#also no I won't review the first half but I might keep this up till the finale or smth

[the-gayest-show]

just finished all the remainder of the episodes of fop a new wish that i didn't finish (so crocker to the future to lost in fairy world) and i really liked it!

overall, banger after banger this show really is a fun one, nickelodeon better give em a s2 PLEASE THIS IS THE ONLY CURRENTLY RUNNING SHOW I HAVE-

episode reviews below!

Crocker to the Future: genuinely loved all the parascience things. I do 100% feel like that award for preserving in the face of adversity or whatever truly belonged to Crocker. my guy was at this for like. 10+ years! AND THAT"S JUST THE OG FAIRLY ODDPARENTS!!! MY GUY WAS ON HIS "fairies are real!!! trust me!!" thing for ENOUGH TIME FOR FOP A NEW WISH TO TAKE PLACE!!!!!! i'm so glad he (sort of) got to have the award in that ghost containment thing.

AJ in the episode was interesting but honestly major L for AJ. I thought he'd be like the next einstein, not a parascience mf. maybe Timmy Turner fucked him up a bit, who knows...

Battle of the Dimmsonian: Genuinely felt bad for Peri here. Like DUDE. You are stuck with this asshole kid (Dev I love you but be nicer plss) who just sorta demands things from Peri like all the damn time? poor kid. Reminds me of what Remy Buxaplenty had with his godparent but at least wandisimo had a semi-similar personality so it kind of worked. Not saying that Peri and Dev don't work, it might since Dev has been shown to be nice underneath but I can't stand the blatant mistreatment for now.

But also, damnnnn he IMMEDIATELY recognizes his parents and goes "oh shit" it's crazy how he managed to do that when they're fidget toys on a kid's backpack.

I also liked the whole back and forth thing ("Mom? Dad?" "Son?" etc), Cosmo being the only one to not do that is so true for him.

I wonder if Peri not seeing Cosmo and Wanda was intentional, we'll see!

Patty Possum's Party Playground: I almost thought this episode was gonna be like Five Night's At Freddy's or somethign with the animatronics but I guess not! I liked Patty Possum, she's so rad! I can defo see why Winn liked skateboarding after that. I love Cosmo and Wanda being certified idiots in this episode. They took "you can't use magic" seriously (as seriously as "oh Wanda shrunk into the claw machine so we could actually get a prize" can be) and stuck BOTH of their wands in the claw machine. If there's anything I love about this show, it's Cosmo and Wanda being two halves of a whole idiot. Truly can't function without magic fr fr I liked the gag of Hazel's dad literally being punctual as hell. That scene where he's like "oh it only takes 29 min and 30 seconds to get there" and then it hits 7:30 and he's panicking is so real (what if I headcanoned him as autistic. what then? just like me fr fr).

A Date To Remember: A really cute episode where Hazel essentially has to compete against Cupid (who looks like a baby now, I guess they got rid of his looks from the main series and gave them to Peri lol) [look how they untwinkified my boy /j] to make sure Hazel's parents fall back in love again. The ending where the parents think it was just another puppet show was crazy, wasn't expecting that tbh!

Lost In Fairy World: WE GOT THE FAIRY TRIO INTERACTING LET'S GOOOOOOO

It seems like their dynamic is basically just over protective coddling parents vs their son who really doesn't like it. But despite what I used to think before seeing this episode (that maybe Peri had some kind of resentment or something) it doesn't seem that way? Peri seems to like his parents overall and maybe even might enjoy the affection (if it weren't for the godkids there), but I get why he turned off the tracker and such. My guy wants independence! You go boy! Them sneaking in to Jorgan's office was really funny and stuff. I hope we'll see them all together in the next episodes because I like their dynamic and want to see where it goes!

Dev and Hazel were great here too! Dev is still kind of an ass to Peri but not as much which is an improvement! I like how he gets that "dimmadome face" or whatever it was called where he basically looks as deranged as his dad. Like father, like son I guess. Dev and Hazel actually having fun together is a step up from where they used to be, it seems like they solved their argument somehow. Dev sort of took that to mean that they weren't friends anymore, poor thing.

Dev taking advantage of the loopholes is so smart lol, Peri having a crisis and his parents like "AWWW, baby's first loophole wish!" is crazy.

The rule that "you can only go to fairy world if you're being tested by jorgan" doesn't really make sense if you think about original FOP though. Timmy got to go there almost recreationally! Dude probably attended like 90% of all fairy world events and shit and he was the talk for the town for an entire episode! Make it make sense!!!

Overall tho I LOVED these and they were enjoyable af. Would watch again. Judging by what I saw for descriptions of the next episodes, Peri's anti fairy (or Foop, now known as Irep, which if you ask me doesn't have the same ring to it) will be working with Dev? Crazy. Anyways yeah I had a lot of fun and woah this post got kinda long

[savrenim]

hi hi hi. so I just got into the Hamilton fandom, I swear I am four years late where did everybody go, and, well. I am apparently a hamburr shipper. bcs that is my life now. anyway I saw your fic ifmlam and I swear it is my favourite of all the fics I've ever read (and trust me I've read literally thousands). I love it so so much, how do you write fics like that??? I cried about four times during the whole thing, I stayed up till 4am reading it even when I had to wake up at 7 because it is just. that. good. I could not stop thinking about it for days afterwards and ifmlam has just ruined me. I can't think of listen to Hamilton without thinking of ifmlam anymore.

on to my qursttion: is it abandoned? of course it's perfectly FINE if it is. don't let anyone tell u differently, your fic is YOURS and u are amazing.

but pls I really need closure from ur fic, it has been haunting me if its abandoned or ongoing and I've read ur other fics and they are just chefskiss and thank you so much for writing them all. thank you thank you thank you, I will never be able to thank you enough for writing this fic and for everything it's done for me. I am probably thousands of miles away but I am sending you virtual jugs through a co.puter screen right now.

(don't feel pressured to reply to this or update it flam, I know how overwhelming it can get with so many messages and after a while u get desensitized to it. u can literally reply "thx. itfmlam is abandoned" and I would still be amazingly star struck. anyway has gotten way too long and I need to sleep and I'm sorry u probably won't see this so I'm just talking to myself right now but bye!!)

and thank you so so much for writing itfmlam.

aaaah hello anon!

thank you so so much???? I am so??? honored??? that ifmlam rates so highly to you, and also that you've read my other fics??????

the answer to the "is ifmlam abandoned" question is probably the worst possible one, which is pretty much "I do want to finish it, both for the folks that still want closure as well as it bothers to me have abandoned projects that are in the public eye/ already partially published, but also, it is last on my current writing projects list"

my current actually active writing projects list, kind of in order of priority, is

I'm literally three chapters away from being Actually Fully Done with the not-quite-first-not-quite-second let's call it 1.5th draft of an actual?? full?? original?? novel?? Opus which of course then goes out to beta readers and then gets who-knows-how-much edited and then maybe beta readers again if a lot does change and then a copyeditor my mom, my copyeditor is my mom, and maybe my little brother he's one of the betas but is very good at catching typos and then I!!! get to publish it!!!! which is the single thing I am most excited for!!!!!!!!! this should be closed up in the next week or two, and then take a while for people to actually read the draft and get back to me.

I really desperately want to finish my open-but-like-90%-written fic, which means we raise it up, the final chapter of to the bottom of the river bc I realized that it was kind of incomplete, and the second chapter of a buried and a burning flame because any more work there will need to wait until the author publishes the next book in the series. this should be closed up in the next month or two.

Speedwrite the draft of the second book of the Opus series so that hopefully by the time book 1 edits are happening, I have an almost complete draft of the second book. this is mostly me side-eyeing myself about taking nearly four years to write the first book, but that is solidly in part because I had so many other open projects which point 2 is about clearing that docket. this should be done in the next year.

And then just have my major projects be, at least until books 1-5 are written and published, books 1-5 of that because that is arguably the first major 'plot arc' of the series, so if I'm looking for a pause point on writing, that's probably where to stop.

There are two or three other short side projects (a weird fun second person short story tentatively titled witch-queen, a collection of four short stories Memoirs about a not-so-evil necromancer and the shenanigans he gets up to trying to rule a kingdom, working title Perfectly Normal Recipe Blog which is a collaborative project about a perfectly normal recipe blog that definitely doesn't include anything out of the normal) that will happen when they happen

There are other projects that are on the backburner -- The Numanok Files, a series of probably 12-15 short novellas about a mercenary/ bounty hunter esque person in space whose specialty is dealing with hauntings, but, like, 80% of their jobs is actually "you are effectively a space home inspector pointing out faulty wiring reacting to solar flares/ there's a weird alien fungus/ it's carbon monoxide okay change your atmosphere filters" and 20% of it is punching ghosts; there's a post-post apocalypse novel that I want to write that I know characters and general pacing and half the setting but need to work out the other half and figure out how much aesthetic I want to commit to; there's Strangeside7 aka spacerace book that is my reaction to how much I love how Redline the anime movie commits itself to "no we are about a race, like 60% of the screentime is just fully going to be an utterly ridiculous sci fi space race"; there's even a ridiculous YA trilogy that I would have to completely transplant the setting but might end up writing because the interplay between angel-physics and physics-physics was one of my favorite things in the world. and I guess the weird ridiculous technically a sequel series to ifmlam that was going to be published as original books that was basically me having fun with 'okay I fucking love star wars prequels old rotting space bureaucracy galactic republic style' except with seers and that also still might happen because it does have some of the coolest sci fi concepts and honestly I thiiiink that's all?

but the tl;dr of that timeline is I'm trying to finish a punch of projects Right Now, so that I can write books 2-5 of Opus, and then when I'm done that (which honestly, my average fiction-writing output is close to 100k a year. if I'm concentrating purely on one project, and writing books that are about 100k, we are talking four years. although my job situation is super up in the air in that period and writing might get put solidly on the backburner as I try to make it in academia, so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯) I will re-evaluate which projects go next, and that's when ifmlam is likely to come up for review.

I do not have any expectations that I will make it as an original author. I'm planning on posting all of my stuff online for free, but, like. it is incredibly difficult to convince people to try out even a piece of free and easily accessibly original work even if one has a huge following, I am a very small fanfiction author, and from what I can tell the majority of the people who are interested in my work are mostly interested in me finishing ifmlam. writing is a hobby for me, and while I'm writing mostly for me--and hence the for me bit at least for the next five years is pretty solidly going to be this series that I am deeply excited about and have sunk my heart and soul into every single aspect of--I'm human, and I don't really like shouting into the void, and I expect if I spend five years publishing to absolutely no response I will either stop writing for a while and do other things gods know my life is busy enough, return to fandom in general to write some other fanfic about whatever I get deeply into, or return to a work that I actually get response to. so ifmlam will probably start getting worked on a bit at that point one way or another. unless, of course, we are in the incredibly rare timeline in which I do make it as an original author, there are people who are deeply hyped for my original works and an actual demand for them, in which case as you may have noticed there are enough ideas there to keep me busy for a decade or two, and they will just get my full attention instead of fanfiction*. in this timeline, I will do what I was considering doing a few years ago, which is officially declare ifmlam otherwise abandoned and make one more giant chapter update which is a full and cleaned up outline of what I was going to write, interspersed with the scenes already written, and have ifmlam be given at least that closure.

*I want to make it clear that I very much love fanfiction and am proud to have been a fanfiction author and in my heart of hearts would keep writing it forever, I just also have a lot of ideas for characters and settings and magic systems and Aesthetics and I have been biting at the bit to write something that is //mine// and all mine and only mine for a while, I don't see original work as superior so much as there are a dozen fandoms that I am currently in and bursting to make content about except oops these fandoms currently only exist in my head, and I want to correct that

of course given how much as writing is my vent activity and I write what I'm in the mood for, there's a chance I'll feel ifmlam cravings before then, just... expect it to take a couple of years for an update, but also for there to be an update one way of another in a couple of years? but as for right now, I'm turning to original writing, because that is what brings me joy.

but I am really deeply honored that it brought you so much joy!!! and while I will never publish spoilers in a public place, if you message me off anon I am perfectly happy to give a run-down of my current plans for the ending, bc I know "wait a couple years and see" is not the most satisfactory of answers! and hey maybe you'll be like me and once you've given Opus a try you'll decide you like it better too, it does have Seers although they are deeply different Seers than in ifmlam but imo it's very gay and fun and at least politics on one side

[fapangel]

> It’s not like it’s a desktop plugged into a normal ISP | No, but it runs software written by people who think "just reboot your airplane mid-flight if you cross the international date border" (F-22) and "remember to reboot your missile battery every day or you will murder your own people" (Patriot) are acceptable workarounds. They won't catch cryptolockers (probably), but I'm not that optimistic about their resilience to targeted attacks.

Those are both good examples of why cyberattacks on weapon systems are so hard - even something as simple as a date or time tracking bug (like with the Patriot) can lead to people dying. (Rebooting the system was not considered an “acceptable workaround,” by the way; that was a temporary remedy until they could get the updated software rolled out.) This is one big reason that upgrading old ships and combat systems can be so expensive - the software is not trivial. Perhaps no other software on Earth is more extensively proofed, tested, and examined - and for damn good reason. COTS (Commercial Off The Shelf) has reduced the other big cost; which was the (essentially) custom-built mainframe computers most warplanes/ships used up till the 90s, but the coding is still very expensive and time-consuming to do. Hell, the baseline upgrade that allowed Aegis ships to operate in anti-BMD and anti-air modes at the same time was 90% a matter of improved software, as I recall. Compromising such systems is a hell of a lot harder than you might think, especially because you can’t just install a copy on your own boxen to start looking for zero-days - some of this software is allegedly based on Windows Version Whatever, but that short-sells the sheer extent of the custom modifications. Same for Linux/UNIX based systems. 

But this is all completely aside from the bigger issue - attack surface. How the hell do you communicate remotely with the target? You can’t just “ping the carrier’s IP address.” You’re not Jeff Goldblum hacking the Alien mothership on his fucking PowerBook 5300. How do you access those systems in the first place? You either need to engineer physical access - such as putting a poisoned USB drive into circulation “upstream” and hoping either the drive - or its payload - can then percolate downstream till some contractor plugs it into a computer on the target ship (this is how the NSA nailed the Iranian uranium centrifuges; via Siemens engineers in Germany,) or you have to access the enemy’s military communications network - which is a fucking colossal challenge in and of itself. That’d entail getting into the MILSTARs network - which is routed through our geo-synch satellites - and THEN gaining so much control over that system that you can then pass arbitrary signals down the links to receiving combat platforms, and get past their verification checks and encryption challenges as well. 

It’s far easier to target the enemy’s C3 network itself, and deny the combat platforms the greater benefits of networked communication - or to outright jam the links between the combat platforms themselves (or their C3 assets, for that matter.) Or you could just shoot down the satellites. Geosynch satellites are well out of reach of anything short of an ICBM-sized weapon, you usually have to send a kill-sat after them... and that miiight just be why the Air Force has already launched a pair of geo-synch inspection satellites to keep a very, very close eye on anything suspicious that might start matching orbit phases with our geo-synch MILSTARs assets. 

Anon, there is a fucking reason 8/10ths of hacking these days is done via old-fashioned, pre-computer style “Social engineering” (i.e. send some fuckwit an e-mail to trick him into just giving you his password and username,) and most if not all of the serious successful hacking attacks on the US were against contractor computer systems, not hardened weapons-crucial systems. 

While we’re at it, a similar comment sitting in my inbox: 

You don’t just “hack a carrier,” // What, did you forget about Wiki leaks dump about CIA's vault 7? All those nice cyber attack systems could well be used against us fapangel. That and an inside agent that got payed off or other wise compromised by outside forces. BTW, just how many contract workers does the Navy have they can't be sure of? Government contractors seems to be the source of a lot of leaks and weak points these days. 

The lesson you’ve failed to learn from the many WikiLeaks revelations is just how goddamned good US cyber war capability is. You must understand that all this shit coming out in the Wikileaks files is years old. Yes, even the WannaCry exploits? Years old. Just a zero-day nobody else had found in the meantime. The NSA does not sit still, and even a few years is an eternity in the cyber realm. I promise you that the NSA is currently using shit that was barely a whitepaper when Snowden was swiping files on currently active systems and tools. 

And while we’re at it - trying to use our own fucking code against us is like trying to drown a fish in water. We fucking invented this shit, bro - we know it backwards and forwards. The first thing the NSA did when Snowden walked out was conduct a very thorough review and cataloging of all the shit he compromised, and then the second thing they did was assume that every single fucking byte would be in the Russians fucking hands ten seconds after he touched down. Sure, Snowden has all that shit super encrypted and he’s a good guy who was looking to Save America, not hand the fucking Russians the intelligence coup of the century, but:

The spooks might fuck up royally sometimes, but they’re not that fucking stupid. They’ve been expecting these weapons to be turned against us since the day Snowden left and been reacting accordingly. The real problem is that hand-me-down cyberweapons are still dangerous even when the Big Boys aren’t playing with them anymore - just like any other weapon, once they’re tossed into the playpen, it’s what every other fuck is going to do with them against civilians, governments, economies in general that is going to cause mayhem. Such as, say, Russian mafia cyber-criminals using them to propagate new ransomware strains or build new botnets. 

Seriously, read up on this shit, and you’ll notice how little actual military systems are mentioned. They are targeted, mind you, and there is a danger there, but it’s many orders of magnitude harder to attack a very limited, well-defined system that’s made redundant and paranoid by base design, because it controls weapons - with extensive security then overlaid on that. Yes, you can attempt it, but the returns on investment are massively better when you can take down the power grid of entire fucking cities by tricking one fuckwit civvie into sending you his fucking username and password. Assuming you don’t just sneak into the building at night and leave a pinhole camera somewhere it can watch a fuckin keyboard, at that! 

The damage these attacks can wreak is incalculable. And also military significant. One thing the US was criticized for - by the likes of Pierre and other shitbirds - was how many targets in Serbia (Operation Allied Force/Resolve) were strategic in nature, rather than tactical. They were whining about how the ChairFarce still has the Strategic Bomber Mafia mindset from WWII instead of the MODERN WARFIGHTA idea of killing each tank itself, (buy more A-10 plox F-whatever a turkey visual awareness > radars blah blah). But they did illuminate something - the US tends to target critical infrastructure as a way of punishing nations without threatening their ability to resist invasion, which might panic them into doing something stupid, or killing lots of soldiers or civilians. When your people are screaming blue murder because half the nation is without power and all the bridges are blown and they can’t get food shipments to local supermarkets, that tends to generate, ah, pressure. And of course power plants and such are the first thing targeted in a full-out, no-holds-barred war like the Gulf Wars, too - knock out a powerplant and you make life much harder for the enemy in that area. Every military invests in backup diesel generators, but they’re backups - you can force them to rely mostly or exclusively on their own communication networks and supply lines. What fucking good is a jamming aircraft in the air, if the assholes can just pick up an old-fashioned copper landline and call HQ? And everyone uses the same roads and bridges! 

Now, consider - America’s domestic infrastructure was completely invulnerable to attack during WWI and WWII, despite some elaborate attempts to change that fact by our enemies - and it was a huge contributor to our victories in those wars. In a modern conflict, our very cyberattack-vulnerable civilian infrastructure offers China and Russia a way to strike at our homeland - either for purposes of morale/pressure or direct military goals - in a way that they literally CANNOT do kinetically, even if they were insane enough to try. For return-on-investment, it makes damn little sense to attack our military networks directly - especially when even if everything broke their way, they’d still be fighting a war they simply could not win, based on industrial output, tech base, and above all, current force disparities. The non-kinetic but very painful domestic option fits the “hybrid warfare” schematic perfectly, and make no mistake, China would have to use this just like Russia is now - any armed conflict will include efforts to seek a cease-fire fast. China’s position is much like Japan’s in 1941; they cannot win an extended clash, but they can hope to win a sharp initial clash, and then push to “win the peace” to use diplomacy to solidify their gains. Or at least, they think they can. 

This isn’t academic, either. I’ve been reading about this on Slashdot for years. One honeypot - set up to look like the web interface of a local city’s water-treatment plant - recorded the intruders gaining access, twiddling the levers just long enough to check that the virtual dials were responding - and then quietly installed a backdoor, covered their tracks, and logged out. The Chinese and Russians are actively building a catalog of pre-compromised civilian targets in the domestic US to be attacked en-masse should it be required. 

And you’re worried about them somehow magically hacking away our crushing technological and weaponry advantage with some kind of Hollywood Hacker gee-whiz plot excuse bullshit? Motherfucker, you don’t even know.