#but he's still politically inept and doesn’t always. make the most sound decisions

[good--merits-accumulated]

me sprinkling my current interests into whatever fic i'm writing: fuck yeah. this is going to be hilarious for all the legions of people who are into all of these specific things! (the legion is me)

[lilikags]

Kamisato Ayato HCs

a/n: ik we know next to nothing about this man but here are my thoughts on him. no i do not believe in the scara = ayato theory. (its fine if u do tho just i don’t) 

Ayato is also a truly gentle soul but has to be tough in politics work. At home, he treats all servants with respect and gives them reasonable schedules, unlike some other heads in Inazuma. He allows them to take days off, and as long as they do their work, he’s happy. When meeting with other officials, he’s headstrong and blunt, speaking in a matter-of-fact tone and strives to keep meetings short. He keeps his points till he is forced to step down or gets his way. Many of these old men see him as a hot headed young man, but he just cannot afford to see injustice in the people. He will show respect to Baal, but he will voice his opinions that represent the citizens of Inazuma. 

ayato works better in the morning and night, afternoons are a bit of a drag to him. The thought of being able to work alone comfortably allows him to work best. The factor that allows him to work best is the fact that he is alone during these times; he prefers to get his thought process finished before showing it to anyone, with fear that he will be judged negatively before the idea is fully fleshed out. Everyone is awake in the afternoon, and only from evening to early morning is when Ayato can truly focus, for the fear of being judged is minimal. He is often treated like he’s lazy in the political courts, however there is no disputing his policies are quite thought out. 

he often stays up late and tries not to sleep in the early afternoon, but sometimes he just ends up falling asleep at that time. The schedule that allows him to work best is to work till lunch, sleep till the evening, then get back to work. 

When Ayato takes his naps in the afternoon, he puts his hand protectively around your waist and snuggles his face into your neck. He puts the curtains up but a bit of light comes though, when it’s summer you can feel a light breeze through the windows and the sound of birds chirping from the gardens. It smells like afternoon dew, and the fountain in the garden is what you can hear most clearly. Within minutes, you can hear Ayato lightly snoring, his breath slowing into a steady rhythm. 

Ayato loves traditional Japanese gardens, he finds serenity in walking through them alone. He’ll often find himself in he garden his grandfather built and he’s just listen to nature when he has the time. Oftentimes, he’ll be found doing this in the early afternoon, before getting ready to take his nap in the afternoon. He’ll stroll in the evenings too, to help him properly wake up from the sleeping haze he was in before. 

Ayato wants to believe the other heads of clans care about the people of Inazuma, but he knows they’re just sucking up to Baal. He doesn’t want to show disloyalty, but he also wants to help the citizens in his line of work. He’ll often switch between what Baal wants and what he believes is best for the people, and he’s known for his brilliant policies on both sides. If he’s feeling up to it, he can convince a unanimous vote in his favor for the policy made for the people. Sometimes, he’ll disguise it to be one of their liking, but in due time, it’ll turn on them. 

Ayato is very good at predicting the future. No, he’s not any sorts of prophet, but he often runs simulations of everything. This allows him to see what might happen in he future, and he will make decisions accordingly. Of course, he can’t truly predict using anything else than logic and reason, and sometimes, he could be wrong. After all, he doesn’t know everything and he’s still human.

Ayato is very proud of his sister. He admires how she can help the people directly in her own way and is proud of her success. His sister is more important to him than his parents, though his parents are still important to him. He often tells her to take care of herself, but he’s the one that needs to be told that. 

Ayato often stays home for his line of work and only goes out when he needs to attend a meeting. As the head of the Kamisato clan, he does have things to take care of in the clan as well, though his and Ayaka’s younger sister tries to help him on that. His family has been pressuring him to marry a woman to take care of these affairs, but he’s not ready yet and as the head of the clan, he has the power to refuse. Though, he has lost support within a few factions attempting to gain power through marriage or connections. 

Daughters of faction leaders have often been introduced to Ayato in an attempt to gain his favor through them, though he’s shown to be fair to everyone and showing no favoritism. He’s quite closed off and only truly cares about his siblings and parents. 

Ayato often walks barefoot in his room, where he usually is. He works and sleeps in the same room, and he wears his slippers when he goes out of his room. His room’s a mess and the servants are only allowed to sweep the floors and do maintenance. There are lots of books and papers scattered, and it’s an organized mess. 

Ayato knows that sometimes, violence is inevitable to solve certain problems, but he’s rather not in all occasions. He’s not at all inept at fighting, but his strong point is in politics. His attacks are quick and forceful; if one must engage in violence, it should be done quickly. He probably has a hydro vision. He has little defensive capabilities but can dish out lots of damage quickly. His skill set would most likely make him a main dps. As he gets tired quickly, his stats make him very strong in the beginning and decrease slowly until he is swapped off the field. 

Modern!AU: this man knows all the laws and has never gotten in trouble. He drives very carefully and simply sighs when he sees someone not following them. He is always cautious and always prioritizes safety over everything. 

taglist; @paradise-creator​

[cometsweepandleonidsfly]

When Game of Thrones ended its eight-year run on Sunday, the series finale, titled “The Iron Throne,” received a largely negative critical response. Many writers pointed out that the show’s last season had given up on the careful character-building of Thrones’ early days—a problem that, in truth, had started a few years back. The result was a seemingly rushed conclusion where multiple characters made poorly justified decisions and important story lines felt only halfway developed.

The show made plenty of mistakes in its final episode, but among the most significant was Thrones’ abrupt and uncharacteristic turn to moralizing—and its use of heavy-handed allusions to 20th-century history to do so. Characters who were once morally complicated, whose actions fit within well-developed personal motivations and fueled the show’s gripping political drama, became mechanisms to bring the story to a hasty, unearned conclusion. Characters like Daenerys Targaryen and Tyrion Lannister—previously complex and fully formed—became, in “The Iron Throne,” mere tools in the service of a plodding message about the dangers of totalitarianism.

The reliance on contemporary historical allegory pervades the entire first half of the final episode, but the most glaring instance comes about 10 minutes in, after characters have walked through rubble-strewn streets and debated the ethics of summarily executing prisoners of war. Daenerys enters the scene upon her dragon, descending from the darkened sky. It’s a visceral case study in dramatizing evil as authority, which is to say it’s cribbed from Triumph of the Will. Daenerys’s appearance mimics Adolf Hitler’s entry in Leni Riefenstahl’s 1935 propaganda film. The queen arrives on dragonback, he on an airplane. Both come from above, seemingly higher and mightier than the mortals watching. Daenerys dismounts and walks through the blasted hulk of the Red Keep’s gates, directly toward the camera. When the wings of her last living dragon spread out behind her as if they were her own, the message is clear: The dragon has awoken. Dany gazes upon serried ranks of soldiers, fires still burning over miles of city and ash falling from the sky. Somewhere on the way to becoming the dragon, she has left behind the medieval machinations of earlier seasons and adopted the manicured totalitarianism of 20th-century dictators as her own.

The dragon queen begins to speak of liberation and renewal and bloodshed in front of a cheering crowd of uniformed soldiers, standing at attention, the blood of innocents still on their spears. Her zealous defense of war crimes in the name of ideology could be a Nazi’s speech, or perhaps a leftist authoritarian’s. There’s certainly something of Joseph Stalin and Vladimir Lenin in her idea that people ought to be liberated, by force if necessary, even if it means death for thousands. “Women, men, and children have suffered too long beneath the wheel,” Daenerys proclaims. Over the heads of her soldiers, viewers see what liberation means: the wreck of King’s Landing, Daenerys with her dragon sigil on one side and the flesh-and-blood reptile on the other. Hitler’s banners were the same red and black with a circle in the center, containing an odd, swirled insignia. The sieg heils are replaced by the thudding of spears, the brownshirts by men in helmets and leather, but the effect is identical.

The parallels are in some ways fitting. Daenerys’s rhetoric has always had a brutal streak—she’s had no problem promising the death of enemies to her followers. But her guarantees of violent revolution had previously been couched in the character’s personal kindness and her repeated efforts not to become a reborn version of her pyromaniacal father. Perhaps unable to make her sudden moral downfall in Season 8 seem wholly organic, Game of Thronesopted to lean on dramatic visual cues. If the show could not sell viewers on Daenerys’s embrace of unambiguous villainy, it could at least tie her directly to Hitler, to Stalin, to dictators whose reigns are within living memory.

In earlier seasons, tyranny did not always look like tyranny. Few moments capture how elegantly Game of Thrones used to work like the ones in Season 2when Tywin Lannister, one of television’s great villains, interacts with Arya Stark, who’s disguised as a servant. Tywin comes off as human, as a man concerned with his family and his legacy. He shows generosity, asks about his servant’s family, and treats her more gently than many of the series’s purported heroes might have. Such nuance extended to other characters, too: The often ruthless Stannis Baratheon practices a harsh but evenhanded form of justice. His late brother Robert, a drunkard and philanderer, still strove to act as a king and friend should, despite his constant failures. Even the murderous Roose Bolton’s and Walder Frey’s behavior was motivated by fundamentally human desires to improve their families’ lots. Viewers didn’t need fascist or Stalinist symbols to know when an action was vile, even if it came from a character who didn’t seem fully evil.

Things are simpler when viewers do not have to think about the people behind the evil. Game of Thrones used to ask its audience to think about those people, though. One episode in the show’s second season began with a seemingly random conversation between two soldiers guarding the Lannister army’s horses. They aren’t significant to the plot, but they get almost two minutes of screen time. They’re normal people who joke around—farting is involved—and laugh. And then they’re killed. The show often forced viewers to question its heroes not through cruelty and violence but through peace and humor. It was not the sudden death of the Lannister men that gave the scene its emotional heft but the ordinariness of what came before it.

That sort of nuance disappeared in later seasons. Even when the opposing side became sympathetic victims, they were not fleshed out with the same care as the Lannister soldiers were in the second season. The unsubtle imagery in Game of Thrones’ later seasons was aided by the show’s use of the Unsullied, Daenerys’s army of erstwhile slaves. Though they never really took on individual identities, the Unsullied had a story, and their very presence on the show made a point about who Daenerys was. But in Season 8, the Unsullied became an entity to be neatly organized and casually discarded. Their lack of individuality served the show’s thudding metaphors in “The Iron Throne.” The Unsullied’s faceless helms display no emotion but suggest total loyalty. The men slam their spears into the dirt in unison when Daenerys speaks. They are an authoritarian’s dream.

“The Iron Throne” doesn’t stop with the imagery of totalitarianism. Apparently concerned that some viewers might miss the parallels to 20th-century dictators, the show has Jon Snow, its morally upstanding and politically inept co-lead, join the now-imprisoned adviser Tyrion Lannister in his cell to fully explicate Daenerys’s transition to fascism. Tyrion asks Jon: “When you heard her talking to her soldiers, did she sound like someone who is done fighting?” Of course she didn’t, because dictators always need enemies. But in the past, Game of Thrones didn’t need to explain to viewers exactly what was happening. It presented well-shaded characters and morally unclear choices, then asked the audience to come to its own conclusions.

Tyrion continues: “When she murdered the slavers of Astapor, I’m sure no one but the slavers complained. After all, they were evil men. When she crucified hundreds of Meereenese nobles, who could argue? They were evil men. The Dothraki khals she burned alive? They would have done worse to her.” It’s impressive, really, that a character in a premodern fantasy reality is so well versed in postwar German confessional poetry: Tyrion’s words echo the Lutheran minister Martin Niemöller’s “First they came …” almost exactly. “First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out— / Because I was not a socialist,” Niemöller said. First she came for the slavers of Astapor.

Niemöller’s words are famous for good reason; they tell simply and concisely how evil results from inaction. But Game of Thrones viewers were watching a 73-episode television series that had the luxury of showing exactly how horrifying bloodshed can result from the intention to make society better. Thrones once had faith that its depiction of a kingdom torn apart by petty squabbles and the indifference of wealthy autocrats resonated with viewers. Until the last season, the show didn’t feel the need to tell viewers how it resonated.

Of course, since its inception, Game of Thrones has referenced real-life history. The central conflict is inspired by the Wars of the Roses, the notorious Red Wedding was based on a 15th-century event called the “Black Dinner”—the list goes on. But such references have usually been to things outside of living memory. They’ve been to medieval or ancient events, and usually they were mined more for plot points or invented history, not to set up obvious ethical comparisons.

The show’s final act didn’t trust viewers the way the early seasons did. The audience didn’t need a fable about power to be wrapped in a bow and delivered in the form of 20th-century historical analogies. (Or maybe we did—maybe some of us have “become inured to the shoddy writing and plotting.”) In its first half, and perhaps even for a season or two after leaving Martin’s books behind, the show trusted its audience enough to avoid allegory and the simplistic morality that comes with it. It trusted that the audience knew right from wrong, and knew that both could coexist within a character. It asked viewers to find their own messages in a series about a faux-medieval world of dragons and ice zombies—and take them or leave them as they saw fit. It would have been better if the show had ended that way.

[shirlleycoyle]

The Democrats Screwed America With an App No One Asked For

Normally, by now, we'd have a clear winner in the Iowa caucus. A Democratic candidate for president would have won their first delegates and talking heads on cable news would have started constructing narratives with the first actual votes in a heated and unpredictable primary.

But as you found out if you stayed up all night or rolled over this morning to look at your phone and audibly ask yourself what the fuck is going on, this is not the case today. A combination of Iowa's byzantine caucus system, a failed app, and the catastrophically inept Democratic establishment has delayed Iowa from declaring a winner, though it says the result could come in later today.

Theoretically, a democracy is a system where people vote for the representatives, officials, and policies they want. Embarrassingly, that is not exactly the system we have in America, but even with the electoral college, superdelegates, coin flips, and other quirks that convolute this process, how many votes each candidate gets is what's supposed to determine a winner, and it's not technically critical if the final tally of these votes is reported Monday evening, Tuesday morning, or even next week.

However, all involved parties—the campaigns, the party and its establishment, the press, and the public—want the results as quickly as possible. This is especially true in Iowa, because the main importance of the contest is in the fact that everyone has agreed to take the narratives it generates seriously. Candidates especially count on being able to get lots of publicity out of good showings and ride the momentum into the New Hampshire primary, while everyone from backers to voters count on being able to identify who’s dead in the water.

This year, the Iowa Democratic Party planned to use a new app to report and share the results on which the whole system is based. David Jefferson, a board member of Verified Voting, a nonpartisan election integrity organization, told the Times that the Democratic National Committee advised the Iowa Democratic Party to use the app instead of having caucus participants call in the votes. According to the Wall Street Journal, party leaders said the app would make it easier and faster to report results from the roughly 1,700 caucus sites in Iowa. (What the utility of this would be when paper and phones have long provided quick and reliable results isn’t exactly clear.) At the time, the Iowa Democratic Party declined to say who made the app because, it claimed, doing so could make it more vulnerable to attackers.

Even Tuesday, after the problems with the app became clear, the party has still declined to explain what the app is and what it does.

In a statement, the party said that there were "inconsistencies" with the data the app was reporting and what precinct chairs were seeing on the ground: "We determined with certainty that the underlying data collected via app was sound. While the app was recording data accurately, it was reporting out only partial data. We have determined that this was due to a coding issue in the reporting system."

Do you know anything about the app used to tabulate votes in Iowa? If you were a precinct leader or know anything else about the app, please reach out to Jason Koebler securely on Signal: 202-505-1702. He also has open Twitter DMs @jason_koebler.

In a sane world, we would not rely on smartphone apps to report critical election data. But even in the broken world we have, it is beyond irresponsible to attempt to hide the developer and name of a vote-reporting app. One of the best-known axioms in the cybersecurity industry is that "security by obscurity" doesn't work. Cybersecurity experts should have been allowed to publicly probe and test the app, which is ultimately critical infrastructure we rely on to protect our democracy. As Motherboard previously reported, the fact that election systems are not entirely transparent to the public is a security risk, especially rapid result reporting systems that don't have the same certification requirements as, say, voting machines.

This decision by the DNC to double down on insecure technological solutions to problems that don't exist just four years after it got spectacularly hacked by Russia indicates two things: The Democratic establishment learned absolutely nothing from that hack, and it is dangerously incompetent and cannot be trusted to protect, well, our democracy.

At the very least, the Iowa Democratic Party needs to be forthright about who developed the app so that the public can determine, to the best of its ability, whether that company is trustworthy.

Today, we know that the app was developed by a small company called Shadow, which, according to Federal Election Commission records, has previously provided services to the Texas Democratic Party, Kirsten Gillibrand's failed primary bid, and Pete Buttigieg's campaign. Abhi Rahman with the Texas Democratic Party told Motherboard that the Texas Democratic Party only used Shadow as one of the many texting contracts it has with vendors. Shadow also sells software to "recruit volunteers and mobilize voters," which suggests that its clients may not be just supposedly candidate-agnostic state Democratic committees, but individual campaigns themselves.

Acronym, "a nonprofit organization committed to building power and digital infrastructure for the progressive movement," released a statement last night explaining that it's an investor in Shadow, but that it doesn't know how or why the app failed.

There’s enough going on with these two operations to launch a thousand conspiracy theories, and that’s probably what will happen. (A few examples: Gerard Niemira, CEO of Shadow and formerly COO and CTO of Acronym, once contributed to a project to generate “fake data such as names, addresses, and phone numbers”; Pete Buttigieg’s national organizing director, Greta Carnes, came directly from Acronym; and, as Sludge has reported, Acronym’s PAC is funded by, among others, the National Democratic Redistricting Committee, which is chaired by former Obama attorney general Eric Holder.)

It doesn’t take a conspiracy, though, to surmise what happened: Connected insiders using buzzwords to sell an unnecessary and overcomplicated solution to a nonexistent problem is the political system working as it always does. The difference here is just how public and spectacular the failure was.

Some caucus chairs, like Iowa state senator Zach Wahls, said they had no problem reporting results via the app. However, Wahls also tweeted that iPhone users had to download the app via TestFlight, an iOS environment that allows developers to share and test their apps with other users before they're officially released. Developers often share their games and apps with Motherboard with TestFlight for pre-release review purposes. This, again, is a nonstandard way of installing apps. Even though we have installed many apps this way, there are often problems installing them. Given our experiences with TestFlight, it is not at all surprising that asking hundreds of people to install an app using TestFlight could result in some problems.

The DNC and Iowa's Democratic establishment has failed at their most basic duties: Instilling a sense of competence, trust, and normalcy in the electoral process. The decision to use an app that it didn't need, to hide the creator of this app, and to delay the reporting process has led to unmitigated chaos. It's critical that Iowa used paper counts for its official tallies, but with so much of these campaigns relying on a media and momentum narrative, the failed app has caused enough of a mess to do real damage.

"It's important to keep in mind that these are caucuses, where each local count can be verified by every voter and candidate representative and then recorded on paper. We'll be able to confidently get a result, so we should all take a deep breath," Ben Adida, an election security expert and executive director of VotingWorks, a non-partisan, non-profit building secure, affordable, and open-source election technology, told Motherboard.

"However, there is a lesson here that we should be mindful of the cost/benefit of introducing technology in elections—what was the benefit of this app supposed to be? And we should insist that the technology upon which we build our Democracy be open and broadly vetted."

With the media and voters around the country demanding election results immediately, we ended up with election officials in Iowa tweeting chicken-scratch screenshots of math worksheets and whiteboards that tallied caucus results from disparate precincts. Every major candidate has declared victory in some way or another, and it seems possible—even likely—that candidates themselves have better results right now than the public. A Bernie Sanders precinct captain told Motherboard that the Sanders campaign had its own app that it used to tabulate delegates.

"The app I used was specific to the Bernie campaign. Every precinct captain was trained to use it, and we reported detailed first count, second count, and delegate allocation numbers through it," the precinct captain said. "That's where the Bernie campaign got its numbers it sent out in that press release, presumably. I take it they wanted their own info straight from as many caucus sites as possible given how much bullshit there was in 2016."

The New York Times reported that many precinct leaders who were supposed to use the app to report results ignored the request from the Iowa Democratic Party and instead attempted to report results like did in previous by calling results in. When they called, many found that it took hours for Democratic party headquarters in Des Moines to pick up. A caucus secretary for a Story County precinct said he was on hold for over an hour and simply tweeted the results after being hung up on while talking to Wolf Blitzer live on CNN:

Last night, IDP communications director Mandy McClure said that the problems with the app were "simply a reporting issue," and that "the app did not go down and this is not a hack or an intrusion." Voters have no way of really knowing because the app was never vetted by the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, other election security organizations, and the broader cybersecurity community. We don't know if the app is secure precisely because IDP kept it a secret.

The DNC, IDP, Shadow, and Acronym did not immediately respond to requests for comment for this piece.

Even if the app is secure, we don't know if it worked as designed or if people knew how to use it. (“The app wasn’t included in the chair training that everyone was required to take,” Zach Simonson, the Democratic Party chair in Wapello County, told the Times.) There’s a lot we don’t know; we do know that right now it looks like the institutional Democratic Party is far more interested in appearing to do things effectively than in doing so.

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