing softwares and putting your feet by the warm, spinning fans of your computer while it whirred away and downloaded your albums in *checks* 46 more minutes. It was horrible, it was dirty, it was gritty, we all hated it and thought the 90s were the last time music was good and that nothing good had happened since 1997. It was garishly bright clothes we were all embarrassed of by 2011, it was multiple layers and leggings and asking your mum to cut the itchy tag on the back of your low rise jeans only for her to snip your back. It was bell bottoms at the start of the decade. It being thankful that by 2017, no one would dream of wearing low rises anymore, please please, please let them never come back.

It was faux nostalgic of the past itself. It was ‘please make sure baby you’ve got some colours in there’ in your clothes. It was moral panic over emos. It was wanting to escape into a better past that you could see was visibly impoverished in the present. It was watching your favourite programmes become less and less relevant on air. It was watching MTV decisively die a horrible death. It was watching important venues and nightclubs get bulldozed. It was watching the last regular broadcast of Top Of The Pops in 2006. It was seeing how the 2009 financial crisis most definitely put a stop to independent music in the western world for a decade, it was watching the rise of bedroom DIY and electronic music. It was seeing the phrase ‘SoundCloud rapper’ being coined. It was the rise of Disney pop. It was counter-culture Justin Bieber hatred. It was the MS paint meme of those tumblr girls thoroughly unimpressed by the guy.

It was not using the words ‘indie sleaze’ at all, in fact. That’s a retconned word. It was garage rock revival. It was ‘post-grunge’. We didn’t care what it was called, we hated it all the same. It was a lead into a decade of despair and nihilism, it was the last hurrah for the music industry before it splintered into a thousand little online ecosystems, it was the last time we had physical community and any shared pop cultural moments. It was Live8 2005. It was the same as it is now, and it was a time that’ll never happen again, for better and for worse.

But one thing is for sure: it was decisively dead by 2014. Santi and Karen O’s 2012 collab was its last hurrah and it was dead by Comedown Machine by the Strokes (2013). It has nothing to do with 2014.

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yandere-romanticaa · 10 months ago

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Some software company is hiring people who know English and can write, I wonder if I'll get that job.... Probably not but it's worth a shot!

#♥️ girlie says

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max-levchin · 1 year ago

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Shamir Secret Sharing

It’s 3am. Paul, the head of PayPal database administration carefully enters his elaborate passphrase at a keyboard in a darkened cubicle of 1840 Embarcadero Road in East Palo Alto, for the fifth time. He hits Return. The green-on-black console window instantly displays one line of text: “Sorry, one or more wrong passphrases. Can’t reconstruct the key. Goodbye.”

There is nerd pandemonium all around us. James, our recently promoted VP of Engineering, just climbed the desk at a nearby cubicle, screaming: “Guys, if we can’t get this key the right way, we gotta start brute-forcing it ASAP!” It’s gallows humor – he knows very well that brute-forcing such a key will take millions of years, and it’s already 6am on the East Coast – the first of many “Why is PayPal down today?” articles is undoubtedly going to hit CNET shortly. Our single-story cubicle-maze office is buzzing with nervous activity of PayPalians who know they can’t help but want to do something anyway. I poke my head up above the cubicle wall to catch a glimpse of someone trying to stay inside a giant otherwise empty recycling bin on wheels while a couple of Senior Software Engineers are attempting to accelerate the bin up to dangerous speeds in the front lobby. I lower my head and try to stay focused. “Let’s try it again, this time with three different people” is the best idea I can come up with, even though I am quite sure it will not work.

It doesn’t.

The key in question decrypts PayPal’s master payment credential table – also known as the giant store of credit card and bank account numbers. Without access to payment credentials, PayPal doesn’t really have a business per se, seeing how we are supposed to facilitate payments, and that’s really hard to do if we no longer have access to the 100+ million credit card numbers our users added over the last year of insane growth.

This is the story of a catastrophic software bug I briefly introduced into the PayPal codebase that almost cost us the company (or so it seemed, in the moment.) I’ve told this story a handful of times, always swearing the listeners to secrecy, and surprisingly it does not appear to have ever been written down before. 20+ years since the incident, it now appears instructive and a little funny, rather than merely extremely embarrassing.

Before we get back to that fateful night, we have to go back another decade. In the summer of 1991, my family and I moved to Chicago from Kyiv, Ukraine. While we had just a few hundred dollars between the five of us, we did have one secret advantage: science fiction fans.

My dad was a highly active member of Zoryaniy Shlyah – Kyiv’s possibly first (and possibly only, at the time) sci-fi fan club – the name means “Star Trek” in Ukrainian, unsurprisingly. He translated some Stansilaw Lem (of Solaris and Futurological Congress fame) from Polish to Russian in the early 80s and was generally considered a coryphaeus at ZSh.

While USSR was more or less informationally isolated behind the digital Iron Curtain until the late ‘80s, by 1990 or so, things like FidoNet wriggled their way into the Soviet computing world, and some members of ZSh were now exchanging electronic mail with sci-fi fans of the free world.

The vaguely exotic news of two Soviet refugee sci-fi fans arriving in Chicago was transmitted to the local fandom before we had even boarded the PanAm flight that took us across the Atlantic [1]. My dad (and I, by extension) was soon adopted by some kind Chicago science fiction geeks, a few of whom became close friends over the years, though that’s a story for another time.

A year or so after the move to Chicago, our new sci-fi friends invited my dad to a birthday party for a rising star of the local fandom, one Bruce Schneier. We certainly did not know Bruce or really anyone at the party, but it promised good food, friendly people, and probably filk. My role was to translate, as my dad spoke limited English at the time.

I had fallen desperately in love with secret codes and cryptography about a year before we left Ukraine. Walking into Bruce’s library during the house tour (this was a couple years before Applied Cryptography was published and he must have been deep in research) felt like walking into Narnia.

I promptly abandoned my dad to fend for himself as far as small talk and canapés were concerned, and proceeded to make a complete ass out of myself by brazenly asking the host for a few sheets of paper and a pencil. Having been obliged, I pulled a half dozen cryptography books from the shelves and went to work trying to copy down some answers to a few long-held questions on the library floor. After about two hours of scribbling alone like a man possessed, I ran out of paper and decided to temporarily rejoin the party.

On the living room table, Bruce had stacks of copies of his fanzine Ramblings. Thinking I could use the blank sides of the pages to take more notes, I grabbed a printout and was about to quietly return to copying the original S-box values for DES when my dad spotted me from across the room and demanded I help him socialize. The party wrapped soon, and our friends drove us home.

The printout I grabbed was not a Ramblings issue. It was a short essay by Bruce titled Sharing Secrets Among Friends, essentially a humorous explanation of Shamir Secret Sharing.

Say you want to make sure that something really really important and secret (a nuclear weapon launch code, a database encryption key, etc) cannot be known or used by a single (friendly) actor, but becomes available, if at least n people from a group of m choose to do it. Think two on-duty officers (from a cadre of say 5) turning keys together to get ready for a nuke launch.

The idea (proposed by Adi Shamir – the S of RSA! – in 1979) is as simple as it is beautiful.

Let’s call the secret we are trying to split among m people K.

First, create a totally random polynomial that looks like: y(x) = C0 * x^(n-1) + C1 * x^(n-2) + C2 * x^(n-3) ….+ K. “Create” here just means generate random coefficients C. Now, for every person in your trusted group of m, evaluate the polynomial for some randomly chosen Xm and hand them their corresponding (Xm,Ym) each.

If we have n of these points together, we can use Lagrange interpolating polynomial to reconstruct the coefficients – and evaluate the original polynomial at x=0, which conveniently gives us y(0) = K, the secret. Beautiful. I still had the printout with me, years later, in Palo Alto.

It should come as no surprise that during my time as CTO PayPal engineering had an absolute obsession with security. No firewall was one too many, no multi-factor authentication scheme too onerous, etc. Anything that was worth anything at all was encrypted at rest.

To decrypt, a service would get the needed data from its database table, transmit it to a special service named cryptoserv (an original SUN hardware running Solaris sitting on its own, especially tightly locked-down network) and a special service running only there would perform the decryption and send back the result.

Decryption request rate was monitored externally and on cryptoserv, and if there were too many requests, the whole thing was to shut down and purge any sensitive data and keys from its memory until manually restarted.

It was this manual restart that gnawed at me. At launch, a bunch of configuration files containing various critical decryption keys were read (decrypted by another key derived from one manually-entered passphrase) and loaded into the memory to perform future cryptographic services.

Four or five of us on the engineering team knew the passphrase and could restart cryptoserv if it crashed or simply had to have an upgrade. What if someone performed a little old-fashioned rubber-hose cryptanalysis and literally beat the passphrase out of one of us? The attacker could theoretically get access to these all-important master keys. Then stealing the encrypted-at-rest database of all our users’ secrets could prove useful – they could decrypt them in the comfort of their underground supervillain lair.

I needed to eliminate this threat.

Shamir Secret Sharing was the obvious choice – beautiful, simple, perfect (you can in fact prove that if done right, it offers perfect secrecy.) I decided on a 3-of-8 scheme and implemented it in pure POSIX C for portability over a few days, and tested it for several weeks on my Linux desktop with other engineers.

Step 1: generate the polynomial coefficients for 8 shard-holders.

Step 2: compute the key shards (x0, y0) through (x7, y7)

Step 3: get each shard-holder to enter a long, secure passphrase to encrypt the shard

Step 4: write out the 8 shard files, encrypted with their respective passphrases.

And to reconstruct:

Step 1: pick any 3 shard files.

Step 2: ask each of the respective owners to enter their passphrases.

Step 3: decrypt the shard files.

Step 4: reconstruct the polynomial, evaluate it for x=0 to get the key.

Step 5: launch cryptoserv with the key.

One design detail here is that each shard file also stored a message authentication code (a keyed hash) of its passphrase to make sure we could identify when someone mistyped their passphrase. These tests ran hundreds and hundreds of times, on both Linux and Solaris, to make sure I did not screw up some big/little-endianness issue, etc. It all worked perfectly.

A month or so later, the night of the key splitting party was upon us. We were finally going to close out the last vulnerability and be secure. Feeling as if I was about to turn my fellow shard-holders into cymeks, I gathered them around my desktop as PayPal’s front page began sporting the “We are down for maintenance and will be back soon” message around midnight.

The night before, I solemnly generated the new master key and securely copied it to cryptoserv. Now, while “Push It” by Salt-n-Pepa blared from someone’s desktop speakers, the automated deployment script copied shard files to their destination.

While each of us took turns carefully entering our elaborate passphrases at a specially selected keyboard, Paul shut down the main database and decrypted the payment credentials table, then ran the script to re-encrypt with the new key. Some minutes later, the database was running smoothly again, with the newly encrypted table, without incident.

All that was left was to restore the master key from its shards and launch the new, even more secure cryptographic service.

The three of us entered our passphrases… to be met with the error message I haven’t seen in weeks: “Sorry, one or more wrong passphrases. Can’t reconstruct the key. Goodbye.” Surely one of us screwed up typing, no big deal, we’ll do it again. No dice. No dice – again and again, even after we tried numerous combinations of the three people necessary to decrypt.

Minutes passed, confusion grew, tension rose rapidly.

There was nothing to do, except to hit rewind – to grab the master key from the file still sitting on cryptoserv, split it again, generate new shards, choose passphrases, and get it done. Not a great feeling to have your first launch go wrong, but not a huge deal either. It will all be OK in a minute or two.

A cursory look at the master key file date told me that no, it wouldn’t be OK at all. The file sitting on cryptoserv wasn’t from last night, it was created just a few minutes ago. During the Salt-n-Pepa-themed push from stage, we overwrote the master key file with the stage version. Whatever key that was, it wasn’t the one I generated the day before: only one copy existed, the one I copied to cryptoserv from my computer the night before. Zero copies existed now. Not only that, the push script appears to have also wiped out the backup of the old key, so the database backups we have encrypted with the old key are likely useless.

Sitrep: we have 8 shard files that we apparently cannot use to restore the master key and zero master key backups. The database is running but its secret data cannot be accessed.

I will leave it to your imagination to conjure up what was going through my head that night as I stared into the black screen willing the shards to work. After half a decade of trying to make something of myself (instead of just going to work for Microsoft or IBM after graduation) I had just destroyed my first successful startup in the most spectacular fashion.

Still, the idea of “what if we all just continuously screwed up our passphrases” swirled around my brain. It was an easy check to perform, thanks to the included MACs. I added a single printf() debug statement into the shard reconstruction code and instead of printing out a summary error of “one or more…” the code now showed if the passphrase entered matched the authentication code stored in the shard file.

I compiled the new code directly on cryptoserv in direct contravention of all reasonable security practices – what did I have to lose? Entering my own passphrase, I promptly got “bad passphrase” error I just added to the code. Well, that’s just great – I knew my passphrase was correct, I had it written down on a post-it note I had planned to rip up hours ago.

Another person, same error. Finally, the last person, JK, entered his passphrase. No error. The key still did not reconstruct correctly, I got the “Goodbye”, but something worked. I turned to the engineer and said, “what did you just type in that worked?”

After a second of embarrassed mumbling, he admitted to choosing “a$$word” as his passphrase. The gall! I asked everyone entrusted with the grave task of relaunching crytposerv to pick really hard to guess passphrases, and this guy…?! Still, this was something -- it worked. But why?!

I sprinted around the half-lit office grabbing the rest of the shard-holders demanding they tell me their passphrases. Everyone else had picked much lengthier passages of text and numbers. I manually tested each and none decrypted correctly. Except for the a$$word. What was it…

A lightning bolt hit me and I sprinted back to my own cubicle in the far corner, unlocked the screen and typed in “man getpass” on the command line, while logging into cryptoserv in another window and doing exactly the same thing there. I saw exactly what I needed to see.

Today, should you try to read up the programmer’s manual (AKA the man page) on getpass, you will find it has been long declared obsolete and replaced with a more intelligent alternative in nearly all flavors of modern Unix.

But back then, if you wanted to collect some information from the keyboard without printing what is being typed in onto the screen and remain POSIX-compliant, getpass did the trick. Other than a few standard file manipulation system calls, getpass was the only operating system service call I used, to ensure clean portability between Linux and Solaris.

Except it wasn’t completely clean.

Plain as day, there it was: the manual pages were identical, except Solaris had a “special feature”: any passphrase entered that was longer than 8 characters long was automatically reduced to that length anyway. (Who needs long passwords, amiright?!)

I screamed like a wounded animal. We generated the key on my Linux desktop and entered our novel-length passphrases right here. Attempting to restore them on a Solaris machine where they were being clipped down to 8 characters long would never work. Except, of course, for a$$word. That one was fine.

The rest was an exercise in high-speed coding and some entirely off-protocol file moving. We reconstructed the master key on my machine (all of our passphrases worked fine), copied the file to the Solaris-running cryptoserv, re-split it there (with very short passphrases), reconstructed it successfully, and PayPal was up and running again like nothing ever happened.

By the time our unsuspecting colleagues rolled back into the office I was starting to doze on the floor of my cubicle and that was that. When someone asked me later that day why we took so long to bring the site back up, I’d simply respond with “eh, shoulda RTFM.”

RTFM indeed.

P.S. A few hours later, John, our General Counsel, stopped by my cubicle to ask me something. The day before I apparently gave him a sealed envelope and asked him to store it in his safe for 24 hours without explaining myself. He wanted to know what to do with it now that 24 hours have passed.

Ha. I forgot all about it, but in a bout of “what if it doesn’t work” paranoia, I printed out the base64-encoded master key when we had generated it the night before, stuffed it into an envelope, and gave it to John for safekeeping. We shredded it together without opening and laughed about what would have never actually been a company-ending event.

P.P.S. If you are thinking of all the ways this whole SSS design is horribly insecure (it had some real flaws for sure) and plan to poke around PayPal to see if it might still be there, don’t. While it served us well for a few years, this was the very first thing eBay required us to turn off after the acquisition. Pretty sure it’s back to a single passphrase now.

Notes:

1: a member of Chicagoland sci-fi fan community let me know that the original news of our move to the US was delivered to them via a posted letter, snail mail, not FidoNet email!

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olderthannetfic · 3 months ago

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So, like, I'm pro-piracy, I haven't watched anime through any sort of legal channel in years, but I'm getting increasingly annoyed by the people that try to champion as some sort of moral issue. Like, of course companies are going to try and take down those sorts of streaming sites, it's not a moral outrage that they're taking issue with people offering their paid product for free. Obviously, it's a whole other can of worms when this is accompanied by life-ruining fines for the people running these sites, but, ninety percent of the time, that's not what I see people complaining about.

Piracy can be a political act... but... like... people in third world countries stealing job-related software because rich countries won't license them stuff at a reasonable rate. Or media preservation of things that get removed from everywhere.

"Wah, it's coming out in the US, so they cracked down on the English language fan translation stuff" is less sympathy-inducing.

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melyzard · 2 months ago

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Been traveling a lot lately and I love how, in US TSA security lines, they always make sure that the big sign saying the facial recognition photo is optional is always turned sideways or set so the spanish-translation side is facing the line and the English-translation side is facing a wall or something.

Anyway, TSA facial recognition photos are 100% not mandatory and if you don't feel like helping a company develop its facial recognition AI software (like, say, Clearview AI), you can just politely tell the TSA agent that you don't want to participate in the photo and instead show an ID or your boarding pass. Like we've been doing for years and years.

#privacy #anti facial recognition #clearwater AI #you need to protect yourself #its dishonest is what it is #the signs are always there #as per law #but they are hidden/turned/set way to the side

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retrocgads · 7 months ago

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UK 1987

#UK1987 #GREMLIN GRAPHICS #LUCASARTS #VORTEX SOFTWARE #THE ENGLISH SOFTWARE COMPANY #ACTION #C64 #BALLBLAZER #KNIGHT GAMES #HIGHWAY ENCOUNTER #THE EIDOLON #AVENGER #THE WAY OF THE TIGER #TRAILBLAZER #STAR GAMES II

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girlfriendsofthegalaxy · 10 days ago

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tuesday again 11/19/2024

no silly little witticism here this week! just heartfelt thanks for helping me pay my rent this month :)

listening

absolutely wild pick from last week's spotify weekly recommenced, Things Will Fall Apart by Louis Cole feat the Metropole Orkest and conductor Jules Buckley. it's been on loop all week for me and im a little sad it won't pop up in my spotify wrapped

when you make a dance pop song with a full orchestra backing, it has a really interesting effect somewhere between Golden Age of Hollywood swashbuckling film score and marching band?

Yes, understood Things will fall apart just likе they should This little shred was good Don't think it through Things will fall apart, they always do At least, something's always true

the syllables are so choppy they don’t even register to me as English at first, i was fully willing to believe this was German for the first couple lines. like @dying-suffering-french-stalkers, i have a deep fondness for works about putting an era to bed. or works focused on the sunsets of things, or one of the last living practitioners of an art. putting the chairs up on the table, sweeping the floors, and turning the lights out and locking the door behind you. this song has that sort of quiet post-wake-party remembrance.

however once you think the song has ended but it keeps going, you can turn it off. you don’t really need that extra minute and a half of strings and light vocalizations.

Lately, Louis Cole has been doing live shows with the Netherlands’ Metropole Orkest and conductor Jules Buckley. Cole recorded nothing with the ensemble. In a press release, he says, “Sometimes, when I’m mixing my own solo stuff, I’ll feel like a song needs a little magical dust. But mixing an entire orchestra and your own rhythm section, there’s so much human energy! You don’t have to add any magic. It was there the whole time.”

i don’t hear many pop songs this millennium with a full orchestral backing. perhaps i need to look harder. unfortunately spotify took this extreme interest in this song as a newfound extreme interest in electroswing, which is really not what this song is. i hope this artist does more albums like this so they can wear grooves in my brain

reading

very hard to focus on anything book length this week. some depressing local news (my local paper's links do Not want to preview nicely here, which is annoying:

At a city council meeting in October, district Vice President Dan Joyce told council members that the management district was not attempting to "criminalize homelessness." The city’s civility ordinance bans people from sitting, lying down or placing personal items or bedding on sidewalks from 7 a.m. to 11 p.m.

cool piece from our pals at 404 Media. i am So fascinated by crime infrastructure

Based on interviews with malware developers, hackers who use the stolen credentials, and a review of manuals that tell new recruits how to spread the malware, 404 Media has mapped out this industry. Its end result is that a download of an innocent-looking piece of software by a single person can lead to a data breach at a multibillion-dollar company, putting Google and other tech giants in an ever-escalating cat-and-mouse game with the malware developers to keep people and companies safe.

(via longreads) my interest in how and why systems fail extends to invasive species management. plus i used to live in florida just above the everglades and these fuckers (the snakes) were everywhere

[I]magine thousands upon thousands of pythons, their slow digestion transforming each corpse into python muscle and fat. Unaided, Florida’s native wildlife doesn’t stand a chance. “That’s what I think about with every python I catch,” Kalil says. “What it ate to get this big, and the lives I’m saving by removing it.” Biologists are taking a multipronged approach to the issue. They have experimented with enlisting dogs to sniff out both pythons and nests—a technique that has proved difficult in such hot weather and inhospitable landscapes. Ongoing projects use telemetry to track pythons to find “associate snakes.” Researchers use drones, go out in airboats, or even take to helicopters to locate their subjects in the interiors of the Everglades. Always, agencies and individuals are looking for the next best methods. “But for now, the python contractor program is the most successful management effort in the history of the issue,” Kirkland says. “We’re capturing more and more—something that is indicative of the python population out there and indicative of us getting better at what we do.”

watching

continuing noirvember, watched hitchcock's Notorious to see if i still dislike hitchcock. the answer is yes. there are bond girls and there are hitchcock girls, and not that bond girls are paragons of female agency in film, but hitchcock girls are mostly fluttering little pathetic things. a scrap of agency they showed in the beginning of the film becomes a running joke and something their noses are rubbed in for the rest of the film. not for me!

patrick mcgoohan is leading me into some real dad-ass movies. Ice Station Zebra (1968, dir. Sturges) is a real you're stuck at home sick with your dad and it's on TV for the whole afternoon kind of movie. they truly do not make two and a half cold war submarine espionage films in super panavision with an overture, intermission, and interact music any more. i get why howard hughes was really obsessed with this one. it is a suspense film, but full of people competently going about their business, which i find oddly comforting.

youtube

unfortunately i do not feel this really needed to be two and a half hours long. the loving closeups of sub interiors and instrumentation really did keep me amused, though. despite how cluttered every shot is with actors, there is tremendous clarity of purpose and motion with the camera movement. just a really technically brilliant film.

how similar the russian and american control rooms and instrumentation were made me chortle. ties nicely into a little diatribe mcgoohan goes on much later in the film, "The Russians put our camera made by our German scientists and your film made by your German scientists into their satellite made by their German scientists." funny and darkly true! every allied nation had some sort of Operation Paperclip going on! mcgoohan is the focus of every scene he's in, as a spy who is really hanging on by the last remaining shreds of his fingernails.

i had a good time with it, but one of many cold war suspense films im glad exist in the world but don't necessarily need to see again. it might join Escape from New York as a film i put on when im very sick though.

playing

this pc needs some sort of replacement something, bc it has a really persistent overheating problem. it only tolerates powerwasher simulator on the lowest possible settings and genshin impact on basically mobile settings. it does not even want to run new vegas. i popped my head out of goodsprings to look out over the desert at the Strip and it said no thank you! too many polygons! naptime!

speaking of genshin, major update this week and new character i will be pulling for. she has a sister who died in the last patch, which i do Not care for as someone with a beloved little sister, but her moveset and skills are unique so far in the game. i feel like her skills are little too complicated for me to fully take advantage of with my "hit enemy very hard until he is dead" playstyle but she has a limited flight ability that will genuinely be very useful for exploration.

if i do not get her when i hit pity on the banner i won't bother pulling another nine times or whatever, bc the next patch has a character i really desperately want and i am saving for her

making

the local crew is all getting art this year, bc i already have bristol board and a selection of small frames and zero budget. people who have pets are So easy to get gifts for bc u can simply get them stuff for their pet or that looks like their pet. way less gray cat than black cat merch in the world tho

aiming to send out international holiday cards by the end of the week, and canadian cards by american thanksgiving. the rest of you they'll get there when they get there ok

#tuesday again #tuesday again no problem #SoundCloud

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newtafterdark · 1 year ago

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I found this old CD-ROM from 1997 by pure chance! It just arrived in the mail too, so I haven't had a chance to put it into my CD drive yet, but I am excited!!

This is a CD-ROM specifically for the parents, but judging by the booklet it seems to also have a few bits of extra content on it that is not found on the official software?

Important note: This was not made by the company that made FinFin, but a German company unaffiliated with them. That being said, it has an ISBN number, price tag and everything! You could've bought this easily back in the day!

I plan on fully translating the booklet & whatever is on the disk itself into English and post it all on here. Also, I'll try to get all of the files from the disk and put it up somewhere for everyone to download for free!

#finfin #fin fin #wayneradiotv #lemme throw that tag in here as well since most folks know of FinFin because of Wayne #I might also get in contact with the person who runs the un-official FinFin wiki and see if they want the files for the archive as well!#If there is an actual executable program on the disk I'll stream it to you all on Twitch #everyone needs to see more of FinFin #Newt's ramblings #the book of finfin

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naivrse · 3 months ago

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HEAVENLINK is a mobile app and web platform created by south korean entertainment corporation seventh heaven. the app specializes in hosting multimedia content , the sale of artist–related merchandise , content subscription , and artist–to–fan communications. the company also uses the platform to release statements. the platform is home to all seventh heaven artists , including all those signed to subsidiary labels. as of 2024 , heavenlink has over 50 million monthly users.

launched : january 1 , 2021

available in : korean , english , japanese , mandarin , hindi , russian , spanish , + more.

developers : eden , seventh heaven

license : propriety software

platform : android , ios

#seventh heaven.#tree of life.#halo music.#fictional idol community #fake kpop group #fake kpop idol #kpop oc

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izicodes · 10 months ago

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Saturday 20th January 2024

Someone asked me earlier this week a question that I didn't really deeped about beforehand. Basically, I was stuck answering it and it boggled my mind ever since because it stuck to me how I didn't think about this earlier on?

"What are your career goals?"

Since I started learning programming and Web Development back in 2020, I just thought "Oh getting a proper job in Tech would be great!"... but now I got it, it's like okay what now? Do I just continue this, learn new things, and just stick to this position?

I had to answer this person straight away for specific reasons but I said "Maybe being a Senior Software Engineer would be nice 🤷🏾‍♀️" and yeah I'm sure having that title would be great for my Dad to boast to his family and mates about "Oh my daughter is a Senior Software Engineer~! 😎", which honestly I don't mind as he's happy, but what else? What do I actually want to work towards now - short and long-term?

But making short and long-term goals is very important. For some people, this helps them have a path for them to work towards. I am one of those people because that's what I did to get where I am now in my programming journey, but I didn't think THIS far as to what next after I got the job I wanted. I came up with some ideas but I might work on them a bit:

Senior Software Engineer be nice?

Whatever a CTO actually does? (long-term)

Be proficient enough in Web Development technologies to teach others properly maybe? Especially the younger generation (HELP I tried teaching my sister coding and she called me a nerd...)

Work on my own web app product thingy?? and sell?? and earn money?? (confused about how I would do that though)

Venture out to Game / App Development maybe? (long-term)

Ability to work anywhere internationally (I have other goals where I would have to visit countries so would also like to work in Tech as I complete those side-quests)

Right now I am comfortable working FOR someone / company - I'm the type that SOMEHOW I become a CEO I still would work than be a no work/meetings/travel to conferences type of CEO if that makes sense

Help other companies temporarily on Web Dev stuff (free or paid, I don't mind - just want experience, innit?)

Work in another country maybe? That doesn't speak English though cause that's cheating (to me, I like challenges and language learning is a really good one)

But maybe now I will have something to work towards, but I will soon convert this bunch of ideas to a roadmap a bit~! 🤔

Thank you for reading and hope this makes you think about your own goals in terms of career/work/profession~!

#xc: side note post #codeblr #coding #progblr #programming #studyblr #studying #computer science #tech #study inspiration #career advice post #career tips #career advice #career

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pinkpastelcalesti · 11 months ago

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LANDSCAPING LOVE || Bakugou Katsuki x Reader || Chapter I.

SUMMARY -> Tired of bouncing back and forth between the U.S. and Japan after graduating college, you’ve finally secured the career of your dreams: You’re Japan’s first heroics cartographer, a title bestowed upon you due to your quirk and specialty, that creates geographic maps for hero agencies across the country. While your work is highly respected and sought after, you’re known for a more niche reason among your coworkers at the Dynamight Agency: the food you make is fucking amazing. When Dynamight himself inevitably gets word that you’re coming for his cooking title on his own turf, chaos ensues and you find yourself competing against your boss for not only best chef, but also to win over his heart.

CONTENT/WARNINGS -> Pro hero AU, agency reader, reader with a quirk, fem/AFAB reader, reader is originally from America, reader is bilingual (English and Japanese), strangers (more like coworkers that don’t get a chance to speak much) to friends to lovers, fluff & chaos, minimal angst, suggestive humor.

LENGTH -> 7.9K

MASTERLIST

Running late for your first agency project presentation was not on your bingo card this year.

Because of nerves and the constant fear that you were going to tumble over your words during your presentation, you pulled a semi-all nighter and stayed up until 3 a.m. rehearsing your slides and your speech for the Dynamight Agency’s meeting on your current geographic project.

You’ve been working for the company for 7 months now, and this project is the first large-scale assignment you’d been given since you started. You’ve worked on smaller, personal projects for Dynamight and other pro heroes, but this project was your pride and joy, seeing as it was requested by Dynamight himself.

Your quirk, landscape, allows for you to create an entire mental map, in very graphic detail, of the area around you within five miles. This includes the visualization and relative scale of buildings, sidewalks, roads, and alleyways. Your quirk works when you place your bare hands on the ground, which sort of sucks because the city’s grounds weren’t exactly the cleanest. In order for you to utilize your quirk correctly, you grew up practicing cartography of all sorts. One could say your quirk opened up doors to many different career paths, such as engineering or urban planning, but you had decided early on that the best way you would be able to help people is by utilizing your maps for heroes.

Heroes use maps for everything, and you were going to profit off of that no matter what. Your quirk could expand past the five mile radius if you kept bouncing around to different areas, drew their maps from your memory, and combined all maps to create one whole map of a specific city or town. During your time in undergrad, you majored in and graduated (Summa cum laude, may you add) with a degree in geography, your main focus of research being urban cartography. Heroics cartography didn’t exist, so you figured the next best thing would be urban areas.

Your undergraduate research consisted of said urban cartography, and because of your academic standing, you were offered a study-abroad program for geographers that was located in Tokyo, which you took without a second’s hesitation. You always dreamed that you’d be helping U.S. heroes, however, during your time in Tokyo, you fell in love with the entirety of Japan and the vast landscapes you got to visit and draw. Your research professor oversaw your projects, which consisted of city maps, data collection, and utilizing GIS software to create digital maps that could be used for multiple different areas, whether that be infrastructure planning, evacuation routes, or heroics, your main focus.

Your current job as a heroics cartographer is a first in Japan. While it’s not that well-known that you’re the first person to ever have such a title, the pro heroes around you seem to understand its importance. Your job at Dynamight’s Agency allows you to create maps for Dynamight and his sidekicks to use for patrol routes, monitoring high crime areas across the city, and visualizing the areas where property damage occurs most. Not only do you work for Dynamight, but your skills have been requested and used by other pros across the city, including but not limited to Deku, Shouto, and Red Riot.

You really got into this career out of sheer luck and fate. While you were drawing up maps for the city during your third year of undergrad, pro hero Red Riot had reached out to you after he accidentally destroyed one of your maps at the post office in Musutafu during a fight with a villain. He’d picked up the broken display and noticed your name in the corner and contacted you through your professor. Initially pissed off because you’d just finished that map literally a week and a half prior to its destruction, you gave him grace and told him you’d be in touch with the post office to create a new one.

He ended up paying you back for the damage, and upon realizing how detailed your maps were, inquired about your skills in cartography. It was quite jarring, sitting in Red Riot’s agency at the ripe age of 20, sweat dripping down your back through your blouse as one of the top heroes in the nation asked if you’d be able to draw up a map of a large electrical facility for him to use for an upcoming mission. He’d apparently been trying to find an up-to-date map of the interior, but had no luck. Within a week, you were being driven in a fancy company car to the facility so you could use your quirk and recreate the building’s interior infrastructure.

After you’d created the map for him, Red Riot, or Eijiro, as you now get to call him, had asked that you look into working for the pros after you graduated. He was under the impression that you were actually a Japanese university student, so you had to break the news that you actually worked in the U.S. Upon realizing, Eijiro explained that he would be more than happy to get you in contact with plenty of heroes that could use your work and give you a job abroad for almost double the pay you’d be receiving if you stayed in America.

Turns out that keeping in contact with a top hero in Japan that destroyed weeks of your work within 3 minutes of a fight was a good idea after all. Eijiro was the one who ultimately hooked you up with a job under the roof of Dynamight’s agency. Once you’d graduated, you decided that you’d work in the U.S. for a little while longer to build up your experience and resume before you decided to go abroad.

You ended up staying in America for two more years after graduation, traveling across the country and working with urban geographers in cities like Los Angeles, Detroit, Chicago, New York City, and Washington D.C. During this time, you were given full travel privileges to fly to Japan and help Red Riot and his pro hero allies develop brand new patrol map routes across different cities. You loved this part of your job most, and after finishing up your second year post-grad, decided to make it official and asked Eijiro if the job position was still on the table.

He would go on to give you one of the prettiest smiles you’d ever seen and excitedly tell you that yes, it was always available to you. Being friends with Eijiro meant not only a once-in-a-lifetime career connection, but it also meant realizing your potential early on.

You absolutely adore the work you do for Dynamight and his peers and wouldn’t trade it for the world. However, if you don’t hurry the hell up and get to your building in the next 7 minutes, your dream job might as well go poof. Dynamight absolutely hates when people are late, and you’ve had the pleasure of watching him blow up on company execs for showing up 15 minutes late and “wasting his fuckin’ time.”

Working for a man like Bakugou Katsuki was definitely a wakeup call the first two months you were at his agency. Turns out that while he approved your position that would inevitably change the way cartography was viewed in the modern world of heroes, Bakugou didn’t exactly care to look into what you specialized in, or so you thought. You really hadn’t had a chance to actually speak with him aside from filling him and his manager in on upcoming projects and maps you were in the process of making. After 7 months of working for the agency, you’d spoken to your boss a whopping four times, all lasting under three minutes.

This presentation you were about to give is the first one where Dynamight would be present, and fuck if you weren’t about to shit your pants from not only nerves, but fear that you might not get in the door on time for its start.

Racing past the front desk and haphazardly greeting the security guards before flashing your badge to be let through the agency gates blocking visitors from reaching the elevators, you managed to press the button for the remaining elevator on the ground floor that was being sent up.

You probably looked like an absolute atrocity in front of your fellow coworkers, with windswept hair and panting in the virtually silent elevator, save for the whirring of the machine as it took you up to the fourteenth floor of the building.

As soon as the doors of the elevator opened, you booked it down the hall to the meeting room, with 43 seconds to spare before the clock hit 9 a.m. sharp. “So sorry I’m running late! I was supposed to be here setting up earlier but some big stupid bitch tried hijacking the bus I was going to take-” you began in a rush, placing your bag and coat on your chair in the large room with a round table full of your team members and other coworkers from the analytics department.

Your team member Carl, one of only three others in the cartography department at the agency, hit your foot from under the table while calling out your name. “You’re speaking in English, we have no clue what you’re saying,” he whispered, with you quickly muttering out an apology. “Shit— sorry about that— slips my mind to switch back and forth sometimes. Apologies for not being here sooner,” you bowed to the ten workers in the room, suddenly realizing Dynamight himself nor his manager had shown up yet. Thank god, you let out a small breath of relief.

“Is Dynamight going to be in soon or should I begin without him?” You asked as your other team member Kanako grabbed your computer out of your bag and plugged it into the projector while you began pulling out your speaker notes.

“Said he’d be in soon, had to catch up with Red Riot about an ongoing police chase outside the city,” your last team member Naomi spoke out loud. Naomi was your resident work bff, and was also the one that regularly reached out to Dynamight for you to inquire about starting new projects or letting him know of recent updates. She honestly didn’t even like having to email her own boss that much, but she was more than happy to run into his manager and talk about the highs and lows of cartography if it meant staring at the poor man like he was on the lunch menu.

“Well that at least gives us some time to set it up. Sorry you all had to wait on me to get here to pull up the slides.” You felt guilty that your team had to sit in awkward silence with a department that rarely ever interacted with your own for probably a solid 20 minutes, but at least you got to the room before Dynamight so you didn’t risk a verbal ass beating in front of everyone.

As soon as you’d finished laying out the hand-drawn maps of your project out on the round table, Dynamight himself opened the large oak door and walked into the meeting room, glancing at you for a split second before sitting in the chair that was opposite of you, towards the back of the room and for him to be able to see everyone clearly. His manager trailed in behind him, scolding him for not slowing down and hearing his run down of how the meeting would go. Dynamight only waved his hand in the air at his manager before casting his sharp gaze back to you.

You felt a twinge of anxiety race up your body. You really hadn’t been expecting him to come to this meeting until Naomi filled you in two weeks ago that he wanted to attend. Guess it meant he actually did pay attention to what he hired you and your team for. Regardless, you bowed to him and began speaking, not waiting for him to tell you to start, as he wasn’t one that gave directions to grown adults.

“Thank you for joining us today, Dynamight. The project that my team and I have been working on recently is one you formally requested for us to start three months ago,” you clicked the presentation remote that flipped to the next screen on your slideshow. “As you requested, the cartography department created digital and physical choropleth maps of the districts within Musutafu and their relative crime rates within the past year.” You pointed towards the round desk. “The top map is the same as the map you see on our slideshow,” you spoke in a quick, easy-to-understand manner and glanced at everyone’s faces to gauge their reactions throughout your presentation speech.

The maps that Dynamight had asked for were so that he would be able to see if his patrol routes needed to be changed in order to monitor areas of Musutafu that were still unresponsive to patrols by heroes in terms of crime decreasing. If there was one thing your boss prided himself on, it was his patrol routes and his ability to cut crime and villain attack rates in his designated areas in half. However, recently there was an uptick in petty crime rates, and in order for him to not get shit on by the public for a “lack of appropriate response,” he put in a formal request for your department to create maps relating to recent data changes in crime rates across the city.

You and your team were more than happy to fulfill this request, as it meant working with real, recent data and meant you got to visit neighboring hero agencies and compare their patrol route crime rates with Dynamight’s. Any excuse to get out of your department’s office on the fifth floor was a godsend because your back really couldn’t handle anymore work days where you were hunched over the large workbench mapping out the city for hours at a time.

As you continued on with your presentation, you periodically glanced towards Dynamight to check his facial expressions for any annoyance or confusion at your maps. Seeing none, you internally LETS FUCKING GOOOO’d because you knew it meant at the very least that if he was understanding the maps, everyone else most likely could too.

Once you reached the last slide, you made a small noise of dissatisfaction. “When we took a look at certain districts, we did notice that the victims of the crimes committed were young women who regularly walked home by themselves later at night. They seemed to be around their early 20s to their late 30s.” Naomi nodded at you, a silent way of saying to continue on.

“I’m sure that you don’t like when many do this, and forgive me if I’m stepping out of bounds,” you began, feeling your hands sweat. “But please do take this information seriously. I know you’re a hardworking hero, so I trust your skills. But I sincerely hope the next time I check the data that the rates will have fallen. People deserve to walk home without fearing for their lives.”

Dynamight’s eyes seemed to bore into your skin, wanting to bark a clipped response back, but he managed to nod silently. You didn’t want to outright mention you yourself were scared of the trend in crime since you fit the statistic, often walking home by yourself late after all-day shifts, but it seems like he’d caught on by the look on your face.

You wrapped up the presentation and answered a couple different questions that the analytics department had about the data collection and resources you used. After your coworkers began packing their bags to leave, you noticed that Dynamight had gotten up out of his chair and walked over to you, who currently stood beside your bag, closing all the tabs you had open that were starting to overheat your little computer.

Glancing up, you nearly choked on your spit at the proximity between the two of you. He was in his winter hero suit, with the black turtleneck beneath his chest piece being pulled tight against his arms, making his muscles pop out unnecessarily in your face, but you definitely were not complaining. Bim..g… muscles… you thought, trying not to stare too long.

“Y-Yes, Dynamight sir?” You managed to sputter out, all too aware of your team members looking at the two of you now. Dynamight managed to grunt in acknowledgement before speaking. “Wanted to ask if you could make one of your fuckin’ maps for Deku. The shithead keeps begging me to ask, he wants one to hang up in his office of his patrol routes.”

Your eyes widened in surprise. Of course you would make him one, but you didn’t expect for Dynamight to ask you directly. Typically he forced his manager Atsuno to write out emails of requests he had. You managed to nod eagerly to him. “Yeah, no problem. I can email him later and ask about details. Thanks for letting me know.”

Dynamight only grunted once more before turning on his heel and leaving the room, leaving Atsuno to give chase to his boss as he bowed quickly at you and gave his appreciation for your presentation before leaving the room himself.

The only ones left in the room now were your teammates, and all it took was one glance between the four of you before you all let out a holler in excitement. “We did it! You did incredible up there girl,” Naomi slung her arm around you as you pulled her in for a hug. “I was shitting bricks the whole time, I don’t think I realized how intense Dynamight’s stare can be.”

Kanako and Carl high fived you as you all made your way to the elevator to take back down to your department. “Our first big project presentation and we didn’t get screamed at for a minuscule error? I think we deserve to celebrate tonight,” Carl wiggled his eyebrows towards you and Kanako, with Naomi agreeing excitedly.

“Bar or at someone’s place? Should we drink? Oh we’re totally drinking.” You couldn’t help but smile at your coworkers beside you. You were so grateful to have them beside you while you’d adjusted to the agency life the past couple months. All three of them had come from a specialized area in the analytics department that related to gathering information data on the public, which included things like crime rates and damage assessments.

When your job had been approved, Atsuno told you that you’d be working in a new department in your own section within the agency with some people taken from the analytics department, taking you off guard. You’d surely thought you’d be thrown into analytics too, seeing how geography and cartography could squeeze into it somehow.

Meeting your team for the first time, you were more than grateful to have them work with you as you’d expected to be alone in your department for a while. You helped walk them through the basics of cartography and digital mapmaking using current software, quickly realizing the talent each one had for different areas. While you were technically the head of your department, you felt like everyone pulled their weight equally and deserved to be held on the same level.

“We can go out or I can make us something,” you spoke out loud as the elevator dinged open. “I know you guys have been bugging me about cooking since I bring my own lunches everyday.” Naomi cheered beside you, agreeing as Carl and Kanako hummed in thought. “I’ll pitch in for ingredients if Carl and Naomi buy the alcohol,” Kanako said, casting a glance to her coworkers that were chanting, American food! American food! Over and over again to one another.

All in agreement, you quickly got off on the fifth floor and entered your department room. Located towards the right hand corner in the back of the large office floor, the department itself wasn’t noticeable to the general eye unless you went looking. You each had respective offices lining a small back hallway, with the room at the very end of it being your workshop that expanded into a large open-area space containing desktops, workbenches, and cartography supplies strewn around the place. Atsuno had been kind enough to order a custom nameplate to go above the awning of you and your team’s hall, with Heroics Cartography Department written out in beautiful gold lettering, contrasting nicely against the cool grey paint of the wall.

“Let’s lock in on the rest of the requests and orders today so we can leave at a decent time,” you said, closing the door to the workshop as everyone spoke in agreement. Carl called out your name as you were booting up the desktops to pull up emails from your clients. “We doing hard liquor shit tonight or going with something like wine? Need to pair it well with whatever you’re making.”

You hummed in thought. “We could definitely do cocktails. I was thinking about making gumbo since it’s still cold outside.” You grabbed your phone that was situated in your bag and opened up the Notes app to create your grocery store list. Luckily Japan kept up with their spices and typically had an American section in larger stores where you could grab some of the spice mixes needed for your food.

“Make it spicy as fuck girl, I wanna feel tears pouring out of my eyes to your incredible cooking,” Naomi said, sending you a dreamy look. “If I make it too spicy, Carl’s gonna shit his pants. We all know this man can’t handle spice to save his life.”

“Hey! Will not,” Carl scoffed in surprise. “I just got dunked on by my ancestors because they thought it was funny to give me no spice tolerance in a country that literally eats spicy food in almost every meal.” Kanako managed a laugh at that, sending Carl a sympathetic glance before speaking to you. “If it’s not too much trouble, you could always split it into one pot being spicy and one pot being milder.”

“Fair point, but y’all better eat every morsel of my food. Southern cooking isn’t for the weak,” you mentioned as you scrolled through your finished grocery list, checking for any missing items. Naomi sent you a questioning look before asking you, “you’re from the south U.S. right? Isn’t that like hella country?” You sighed as you nodded. “Yeah, but I lived in the city, not necessarily rural. Didn’t stop me from cooking all types of recipes though.”

“Well wherever you were, you managed to become a pretty kick ass chef on your own. Your lunch always looks god tier.” Kanako said as Carl and Naomi nodded in agreement. You felt your face heat up in embarrassment at the compliment. “Living on your own in college will make you think of some wild new recipes in the name of using up all your groceries to not waste food.”

“That’s for sure, I lived off 20 different cup ramen recipes I created myself with random items from the dining halls I could snag before I got caught.” Carl muttered out loud while he pulled different sized calipers from his desk drawer to begin sketching up a project for Chargebolt.

“Food is food, for real,” you nodded in solidarity. There’s been one too many times where you felt too lazy to make full meals during school, which meant being stuck with random microwave food you kept for low energy days in your apartment kitchen. “Can’t wait to get shitfaced and discuss the existential dread of fucking up on expensive mapping paper,” you mused. Being an absolute geek over geography and cartography, you’ve caught yourself in too many drunken rambles about work-related topics when out with college friends after finals and papers were finished up for the semester.

“Let’s do our best so we can enjoy our Friday into the weekend!” Naomi pumped her fist in the air as she spoke, all of you cheering in agreement.

ೄྀ࿐ ˊˎ-

Later that night, after you all managed to finish up your progress for the day and headed out to grab your respective supplies for your celebration, you found yourself humming to a random 2010s playlist that Kanako had thrown on randomly while you cooked in the kitchen of your apartment. You lived not too far from the agency, a 25 minute walk or an 8 minute bus ride, in a nice neighborhood adorned with townhomes along the street, away from the major roads but still comfortably accessible. The salary you had now had blessed you with the opportunity to live in a nicer place, but you still opted for a more homey feel rather than all the modern bullshit that people were raving for. You really hated the idea of solid white walls and no color in your living space.

Your apartment was on the smaller side but it was just you who lived there. Naomi actually lived in the townhome across the street on the second floor. You both had found out early in your job at the agency, walking home at the same time and going from that awkward “going the same way, sorry” to “oh word you live here?” It meant that you had regular girls nights together and grew close, the friendship between the two of you falling into place naturally. Kanako and Carl were actually roommates in a flat that was a 10 minute train ride away. It truly was fate that all of you managed to not only work well, but vibe with each other outside the office too.

As you finished plating your dishes in bowls, you could hear the conversation flowing between your team in your living room. A couple drinks had already been thrown back and you were more than aware that drinking before you had food in your system was probably a bad idea, but you were about to eat anyways so fuck it. You were already two Moscow mules deep by the time you’d finished up the gumbo.

“Food’s ready!” You called out from the kitchen, the open floor plan making it easy for you to get the attention of everyone else sitting on the couch watching Love is Blind. That show was a debatable one, but you enjoyed watching Carl’s bewildered expressions at the absolutely heinous jokes Kanako would throw out about the men and women of the show and some of their horrible personalities.

“Girl get in here and tell me whether or not you think Gigi needs to up and leave ugly ass Damian,” Naomi said, helping you grab two of the four plates you were bringing out to the coffee table. “I can tell you right now that she does, she’s way too good for someone that looks like a chad version of Ed Sheeran.”

Kanako busted out laughing at your remark, agreeing at the resemblance. As you ate, everyone poured endless compliments into your food, making your chest swell with pride in your hobby. You absolutely loved to cook, and it helped you get through the more rough parts of life when you were struggling to keep up with the demands of school and research. Cooking was your safe space and you made sure you perfected staple recipes from home so you could share them with others, like you were doing now.

Kanako threw back another shot as she chased it with a can of Dr. Pepper before speaking your name. “You do know that your cooking could rival Dynamight’s, right?” You paused mid chew, throwing up an eyebrow at her to continue. You didn’t strike your boss as a cooking connoisseur, but you yourself didn’t look like one either, so you kept an open mind.

“He brings food to the potlucks we have during holidays sometimes. When I tell you that man can damn well cook, believe me,” she slurred slightly, the alcohol already hitting her. Naomi nodded in agreement. “Trust us when we say his cooking is top tier. He’d never admit it, but he likes cooking for others if it means feeding into his ego.” Naomi said, letting out a huff of laughter.

“I tried his signature mapo tofu once and it was so good but I literally had to call in sick the next day because I could not handle the spice he puts in his recipes,” Carl’s forehead thudded against the wood of the coffee table as he grimaced at the memory. “If he ever found out I nearly passed out on the toilet from what he called ‘baby shit spicy’, I think he’d fire me.” You barked out a laugh at that, imagining Dynamight drilling it into your teammate about not appreciating his food and getting sick from it.

Your team had been working with the Dynamight Agency for almost 2 years before you’d joined. It was always jarring to hear the stories of Dynamight from them. Your initial reactions to him early on were anything but pleasant, and still sometimes lean on the side of moderate annoyance. He sounded like a total dick at the beginning, but had apparently mellowed out after high school. You heard he’d bullied the hell out of the current number 1 hero during his time in middle school and a little bit of high school, which had made you livid.

You grabbed the handle of Tito’s sitting in front of you all and poured it into your glass before cracking open a new can of ginger beer and pouring it into the glass as well. You could feel the warmth of the alcohol spreading through you, loosening up your tongue the more you drank.

Retrospectively, you really shouldn’t have said the next thing that you did if it meant saving your ass in the workplace that following Monday.

“I could definitely kick Bakugou’s ass if we had a cook off, I mean I’m basically a god tier hobby chef at this point,” you muttered, missing the expressions of your coworkers, specifically the smirk Naomi had on her face. “You think so?” Carl nudged your leg with his own, casting you a tipsy glance. “Fuck yeah I could, I don’t think you realize how hard some southern cooking can be. If I can keep making the recipes without screwing them up, I’m pretty much a god in the kitchen.”

Naomi snickered as Kanako sighed out. “Don’t let Dynamight hear you say that. He gets competitive fast, especially when it comes to food. He was known in high school as the chef of his dorm, didn’t trust others to cook as well as he could.” You definitely could see that, as he struck you as the type to call his friends’ cooking skills trash compared to his own. You hadn’t had the chance to try anything by him yet but could assume it was pretty good if your coworkers spoke of it so highly.

“He can bring it on, I’m not scared of his ass, I bet he couldn’t cook a Cajun recipe if he tried,” Your mouth was moving before you had a chance to realize the words you were saying. “Yeah yeah, big talk for a girl that stuttered after taking one look at her boss’ biceps.” You nearly choked on your drink as Naomi absolutely obliterated you with one sentence. Damn, I really thought I was slick with the look. You sighed as Kanako simply whistled in your direction.

“Don’t tell me you’re falling for him already? His good looks are hard to miss,” she said as she handed you a napkin to wipe your mouth with. Muttering out a thanks, you tried to save yourself some embarrassment. “Oh please, if I wanted to torture myself by falling for a narcissist, I’d go for Shindou instead.” You shuddered at the thought of working for someone like him, suddenly grateful at the fact that you were working for Dynamight instead.

“Don’t deny yourself. I bet you probably had a Dynamight wall in your dorm room at some point.” Carl was an absolute menace when he got tipsy, clearly not skipping out on poking fun at you. You groaned at his comment, shaking your head. “Nah, it was a Deku wall, actually.” You weren’t lying if you thought about it, you did have a lot of respect for the hero as you’d learned more about him during your study abroad. He came from a humble background, what was there not to like about someone as sweet as the number 1?

“You always struck me as the type of person to go for someone batshit crazy though. I bet you’d probably like it if Dynamight was mean to you.” Kanako sent you a look that made you shiver. “How dare you accuse me of such nonsense,” you tutted, sipping on your drink before muttering a small, “I probably would.” Naomi slapped her hand on the table, yelling out, “I heard that you freak!”

You couldn’t help but laugh as your team members switched the topic to their picks for hottest heroes, with Carl sighing dreamily as he named Red Riot his number one choice, Uravity being a close second. During the chaos of the conversation, you forgot all about your quip towards Dynamight’s cooking.

You really should have remembered, because remembering would mean you could have prepared yourself more for your conversation with him later.

ೄྀ࿐ ˊˎ-

After the eventful weekend and nursing a massive hangover from the sheer amount of vodka you managed to drink together, your team trudged their way into the workplace again and began the process of uploading and creating new maps on ArcGIS to send over for clients’ approval. You were all lucky you got weekends off when there wasn’t a high demand of requests for maps and geographic data.

You were midway through a rough sketch of Deku’s patrol route, taking a small break to grab a water bottle from the vending machine on the second floor when you heard the first whispers.

“— she definitely wouldn’t,” a man from the finance department whispered to his coworker who was shaking his head enthusiastically. You recognized the guy who was speaking as Leo, a coworker you’d met early on that helped you budget out what was needed in terms of supplies in your current workspace. He often chatted with Naomi, who regularly contacted him to put in new orders of pencils and ink for the maps you all drew by hand. “I think she could. She’s from the west, they tend to take home cooking pretty seriously over there. No doubt she could beat him.” The other coworker beside Leo spoke. Now that caught your attention. It sounded like they were talking about you, but you couldn’t be sure. You didn’t know how many other people were in the agency that were also from the west, they could be talking about anybody, right?

As soon as they saw you, Leo nudged his coworker to shut up before waving at you with an uneasy smile. “What are y’all talking about over here? Something about cooking?” You said, walking over and greeting both of them. Leo nodded, slightly caught off guard. “Yeah, we— uh, we were talking about a cooking show we both watch! One of the chefs is from the west and she’s competing with other chefs to win a national title.” You raised an eyebrow at him, not really buying it but not really caring too much to think that hard about it. “Well remember that westerners can be pretty goated at cooking all kinds of food. She’s probably got a chance,” you shrugged before excusing yourself, waving at them as you walked back to the elevator once you purchased your water bottle.

You continued to flutter in and out of your workspace throughout the day, stopping for lunch and eating in your office with Naomi before returning back to work. However, you weren’t stupid; there were way more eyes on you today than you’d ever experienced, even more than when you first joined. You knew Naomi was sort of a gossip guru in the office, but you’d assumed she was probably flexing your cooking to anyone that crossed her path during the day.

You didn’t mind it, but the attention on you was definitely kind of concerning, especially because people kept whispering about something to do with an upcoming agency event that would include food. You figured you could probably whip up some good appetizers to bring to it, whenever it was.

As you were finishing up your sketches and scaling them correctly with the notes on your computer, Atsuno hurriedly burst through the door of the workshop, looking slightly disheveled. Your coworkers all glanced up at him at the same time before he coughed awkwardly and straightened his posture.

“New request sent in? Surely it’s not that important for you to have to run in here for,” You asked him as you wiped your hands on a towel to get rid of the ink stains along your palms. You definitely couldn’t risk messing up the paper now that you were this far along. He sighed heavily before shaking his head. “No, I uh— I had to come in here and ask that you go meet with Dynamight before you get off work. He wants to check in on the progress with Deku’s patrol route map.” You raised an eyebrow. Couldn’t he just shoot us an email? you wondered before nodding, asking if he was in his office. Atsuno nodded, offering to walk with you there, filling you in on the progress that’s about to be made with the maps your team had created relating back to crime rates along the districts in the city.

You missed the slightly concerned glance Naomi cast your way as you exited the shop.

After taking the elevator up to Dynamight’s office located on the 10th floor, you stepped off the lift and looked around the interior. You rarely ever came to this floor since it was mainly Dynamight’s office, the rest of the floor filled with smaller offices that were for his sidekicks, Atsuno, and his other head managers from different departments.

Turning right out of the elevator, Atsuno walked you to Dynamight’s office, adjacent from his own. Upon knocking, a gruff “come in” came from the other side of the door. Dynamight’s office was fucking nice.

It was as large as your own workshop, if not larger, and contained Dynamight’s desk, shelves full of memorabilia and other items, a couch in the center of the room, and what seemed to be an en-suite bathroom. His office overlooked the rest of the city, large window panes lining the wall his back was turned to. Along the rest of the non-windowed walls were frames of photos that contained Dynamight in his younger years, from when he was in high school to now. He was still in his mid 20s, but the photos along the wall told an interesting story of his life the past few years as he climbed the hero ranks.

Turning towards him, Atsuno cleared his throat before bowing to you and leaving, citing that he had to go sit in on a phone call with a sports clothing brand that was looking to sponsor Dynamight. He sure did clear out of here fast. You figured he was probably just busy, as all Mondays are.

Dynamight was staring into your soul again as you turned back to him and awkwardly shifted your weight onto your other foot. You began the conversation with, “you wanted to check in on Deku’s request, right?”

“Yeah. Nerd’s looking forward to it and won’t shut the hell up every time he calls me. Enjoys your work a fuckin’ ton,” he spoke, his gravelly voice sending a pleasurable hum through your body. If he wasn’t a hero, he could definitely be an ASMR YouTuber, you mused.

You gave him a small smile. “I’m surprised he’s heard of me. My work isn’t exactly groundbreaking,” you began to fiddle with your work jacket’s zipper. It was cold as shit in your office, so you had Leo sneak in an order for your team to have matching work jackets by Carhartt since they were durable and warm. “Yeah, well get used to the recognition. Your job is a first for the country. Constantly gettin’ questions about why I hired you.” You felt a small spark of annoyance work through your system. “Not sure you mean that in a good or bad way.” You huffed, walking towards his desk and sitting across from him in one of the plush seats. He eyed you with mild curiosity before explaining.

“Not a bad thing. People just don’t understand why yer work’s so important.” You nodded in acknowledgement. He wasn’t wrong. Cartographers are uncommon in the modern world now that technology has dominated the industry. You remember the times in college where people would always ask why you got into your field. You had to explain that cartography wasn’t just hand drawing maps; it related back to software and digital images too.

“I get to create anything I want on a map. My quirk’s a weird one, but it helps a lot of different people, so I’m not complaining.” You eyed the pack of pink sparkly sticky notes and glitter pens sitting next to Dynamight’s keyboard. Pinky probably brought him her new stationary set that launched recently, you thought to yourself with amusement.

“Speakin’ of, been wantin’ to ask you a question.” Dynamight caught you eying his stationary and scratched his neck in what you could assume to be embarrassment. “Shoot,” you replied, noting that the sun was finally beginning to set later in the day now that the winter solstice happened a month ago.

“Why didn’t you become like— a fuckin’ underground hero or some shit? Your quirk isn’t that niche. Could use it for raids n’ infiltrating places.” You didn’t know whether or not to take his commentary as a compliment or not, but you figured that if he was questioning your avoidance of the hero career path, it meant he noticed something in you that you didn’t.

“It wasn’t for me. My quirk is exhausting. Five miles sounds like a pretty small radius, but when I’m visualizing the area, everything is visualized. Buildings, roads, you name it. Drawing it from memory takes a lot out of me,” you spoke. “I take a while to draw and digitize my maps. It wouldn’t be easy to keep up with the hustle of hero work, let alone working within a time crunch.”

Dynamight hummed in acknowledgement. You really didn’t expect to be conversing with him about your life choices, but it was a nice break, and it meant you got to learn more about him, even if he was asking about your life.

“You still chose to work with heroes though.” You let out a small laugh. “I guess you’re right,” you began, meeting his stare. He was really pretty now that you were looking closer at him. “I figured if I couldn’t handle the stress of real hero work, that working behind the scenes is the next best thing. My maps are almost always accurate and to scale; I pride myself on it. Means that heroes can rely on the information for a multitude of things.”

He nodded, seemingly hesitating before speaking again. “Know we ain’t had a chance to talk much since y’started working here. Red begged me to put you in my agency because he figured you’d be easier to reach here and your name would get recognized if it was associated with my office.” You hadn’t really thought of that before, but he was right. Red Riot’s office was packed as it was, and you figured everyone else’s was too. It was a lucky shot that you got placed with Dynamight, since he was still looking for workers to fill in his office due to it being newer than most.

“I really appreciate Eijiro being able to start my career off like this. I never would have imagined moving across the country to start my dream job so soon, if at all,” you said, casting your gaze to the pictures on Dynamight’s shelves behind his desk. “First name basis, huh?” the hero smirked as you let out a small noise of shock. “Y-Yeah, we kept in contact a lot and he would regularly help me gain clients in different cities. Told me that we were friends and to stop addressing him by his hero name every time we talked.”

“That’s Eiji for you.” A pregnant pause followed before your boss let out a groan of frustration. “I’m not— I fuckin’ hate small talk like this. Don’t know how people do it,” Dynamight said finally, pinching the bridge of his nose before speaking again. “Couldn’t figure out how to speak to you without sounding like a dick ‘cause I didn’t do it sooner. Atsuno was grilling me about not even having a functional conversation with you yet, even though I’m the one that hired you.”

You let out a laugh at that. You had been a little mad at him for not even properly greeting you since you began your work for the agency, but you assumed that being the number 2 hero in Japan was busy as shit. “I get it, you’re a top hero. I’m sure you’re busy enough as it is, can’t blame you for not being able to talk to a cartographer of all people,” you shrugged as you spoke, Dynamight leaning back in his office chair and giving you a small nod.

“Yeah. Sorry for steering the conversation elsewhere. How’s Deku’s shitty map comin’ along?” He asked as you began going through the details of your progress.

After you explained the gist of it, he grunted in response before standing up. He’s tall as fuck, you realized as you hurriedly stood up as well, assuming your talk was over with. Dynamight walked you to his office door before stopping once you turned around to thank him again. “Thanks for uh— earlier. When you were complimenting my work. It means a lot, truly.”

“Don’t let it inflate yer shitty ego. Can’t handle another person that gets a big head after someone compliments them,” he spat. You could tell he wasn’t used to being given a sincere thanks very often. “Hey. One more thing.”

You raised an eyebrow at him as his face turned blank for a moment before he sighed and his signature scowl returned. You should have known the conversation you were having earlier was too good to be true.

“You would not be able to win against me in a fuckin’ cook off. My cooking probably beats yours by a shit ton. Watch your mouth next time you run around all bark and no bite.” You nearly fainted on the spot as your body ran as cold as ice. What the fuck. What the fuck? WHAT THE FUCK? You repeated in your head, eyes going wider than dish plates as Dynamight’s glare sent another chill down your spine.

“Shit.” Is all that came out of your mouth after he all but pushed you by your back out the door and closed it in your face.

It’s official, you think as you trudge your way to the elevator, the beginning of a migraine creeping into your skull. You were going to kill Naomi.

#pro hero katsuki x reader #pro hero bakugou x reader #bakugou katsuki x reader #katsuki bakugou x reader #bakugou x reader #katsuki x reader #bnha x reader #mha x reader #ross works

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