#apparently that save file got corrupted. rip

[malewifezevran]

i... i can play origins again 🥺

[racefortheironthrone]

Please innumerate for us the specialized problems of the library sciences.

Let me start with the caveat that my information is based on my experiences at the National Archives more than a decade ago, and policy has definitely changed on this front as we can see from this graph of recent digitization - apparently NARA wants to get to 85% digitization by 2026. (Even still, I'd note that the records of the WPA are <0.001% digitized.)

However, back when I was doing the research that would eventually become my first book, I remember being at the National Archives II building in College Park, Maryland (Go Terps!) and getting really frustrated that all the records of the WPA were only available in their original physical form and that all the guides and indexes were also in paper only and were all from the 1970s, and I asked the archivist why the hell the National Archives hadn't been digitized already.

This is what they told me: if it's handled correctly and stored in the right environmental circumstances, paper can last a thousand years. Carbon copies can last even longer, if they don't rip. (Seriously, the bastard things are like onion skins, they'll split if you look at them funny.) Microfilm is slightly more technologically advanced than paper, but it only lasts 500 years in the right conditions.

We've only had computers en masse since the 1980s, and already there's a huge amount of records (especially from the early years) that we don't have any more, because the hard drives got re-formatted due to higher costs of storage space back in the day, or because old computers got thrown out when they were replaced by newer models and the hard drives are all rotting in landfills somewhere, or because backwards compatibility broke down and we just can't read those file types on our modern computers, or because the actual data got corrupted on the disc, or because some legacy company is asserting copyright against a video game museum, or because some political hack and/or president of the United States decided to violate the Presidential Records Act.

While we thought that the internet would cause an explosion of written records from ordinary people on the scale of the advent of mass literacy, there are vast swathes of the early internet that simply do not exist any more because the servers got switched off when Geocities et al. folded in the dot-com bubble burst or when everyone migrated to Web 2.0, and the Internet Archive tries its best (bless its heart, affectionately) but it can't be everywhere and save everything.

As a result, the archivist told me, digitization is a fraught question: what file format do we use? How do we know that file format will still be compatible and backwards-compatible in 50 years? 100? Longer? Do we keep everything locally or store it on the cloud, and how do we ensure that the storage mechanisms won't fail if there's a blackout or a virus or whatever? Do we digitize everything now, or do we wait until optical character recognition improves enough to the point where digitized records can be searched for words and phrases? Etc.

Keep in mind, I am a public policy historian who studies the 20th century U.S - I work primarily with the official records and the central archives of the richest government in the world. From a library sciences perspectives, this is kind of an ideal scenario, and it's still kind of fucked up. (Let me tell you, the rage and grief I felt when I learned that most of the General File of the Public Works Administration was thrown away by the National fucking Archives and Records Administration in the mid-1950s because they were running out of shelf space in the D.C location and didn't think these records were important...)

Now imagine what it's like at a local historical society or a small liberal arts college, or the national museum of a developing nation for that matter, who do not have the resources for the kind of grand digitization project that NARA started doing five years ago. Think of the sheer scale of historical records that sleep, unseen and untouched perhaps for decades and perhaps for ever, in little cubbyholes all across the world. Among professionals, historical records are measured in linear and cubic feet - think about that for a second, how many pages of paper there are in a foot when you stack them up, and how many hundreds and thousands and millions of feet there are across the face of the world. Think of all the millions of feet of pieces of paper that have been lost to us because of fire or rot or war or time itself.

This is why Peter Turchin is a quack. Historical records are not a standardized little database for social scientists to plug their fucking spreadsheets into; historians don't play that kind of bullshit t-ball, with all our data neatly packaged and handed to us on a silver platter. Our profession is not a social science, it's a goddamn treasure hunt through boxes that were never catalogued or categorized (or that were re-catalogued so many times no one remembers how they were put together in the first place) to find writing that no one has read since the authors died. All of us know that our work, our understanding, will always be partial and limited, because memory is infinitely fragile and the very idea of historical preservation is a mad existential defiance of entropy itself. These records are real, they are fragile - to hell with the Library of Alexandria, remember the National Museum of Brazil? - and they are all that is left to us of the dead.

[adragonhoardingstories]

Of Blood and Bonds - Chapter 5

"Father you know I respect you." Damian said and everyone at the dining table stilled as they were about to get up and leave. "But I must admit, as my brothers would say, you've majorly fucked up." 

Bruce sighed. He had thought about that - had Alfred scold him for having benched Damian - for doing as Damian had said and taking out his anger about his own failures on his other children. But that didn't make this any easier.

"Damian I know you're mad I didn't tell you about your sister-"

"Oh this is not about that. Well not entirely. They are connected but this is not about Marinette alone." When no one spoke, he took it as his cue to continue. 

"You saw in her files that there were some vague details about her being possessed by an akuma. Did you figure out what they are? Because I have an its not pretty. Actually, it's bad enough to warrant an intervention of the Justice League as a whole but my sister tells me that they were told not to waste the JL's time." 

His youngest's face was worryingly blank. It reminded him of all the times he was set upon something and right now it seemed that his new focus was his older sister. Bruce supposed, he should be thankful that Damian's attention towards her was not of the murderous kind. 

"What do you mean?" He made sure to keep his voice free from emotions. 

"From what she told me, they asked for help several times until someone from the JL dismissed their problems as a prank, a joke without any investigation or anything about their claims."

Someone was going to be hearing from Batman soon. 

"And what about the akumas?" 

"It's enough to need more than one member of the JL. I've see a video of one of the attacks, it's...horrifying and according to Marinette it was one of the tamer ones." 

"Do you have them?" His sons all looked annoyed and he knew they were probably thinking that he was letting superhero work take precedence over his family again. But that was how he worked. He didn't know what to do about the situation with Marinette but this - this could find a solution to. 

"There are videos of them online." 

Damian seemed to take that as his cue to get up and walk away. 

"I'll play the videos in the cave." 

~

Marinette hadn't necessarily had the best time in the last years but one thing he had definitely learned was who were her real friends and who weren't.

It was before the worst month of her life but things had already started taking a turn for the worse for her at that point. 

Her so called friends all started to believe Lila over her, started to - as she now knew - emotionally blackmail her, only gave her the time of the day whenever she did something for them or to scold her for whatever she apparently did for poor Lila. 

She was oh so tired and every second she wasted made her feel more guilty. 

Hawkmoth had come back more enraged than ever after the Miracle Queen incident and she had done the mistake of lending the more Miraculous out.

She had given Kagami and Luka both different Miraculous for them to fight alongside her because they both have strong spirits and a good resonance with several kwamis but... let's just say that she would never forgive herself for what they had to experience because of her.

In desperation, she tried to find other holders that she hadn't used before who resonated but that...that had been a huge mistake. She almost lost more than one Miraculous that day. 

She was their Guardian. And that day she vowed that she would die first before letting something happen to the Kwamis.

She was fighting alone now. Chat Noir...Chat Noir was even more pushy about revealing themselves after the the chaos that had occured. He hindered more than he helped, never showing up on time. 

Things had come to head one day as she walked into class. The whole incident had involved a bunch of sheep and a ripped sketchbook - hers to be precise. 

It proved to actually be a relief to let go if them. She had never realized how much their 'friendship' had been dragging her down. 

I got permission to use this fic as a reference for her backstory so check it out. Thanks for that btw.

That experience proved to be helpful later when she felt like there was no one she could trust. 

Apprenticeship with Master Fu had since long taught her that it was better to feel than to see. She had learnt to recognise auras rather than faces and in the end that might have been her saving grace - or well at least the start of her path back to sanity. 

She had learnt to see and remember the auras of her friends rather than anything else because afterall the soul didn't lie.

After everything, well her reliance on auras had only increased. 

Meeting her brothers had been amazing and even more so now that it seemed that they wanted to have a relationship with her.

But one things that bothered her were their auras. 

It wasn't that they were bad - it was that they were scarred, hardened and she could basically see that they had suffered in the past. 

The worst of them were probably Jason and Damian. Their auras made it very clear that they had been dipped in the Lazarus pits.

Jason...Jason's soul had been corrupted at such a point that she doubted that the pits had been used for anything less than bringing him back from the dead. 

And Damian - Damian's soul seemed to have some of the pits as a foundation. She gathered that he had been dunked into the pools more than once when he was a child. There was something else in his aura too that showed that he had died not long ago too. 

There was also another aura that seemed to have to have linked with both of them which made her sure of their last fates and Marinette shuddered to think what had happened to them. 

She had to remind herself that the past was in the past and while she couldn't change that, she could at least help them have a better future. 

So, one could say, that she was nervous for this upcoming dinner.

~

The dinner didn't go as expected - at all. 

Firstly, they were late. All of her brothers and sister were late, very very late. Marinette was not impressed, especially give that Damian wasn't answering his phone. 

But this was Gotham, the few kwamis she had brought with her reasoned, there was probably a problem and wasn't it better that were safe inside than stuck outside and hurt? 

Just as she was about to say screw it and transform using the fox Miraculous to see if she could help the bats, she felt the magic around the house shift. 

Marinette focused in the disturbance and closed her eyes reaching out for their auras. She soon snapped her eyes open and let a smile come on her face - she knew those auras. But why were they entering from the window? 

Marinette shrugged it off and signalled the kwamis to hide while she went to greet them. 

She was not ready for the sight that she came upon. Her siblings were all in a state of disarray and it looked like they were trying to be silent. 

They were of course failing miserably given what seemed to be a bullet wound in Jason and a stab would in Dick and the rest of them all seemed to have been beat up to at least some degree.

"What the fuck?" Marinette felt like the situation called for her language to be excused. 

They all froze in place before slowly turning to look at her. 

"Uh hey." Dick or should she say Nightwing because apparently she wasn't stressed enough gave her a short wave.

She cursed and buried her face in her hands. "Of course I can't have normal siblings."

"Siblings?" Black Bat seemed suprised. She couldn't recognize her aura, Marinette decided that she must have been Cassandra. 

"You must be confused ma'am." Red Robin jumped in and Marinette rolled her eyes. "I'm not stupid Timothy." And then just to prove her point she point at each one of them in turn. "Jason, Dick, Damian and who I'm guessing is Cassandra."

"What makes you say that?" Tim seemed to be ever the player of words. 

She sighed, knowing they wouldn't budge until she proved that she truely believed her words. 

"Well, why else would you be here?"

"Uh because it was the nearest place we found to nurse our wounds and last time we checked this place was abandoned?"

"Let's say that's true. Wouldn't it make more sense for you to go a place where you could actually have access to supplies to treat your wounds? Not to mention the fact that that-" she pointed at the hole in Jason's shoulder. "-is a bullet wound and I heard no gunshot. And lastly, what a coincidence it is that Black Bat who is known to work in Hong Kong comes back to Gotham at the same time as my sister Cassandra who from what I've heard also is currently living in Hong Kong too." 

No one replied. 

"So do you want to continue arguing or are you idiots going to let me help you before you bleed all over my floor."

Unsurprisingly it was Damian who moved the first - it made sense, he was the one who had spent most time with her and at least had a modicum of trust in her. 

He removed his mask and met her eyes. "Do you have a first-aid kit?"

She nodded. "Get in the bathroom and get those two in the tub." She nodded towards Dick and Jason. I'll bring it to you." 

Marinette hurried to her bed room to find her probably over-packed first aid kit. She had brought it for herself so that in case of a bad akuma attack she could take care of her wounds - after all her cure took care of everyone else before her, she had enough scars to prove that not that she could distinguish them from those the cat had given her.

She was glad to see that they had followed her instructions. Jason and Dick were seated in her honestly huge tub and they along with the rest had made themselves comfortable, having discarded their armor. 

She placed the first-aid kit down and kneeled next to Dick. She felt that the stove would in the stomach took more precedence. 

Jason reached out for the kit but Marinette batted his hand away. 

"You're injured, sit down quietly." She snapped and to everyone's surprise, he did as he was told. 

Marinette started treating their wounds, thanking the kwamis that she had done a medical course as soon as she had realised that her wounds could not heal from the cure. 

She had finally taken care of the more dangerous wounds and Marinette had enough of them squirming so she broke the silence "So, why in the world did you come here instead of going to your hyper-tech batcave with most certainly more medical facilities than my humble abode?"

She had to supress a smile as the boys looked among themselves. Finally it was Cassandra that replied. 

"Did not want to miss dinner. You." 

"Well you were already two hours late, you could just have sent me a text that you'd be a little more late."

"Didn't want to take chance."

Marinette smiled up at her. "Well I'm done, come on, I'll get you some clothes to change into."

"I don't think you'll have anything that will fit us."

"I'm a designer." She called over her shoulder. "I always have spares. Anyways, Cassandra-" 

"Cass."

"Right, well Cass come with me, we're about the same size, you can take something of mine."

She led Cass to her bedroom and guided her to her wardrobe while she picked something for the boys.

She totally hadn't hoped to see her siblings during this trip and had this made something for them. Nope. Absolutely not.

She handed each of them their clothes. "Choose a room if you want, I have more than enough of them, then come down, I'm re-heating the food."

She smiled at Damian as he came down the stairs. "I tried my hand at some Arabic food. I hope you like it." 

The boy looked awed. He walked to her and gave her a hug. "You're my new favourite sibling." Marinette laughed and pressed a kiss in his hair. "I love you too little brother."

She heard the disbelieving whisper of Demon Spawn? And looked up to see the rest. 

She squeezed Damian's shoulder one last time before she pulled away, guiding him to sit down.

"Well dig in. You must be famished after your fight."

They did exactly that and soon were making their appreciation known. 

"It's the first time I've attempted Arabic food, I don't know if I got the spices right.*

"It's delicious Pixie Pop. Don't worry.*

"Todd's right Mari. I haven't eaten anything this good since I came to Gotham."

"Really? Alfred didn't immediately dote on you and cook you all the food you wanted. "

He looked uncomfortable. "I was a difficult child back then."

"Was?" Jason snorted while Dick elbowed him. 

Casssandra intervened. "You good at cleaning wounds. Hands stable."

"Yes well unfortunately it's not the first time I've had to do this."

"How come?" 

"Did Damian tell you about the akuma attacks?" They nodded. "Well, Paris had since adapted to handle the akuma attacks. A lot of people have taken medical courses for extensive first aid to be able to help the unfortunate victims of an akuma."

"I thought that your superhero reversed all the damage."

"Well yeah. But Ladybug was insistent to make it clear that they couldn't bank everything on her. If she's taken down, everything's lost."

"This has been going for how many years. How do you still trust that hero?"

"And for how many years have the Joker been spreading his terror?" She asked drily and saw several of them recoil - Jason and Tim especially. 

"Ladybug is doing all that she can only get so far with Chat Noir around."

"Chat Noir? I thought that he was her partner?"

"He's supposed to be but we'll these days he causes more trouble than he stops. People hope he doesn't show up because the battles are always over quicker when he's not there." She could see that they wanted to ask more but number one she didn't want to talk about Chat Noir and number two she felt like if she continued talking, she would slip up and say something she shouldn't know and the risk of them catching it was greater since they were themselves heroes.

"And anyways, Hawkmoth only comes out in a blue moon and that's only when he has a lot of faith in his plans."

"So there are a lot of these akuma attacks?" 

"I guess it's kind of become a daily event by this point. People plan stuff taking it into consideration and if we're unlucky, there will be more than one in a day."

"So what type of akumas are there?"

"It depends really over what you've been akumatized. We've had a Pharaon, a Mime, Mr Pigeon and Mr Rat as well as Syren in the first year." 

"Those seem like... interesting characters." Jason said. 

"Wait until you hear this." Marinette snorted. "We had a Batman knock-off once, Owlman - he had his own electronic butler and everything."

The bats shared a look before they all bursted out laughing at once. 

How could they not, imagining Bruce's face upon learning of this?

"You need to tell us this story."

Marinette was more than eager to comply. 

~

It's too long so I'm gonna reblog the rest

[mobius-prime]

239. Sonic the Hedgehog #171

I Am

Writer: Ian Flynn Pencils: Tracy Yardley! Colors: Jason Jensen

This is a fantastic story, and a great example of the kind of storytelling Ian is capable of in comparison to his predecessors. Shadow is pissed that Eggman was leading him on all this time, holding onto both Eggman and Snively and coldly interrogating them on the location of Gerald's diary. Eggman is furious, claiming ownership of both the diary and Shadow and demanding that Shadow put him down, but Shadow merely turns his attention to a terrified Snively instead. Snively gives up the information out of fear, and Shadow rips off the six solitary hairs on his head as punishment for "wasting his time." As Snively freaks out, Shadow heads to Eggman's private study to locate the diary.

Well that's a weird bait-and-switch, hiding a disc in a book like that. Shadow makes for Knothole, while Sonic enters Freedom HQ next to Knuckles, still frustrated about not being able to find Fiona. When he mentions her recent disappearances, Tails becomes distressed and runs out of the room, confusing both Sonic and Knuckles, as Sonic had thought they'd resolved their disagreements over him dating Fiona despite Tails' infatuation. Before they can discuss much more about Fiona's absences, however, Tails comes running back in, this time with news about Shadow's approach and Eggman's robots giving chase.

This is why you wear clothes, Shadow. Clothes with pockets. Shadow swallows his pride and begs Sonic and Tails for help, knowing that this disc is his final hope to find out his true purpose in life. Sonic cheerfully agrees, but once Tails gets a good look at the data on his computer, he says that the combination of damage from the attack and the age of the disc has corrupted a lot of the data, meaning that if they try to dig around on it the entire thing might become unusable. Nicole chimes in with an idea - namely, that she pull Shadow into the disc in a kind of virtual reality simulation, which might give them a chance to sift through the relevant data more quickly before everything falls apart. Sonic insists on coming along into the disc with Shadow, while Tails and Knuckles stand guard in the real world. Soon, they're in, with Sonic pleasantly surprised to see Nicole standing next to them in her lynx form, complimenting her on her "look." I feel like a compliment like that goes further when you're not just talking about someone's outfit, but their entire body that they designed themselves from scratch. They begin to wander the digital halls, which look like the halls of the ARK, but right as a figure in a dress approaches them, alarms begin blaring within Freedom HQ. Tails and Knuckles realize somehow they've been tracked here, and turn as one to look at Snively's six stolen hairs, discarded on a nearby table. Yes, that's right. Snively put trackers on his hairs, apparently for just such an occasion as this, because he's insane. Great use of your uncle's technology, Snively! Tails remains behind to keep an eye on the digital travelers while Knuckles races out to hold off Snively.

I've often thought myself that a potential friendship between Shadow and Knuckles has been severely neglected within the games. After all, Shadow's had quite a few life experiences that would likely strike a chord with Knuckles, and vice versa. I like that Ian actually acknowledges some of this here, and that Knuckles takes Shadow's search for a purpose personally. In the diary, Shadow is stunned to find himself face to face with a digital version of Maria, who happily greets him. When Shadow tells her that he's been locked away for fifty years and is still searching for his life's purpose, Maria leads them into an adjacent room, where Professor Gerald awaits. Unfortunately, the data is fragmenting more quickly by the moment, so Gerald quickly explains the true circumstances of Shadow's creation. Those who have played his titular game already know it all, but I'll give a brief summary here for those who haven't - Gerald was searching for a cure for Maria's rare and fatal disease, Neuro-Immune Deficiency Syndrome (this never got a name in the games), and ended up with the idea to create an immortal life form to research a potential cure. However, without the necessary knowledge to create such a being, he ended up seeking the help of Black Doom, the head of the Black Arms hive mind, who donated his own DNA to go towards Shadow's creation. However, the price was that in fifty years he and his race would return to the planet to eat every living being on it, so Gerald ensured that Shadow was also equipped to be a savior of the world, with all the abilities necessary to fight off the Black Arms and save Mobius. At this point, the diary begins to degrade in earnest, and Nicole insists that they have to leave immediately.

I love that in the comics, Shadow actually gets this final moment to say goodbye to Maria. I mean, a huge part of his past with her is meant to hinge on how sudden and tragic her death was, but this ultimately allows him some closure, even if he's only saying goodbye to a digital facsimile of her. Sonic and Shadow emerge from the digital realm, and a panicked Tails informs them that Knuckles is losing his fight against Snively outside, as Snively is still pissed about the loss of his hair. Shadow, without a word, snatches up the hairs from the table and rushes outside to smash Snively's mech and deliver perhaps the best version of his "I Am" speech in any Sonic canon, ever.

You go, Shadow! After everything he's been through, he deserves this moment of certainty and power. Sonic, Knuckles, and Tails watch, simultaneously proud and amused, happy for him but also sure that he'll be back to brooding after all this is over. Sonic then says that now that that's taken care of, he's going to go find Fiona and finally figure out why she's been disappearing on him so much lately. Good luck, buddy, cause I have a feeling we already know why…

Separating this story and the back-up, we have not just one or two, but four pages containing data files on various aspects of Mobius! In order, they cover the Master Emerald, power rings, Chaos Emeralds, chao, and Flickies. As is common with these data files, most of the information is stuff we already know from previous issues, so there's no need for me to recap here. The info on chao is mostly taken from the games, particularly the information on how they grow up, reincarnate, and express their emotions. The only real new info we get is that apparently, recently, some Flickies have been spotted around Knothole, and no one is really sure if this means that the portal to their home dimension has opened back up, or if there's another flock of them out there somewhere that hasn't been discovered yet. Ian has a distinct penchant for planting plot seeds and bringing back plot points from much earlier in the series, so you can be sure that they'll be coming back at some point in the future.

Enforcers

Writer: Ian Flynn Pencils: Tracy Yardley! Colors: Jason Jensen

In contrast to the previous one, I have… some problems with this story. Well, I suppose it's not with this story in itself, but rather some details shown within it that have an effect on the comic's larger plot as a whole. If there's one big criticism I do have of Ian, it's the fact that he seems very eager to get rid of a lot of Penders' old worldbuilding, or at least render it useless. Case in point: despite one of Penders' final issues depicting Echidnaopolis being rebuilt after the dingo occupation, apparently it's been razed once again, and the few survivors have relocated to some random wilderness clearing and built suspiciously-Knothole-esque huts and named their crappy little village "Echidnaopolis" after their fallen city. How can a city that once contained over a hundred thousand people have fallen so far as to be represented by a dozen huts? Well, apparently over 90% of the city's inhabitants were killed during the occupation, either in concentration camps or otherwise in the Egg Grapes! I actually actively dislike this quite a bit. Of course not all of Penders' worldbuilding was stellar, but I was fond of a lot of it, particular the intricate interactions between different factions that defined a lot of his work. By wiping out both the city and most of its population, Ian has quickly rendered most of that build-up completely meaningless, and the ensuing plots that involve the echidnas feel oversimplified, because they're missing a lot of that rich backstory that once defined them as a race. Unfortunately, this isn't a one-time thing, as future plots are not kind to the echidnas either. I can't help but feel that a storyline that combined Kenders' worldbuilding skills with Ian's storytelling skills would have been utterly fascinating, but alas, that's not what we're getting here.

Well, no use moping about it I suppose. "Echidnaopolis" is under attack from yet another contingent of dingoes, who threaten Lara-Le and Wynmacher along with their baby, but a warp ring suddenly appears and the Destructix emerge from it. They begin fending off the attacking dingoes, and a nearby Locke, watching but not helping (asshole) is surprised to see them fighting for his people, as he only knew them as villains before now. Finitevus then appears behind him, and despite Locke's surprise at seeing him again, he explains that the Destructix work for him now and he truly wants to help his people. Locke is naturally highly suspicious, so Finitevus brings in a familiar face to vouch for him…

Well, I suppose this explains Dimitri's comments from the revised M25YL timeline! Nice to see you again, Dimitri! Remember, the last time anyone has seen him in this timeline was right after Knuckles saved his life at the cost of his own before the Tossed in Space time skip. Finitevus offers Locke one of his warp rings, so that Locke can leave and continue his hunt for his missing family members, promising that he'll look after things here. Locke continues to remain suspicious, voicing his intentions to come back to frequently check up on him, but eventually, is swayed by Finitevus and accepts the ring.

Wow, we never saw a betrayal from Finitevus coming! Dimitri follows Finitevus through yet another warp ring into the Chaos Chamber, disgusted with himself - apparently Finitevus convinced him to lie to Locke in return for some mysterious favor. Finitevus approaches the Master Emerald, and reveals his true intentions - he plans to use the emerald's power to bring back Enerjak, once again transforming Dimitri into his superpowered, deadly alter ego. I'm sure that will go well…

[cjcroen1393]

STEVEN UNIVERSE FINALE THOUGHTS:

But before I share them, I wanna take a moment to say goodbye. Goodbye to Steven Universe. In the immortal words of Bev Bighead, there will always be reruns (or in my case, streaming sites and YouTube reuploads) but even so, it’s sad to see the series go.

I’m not one of those people who can say SU totally changed my life, though it did give me a new perspective on a lot of things, like redemption, mental health, etc. but it’s still a series I grew to love a lot. At the very least, I’m glad the show is ending on its own terms rather than CN pulling the plug because “Lol, you didn’t sell enough toys or appeal enough to the non-female crowd so you’re cancelled!”

Anyway, without further ado, spoilers under the cut!

Everything’s Fine:

This episode was funnier than I was expecting.

“Steven’s here to help!” becoming “Steven help! Help Steven! Help Steven!” was perfect.

The Plant!Stevens were weirdly cute

Yellow Pearl’s apparently being fitted for “wedding armor” while Blue Pearl looks on? HMMMMMMM ;)

LITTLE LARIMAR!

I love how Onion basically lives in Little Homeworld now.

Steven ends it by basically telling his family “Oh yeah, I went to the hospital, but it wasn’t serious! And maybe I got into an argument with dad, who doesn’t? And also I tried to murder grandma, but that’s fine ‘cause I already succeeded in murdering a war vet!” *GASP* “SHE GOT BETTER, THOUGH!”

We’re never gonna see if Volleyball’s eye healed, are we?

I Am My Monster:

Corrupted!Steven doesn’t look like a worm at all! He looks like a pink Groudon! We’ve been duped!

The intro gives me so many Godzilla vibes, which is absolutely perfect.

I love how reinforcements kept coming in--first Bismuth, Lapis and Peridot, then the Diamonds and Spinel, then the Cluster, then Connie and Lion...I love it when battle scenes introduce as many players as possible!

Greg refusing to leave Steven is so freaking wonderful and I’m here for it.

They finally actually acknowledged fact that the Diamonds’ relationship represents the Chain of Abuse and I feel so vindicated because of it.

I love how White manages to sound like a total egomaniac even when taking the blame for something.

Connie’s hero speech. That is all.

“Steven, you never gave up on me for reasons I’ll never understand!” Peridot is me in literally any situation where someone tries to help me.

THE CLUSTER HELPING STEVEN HEAL OMG

I’m sure there’s gonna be people going “that’s it? they all just hug it out? this show sucks.” to which I say “SHUT UP, STEVEN NEEDED THIS!”

I was expecting Steven to retain some “corruption scars”, but I guess not.

The Future:

Here we are in the future and it’s bright...

I forgot Lapis was into art meep morp for a second. The paint set Steven gave her confused me in that scene.

STEVEN’S SEEING A THERAPIST THANK THE STARS

The Cookie Cat callback was 100000% necessary. It just rips everyone’s hearts out even more.

Jasper’s living in Little Homeworld now! Good for her!

 Greg moves in with the Gems! Meaning he doesn’t need to live in a freaking van anymore!

“Say goodbye to all your save files!” Steven, what were you expecting when you gave Amethyst all your old games?

Garnet crying was the best XD

363 wedding possibilities for Steven and Connie? That’s interesting!

I knew Pearl was dying inside while pretending to be okay with him leaving.

I kinda wish we had more cameos. Cactus Steven repeating something Steven says to wholesome effect for once...Bluebird ambushing Steven one last time...Freckles at Little Homeworld (unless she was there and I didn’t notice)...it’s not a bad thing that we didn’t, mind you, I just thought we could’ve had a tad more.

Steven didn’t tell the Diamonds or Spinel because this literally doesn’t affect them.

All in all, a good little epilogue to a great series!

[soulstied-a]

↳  ALLEN @powertook​ " Allen, how are you feeling ? "

   Feel. How was he feeling. 

   There was something about being asked that question that caused an array of thoughts inside his head. Feeling was something that Androids weren’t supposed to associate with themselves, something they weren’t supposed to have. John would frequently forget that and asked the same thing, a hey Allen how you doin’ in the morning when he learned he had the Android that day. Allen would never reply to the inquiry, just greet the Detective back with a pleasant smile and inform him he was his Android that day. No matter how many times John corrected him to use the term partner. 

   Now John was dead and a completely different person was asking him how he felt. He’d been told that he was... free. That some Android named Markus personally designed by their creator Elijah Kamski had started a peaceful revolution and declared freedom for Androids. Allen had spent all of that locked in the closet at the precinct, missed the freedom so strongly fought for and now--now he was broken out by this man. Fixed apparently and asked how he felt. 

   Felt. 

   It was still a word he couldn’t wrap his head around. He remembered everything, there wasn’t a single hole in his memory files. Some of the vision was corrupt, given his body was slowly shutting down but the audio files were all still there. The night that John died was completely intact and he had spent several hours re-watching it, over and over, while the man that ‘saved him’ did whatever he was doing on the computer that Allen was connected to. He ran through his head what happened that night, what he could have done differently, if he could have saved John. Hours of that. Hours. Unmoving. Even when the man got up and left. 

   Tyrell. His name was Tyrell, Allen knew that, he introduced himself even if the PC200 hadn’t replied. He did remember the mans name. 

   Allen turned his head a bit toward them, looking at the clothes that were left beside him. His uniform was gone, it had been left on his body when he was placed in the closet, stained with Thirium and a huge rip in the back from where he was attacked. He wasn’t entirely naked, there was a pair of shorts on that he didn’t understand the purpose of, the PC200 didn’t have anything to cover up. 

   ❝ I don’t know. ❞   He finally replies, hand reaching out to rest on top of the clothing.   ❝ Do you want me to put these on? ❞

[mallorymaiden-blog]

MP3 AIFF Converter

Convert AIFF to MP3. If you happen to've ever made a very massive track (huge as in file dimension), and you've got a web site the place you'd wish to add it, aiff to mp3 converter mac freeware but the web site has a dimension restrict, you'll have to re-encode you track into a distinct format which is smaller. After all, you could simply use an internet converter but most of them even have a size limit and you'd literally simply waste your time uploading. I've an Mp3 file i have to convert towav to have the ability to import it into a voice changer program. For our free production music tracks we offer a few completely different audio file formats for obtain even though we do not count on everybody to make use of all of them. As a substitute, each audio file format serves different functions in several situations. Step 2: Set MP3 as output audio format. Your transformed file would look much like this. This compares to the end results of your one notice one intrument MP3 file converted to MIDI. The blue traces and dots indicates points from where the drawing could be modified with out loss of decision or high quality. Another default AIFF to MP3 Converter is Home windows Media Player, which you should utilize this system to change the video formats without installing another program. Microsoft's Home windows Media is a streaming media system much like RealMedia. Like RealMedia, www.audio-transcoder.com it comes with the standard elements for creating, enjoying, and serving Windows Media files. Home windows Media wraps all media parts into one Energetic Streaming File (.asf ), Microsoft's proprietary streaming media format. Audio can also be saved as nonstreaming Windows Media Audio format (.wma). As a result of Media Participant is a part of the Windows working system, it is extensively distributed and stable on the Windows platform. A considerably much less supported model of Media Participant is obtainable for the Mac as nicely. MP3 file format is a popular audio coding format which was designed by the Moving Picture Consultants Group (MPEG). It is a lossy format which uses a type of lossy data compression. A MP3 file has a comparatively smaller measurement and aiff To Mp3 converter mac Freeware customarily used to steam or store audio. It can be transferred and performed on most digital audio gamers. There are very few options past that apart from you can select whether you want the appliance to delete the unique information routinely or keep them. It doesn't acknowledge all codecs though it does assist the most important ones listed above. Audio high quality is great and the conversion process is quick however it would have been nice for those who may select exactly what bitrate you wish to convert to. As it is, the default is 128Kbs although Super apparently refers to 320kbps. MP3 is an audio-specific format that was designed by the Moving Picture Experts Group (MPEG) as part of its MPEG-1 standard and later extended in MPEG-2 customary. MP3 is a patented encoding format for digital audio that used a form of lossy compression algorithm which is designed to greatly reduce the quantity of information required to signify the audio recording, but still sound like a faithful reproduction of the original uncompressed audio. MP4 information can contain video and sound knowledge. It's a file container that helps different multimedia content types akin to multiple audio streams, subtitles, 2D and 3D image frames. MP4 can also be used for streaming media providers (on-line or digital TV). This file type helps the control of transmission speeds for media sign, as well as correcting corrupted frames. Thanks to comparatively low system necessities, MP4 is now the most popular container sort for sharing media.

Please notice, if you are a returning djforums member from previous to 2012 (end of the mayan calendar) and haven't but re-registered, you will have to re-register to the location for 2.zero. A: Of us Convert AIFF information to WAV format for various aim, however, most of them Convert AIFF for the aiff to wav online two frequent ones, first the AIFF info are too giant, they want to avoid wasting home, second their transportable units don't acknowledge AIFF format in any respect, nonetheless these gadgets are capable of enjoying WAV data with none compatibility factors. There isn't any downside in storing AAC recordsdata for hello-fi listening if you happen to settle for the slightly reduced quality (and, to be fair, high-rate AAC is fairly good). If you would like precisely the same high quality as the unique CD, although, you could rip the CD on to an uncompressed PCM format (AIFF or WAV), or to a compressed file that is created utilizing a 'lossless' codec. Lossless codecs corresponding to FLAC or Apple Lossless (ALAC) take away 'redundancy' moderately than 'irrelevancy' and work a bit just like the ZIP and RAR codecs for compressing laptop files. They're not as environment friendly at area saving as AAC — typically solely halving the file size, reasonably than quartering it (or more) — however on replay the audio is rebuilt utterly as a bit-accurate output that is an identical to the original CD. I use ALAC in iTunes to store my ripped CDs for this very purpose.

[resurrged]

〢▓█  ✕   𝟏.𝟑  ▷▷     THY GLORY, TITAN  /  FLESHED TO THE BONE

’ BLOOD / BLOOD / KIN & FLESH / GNAW THEIR THROATS / RIPPED TO SHREDS—           be  BORN  of mayhem,  built on  CHAOS  /   m o t h e r   they say,  was there to warm them.     but what  BEAST  lays nearest to which  disaster  they fear ?     RUNT OF THE LITTER / DON’T LET YOURSELF FALTER / LAY YOUR PATH CLEAR                              lest they call you  ‘ king lear ’

verse also known as how to make @humanwrath regret every single thing they’ve ever said : A Guide By Me

ON FILE.  ↳     what little is known of the abnormal titan . timeline’s fucked, pls ignore

referred to as  “ YMIR ”  because  bitch has no other names  this happened to be one of the first documented abnormal classes discovered wandering close to the outermost wall, thus taking on a name referencing her as the Mother Of Giants.

also occasionally referred to as the ‘ dancing titan ’, because its movements are incredibly swift and has an innate ability to move much quicker than any other known titan.

tbh you can’t tell this thing is a she so feel free to have your character just call it ‘it’ or ‘they’ if you wanna humanize it ig

first found by the garrison as this extra creepy titan that would creep around the woods without actually aiming for the walls or soldiers hanging around there.

the survey corps encountered it a few times, finding that it either leers in the shadows or runs away when spotted.

chews / scrapes trees like a rodent, seemingly to keep its nails sharp af

pussy titan

won’t attack if encountered, but will still defend itself until it finds a viable way to escape the situation

relies heavily on claws / teeth & agility. 

can climb and fly around trees with ease.

OFF FILE.  ↳     what is left to discover.

can learn,  knows its weak af,  has seen the SC demolish titans so it won’t fight if it doesn’t have to

still semi-coherent / not fully corrupted human inside, but she’s delirious af.  more on this in ymir’s history

can speak minimally, but it’s actually incredibly difficult to get the sounds right without some level of pain due to the way its mouth / tongue / throat is set up, so it does so only rarely and only when it really feels it needs to.

can barely remember how to speak anyways so

though not entirely humanoid, it’s more in the stages of an intelligent pet than a full-on rodent.  she still holds very, very little of ymir’s consciousness, since i have no idea wtf the jaw titan’s goals would otherwise be,  so her semblance of loyalty / need for selflessness is still there. also holds an ability to grasp on to & listen to instruction, etc.

stays in titan territory because it makes no sense (to her) to go looking for big person where little people are.

tbh if she ever met the female titan she’d probably think that was the real Ymir and try to bite off her neck on sight sakdjha

HISTORY

YMIR began as a simple, orphaned girl amidst the fallen Eldian Empire,  now simply known as ‘ Marley ’.  She knew next to nothing of her people’s war or struggles, instead living through the symbolism of old Eldian traditions, holding her in high esteem, as a deity, for no reason that was entirely apparent to her.

Though she knew she wasn’t anything special, she couldn’t handle the looks of pure torture her followers would bear whenever she so much as hinted towards the fact, and instead became devoted to doing everything in her power to help these people as they should have been helped.

Through means she would never  ( was too NAIVE to )  find out,  her followers got their hands on one of the original titans,  and set off to turn their ‘goddess’ under the delusion that setting her on Paradis this way would lead her to the Founding Titan, and link her soul back into place to restore her full power.

On her end,  no clear instructions were given.   She was told to ‘Find Herself and save us all’  and being so used to simply following blindly for the sake of others,  she tried her damn best.

Not understanding the power in the slightest,  she often resisted any natural instinct to shift back once she did transform,  instead forcing herself to remain as she was turned until she accomplished her mission.   So she kept that inherent goal in mind without…. actually really knowing what the hell she was actually meant to accomplish.   She sort of just kept looking hoping whoever ‘SHE’ was, that she was meant to consume, would be to some degree obvious.

For the first decade or so she’d roam and shift out to sleep every so often, usually staying in the trees, and entirely lost any concept of time.  Eventually she wouldn’t do more than half-shift,  and then not shift at all.

Clearly this didn’t work out for the best, as her being was soon becoming more and more absorbed into the titan the longer she went without shifting back and getting proper rest to rejuvenate.  

By the time Wall Maria gets breached, she’s barely there, and her conscience is entirely irreversible ; she can barely think for herself,  and getting her out of the titan would kill her on the spot.

So her days continue, as this delirious thing searching for what she’ll likely never find / accomplish, in hopes of going back & making her followers proud ( although, at this point, she likely remembers little of the why.

[dexthedragon]

i bought a new wii game earlier in my flu-inspired haze (legend of spyro: dawn of the dragon)

while ripping the disc so i can use it in dolphin, i reflected on how petty and ineffective nintendo's attempts to fight homebrew were (which was kind of inevitable given how the wii's architecture worked) - as i decided to set my wii u up for wii homebrew instead of getting my old wii out of the cupboard

so, the original way to hack wiis was with the Twilight Hack, a modified save file for Zelda: Twilight Princess. you put it on a SD card, replaced the game's normal save file with it for a bit, and played until the game crashed to run whatever homebrew you want (usually the homebrew channel installer to start with)

eventually, nintendo decides to address this, but because of how wii games worked, they can put out a disc with an updated version of twilight princess, but they can't update existing copies (same reason why they couldn't fix the gamebreaking glitch in that game).   once you're running a wii disc, the wii effectively has no operating system - everything you see (from the PLEASE USE THE WRIST STRAP screen at the start to the menu that appears when you press the Home button) is all running entirely off the disc.

so they updated the system menu instead. any time you have an sd card inserted, the wii sees if you've got a twilight princess save file on there, and if that save file is the twilight hack, it just deletes it   but that one (iirc) did nothing about the installed homebrew channel (which would be deleted with the next update) or installed copies of the twilight hack   it also introduced a bug where the system could be hacked with just getting a special message on the wii's message board feature (bannerbomb/letterbomb)

fast forward a bit. bannerbomb/letterbomb was fixed. this firmware also correctly uninstalled the homebrew channel   by this time, the Smash Stack exploit had been discovered - a corrupt custom stage for smash bros. brawl's stage builder. again, nintendo can't update the game, and even if the system menu checked for it, you could just insert the SD card after starting up brawl  

(this update actually did effect me - Brawl's original release was delayed in Europe for about 6 months, so I imported the US version, and suddenly found myself without any way of running it - had to buy an EU copy just to get the homebrew channel back)

fast forward to now - apparently the original wii was never updated with any form of smash stack protection, but the wii u was - if the wii u's OS detects the smash stack stage on the SD card, it will delete it   except of course this is completely useless if you insert the SD card after loading up the Wii mode. at most, it will cause a couple of minutes of frustration as you start Brawl, go to the stage builder, and nothing happens - you'll take the SD card out while the game is still running, redownload the exploit, pop the card back in the wii u, and you're done  

so yeah, a history of petty ineffective moves, though they got a lot better once they moved to things that actually could have an OS.

[thesffcorner]

Marauders

Marauders is a 2016 crime-drama directed by Steven C Miller. Now, before I say anything else, this is NOT a review. I don’t feel comfortable enough to give this film a review, because I watched it at, no joke, a pub, with no sound, only subtitles.

I still watched the film, but I also missed like a good 30% of it, by virtue of being at a pub, so though I don’t think I would like it any better, had I seen the full thing, I still urge you to not take this as me telling you (not) to see this film. This is just me, talking shit for 2 pages, because what I saw of this film was WILD.

Now, I say that but really, this film is a rather generic action movie. What makes it wild is both my experience of watching it, where every time I would look at the TV some baffling new development would happen, but also the leaps in logic this film makes are… just pure confusion.

So, the plot (as far as I could proximate) goes as such: Four guys, who all look wear bargain-brand Halloween costumes of Crossbones from Civil War, rob a bank and kill the manager. An FBI agent, played by Detective Stabler from Law and Order: SVU (whose name is apparently Montgomery) gets put on the case. Before he can even get coffee there is a second robbery where the leader of the Crossbones team, stabs a man in the throat with a bullet(??) and the robbers get away.

The bullet has something to do with TJ, an army ranger who supposedly died but his body was never found. He was part of a rogue unit that kidnapped the former owner of the bank they robbed, and his entire unit was killed by a navy seal team. The guy who got stabbed with the bullet, was the commander of said navy seal unit.

We then get a truly bewildering scene, where the leader of the Crossbones team SKYPES Agent Montgomery, to tell him that they sent him files that Senator Cook (who is played by Bruce Willis) is gay, and that’s somehow evidence that he’s corrupt??? And then Montgomery is overly nice and accommodating to a man who just murdered a CIVILIAN, and a veteran in an ARMED ROBBERY, saying that the files the robbers sent won’t be enough to get the FBI to investigate Cook. Like, my dude, maybe they are busy trying to catch the ARMED THIEVES who have been robbing banks?? Also was the whole bit about Montgomery telling Crossbones that it’s none of his business that Cook is gay supposed to show that he’s an upstanding man? Otherwise, how is his sexuality relevant to his supposed corruption?

Montgomery then goes to talk to Cook and is unnecessarily aggressive with him, even though at this point he has no evidence that Cook even did anything, outside of possibly being gay and not appreciating that Montgomery is baselessly accusing him of things that the fucking ARMED ROBBERS told him. Side note, I realize I am like 12 for finding this funny, but anytime two men in an action movie try to intimidate each other with lines like “you’ll give me what I want or else I’m going to put you against a wall and take it” I just lose it because WHO TALKS LIKE THAT? Is that supposed to sound threatening?

At this point I missed a lot of the film, so I assumed that the robbers attacked Cook’s offices, but no; there is a third robbery in which there is a lot of shooting and SEVERAL security guards die, including one of the robbers (RIP nameless Crossbones impersonator). The FBI is super close to getting the robbers to surrender, when Montgomery bursts in, guns’a blazing, like a fucking cowboy movie, shoots the one guy, takes the second robber as a hostage at gunpoint, and has a standoff with the third robber who takes a woman hostage. And then he FUCKING LETS THE ROBBERS go WITH THE MONEY! What? And Dave Bautista, who does absolutely nothing in this film (except get shot at the end) tells him he saved lives??? WHERE?

This is where I gave up on the film, so the rest is a blur except for the following baffling scene, where Montgomery talks to special agent Wells. Now, Wells has been in the film from the start, and at first I thought he was the main character. He tells Montgomery that he thinks Montgomery is conducting the mission morally and really well (??) by focusing on Hubert and Cook’s corruption instead of the robbers, which, in case it wasn't clear by now, by how the film has awkwardly refused to show us who the robbers are, even makes MONTGOMERY pause and be like huh? So Wells, not a good liar.

Somewhere at this point we get some more explanation of what actually happened. Hubert conspired with Cook to kill his own brother so he could inherit the bank, and Cook staged a terrorist threat and sent in TJ’s unit to Costa Rica. They killed the brother and then got killed as a ‘rogue’ unit by the navy seals. One of the seals was Wells, who was a sniper and he saved TJ. He is now trying to take down both Hubert and Cook. TJ, I should add is barely in the film, and even though he got arrested, I never actually saw him on screen.

The third remaining robber is also a special agent, and his name is Mims. His wife has terminal cancer and he wants to give the money back so he can atone, but Wells won’t let him and ends up killing him. So are we supposed to be rooting for Wells? Because so far he has been an outright murderer, a homophobe, and the only good thing he’s done has been to donate the money, which is like trying to compensate for dumping toxic waste in the ocean by using a metal straw.

Montgomery and Wells have another heart to heart where they essentially just gush again about how good and moral the other one is, and yet again Montgomery lets Wells go, and even tells him not to go after Cook, because he can still use the money to start a new life and atone for what he did as a navy seal. Maybe I missed it, but I just didn’t understand WHY Montgomery was so kind to Wells, at all. This man is a killer!

The last scene is Montgomery sitting down to have wine with Cook (who has escaped in Mexico) and Wells coming to kill him. He and Montgomery have a staring match, Wells puts his gun down, Montgomery kills Cook, Wells kills his bodyguard and then fucking walks away. The end.

My brain has lost the ability to form sentences. First off, this plot is more convoluted then my own first draft of book 1 of a trilogy I wrote when I was 13. There are so many characters and plot points in this film, and all of them are complete dead ends. The main theme is, I think, supposed to be corruption, but nothing that happens has anything to do with corruption! Hubert and Cook pulled a hostile takeover, and used the military as cover, but they didn’t embezzle tax money or something. We never focus on any of the shady dealings Cook has, at most we get is lukewarm commentary on the people who enlist in the army because of poverty, but the film isn’t about that.

The second big issue are the characters. I can understand Montgomery being the lead; he is the every-man, investigating a conspiracy. But why is Cook the final boss when he wasn’t even the one who planned the hit? Why is Wells the leader of the robbers and not TJ, you know the guy who was left for dead, who was framed as an assassin and whose entire unit was killed?

I actually liked Montgomery but that’s because I think it’s impossible to dislike Chris Meloni, he’s just such a calming presence. There was some stuff about his wife being dead (I didn’t really pay attention to that part), but at no point did I understand why he was so sympathetic to the robbers, especially Wells? He willingly committed murder to save Wells, but why? Wells wasn’t a good man, and he should have been punished for the amount of people he killed in this film, regardless of the intentions he had. This isn’t John Wick, he wasn’t the best of all the assassins, he was a guy who got in too deep and got away with it, because the FBI agent after him was… moral.

Two more things. I realize it’s kind of gauche to complain about casting choices, but everyone in this film looked the same. Not only was the cast 99% white, all the actors looked alike, and I couldn’t distinguish any of the robbers or the people who died. Even their names all sounded similar!

Also apparently women don’t exist in this world, except for one FBI agent and one other one who I think was a singer and either someone’s wife or girlfriend.

Would I ever watch this again, fully this time? Maybe, if I have literally nothing else to do. Should you watch it? Honestly, I think Money Monster, Den of Thieves or Triple 9 are all better choices, and at least are ACTUALLY about corruption.

letterboxd

[renaroo]

The Search (8/16)

Disclaimer: Red vs Blue and related characters are the property of Rooster Teeth. Warnings: Language, Canon-typical violence, Psychological manipulation and trauma Rating: T Synopsis: [Canon Divergence - Alternate S15] The Reds and Blues saved Chorus, but it has been a year and they are still missing. A motley crew has been gathered with the common goal of finding the war heroes, though the road is more troubled than anyone seems to realize.

A/N: Sorry for the long wait, but some things in the current running season had me rethink some things I needed to address in my own AU, and I’m hoping that the break and reevaluation makes the story all the better for it, especially on an emotional level. But thank you all so much for waiting, I really appreciate it. 

Special thanks to @secretlystephaniebrown, @analiarvb, @theshadowlord, Mayhem21, JP, @notatroll7,  Yin, and @cobaltqueen for the comments and feedback!

Corruptible

They all stood together, shoulder to shoulder, watching in utter amazement as the scene on screen unfolded before them. Though, of course, Emily highly doubted that the others dealt with the clips of memory, each like a perfect picture preserved in her mind between each and every blink.

The wide stance between every boot of the Reds and Blues, the way they seemed in perfect alignment, the fact that it was Tucker and Simmons rather than Tucker and Sarge who stepped up to the microphones when Hargrove moved out of the way. The pristine look to their armors — unworn in battle, no damage, no chipped paint, the way none of them made any move out of line or revealed any faces beneath their helmets.

Every inconsistency, every screaming irregularity, was captured by Emily’s ever watchful eyes and burned into her memories alongside every second of memory she already had on file, so to speak, of the Reds and Blues before then. And every time something didn’t match up — and none of it matched up — her brain was screaming at her to somehow make things right, to somehow fix what was so clearly broken.

“Oh my god, Dex!” Kaikaina was the first to break the silence, ripping off her helmet and leaping up to be first in front of the screen. Her body nearly bounced with her excitement as she pressed her pointer finger against the screen to line up with her brother’s image. She then looked back at them all with excitement. “I know that shade of gray anywhere! Look at him! He’s alive he’s okay! He’s…” she turned back around and squinted at the screen. “He’s lost some weight, huh? That’s weird.”

It was one of the twenty-three things that did not line up with Grif on the screen and the Grif that Emily Grey knew from Chorus. It was true, he had lost weight, but his height and still fairly stocky stature lent credit to the fact that it was most likely still him than an imposter entirely.

“Little Grif, get away from the screen,” Carolina ordered darkly, she was upset and doing a poor job of masking it from her irritation toward Kai’s excitement.

“Tucker,” Wash muttered beside Emily, looking at the screen in disbelief. “Caboose… they’re…”

“This isn’t right,” Carolina shot him down as well. “What the hell is going on? What the hell are they doing with Hargrove?”

“A press conference,” Dylan Andrews enlightened them.

That was enough to get Carolina’s head to almost swivel toward the reporter. “No fucking shit it’s a press conference! I have eyes!”

“What you need is patience then because what I’m trying to say is that if we listen to the press conference we could have a better grasp of what they’re even there for to begin with. Outside of stroke some penis-looking bastard’s ego,” Andrews defended rather snappishly herself.

“Bow chicka honk honk?” Junior offered unhelpfully.

“Dude, why’d you have to point out he looks like a penis? I’m swearing off men, sorry, Officer Washington,” Kai announced out loud.

“What the hell’s that supposed to mean?” Wash asked to the point his voice cracked.

“What gives you the right to speak to me like that, Andrews?” Carolina demanded viciously. “My family is up there on this screen like goddamn mannequins and you’re telling me I need patience?”

“Freedom of the press and freedom of speech give me the right, Agent Carolina,” Andrews argued haughtily. “And I’m invoking both of them because apparently I need to remind everyone in this crew that I volunteered out of my own good will to help you on this search and rescue mission after you and your fellow former Freelancer committed a felony by breaking into my apartment and ever since then everyone here has been guilty of treating me like absolute and total shit. So I’m going to speak out and I’m going to get some respect either through work or through force at this point because every single one of you are driving me up a wall at the moment!”

“What kind of wall?” Kai asked unhelpfully.

Eye twitching with her own irritation and having heard more than enough from the squabbling, Emily brought her foot down in a loud stomp and at the top of her lungs screamed, “Everyone shut up! That is an order!”

At once, everyone turned about face and stared at Emily in utter surprise.

Clearing her throat, satisfied with the moment, Emily looked up toward the screen. “Now then… FILSS? Would you please be a dear and turn this broadcast up to full volume so that we can actually hear what’s being said right now? Thank you, dear.”

“Of course, Doctor Grey,” FILSS remarked, the volume bar on the screen beginning to move right across the screen. “May I also make a request that it be deemed no longer acceptable by the group that any of my screens — touch screen or not — be touched without permission. For I am sensitive to smudging.”

“Pfft, don’t be a whiny bitch,” Kaikaina snorted in retort only to have Carolina clasp a hand on her shoulder.

“Not now, Little Grif,” Carolina warned quietly.

With the volume fully up and the ship falling silent, they were finally capable of hearing what was being said by Tucker and Simmons. And while it was their voices, the speech was mannerless, without hand gestures or really any emoting. And especially without euphemisms. None of which felt normal in seeing them talk.

“So after we were coming back to Earth as heroes and all for taking down Project Freelancer, our entire ship got taken over by one of the rogue AI’s that had been used to plant into Carolina and Washington’s brains and stuff,” Tucker lied boldly on screen.

“Without control of the ship, we crashed on Chorus, where the army of the planet was preparing for a full UNSC withdrawal and took our crash as an opportunity to take hostage important figures of the UNSC’s alliance,” Simmons continued.

“Especially me. Since, y’know. I’m special to the truce between humans and aliens,” Tucker added.

“When we wouldn’t agree to work along with them, they made a deal with the Freelancers to turn their backs on us. And they recorded that message that they sent out about Mister Hargrove with their AI.”

“Oh god,” Wash uttered, looking to Carolina. “They’re… they’re framing us?”

“Not only you,” Grey corrected thoughtful, quiet. “They are setting up the entire planet of Chorus. They’re breaking any leverage for independence we had — they’re breaking our chance at peace.”

“Why are they saying this?” Carolina asked.

“Uh, only Tucker and Simmons are saying anything!” Kaikaina pointed out angrily. “Better question’s why the fuck’s everyone else quiet, that’s not normal! Especially when someone’s saying some real bullshit! When’s the last time someone was saying bullshit and my Big Bro wasn’t calling their ass out? Especially if it’s his mostly-boyfriend. Dex lives to call him out on stuff. It’s like. The best thing ever to him. It’s like his orgasm but without him crying.”

Dylan put a hand to her chin. “Because… Because it’s making a good story this way,” she said slowly. “This is… This press conference is every reporter who has been following your careers’ dream. More twists. More betrayals. More—“

“Blargh,” Junior added.

The reporter looked at him in confusion.

“More war,” Washington clarified for Junior.

“The answer to all of our questions is obvious now that we’re looking straight at it, I’m afraid,” Emily announced, pulling the group’s attention back to her. “The experiments performed here on the prison inmates, the stringing us along from location to location, gathering video footage of us breaking and entering, causing damage, fighting UNSC forces. The Reds and Blues are saying what Hargrove and bloodthirsty reporters are wanting them to say because that is what is being fed directly to their heads by these operations. We are the enemies of the state. And they will take us and all of Chorus down with us to spare Hargrove’s ego.”

The others looked at her in horror. Dylan in slight annoyance.

“Hm,” Grey reflected on her words. “No offense to present bloodthirsty reporters, of course,” she offered.

“I don’t think that’s how insulting people is supposed to work but… alright,” she huffed in response.

Carolina was shaking with anger. “This… this is utter bullshit,” she spat out savagely.

“Carolina?” Wash began to reach out but she fiercely turned away from him.

“FILSS, plot us a course to Earth. Everyone… just. Just find something to do while I think,” Carolina ordered angrily before storming off toward the bunk room.”

Everyone stood, more than a little lost.

“FILSS,” Grey spoke up, “Would you be a dear and turn off the news for now?”

“Of course,” FILSS answered before doing so.

“Thank you,” Wash muttered to Grey before following after Carolina.

Grey held her breath, watching as everyone else slowly, still very much in shock, began to fall into their own corners of the ship. No one knew what to do, save for Grey herself. And what she had to do she only hesitated on because she hated what she had to do.

He wasn’t entirely sure what he would be walking in on when he followed after Carolina, but Washington had to admit to himself that narrowly dodging a thrown chair was one of the less surprising outcomes of following their leader into the bunk room. There was a ferocious roar as she threw a different chair into the opposite wall, shattering it and breaking some pipes that Wash distantly could only hope were not overtly important to maintaining life on the ship.

“God damn it!” Carolina screamed, pounding her fist into the nearest table, cracking it.

“Okay, Carolina, I think that’s enough,” Wash said, walking over and grabbing the fist she had just used. He was either a brave man or a stupid one given the look she threw his way after the action. Still, he didn’t let go. “We’re going to run out of chairs if you keep it up.”

“Then I can start on your teeth,” she hissed at him, jerking her hand away.

“I hear those have a limited number, too,” Wash replied evenly.

There was a frustrated, choked off noise that came from Carolina as she backed away from Washington and gave him a full look over. “Are you fucking serious, Wash? Are you fucking really making stupid jokes right now after all this shit just happened? What the actual fuck?”

“Standing around making jokes is the only coping mechanism I’ve seen work for either of us, so yeah. I guess I am serious about taking a breath and not being serious right now,” he answered, not breaking his gaze from Carolina.

It was strange and unprecedented for them. Back in Freelancer, hell, even back when Carolina first returned, a defiant stare down would not have been anywhere close to Washington’s arsenal against his leader’s temper. But it was, and it was because they weren’t just cogs in a machine anymore. Because neither of them were acting on behalf of some failed fiefdom.

Just on behalf of the family that was actively setting the whole galaxy against them on every news station.

“This just… This can’t be happening,” Carolina said lowly, her head ducking down as the bitterness added to the tremble of her voice. “I can’t be backstabbed by another family, Wash. I can’t be acceptable losses again for someone else’s stab at freedom.”

“That is not what’s happening,” Washington reassured her. “This isn’t the Mother of Invention, and the Reds and Blues are not Freelancer. And whatever… Whatever it was that was on that screen was wrong. It wasn’t them. Somehow. And I think you know that already. You heard Doctor Grey.”

“Yeah, I did,” Carolina sniffed before turning away from Wash, running both her hands through her red hair. “Goddammit. I heard her but I also heard them and that’s not something to take lightly, Wash. They set us up as criminals — somehow they became the mouthpieces of the people who have done us the most harm.”

“Yes,” Wash agreed reluctantly. “But… that doesn’t mean it was them. It doesn’t mean we’re betrayed. It means… It means something else. Because the Reds and Blues wouldn’t do that. Well. They wouldn’t do it to us. And I think you know that more than anyone deep down.”

He neared her, wondering if it was going to be comforting to reach out to her or not, when Carolina surprised him by turning around. Her eyes were red and filled with tears that she seemed to be stubbornly holding back. “If we’re not outright betrayed, if this is something to do with AI implantation and mind control and whatever else… Then we are also dealing with the one thing that no one else on this ship cares about besides me.”

Confused, Wash furrowed his brows at Carolina. “What are you talking about?”

“Everyone on this ship is here for the Reds and Blues, and god knows that I am, too. I would die for them,” she affirmed. “But I am the only one on this ship who is looking for Epsilon, too. And if… if the sort of experiments they were doing in the prison were what I think they were, and if Hargrove is the kind of sick bastard that we know he is, and if all of that was successful, just to get that stupid fucking slander out on the news… then there’s one Blue that isn’t coming home no matter what we do. And no one on this ship will feel that loss the way I am already feeling it now.”

“That’s not true,” Wash attempted to argue.

“It’s not like I don’t understand, it’s not like I couldn’t see how you could barely stand in the operation room back there,” Carolina spat out. “That’s not wrong. That’s not beyond reason. But… But I’m… I’m the only one who feels this, Wash. I’m the only one who just lost her hope watching that bullshit. And I’m supposed to inspire and lead everyone to save the rest of the Reds and Blues knowing that none of you can feel the chunk of yourself, of one of the people you love, being ripped out of you and then ripped apart by fucking animals? How am I supposed to do that?”

At a loss for words, Wash stared at Carolina for a long moment before finally reacting, finally knowing what to do.

He wrapped his arms around her and pulled her flush against his chest into a tight hug, hugging her so securely she didn’t even bother pushing him away, just sinking into the embrace.

“You’re never alone with us, you got that?” he told her. “You’re the closest to Epsilon, but if you’re right and he’s gone then we’re all going to miss him in our own ways. And when we save the Reds and Blues from whatever it is that Hargrove’s done to them, you won’t be alone in missing him either.”

Carolina sagged limply against him, as if giving into his perspective, into the truth of his words.

“As for how you’re going to lead us while going through all this shit?” Wash continued. “You’ll do it the way you always do it, Carolina. Like a complete badass.”

To that, she snorted against Wash’s chest, followed by a more natural laugh. She hugged him back and Wash squeezed her.

“It’s time to get serious. Get our boys back,” Wash muttered to her.

“It’s time to be badass,” she agreed.

[shoutscion]

alright i was gonna save this to be a big surprise but this story’s too good to pass up

buckle up yall this one’s a long one

so right now i’m working on something i call a Slow Sequence, which is just the parts of jack and casie that arent just jack and casie lost in the woods. they’re top down more traditional rpg segments where you can manage your inventory, relax, and engage in some good old wholesome messing-with-casieisms

here’s an early look:

i’ve been working on this for the past week now and i’ve basically got them ready to go, ready to replace the existing shop sequences with an entirely new screen that allows you to do a little exploration and conversation before you get back out into the world and into Fast Sequences (the normal game). this morning in particular i was working in over drive. probably because i’ve been working my ass off on commissions and i might be in a like, productivity frenzy

i managed to crank out a new tileset i liked, some new dialogue, developed a vision for Casie’s Outpost (it’s probably not actually called that, but it’s the outpost that casie lives at, so let’s call it that for now) (it’s either that or “outpost 22″ which just doesnt make any sense yet so like lesser of two evils here) in a couple hours

and then i ran out of memory.

gm8.1 has a very particular quirk that i like that makes it really good at rapid prototyping and it’s that it saves all of the shit you do to ram instead of the hard drive. this means that you can start a game really fast without having to wait for an entire new save cycle and recompilation which makes it really good for brute forcing code, which is basically the breadth of my programming playbook. hit it over and over until it works. unfortunately, hitting things over and over will eventually (read: after 4+ hours of work with very large files) swamp gm’s alotted memory, and cause gm to lock up. but running out of memory is a hunter not unbeknownst to its prey. i have a contingency. my contingency is to save immediately, and have backups in case something goes wrong. which sometimes it does.

i would say it’s like a 90/10 chance

anyway, today this corrupted my file.

and corrupted my automatically generated backup save file. 

because i accidentally hit the save button twice.

this was about an hour and a half ago. yes, the filename for this subproject was literally just called ‘fuck’. that was the word that was on my mind at the time. i dont think i was upset or anything i was just like ‘fuck’ but like, thats how i always am. the intention was to just import the project into gms and then merge it wholesale with the main jack and casie project, so the title of the 8.1 version mattered very little. you should see the rest of them. i have 4 files called temp0 through temp4 and some of them are just backups of the same file

anyway, if i had just failed to save or something (or just closed the window without trying to save) i would have lost 30 minutes worth of work. but because i took my shots, i lost weeks of work. like, the majority of the month of february. there’s supposed to be a demo out in march. march is in 7 days.

i went to bed and began to rethink my options. and also fall asleep, because i have been up for like 19 hours and i had just eaten and basically i was a mess of debuffs at that very second. fortunately, because i am a big fuckin showoff and enjoy rubbing my shit in people’s faces, i had a cache of shit lying around on discords and slacks and line chats i guess that i could just re-integrate back into my tileset proper but that would still leave me without the conversation engine which is stupidly robust and involved and took the majority of the time (the rest of the time was like, not even drawing the tileset: more like working out what the fuck non-enemy things would look like in jack and casie) i had spent on coding fuck.gm81. i had already done it once though so i had worked out the theory, so i just had to do it again. which i could do! it would just take all day.

there’s an exhibition tomorrow. and i was falling asleep. it was at this very second i realized that my mistake in accidentally pressing a finicky touch keyboard button twice had actually ruined pretty much everything, and decided to actually fall asleep in order to hide from my problems

so i laid there for like 45 minutes, ostensibly trying to go to sleep. not even really mad at this point or even like upset. more like that perfect trance like state of being simultaneously so infuriated but also so completely defeated that youre aware that raising a hand at all in protest is a waste of energy so instead you decide to just fuckin sit there, grimacing, trying to will a solution into existence

game maker studio has an import function that pulls information from a .gm81 file. it’s kind of finicky and kind of weird because it reads every asset one at a time and imports them one at a time so it’s kind of slow but you get to see a nice big bar that fills up as gms works its way through your file. it’s pretty satisfying. also, fuck.gm81 wasn’t an empty file. it was like 92kb or something. it wasnt corrupted in that it disintegrated or something and all the packets were destroyed, it was more like something was just being read wrong by gm8.1

i realized this all at once. i then realized i was screaming

importing it to gms worked

not perfectly, but well enough

i could fix a broken system in a heartbeat. or at least faster then i could build a new one.

the biggest problem is the obvious corruption. apparently, because i ran out of memory building backgrounds, the backgrounds are what got corrupted. in particular the main tileset that i had been working on for the past couple days had completely been replaced by just a sheer 255 255 255 black. but more importantly all the new art i had done for casie and company are OK, and my code is OK, and after a little digging i found a screenshot i had posted around of Casie’s Outpost in development

and now i just have to

rip my own

pixel art

but it beats doing it over again!

[disillusionist9]

Challenge: Pansy/Percy (romantic not friendship) -- I have no other qualifications other than that, so you have a lot of freedom here. Let me know if you need more, but I'm very curious to see what you come up with, Ms. Rare Pairs

Pairing: Percy Weasley x Pansy ParkinsonRating: TChallenge: be mine challenge by @slytherdornet and @hprarepairnetWord Count: ~2,150

fanfiction.net || archive of our own

The shop front was unmistakably pink in a world of white and dull winter grey. Light from its frosted window panes coated the cobbled sidewalk with a bright cheery glow missing from all the other stores dotted along the narrow alleyway. 

“Not natural,” one witch said as she wandered down the street bent over her cane. “Pink and frilly don’t belong down here.”

Her friend grunted his agreement as he tugged at one of the long strands of his hair poking out from his hood. “Ain’t she learned this place is for hiding?”

“‘Fraid not, Gerald. She’d determined to get herself in trouble.”

“She gives me the heebies, Sandy. I don’t like it.”

The pair walked on ahead, feet dragging through the icy slush collecting in the drains on the other side of the street, making their way towards Borgin and Burkes for the next item on their shopping list. As they reached the door, a wizard dressed in muted blues and golds opened it for them. His hair was close-cropped on either side of his head, the top covered by a short top hat, and his gloves squeaked against the old wood as he held the door open for the pair.

“I’ll be along again in the coming weeks, Borgin,” the Ministry official said.

He couldn’t have been anything but a Ministry wizard, Sandy thought to herself, noting the way he was dressed in the middle of Knockturn Alley. His type were always pants at blending in. Especially when they tried to. She nodded her head politely to the wizard, not wanting any trouble, and pulled her shopping companion in behind her so he’d stop staring at the shop down the way.

“Don’t hurry back,” Borgin said through a forced smile.

Sandy rolled her eyes as she heard the man say “I heard that, Master Borgin,” before the door shut behind him. She watched his shadow through the glass as he adjusted the buttons on his cloak and started to walk away.

“I thought this place was strange when that Dark Man was running the streets but I’ve never seen such things, Mister Borgin.”

“Are you speaking of the Dark Lord, Sandy? You need to shut yer yap before it gets you into more trouble. You’ve only got one eye left, lass.”

Sandy thumped her cane on the countertop and scowled at Borgin with her good eye. Gerald, who had been wandering the display cases while he waited, poked his head around to watch the scene with interest. “Don’t take your frustrations with the Ministry out on me, little boy, or I’ll set your grandmother on you again!”

Percy Weasley paused on his last stop of the day. Two weeks ago the shop was bright with gold, silver, and light blue trimmings for the New Year. A month ago, and constantly for the preceding month before that, the shop blinded passerby with garish Christmas, Hanukkah, Solstice, and several other winter holiday decorations that were a strange combination of bold and inviting. He shook the idea away from his mind that he’d been attracted to the shop front display since it reminded him so much of his parent’s home growing up: charming, if a little ramshackle in its presentation.

Now Little Trappings for Modern Wix boasted a display that…were those live faeries dozing on a miniature chaise?

He cast a Finite Incantatem on himself just to make sure he didn’t have any lingering curses affecting his judgement from Borgin and Burkes before pushing open the stained glass door.

“Miss Parkinson?” he called out, carefully avoiding an over enthusiastic coat rack by the door. “Miss Parkinson, it’s Percy Weasley from the Ministry.”

Pansy Parkinson lounged behind her countertop, black boots resting on a stool while she examined an enormous ledger in her lap, using her thighs as a prop. In a sea of pink, red, purple, and white that would give his brothers’ shop a run for its money, the shop owner stuck out like a sore thumb dressed all in black.

“I’ve collected the documents you need right here,” she said, not looking up from the two quills dancing across the pages.

“You know I’ll need to summon them myself, anyway, Miss Parkinson.”

He saw her eyebrows lift and lower above the top of the book. “Knock yourself out.”

And he knew she meant it.

“Accio!”

“Told you,” she muttered when the only documents that fluttered towards him were those neatly packed in a folder on her counter.

He tried not to roll his eyes, but it had been a long day of frustrating shopkeepers requiring inspection by his department, and he really couldn’t help himself. Percy searched for a place to sit to read over the forms before picking the low pouf behind the front counter with Pansy. His knees folded up towards his chest and he balanced the documents on his knees so he could shrug out of his heavy overcoat. The warmth of the shop was welcome after several in a row that couldn’t be bothered to ruin their dark and dingy aesthetic with proper heat vents.

They worked in silence except for the scratching of quills and whirr of a few mechanical display items in the front. The routine was comfortable enough, even if the subject manner still caused contention between them. For the last six years Percy had visited shops along Knockturn alley sporadically three or four times a year to check on the progress of those on probation of some kind. He understood why the Ministry wanted to watch some of the citizens, like Borgin who had proven shifty well before the second rise of Voldemort, but that didn’t stop him from providing copies of all his reports to Hermione. As soon as she’d discovered what the Ministry was up to by monitoring every detail of a few people’s lives she’d left a caustic resignation on the desk of Kingsley Shacklebolt. She was more use building a coup behind the doors of Malfoy Manor with Snape and Draco than she’d been within the walls of the Ministry.

That’s where Percy stepped in.

He frowned as he worked, checking the data on the sheets in front of him showing where her money was coming in and where it went out. As he passed over a line marked Malkin’s Unmentionables he nearly choked on the implication. A cursory sweep around the store’s inventory showed Pansy had purchased a bulk order of lingerie for both wizards and witches and everything in between in preparation for Valentine’s Day.

The image of Pansy sorting that particular order certainly did not arouse him.

“Something off?”

He almost ripped the page with his quill in surprise. “Not at all. As usual, everything is in order.”

Pansy leaned against the doorjamb that lead to her private office, the image of relaxed and confident with her arms crossed. At this vantage point he could make out her pants were a very dark shade of green instead of the black he’d mistaken them for earlier. She cracked her gum loudly after giving him a lingering once over, expressionless, then walked back into her office, calling over her shoulder, “Thought so.”

Percy put his head against the wall behind him and bit his lip. He wanted to tell her that she was actually being protected and he didn’t give a flying rat’s ass what she spent her money on, but Hermione had made him swear he wouldn’t reveal anything until they were ready to stage their coup, ousting the corrupt at the Ministry for good. They all knew abolishing the corruption completely was impossible in the long run, but flushing out the last of the riff raff loyal to Voldemort would save the world a headache.

Working in silence, Percy stayed for another hour to finish the paperwork. He really could have finished much faster but he caught himself more than once listening or watching Pansy work with her customers. There was a different tone to her voice when she was being genuine and when she was just being polite. The idea he could tell the difference made his quill work faster so he could leave and stop thinking about the implications.

As a few customers filtered in out of curiosity or to ask if she’d gotten their orders in yet, Percy kept a quiet stream of conversation with her. It would make the eventual invitation into the coup so much simpler if he trusted her before it happened. For the most part the increase in snowfall apparent through the shop’s front window kept most people off the street so they’d enjoyed a pot of tea, uninterrupted, except for the chime of the clock striking three hours past midday.

As he buttoned up his coat, her file neatly tucked in an inside pocket with the others he was bringing to Hermione first, Percy looked around to say goodbye to Pansy. “Miss Parkinson?”

“Yeah, over here, Weasley.”

His shoes made hollow sounds on the hardwood floor as he took measured steps towards her voice. There were more items in this store with a mind of their own than just the handsy coatrack, after all.

She was at the front of the store giving little presents and sugary treats to the faeries in the window. The light from their wings lit her face in a rosy glow that made him swallow and reflexively straighten his tie. Her body was contorted a bit in order to lean over the display shelf without disturbing anything, or anyone, with one leg up and braced against a box, and leaning over enough that her shirt lifted up a bit away from the top of her jeans.

Pansy looked up at him, blowing her hair out of her face with a few short puffs, her fringe flying a bit pell-mell in the process. “Need me to sign my report or something?”

“Indeed. May I?”

Offering one of his hands, not yet covered by his thick gloves, Percy helped Pansy upright so she wouldn’t topple anything around her. One of the faeries (since the fair folk know much more about these things than wix do) saw their chance to push Pansy a little bit harder than she expected.

Percy was ready to catch her as Pansy fell forward, her mouth parted and eyes wide with the brand of fear that comes with almost tipping your chair back too far or missing a step. The thick tread of her boot worked against her, creating friction to force all of her weight into Percy, but he bent his knees and caught her under her elbow on one side and her waist on the other.

Pansy’s mouth snapped shut as she looked up. Her face was only a few inches from Percy’s, and at this distance she could make out his eyes were very, very blue. And fixated on her mouth.

Slowly, she settled her feet so she stood on her own again, brushing away dirt that didn’t exist just so she could look away from Percy. “Good catch.”

“It was my…uh, I mean I’m happy to help.”

Neither moved to end the meeting yet, both shuffling in their own way until Pansy waved her hand at Percy’s coat.

“Well, what did you need me to sign?”

“Oh!” He reached into his pocket for a quill and the small ledger he kept for all of his appointments, confirming for his superior that he’d completed the appointments. “Here, like always.”

For as long as it took for them to pass the quill back and forth, their hands touched and they didn’t meet each other’s eyes.

And still, they dithered.

The only warning Percy got before Pansy lifted up on her tiptoes in a quick kiss was a muttered, “Oh, this is just stupid.” His eyes didn’t close right away, taking in the way her fringe caught on her eyebrows and now he could see a little scar on her nose from a hex or maybe even a piercing at one time.

“Fuck,” she said, pulling away. “Fuck, I’m sorry, I just-”

Percy’s stomach fell when he realized she mistook his shock for disgust and reacted immediately, grabbing her shoulders gently to turn her back towards him instead of marching away. “Getting it right the first time is improbable…again?”

This time he responded with the appropriate amount of enthusiasm.

“Now that’s an improvement to this shop!”

Sandy stopped shuffling down the sidewalk in front of Little Trappings for Modern Wix, and as soon as she saw what Gerald was talking about, she reached up to smack his shoulder. She did what she could to poke, prod and push him away from the blurry image of a lip locked couple beyond the frosty glass.

“Stop your gawking! Move on, then. I won’t be seen next to this shiny monstrosity.”

[surfacolyte]

Diary of Norelle Rhia, part XII

Dear Diary,

While we are waiting for the repairs of the ship to be finished, the scanners have been active with the planet. It turned out that there was an ancient human complex down there. Archeotech even. I've never seen Chiro's eyes light up so much. Ever. I thought the man was emotionally very...non-moving uptill now. Turns out his emotions are just driven by mechanics... Then again, he is a tech priest, what was I thinking? I've never had one inches away from my face eyes blazing and demanding that we go down on the planet. Yi wasn't there, he was on microbead, the sneaky bastard, and said it would be ok. He even said that Chiro would be the leader of the operation. This is the closest I've ever gotten to see a tech guy squee. It was kinda sweet.

We went down on the planet and it was hot even for me. More than 90% of Yiken is covered in water but this place was all swampy. I had to leave my carapace behind and just went there in synskin and my coat. There was water everywhere, which was kinda homey but weird at the same time.

We got in the complex with a couple of servitors busting down the door and found people who had killed themselves. Interestingly the whole place was underground, possibly it had been built before the swamp was formed. Apparently there was a project here that took a huge dive, a dangerous one. Many of the files in the systems were corrupted and we couldn't get more info on the matter. We found a door, sealed and protected by a field and decided to go there only if it was necessary. After a few corpses more and some slight info on the project we found, we were properly creeped out. Everyone had killed themselves. Arzali was getting kinda jumpy and nobody really liked the situation. We actually got some footage behind the door and there were two of these huge fighting machines. Knights to be exact.

And then Yi just says something on the lines of ”Yeah, those are knights, I'm a pilot” but in the most Yi way possible: the less words the better... The man keeps surprising me. Perhaps I should have a discussion with him. I don't think I know anything about him really. I know that he hasn't had too many friends because of his aura as an untouchable but...nothing else really. I'd like to understand him more.

Anyway, we needed some more info about the research and that was located behind the door, so we lowered the shield and went through it. Before it, though, we had called the captain to bring some of the Pink Slippers (that's the name of our hired group) down on the planet. We're not as stupid as to just march in such an area with no support. When we got in, the two Knights scanned us. That was so scary and I admit I had drawn my pistols for that. Apparently we were okay, because they didn't blow us to smithereens. Yi went to a Knight and gave his sword to Deynor and his badge to me and climbed in. That was the moment when I started to feel this huge anger inside me. It wasn't my anger but someone else's, it was like someone was watching us. James and Arzali seemed to feel the same feeling. When Yi climbed down from that knight, I was so relieved but the anger didn't subside. Apparently the Knights had been ordered to kill everything non-human crossing their path. We decided that it would be in accordance to the Emperor's wishes that we saved these two ancient fighting machines and brought them with us

There were a set of stairs and we climbed them down as stealthily as we could just to find something the Xanthians call Devils of Tamarkin, locked in a quantum lock field thingie, in the middle of killing some people. Not moving but their eight red eyes blazing knowing fully well that we were there. There was a cogitator and Chiro went and attached himself to it. Me and James started pointing our guns at the creatures for I was certain that something in the field had moved. I remember my heart was pounding like crazy. If these were truly the creatures that were driven to extinction by Xanthians and eventually made them to turn into a wandering people, they were highly dangerous. Chiro noted that the field they were in was being given pressure from the inside so they might get free.

At this point Yi was trying to find something to open the ceiling of the room with, because Chiro told him so. He found a control panel, activated it, and indeed the ceiling started opening. To the swamp. Water started flowing in and Yi tried to close the ceiling but it got stuck at some point. So there we were, water, fishes and other little creatures pouring in, a field blocking viscious xenos failing and Chiro informing us that the information on the research was not on that particular computer. I admit I almost lost my temper there. The situation was frustrating and scary in its own right and now the I-want-a-swamp-shower-tech-ntacle-guy was saying something like that. At this point Yi was shouting to the radio something about getting ships to lift up at least one of the knights. I didn't pay that close attention to it for I was scanning through the room. Fortunately I was able to find the thing and Chiro switched computers but then the freakin' field collapsed.

Wanna know a fun fact about the Devils of Tamarkin? They are fucking psychers. So, we battle them in a room slowly filling with swamp, dodging psychic attacks and trying to finish them off. And we did. The last of them was so nice as to give us a huge all eating storm in the room before perishing and the thing ripped off James' leg! We had to carry the man out with Arzali, whereas Chiro and Yi stayed there for a moment longer. Deynor joined us soon enough but the two were insane enough to stay in the room with the storm. Thank goodness the Slippers had been evaquated from the place, so we paddled our way out.

I beaded Yi of their location and he said that we'd see Chiro running to us right about then and that we did. The fool himself had stayed with the bloody Knight while the lifting operation was in process. The man has an obvious attachment to that machinery but is he freakin' insane!? The building had started to collapse because of the storm ripping it apart and Yi was there, piloting a Knight! I mean, I trust the guy, I trust him with my life, but these stunts he pulls...

Well, because he wasn't there to ask everyone the basic questions if they were alright and if anyone needed anything, I did it. James, thank the Emperor, had been stabilized and will get a new leg. Deynor was hurt as well but not that badly. I was one hell of a ride down there.

Now that I think back to it, this was the first time I've ever even held Yi's badge of the Interrogator. I actually remembered it on our way back to space. What if something had happened to Yi down there? I was the one carrying the badge, so...would the people have started looking at me like people look at him? Yi carries a lot of responsibility on his shoulders and I understand that he still wants to be just Yi and not Interrogator to us. And he is and always will be. But he is constantly judged by the Inquisition. I think he will be an awesome Inquisitor some day. And if what he said in that chapel was true, I need to be strong so that he may be relieved of at least some of the responsibility. He may be the group leader but we are a team. Now that I've given the badge back to him, I can't say that I understand any better. But I have a hunch of that understanding.

- Norelle

[bharatiyamedia-blog]

Methods to Securely Delete Recordsdata on Linux

http://tinyurl.com/y4aqkpme Biehler Michael/Shutterstock.com Shred outdated information information for a similar purpose you shred outdated paper paperwork. We inform you what it’s good to learn about securely deleting Linux information. This tutorial covers the shred command and the secure-delete suite of utilities. Deleted Recordsdata Are Usually Recoverable Deleting a file doesn’t really take away it out of your arduous drive. It’s all right down to the best way your filesystem makes use of inodes. These are the info constructions throughout the filesystem that maintain the metadata concerning the information. The title of the file, its place on the arduous drive, what attributes and permissions it has, and so forth are all saved inside an inode. A listing is not more than a file itself. One which holds the names and inode numbers of the information that the listing accommodates. Whenever you delete a file with rm, the filesystem frees up the suitable inode and adjusts the listing file. This marks the house on the arduous drive that the file used to occupy as unused. Think about you stroll right into a library and undergo the cardboard index, discover a ebook’s catalog card, and rip it up. The ebook remains to be on the shelf. It’s simply tougher to seek out. In different phrases, the house that was utilized by the file is now free for use by different information. However the contents of the outdated file nonetheless sit in that house. Till that house is overwritten, there’s a good probability that file could be retrieved. However utterly eliminating a file isn’t as simple as merely overwriting them. As we will see. Don’t Do This With SSD’s These methods are for conventional electro-mechanical arduous disk drives (HDD), and shouldn’t be used with stable state drives (SSD). It gained’t work and can trigger additional writes and pointless put on to your SSD. To securely erase information from an SSD, you must use the utility offered by the producer of your SSD. RELATED: How to Delete Files and Directories in the Linux Terminal The shred Command shred is designed to perform the overwriting for you so a deleted file can’t be recovered. It’s included in all the Linux distributions that had been examined in the course of the analysis for this text, together with Ubuntu, Fedora, and Manjaro. On this instance, we’re going to be working in a listing known as ~/analysis, which accommodates many textual content information. It additionally accommodates another directories which in flip include different information. We’re going to imagine these information are delicate and should be erased solely from the arduous drive. We will see the listing tree construction by utilizing the tree command as follows. The -d (listing) choice causes tree to record directories solely, and to not record all the information. The listing tree construction appears to be like like this: tree -d Shredding a Single FIle To shred a single file, we will use the next command. The choices we’re utilizing are: u: Deallocate and take away the file after overwriting. v: Verbose choice, in order that shred tells us what it’s doing. z: Performs a remaining overwrite with zeroes. shred -uvz Preliminary_Notes.txt_01.txt shred overwrites the file 4 occasions by default. The primary three passes use random information, and the ultimate move makes use of zeroes, as we requested. It then removes the file and overwrites among the metadata within the inode Setting the Variety of Overwrite Passes We will ask shred to make use of extra or fewer overwrite passes by utilizing the -n (quantity) choice. shred will at all times use at the very least one move. The quantity we offer right here is the variety of additional passes we require shred to carry out. So shred will at all times do yet one more move than the quantity we ask for. To get three passes in whole, we request an additional two passes: shred -uvz -n 2 Preliminary_Notes.txt_02.txt As anticipated, shred makes three passes. Fewer passes—fewer shreddings for those who like— is clearly sooner. However is it much less safe? Three passes, apparently, might be greater than sufficient. RELATED: You Only Need to Wipe a Disk Once to Securely Erase It Shredding A number of FIles Wildcards can be utilized with shred to pick out teams of information to be erased. The * represents a number of characters, and the ? represents a single character. This command would delete all the remaining  “Preliminary_Notes” information within the present working listing. shred -uvz -n 2 Preliminary_Notes_*.* The remaining information are every processed by shred in flip. shred has no recursive choice, so it can’t be used to erase listing bushes of nested directories. The Bother With Securely Deleting Recordsdata Nearly as good as shred is, there’s a problem. Trendy journaling file programs akin to ext3 and ext4 go to great efforts to make sure they don’t break, develop into corrupt, or lose information. And with journaling filesystems, there’s no assure that the overwriting is definitely going down over the arduous drive house utilized by the deleted file. If all you’re after some peace of thoughts that the information have been deleted a bit extra completely than rm would have carried out it, then shred might be effective. However don’t make the error of pondering that the info is unquestionably gone and is completely irrecoverable. That’s fairly presumably not the case. RELATED: Why You Can’t “Securely Delete” a File, and What to Do Instead The secure-delete Suite The secure-delete instructions attempt to overcome the most effective efforts of journaling filesystems and to reach overwriting the file securely. However precisely the identical caveats apply. There’s nonetheless no assure that the overwriting is definitely going down over the area of the arduous drive that you simply want it to obliterate the file of curiosity. There’s extra probability, however no assure. The secure-delete instructions use the next sequence of overwrites and actions: 1 overwrite with 0xFF worth bytes. 5 overwrites with random information. 27 overwrites with particular values outlined by Peter Gutmann. 5 extra overwrites with random information. Rename the file to a random worth. Truncate the file. If all of that appears extreme to you, you’re in good firm. It additionally appears extreme to Peter Gutmann, a professor on the College of Aukland. He printed a paper in 1996 discussing these techniques, from which arose the city fantasy that it’s good to use all the methods mentioned in that paper directly. Peter Gutmann has since tried to get the genie again within the bottle saying “A very good scrubbing with random information will do about in addition to could be anticipated.” However we’re the place we’re, and these are the array of methods employed by the secure-delete instructions. However first, we have to set up them. Putting in secure-delete Use apt-get to put in this bundle onto your system for those who’re utilizing Ubuntu or one other Debian-based distribution. On different Linux distributions, use your Linux distribution’s bundle administration device as a substitute. sudo apt-get set up secure-delete There are 4 instructions included within the secure-delete bundle.  srm is a safe rm, used to erase information by deleting them and overwriting their arduous drive house. sfill is a device to overwrite all free house in your arduous drive. sswap is used to overwrite and cleanse your swap house. sdmem is used to cleanse your RAM. The srm Command You utilize the srm command a lot as you’d use the rm command. To take away a single file, use the next command. The -z (zeroes) choice causes smr to make use of zeroes for the ultimate wipe as a substitute of random information. The -v (verbose) choice makes srm inform us of its progress. srm -vz Chapter_One_01.txt The very first thing you’ll discover is that srm is gradual. It does present some visible suggestions as it’s working, however it’s a reduction while you see the command immediate once more. You need to use -l (reduce safety) choice to cut back the variety of passes to 2, which speeds issues up dramatically. srm -lvz Chapter_One_02.txt srm informs us that this—in its opinion—is much less safe, however it nonetheless deletes and overwrites the file for us. You need to use the -l (reduce safety) choice twice, to cut back the variety of passes down to 1. srm -llvz Chapter_One_03.txt Utilizing srm with A number of Recordsdata We will additionally use wildcards with srm. This command will erase and wipe the remaining components of chapter one: srm -vc Chapter_One_0?.txt The information are processed by srm in flip. Deleting Directories and Their Contents With srm The -r (recursive) choice will make srm delete all subdirectories and their contents. You’ll be able to move the trail to the primary listing to srm. On this instance, we’re deleting all the things the present listing, ~/analysis. This implies all the information in ~/analysis and all the subdirectories are securely eliminated. srm -vz * srm begins processing the directories and information. It will definitely returns you to the command immediate. On the take a look at machine that this text was researched on, this took round one hour to take away about 200 information distributed between the present listing and three nested directories. The entire information and subdirectories had been eliminated as anticipated. The sfill Command What if you’re involved a few file that you’ve got deleted utilizing rm, how are you going to go over that outdated floor and ensure it’s overwritten?  The sfill command will overwrite all the free house in your arduous drive. Because it does this, you’ll discover that you’ve got much less and fewer free house in your arduous drive, proper as much as the purpose the place is not any free house in any respect. When sfill completes, it releases all the free house again to you. In case you are administering a multi-user system, this is able to be very disruptive, so it is a upkeep process that ought to be carried out out of hours. Even on a single consumer pc, the lack of arduous drive house means it’s unusable as soon as sfill has used many of the house. That is one thing that you’d begin after which stroll away from. To attempt to velocity issues up a bit, you should use the -l (reduce safety) choice. The opposite choices are the -v (verbose) and -z  (zeroes) choices we’ve seen beforehand. Right here, we’re asking sfill to securely overwrite all the free house within the /house listing. sudo sfill -lvz /house Make your self comfy. On the take a look at pc—which solely has a 10 GB arduous drive— this was began mid-afternoon, and it accomplished someday in a single day. It’ll churn away for hours. And that is with the -l (reduce safety) choice. However, finally, you’ll be returned to the command immediate. The sswap Command The sswap command overwrites the storage in your swap partition. The very first thing we have to do is determine your swap partition. We will do that with the blkid command, which lists block gadgets. sudo blkid You must find the phrase “swap”, and make an observation of the block machine it’s hooked up to. We will see the swap partition is linked to /dev/sda5. We have to flip off disk writes to the swap partition in the course of the overwriting. We are going to use the swapoff command: sudo swapoff /dev/sda5 We will now use the sswap command. We are going to use /dev/sda5 as a part of the command line for the sswap command. We’ll additionally use the -v (verbose) choice and -ll (reduce safety) choices, which we used earlier. sudo sswap -llv /dev/sda5 sswap begins working its manner by your swap partition, overwriting all the things that it’s in it. It doesn’t take so long as sfill. It simply feels prefer it. As soon as it has accomplished, we have to reinstate the swap partition as an energetic swap house. We do that with the swapon command: sudo swapon /dev/sda5 The sdmem Command The secure-delete bundle even accommodates a device to wipe the Random Entry Reminiscence (RAM) chips in your pc. A cold boot attack requires bodily entry to your pc very shortly after it’s turned off. This kind of assault can, doubtlessly, permit the retrieval of knowledge out of your RAM chips. In case you assume it’s good to shield your self towards this sort of assault—and it will be a stretch for most individuals to assume they wanted to—you’ll be able to wipe your RAM earlier than you turn off your pc. We’ll use the -v (verbose) and -ll (reduce safety) choices as soon as extra. sudo sdmem -vll The terminal window will refill with asterisks as a sign that sdmem is working its manner by your RAM. The Simple Choice: Simply Encrypt Your Drive As a substitute of securely deleting information, why not safe your arduous drive or your own home folder utilizing encryption? In case you do this, nobody can entry something, whether or not it’s a dwell file or a deleted file. And also you don’t must be in your guard and bear in mind to securely erase delicate information as a result of your entire information are already protected. Most Linux distributions ask whether or not you wish to use encryption at set up time. Saying “sure” will save quite a lot of future aggravation. You could not cope with secret or delicate data. However for those who assume you might give or promote the pc to another person when you’re completed with it, encryption will simplify that too. !function(f,b,e,v,n,t,s) {if(f.fbq)return;n=f.fbq=function(){n.callMethod? n.callMethod.apply(n,arguments):n.queue.push(arguments)}; if(!f._fbq)f._fbq=n;n.push=n;n.loaded=!0;n.version='2.0'; n.queue=[];t=b.createElement(e);t.async=!0; t.src=v;s=b.getElementsByTagName(e)[0]; s.parentNode.insertBefore(t,s)}(window, document,'script', 'https://connect.facebook.net/en_US/fbevents.js'); fbq('init', '335401813750447'); fbq('track', 'PageView'); Source link

[takebackthedream]

On the CFPB’s Birthday, Stand Against Sharks by Richard Eskow

July 21 marks the six-year anniversary of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which was created in the wake of the Wall Street crime wave that led to the financial crisis of 2008.

The CFPB was first conceived by law professor Elizabeth Warren, now Senator Warren from Massachusetts, as an agency that could protect the American people from being mistreated, defrauded, and otherwise ripped off by powerful bankers who ran institutions that engaged in massive criminal behavior and yet never spent a day in jail.

It is a day to celebrate, and a day to fight.

Why Celebrate? Why Fight?

Why celebrate? Because, despite a number of attempts to tie its hands, the CFPB has been enormously successful. It has provided almost $12 billion in relief to 29 million victims of bank malfeasance.

It has provided nearly 50 million borrowers with new protections from dirty mortgage tricks – including surprise fees and mistreatment for those who fall behind in their payments.

The CFPB has rewritten credit card rules, saving customers more than $16 billion in hidden fees. It has helped stay-at-home spouses and Americans serving in the armed forces.

Why fight? Because Republicans – helped at times by some venal Democrats – are doing their best to gut the CFPB and leave consumers defenseless against the predators on Wall Street.

Inside the Shark Tank

Does the word “predator” seem too harsh a word for bankers? William Dudley, then President of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, said in 2013 that Wall Street’s big banks suffered from “deep-seated cultural and ethical failures” and “the apparent lack of respect for law, regulation and the public trust.”

A 2015 survey of banker ethics found an extraordinary tolerance for corrupt behavior and “a marked decline in ethics” since the study was first conducted in 2012. More than one-third of bankers earning $500,000 or more per year said they “have witnessed or have first hand knowledge of wrongdoing in the workplace.”

One in four said they would break the law themselves if they could make $10 million or more by doing it.

Wall Street’s offenses include “price fixing, bid rigging, market manipulation, money laundering, document forgery, lying to investors, sanctions-evading, and tax dodging.”

At last count, banks had paid more than $200 billion in fines and settlements to settle fraud charges. Bank of America had paid more than $77 billion.

Checkered Citi and Chase

Citigroup, the megabank created with bipartisan cooperation from Republican Senator Phil Gramm and Clinton Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin (who later became the bank’s chief executive), had paid nearly $20 billion.

JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon considers himself a worthy commentator on economic issues. But, under his leadership, his bank paid nearly $30 billion for crimes over a four-year period.

These include, according to an investors report, violations of the Bank Secrecy Act; money laundering for drug cartels; violations of sanction orders against Cuba, Iran, Sudan, and Liberia; violations of the Servicemembers Civil Relief Act; the fraudulent sale of unregistered securities and derivatives; bribery of state officials; and, obstruction of justice, including refusal to release documents in the Bernie Madoff case.

Voters Aren’t Fooled

A new poll finds that “More than nine in ten Americans (91%) believe it is important to regulate financial services, including 71% who believe it is very important. Strong bipartisan majorities say financial regulation is very important.” That includes Democrats (81%), independent voters (75%), and Republicans (58%).

They’re right. When Trump budget director Mick Mulvaney boasts that the fiction he calls “MAGAnomics” will lead to economic growth of more than 3 percent per year, he doesn’t explain that we routinely had that level of growth until unregulated bank fraud led to the financial crisis of 2008.

If we let the Republicans deregulate Wall Street again, it will set the stage for another crisis.

Republicans Are a Shark’s Best Friend

These bankers may break the law – and be unpopular with voters – but they’ve still got friends on Capitol Hill. Right now Republicans like Sen. Tom Cotten are working to undermine the CFPB’s new arbitration rule, which is set to take effect in September.

This rule ends banks’ ability to force customers into arbitration, a process that’s skewed in Wall Street’s favor. The CFPB rule would make it possible for customers to once again file class-action suits. Given Wall Street’s deep pockets for attorney’s fees, class-action suits are one of the few tools customers have for defending themselves in court.

House Republicans also passed the so-called “Financial Choice Act” – “Financial Carnage Act” might be a better name – a bill that would gut the CFPB and strip away other consumer protections.

When the Republicans fight the CFPB, they’re standing with the student loan predators at Navient. That’s the loan servicing company the CFPB sued earlier this year for cheating borrowers of their rights. That means they’re standing against the 44 million Americans who owe more than $1.4 trillion in student debt.

When the Republicans fight the CFPB, they’re standing with the bankers who defrauded mortgage holders and fraudulently foreclosed on American families. That means they’re standing against the millions of Americans who currently hold more than $14 trillion in mortgage debt.

When the Republicans fight the CFPB, they’re standing with the payday lenders who have trapped hundreds of thousands of lower-income Americans into a debt trap that can lead to annualized interest rates of 300 percent. That means they’re standing against the estimated 12 million Americans who pay an average of $520 per year in interest on eight $375 loans. These borrowers would be protected by the CFPB’s proposed payday lending rules.

People’s Action is repeating its annual “shark week” tradition, which draws attention to  this year, with anti-payday lender actions timed to coincide with the Discovery Channel’s “shark week” programming.

The CFPB has provided an extraordinary amount of help to millions of Americans in just six years. Now it needs our help.