#disable wps

[distortedclouds]

Welp! looks like i'm gonna need another writing software, because on WPS Office when I right-click:

[bkthemes]

Essential WordPress Security Tips to Protect Your Website

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[mostlysignssomeportents]

Tesla's Dieselgate

Elon Musk lies a lot. He lies about being a “utopian socialist.” He lies about being a “free speech absolutist.” He lies about which companies he founded:

https://www.businessinsider.com/tesla-cofounder-martin-eberhard-interview-history-elon-musk-ev-market-2023-2 He lies about being the “chief engineer” of those companies:

https://www.quora.com/Was-Elon-Musk-the-actual-engineer-behind-SpaceX-and-Tesla

He lies about really stupid stuff, like claiming that comsats that share the same spectrum will deliver steady broadband speeds as they add more users who each get a narrower slice of that spectrum:

https://www.eff.org/wp/case-fiber-home-today-why-fiber-superior-medium-21st-century-broadband

The fundamental laws of physics don’t care about this bullshit, but people do. The comsat lie convinced a bunch of people that pulling fiber to all our homes is literally impossible — as though the electrical and phone lines that come to our homes now were installed by an ancient, lost civilization. Pulling new cabling isn’t a mysterious art, like embalming pharaohs. We do it all the time. One of the poorest places in America installed universal fiber with a mule named “Ole Bub”:

https://www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/the-one-traffic-light-town-with-some-of-the-fastest-internet-in-the-us

Previous tech barons had “reality distortion fields,” but Musk just blithely contradicts himself and pretends he isn’t doing so, like a budget Steve Jobs. There’s an entire site devoted to cataloging Musk’s public lies:

https://elonmusk.today/

But while Musk lacks the charm of earlier Silicon Valley grifters, he’s much better than they ever were at running a long con. For years, he’s been promising “full self driving…next year.”

https://pluralistic.net/2022/10/09/herbies-revenge/#100-billion-here-100-billion-there-pretty-soon-youre-talking-real-money

He’s hasn’t delivered, but he keeps claiming he has, making Teslas some of the deadliest cars on the road:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2023/06/10/tesla-autopilot-crashes-elon-musk/

Tesla is a giant shell-game masquerading as a car company. The important thing about Tesla isn’t its cars, it’s Tesla’s business arrangement, the Tesla-Financial Complex:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/11/24/no-puedo-pagar-no-pagara/#Rat

Once you start unpacking Tesla’s balance sheets, you start to realize how much the company depends on government subsidies and tax-breaks, combined with selling carbon credits that make huge, planet-destroying SUVs possible, under the pretense that this is somehow good for the environment:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/14/for-sale-green-indulgences/#killer-analogy

But even with all those financial shenanigans, Tesla’s got an absurdly high valuation, soaring at times to 1600x its profitability:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/01/15/hoover-calling/#intangibles

That valuation represents a bet on Tesla’s ability to extract ever-higher rents from its customers. Take Tesla’s batteries: you pay for the battery when you buy your car, but you don’t own that battery. You have to rent the right to use its full capacity, with Tesla reserving the right to reduce how far you go on a charge based on your willingness to pay:

https://memex.craphound.com/2017/09/10/teslas-demon-haunted-cars-in-irmas-path-get-a-temporary-battery-life-boost/

That’s just one of the many rent-a-features that Tesla drivers have to shell out for. You don’t own your car at all: when you sell it as a used vehicle, Tesla strips out these features you paid for and makes the next driver pay again, reducing the value of your used car and transfering it to Tesla’s shareholders:

https://www.theverge.com/2020/2/6/21127243/tesla-model-s-autopilot-disabled-remotely-used-car-update

To maintain this rent-extraction racket, Tesla uses DRM that makes it a felony to alter your own car’s software without Tesla’s permission. This is the root of all autoenshittification:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/24/rent-to-pwn/#kitt-is-a-demon

This is technofeudalism. Whereas capitalists seek profits (income from selling things), feudalists seek rents (income from owning the things other people use). If Telsa were a capitalist enterprise, then entrepreneurs could enter the market and sell mods that let you unlock the functionality in your own car:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/06/11/1-in-3/#boost-50

But because Tesla is a feudal enterprise, capitalists must first secure permission from the fief, Elon Musk, who decides which companies are allowed to compete with him, and how.

Once a company owns the right to decide which software you can run, there’s no limit to the ways it can extract rent from you. Blocking you from changing your device’s software lets a company run overt scams on you. For example, they can block you from getting your car independently repaired with third-party parts.

But they can also screw you in sneaky ways. Once a device has DRM on it, Section 1201 of the DMCA makes it a felony to bypass that DRM, even for legitimate purposes. That means that your DRM-locked device can spy on you, and because no one is allowed to explore how that surveillance works, the manufacturer can be incredibly sloppy with all the personal info they gather:

https://www.cnbc.com/2019/03/29/tesla-model-3-keeps-data-like-crash-videos-location-phone-contacts.html

All kinds of hidden anti-features can lurk in your DRM-locked car, protected from discovery, analysis and criticism by the illegality of bypassing the DRM. For example, Teslas have a hidden feature that lets them lock out their owners and summon a repo man to drive them away if you have a dispute about a late payment:

https://tiremeetsroad.com/2021/03/18/tesla-allegedly-remotely-unlocks-model-3-owners-car-uses-smart-summon-to-help-repo-agent/

DRM is a gun on the mantlepiece in Act I, and by Act III, it goes off, revealing some kind of ugly and often dangerous scam. Remember Dieselgate? Volkswagen created a line of demon-haunted cars: if they thought they were being scrutinized (by regulators measuring their emissions), they switched into a mode that traded performance for low emissions. But when they believed themselves to be unobserved, they reversed this, emitting deadly levels of NOX but delivering superior mileage.

The conversion of the VW diesel fleet into mobile gas-chambers wouldn’t have been possible without DRM. DRM adds a layer of serious criminal jeopardy to anyone attempting to reverse-engineer and study any device, from a phone to a car. DRM let Apple claim to be a champion of its users’ privacy even as it spied on them from asshole to appetite:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/14/luxury-surveillance/#liar-liar

Now, Tesla is having its own Dieselgate scandal. A stunning investigation by Steve Stecklow and Norihiko Shirouzu for Reuters reveals how Tesla was able to create its own demon-haunted car, which systematically deceived drivers about its driving range, and the increasingly desperate measures the company turned to as customers discovered the ruse:

https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/tesla-batteries-range/

The root of the deception is very simple: Tesla mis-sells its cars by falsely claiming ranges that those cars can’t attain. Every person who ever bought a Tesla was defrauded.

But this fraud would be easy to detect. If you bought a Tesla rated for 353 miles on a charge, but the dashboard range predictor told you that your fully charged car could only go 150 miles, you’d immediately figure something was up. So your Telsa tells another lie: the range predictor tells you that you can go 353 miles.

But again, if the car continued to tell you it has 203 miles of range when it was about to run out of charge, you’d figure something was up pretty quick — like, the first time your car ran out of battery while the dashboard cheerily informed you that you had 203 miles of range left.

So Teslas tell a third lie: when the battery charge reached about 50%, the fake range is replaced with the real one. That way, drivers aren’t getting mass-stranded by the roadside, and the scam can continue.

But there’s a new problem: drivers whose cars are rated for 353 miles but can’t go anything like that far on a full charge naturally assume that something is wrong with their cars, so they start calling Tesla service and asking to have the car checked over.

This creates a problem for Tesla: those service calls can cost the company $1,000, and of course, there’s nothing wrong with the car. It’s performing exactly as designed. So Tesla created its boldest fraud yet: a boiler-room full of anti-salespeople charged with convincing people that their cars weren’t broken.

This new unit — the “diversion team” — was headquartered in a Nevada satellite office, which was equipped with a metal xylophone that would be rung in triumph every time a Tesla owner was successfully conned into thinking that their car wasn’t defrauding them.

When a Tesla owner called this boiler room, the diverter would run remote diagnostics on their car, then pronounce it fine, and chide the driver for having energy-hungry driving habits (shades of Steve Jobs’s “You’re holding it wrong”):

https://www.wired.com/2010/06/iphone-4-holding-it-wrong/

The drivers who called the Diversion Team weren’t just lied to, they were also punished. The Tesla app was silently altered so that anyone who filed a complaint about their car’s range was no longer able to book a service appointment for any reason. If their car malfunctioned, they’d have to request a callback, which could take several days.

Meanwhile, the diverters on the diversion team were instructed not to inform drivers if the remote diagnostics they performed detected any other defects in the cars.

The diversion team had a 750 complaint/week quota: to juke this stat, diverters would close the case for any driver who failed to answer the phone when they were eventually called back. The center received 2,000+ calls every week. Diverters were ordered to keep calls to five minutes or less.

Eventually, diverters were ordered to cease performing any remote diagnostics on drivers’ cars: a source told Reuters that “Thousands of customers were told there is nothing wrong with their car” without any diagnostics being performed.

Predicting EV range is an inexact science as many factors can affect battery life, notably whether a journey is uphill or downhill. Every EV automaker has to come up with a figure that represents some kind of best guess under a mix of conditions. But while other manufacturers err on the side of caution, Tesla has the most inaccurate mileage estimates in the industry, double the industry average.

Other countries’ regulators have taken note. In Korea, Tesla was fined millions and Elon Musk was personally required to state that he had deceived Tesla buyers. The Korean regulator found that the true range of Teslas under normal winter conditions was less than half of the claimed range.

Now, many companies have been run by malignant narcissists who lied compulsively — think of Thomas Edison, archnemesis of Nikola Tesla himself. The difference here isn’t merely that Musk is a deeply unfit monster of a human being — but rather, that DRM allows him to defraud his customers behind a state-enforced opaque veil. The digital computers at the heart of a Tesla aren’t just demons haunting the car, changing its performance based on whether it believes it is being observed — they also allow Musk to invoke the power of the US government to felonize anyone who tries to peer into the black box where he commits his frauds.

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

https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/28/edison-not-tesla/#demon-haunted-world

This Sunday (July 30) at 1530h, I’m appearing on a panel at Midsummer Scream in Long Beach, CA, to discuss the wonderful, award-winning “Ghost Post” Haunted Mansion project I worked on for Disney Imagineering.

Image ID [A scene out of an 11th century tome on demon-summoning called 'Compendium rarissimum totius Artis Magicae sistematisatae per celeberrimos Artis hujus Magistros. Anno 1057. Noli me tangere.' It depicts a demon tormenting two unlucky would-be demon-summoners who have dug up a grave in a graveyard. One summoner is held aloft by his hair, screaming; the other screams from inside the grave he is digging up. The scene has been altered to remove the demon's prominent, urinating penis, to add in a Tesla supercharger, and a red Tesla Model S nosing into the scene.]

Image: Steve Jurvetson (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Tesla_Model_S_Indoors.jpg

CC BY 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/deed.en

[tinystepsforward]

automattic vs wp engine mastterpost

adrienne's GitHub recap is probably the best place to see a comprehensive timeline of what's going down. it's been kept up to date. my (very out of date) previous writeup is here.

what's happened/other links

Matt has not logged off, just switched platforms, so there's lots on X/Twitter, Reddit, and Hacker News. it's really not worth wading through.

WP Engine actually filed suit.

the complaint includes some truly remarkable screenshots of Matt trying to blackmail the CEO of WP Engine.

which... personally i would not happily work for someone who just blackmailed me while not even my boss, but that's just me. he hasn't denied this at all, in fact confirming on Hacker News:

I haven't doxxed any private texts from other parties like they have. [source]

and, notably,

I even invited her to my 40th birthday on Jan 11, another text message she decided not to share. [source]

this gives me the creeps. in the context of the rest of the way he's talking to her, and the ways in which he's interacted with women in general, it's. not great.

also he slid into an ex-employee (also a woman)'s DMs asking why she was being mean to him bc he'd never been nothing but nice to her, while also making legal threats. so y'know, pattern of behaviour.

a good writeup of the social side of things

if you don't care so much about the open-source stuff, Steph Lundberg's writeup is, like her previous one on Matt's Tumblr meltdown, pretty solid and people-focused.

Mullenweg has already demonstrated egregious lapses in judgment and abuses of power, it’s just that up until now he’s wielded his power against vulnerable populations without access to high-powered lawyers and their own massive platforms.

a more technical writeup

this one is melodramatic in the same ways Matt was (uses war terminology), which i don't agree with, and which led to some... internal arguments at Automattic. that part's not my story to tell, but a little more on that later. it's a solid writeup of the actual WordPress side of things. there's some seriously dodgy trademark behaviour going on here.

of note: this blogger locked comments on his post:

and then Matt, uh, found a way around that:

wild!

10% of Automattic leaves

that's a link to Matt's blog post. here's an Internet Archive link.

in short, staff were offered a severance deal of the higher of $30k or six months' salary. while that's very generous, it's still very risky in today's tech market, especially (for the same reasons i mentioned when Matt was melting down on here) for people outside the US, people who need the health insurance, or people with young kids. despite that, 10% decided with very little notice (they had two days to decide) to leave.

However now, I feel much lighter. I’m grateful and thankful for all the people who took the offer, and even more excited to work with those who turned down $126M to stay. As the kids say, LFG!

i'm thrilled to see some of my ex-colleagues make it out. i'm keeping the rest who have stayed on in my thoughts. i don't know anyone who's wholesale shilling for Matt.

Matt's been pressuring staff to post in support of him, @-ing the entire company to vote on Twitter polls in his favor, and so on. many of the people who stayed have written blog posts about it, all starting with "I stayed". people on social media have pointed out the very clear pattern of Automatticians jumping into discourse to defend Matt, and it doesn't look good.

i don't have a lot to say about those posts, except to highlight Jeffrey Zeldman, whose "I stayed" post is perhaps one of the more honest ones. (his Rodney King reference was in poor taste, and he... i don't like his role at automattic, tbc) but like. he's nearly 70. he helped shape the modern internet and develop its accessibility standards. he has often put his neck on the line for disabled staff who don't have as much clout as he does. given the financial troubles he talks about and the state of this market and how old he is, i personally have read between the lines of what he's saying in a particular way.

fuck, man. i'm sad. i'm sad for all my friends who are creaking under the strain and watching others leave but who can't do that. i'm sad that many of them are left in teams which are half-empty or divisions where significant senior leadership are just gone, with no time to document what they had in progress.

i'm sad for Josepha Haden Chomphosy, the former executive director of the WordPress Foundation, who was dealing with a personal emergency and ended up having to miss WordCamp US (where Matt started publicly starting shit with WPE). she came back from that to a gigantic fire in the community she's invested a decade of careful, Matt-negotiating, stewardship to, and decided to take the severance offer. she deserved better.

other things Matt's been up to

mostly linking to comments or posts which compile things here, bc it's too scattered otherwise.

blocking people from the official WordPress X account if they disapprove of his actions.

publicly talking about a vulnerability in ACF, a plugin WPE maintains, which could put thousands of sites at risk. this is not normal, and he met with so much horror even from current staff that he deleted his post.

saying he comes across badly because he's "a little ASD", which is driving me personally up the fucking wall. he's never once said it before and he really is turning into Temu Elon.

generally bragging that he still has more planned. jesus fucking christ

continually saying that WPE's suit is against WordPress.org and the community, which is not true. on which note, his pinned tweet is certainly something:

his choice of lawyer is uh. the kind of guy to defend nestle against literal child slaves.

as always, while i think WordPress crumbling will disproportionately affect websites in poorer parts of the world, there are certainly tyrants who are causing much more immediate and potent suffering. if you've read this far, please do send anything you have spare to gazafunds.com.

[jaeyuniism]

lips like hers

pairing: heartbroken!taesan x fem!reader

warnings: sfw, heavyyyy angst (I almost cried writing this) and heartbreak :p

summary: in which you lose yourself trying to become the girl taesan will never stop loving.

a/n: I love writing angst :( my bby taesan would NEVER act like this 💔 check out my wp: jaeyuniism and if you have any reqs, please feel free to lmk!

— wc : 3.2k— did not proof read —

the soft patter of rain thumped delicately against the glass of the window pane. taesan’s lip curled into a frown, his dark eyes narrowing at the sight.

he had never been particularly fond of the rain—its presence serving as a constant reminder of the tears that used to brim his eyes everytime he thought of the past. the past in which his heart was shattered by the girl he thought he would hold in his arms forever.

the girl he sought to marry one day. but it was over now—his dreams, his hopes, his aspirations. she had taken his fragile heart and crushed it into a lifeless and meaningless disarray of fragments.

and now who was he to trust? what was he to trust? nothing. nobody.

his slender fingers found their way into the stitched lining of his denim jean pockets, fishing for the familiar cardboard pack of marlboros. he knows he should quit—that he should have quit ages ago.

smoking wasn’t good for him. that’s what she’d always tell him. her soft whisper, lighter than a fluttering feather. her long hair, silky and smooth, draping over his neck as she softly angled her face to kiss him.

then she’d whisper sweet nothings—words of encouragement—to get him to stop. for her. for their future. but none of that exists anymore, not when she left him.

he finally finds it, forcefully smashing his thumb into the opening of the box before pulling a cancer stick out. he eyes it for a moment, holding it between his middle and index finger with practiced familiarity.

a lighter. he needs a lighter. his eyes scan the dimly lit classroom. neatly arranged wooden desks, all in rows of five vertically and horizontally. he knows he’s bound to find a lighter in someone’s desk, but he can’t feel it in him to get up.

his legs feel frozen—locked into place. as if someone had played a sick prank and dissected his body, disabling all of the nerves inside of him. his lips purse as he exhales in frustration.

who knew love could be so crippling? outside, the rain began to fall incessantly—harder—on the window pane as if mocking him. the roar of thunder sounded, as more clouds began to clump together, forming a blanket of gloom over the once clear sky.

what was the point of it all, he thought to himself. the ache of the dark bruise on his face permeated through his skull. his head pounded, and for a moment he was in disarray; completely unaware of his surroundings.

the cancer stick between his fingers wobbled dangerously, as if about to fall. his eyes fluttered shut, about to give in to the pain that his adrenaline had bid him to forget.

then everything went black.

—

taesan’s eyes felt as though they were being pinched shut when he gained consciousness. the pain on the left side of his eye had subdued, surprisingly, and beneath the splotches of colors that came from his eyes being shut too long, he could see light.

then he felt it. a ghost of warmth brushing against his thick layered tufts of hair. his eyes shot open at the feeling, a sharp pain coursing through his skull as he did so.

then he saw you. the girl he had only noticed maybe once or twice in his two years at the academy. you were quiet—almost invisible—mainly keeping to yourself and staying in the shadows.

come to think of it, taesan didn’t think he’d ever heard you speak at all. but here you were, your soft round features peering down at him as if he were a helpless creature. “where the hell am i?” he croaked, attempting to lift his body.

your palm gently pressed against his chest, your eyes shifting away from his cognac ones in embarrassment.

you had come upon taesan simply by chance. today you had stayed after school, deciding to spend a few hours in the library revising for an upcoming exam. a few hours turned into five,, and you weren’t even sure if the school was still open.

nonetheless, you packed up and headed out of the library. you had made sure to bring an umbrella, aware of the rainy forecast for the day. however, just as you stepped outside and into the rain, you noticed a slumped figure against the window sill of the classroom, prompting you to check it out.

it was taesan, his body seemingly lifeless, slumped against the window. his sharp features and high cheekbones appeared more relaxed in the dim lighting of the abandoned room, and yet you could still see the turmoil that stirred beneath his unconscious face.

the first thing you noticed was the angry purple bruise forming around his left eye as you dropped your things to tend to him. taesan had always been one of the more popular boys. he was good at sports, handsome, smart, and funny.

everyone liked him—including you. but you were the opposite. in the shadows, always making yourself smaller so as to not stand out.

you knew you probably shouldn’t have done it. that you probably should have left him there alone. you barely knew him, and he definitely didn’t know you.

but you couldn’t. not when he looked so vulnerable with his eyes clamped shut and his lips parted open as if he were in pain. not when you loved him.

you swallowed thickly, feeling his eyes burn holes into the side of your face. you couldn’t find it in you to look at him. to see the lack of recognition etched on his face.

“in the classroom.” you say almost inaudibly, your hand still lightly dotting the bruise on his face that had begun to subdue. taesan only studied you, his eyes blank with confusion.

he had no idea why you of all people were the one to find him here. or why you had him in such a compromising position—his head gently resting against your lap and the fabric of your skirt.

your fingers worked diligently, massaging the ointment from your first aid kit into the wound on his face gently. taesan clenched his teeth lightly hissing at the sensation.

“all done,” you whisper, your hands clasping the side of his head to lift him off your lap. taesan protests for a second before letting up, his vision blurring for a moment as he takes in his surroundings.

you’re busy packing up your first aid kit when he speaks. “why did you do this for me?” you avert your eyes to him, a pinched expression on his face as he questions you.

exhaling deeply, you simply shrug jumping off the ledge of the window. taesan’s eyes follow your every movement, the way you slightly cower under his gaze, pulling the ends of your oversized uniform cardigan over your hands as you hug yourself for solace.

he finds it surprisingly endearing. “i couldn’t just leave you like that…” you trail off, your voice low as you keep your head down stepping back a little.

taesan scoffs, his eyes drifting back to the window. rain still poured against the ground heavily, with bright streaks of lightning painting the dreary sky. he realizes he probably kept you from getting home, and despite himself he feels bad for it.

“got a lighter?” it’s the first words he speaks after a long silence. you nod at him, fishing in your bag for the familiar green decorated lighter you kept on you.

handing it to him, you watch his eyes gloss over in recognition before returning to their usual emptiness. you were hoping he’d remember it. it was the same lighter he had dropped a couple of months earlier.

you had tried to return it to him, racing after him, your lungs burning as you struggled to catch up to him. but he was so far ahead at the time—so far removed from you. even now.

holding the lighter to the end of his cigarette, he flicks the switch igniting it, before he inhales, tossing the lighter back to you. you nearly miss the catch, fumbling with it before tucking it securely back into your bookbag.

he exhales deeply, tilting his head back, his adam's apple on full display. you tuck a single strand of hair behind your ear, wringing your hands together as you gaze at him.

you hated cigarettes. you hated the smell, the look, the taste. everything about them. and yet taesan made them tolerable. so much so that you wouldn’t even mind if he kissed you right now, his cigarette ridden breath enveloping yours.

your cheeks burn at the thought, and you shift your weight from foot to foot, looking down as if taesan could somehow read your mind. taesan takes a few drags before jamming the butt of his cigarette against the window sill, a final billow of smoke seeping through his parted lips.

he looks down at you from under his lashes, studying you. just as he expected, you were nervous. fidgeting from side to side, your eyes never meeting his.

and he knows he shouldn’t, but he likes it. the feeling of having power—control—over something, anything in his life. even if it was you, the girl he never had a conversation with. the girl he never spared a glance at.

“what’s your name,” he questions, dropping the cigarette onto the ground as he steps off the window sill stamping it out.

“y/n” you answer coyly, your hands folded behind your back.

he merely chuckles, his molten eyes struggling to meet yours.

“it’s rude not to look at someone when they’re talking to you,” you shift uncomfortably, your cheeks burning at the condescending tone of his. you knew it wasn’t right for him to speak to you like this, but you were okay with it. because it’s taesan. the boy everyone likes. the boy you’ve liked since grade 6.

“i’m–i’m sorry.” you sputter, your hair falls over your face as you bow.

he hums in response, his shiny black loafers taking slow, measured steps closer to you. taesan knows he shouldn’t even think about doing what he’s about to do. but he can’t stop.

he’s drunk on the feeling of having access to you. the feeling of control.

he’s right in front of you now, the rich scent of ambrose wafting from his body infiltrates your nostrils as your breath hitches. his slender fingers cup just under your chin, lifting your head up to face him.

you’re close now. really close. closer than you’ve ever been to a boy.

“you’re cute. be my girlfriend.”

he says it casually, as if its not the question you’d been fantasizing about, daydreaming about almost every night as you lay your head to rest. your heart hammers in your chest, your mind running a thousand miles a minute.

“i–are you sure? no-one really knows–”

he cuts you off, leaning closer to your face. you smell the cigarette from earlier on his breath as he places his lips on yours–slow and smooth. his arm snakes around your waist, clasping it firmly as he pushes you into him.

your head tilts unconsciously giving him access to make the kiss deeper. his fingers scrunch the fabric of your cardigan, nails lightly digging into your back as he kisses you hunrgily.

he pulls away, his breathing heavy, and you swear you see a certain glint in his eye. one that sort of scared you. but you weren’t sure why.

“you’re my girlfriend now.”

—

taesan hadn’t meant it. he hadn’t found you cute, he didn’t truly want you to be his girlfriend. he just needed someone to fill the void.

you weren’t ugly, by any means. just plain. and taesan hated plain. he hated timid, he hated shy, he hated everything she wasn’t. and strangely enough, you were exactly that. you lacked any assertion—letting him speak to you in any way. when taesan told you to jump, you asked him how high.

it had gotten so bad that you even started smoking. he remembers it clearly. the two of you were snuggled up on the school roof, the cool crisp breeze creeping through the thin fabric of your polo causing you to shiver.

you were sat in taesan’s lap, your head nuzzled in his chest while he smoked a cigarette.

“why don’t you try one.”

his voice cut through the silence, soft and inviting. that’s how it always started. he would introduce you to something, make it seem like an option.

you shook your head, burying your face in his chest even further.

“c’mon don’t be a child, try one for me. just for me, baby,”

he’d always do that. call you sweet little pet names, make you feel like you weren’t enough if you didn’t do what he said. you sighed, your fingers shaking as you held your hand out to take the cancer stick.

“good job, that’s my girl.” he whispered into the nape of your neck, his long fingers closing around your own, situating the cigarette correctly.

“that’s it, just inhale. don’t choke, baby.” he coached you, his eyes glued to your lips as you pathetically attempted to inhale the smoke.

you sputtered out, coughing uncontrollably, tiny tufts of smoke leaving your mouth. your chest burned as you dropped the cigarette into his hands, leaning over to take a breath of air.

taesan knew he shouldn’t have been annoyed, but he was. it was like you couldn’t do any little thing the way she did. no matter how much he tried to change you, it would never work.

he thought you hadn’t noticed. that you hadn't noticed the bored and irritated look in his eyes. but you had. and it scared you.

scared you that you might lose him if you didn’t do everything to appease him. so you learned. later that night you went to a gas station, purchasing a pack of cigarettes by flirting with the creepy old clerk.

as soon as you got home, you snuck into the bathroom, grabbing the same green lighter before lighting a cigarette. you tried many times.

fail after fail after fail. eventually, you learned.

you practiced every night, coughing through each drag until the burn in your chest didn’t feel like hell.

you started wearing the lipstick he said he liked on his ex. let your skirt ride a little higher, your words fall more assertive. you even started laughing like her.

because even if he never said it aloud, you knew. he didn’t want you. 

he wanted her, repackaged in your skin. and still, you stayed.

because even an illusion of the love you so desperately yearned for from him felt better than the emptiness waiting for you at home.

the broken, sad excuse of a place you called home. where your parents acted as if you never existed, except to badger you with words more hurtful than life.

“why can’t you be normal?” and “no wonder no one likes you.”

you thought maybe if taesan liked you—if someone, anyone, liked you—you could believe you were worth something.

but love built on lies always sours.

—

you started noticing it in the little things. the way he never looked at you when he said “i love you.” the way his fingers twitched with frustration when you said the wrong thing. the way he flinched when you reached for his hand in public.

he never meant for it to be this way.

at first, it was just comfort. warmth. you were quiet, and quiet was good. quiet didn’t fight back. quiet didn’t scream or cry or throw things.

quiet didn’t break his heart the way she did.

but soon, your quietness became suffocating. you weren’t her. you never would be. 

and taesan hated that.

 he hated the way your eyes followed him like a lost puppy. hated the way you tried so hard to be someone he could love.

and hated himself even more when he started to notice. because one day, he noticed. the way you lit his cigarette before he even asked. the way your body curled into his like a puzzle piece that had always belonged. the way you’d say his name in the same tone she would.

he noticed. and it scared the hell out of him.

so he pushed harder. treated you colder. and waited.

waited for you to finally crack and let him go.

and you did.

not all at once—but slowly. like a fraying thread pulled too tight.

you stopped talking as much. your grades dropped. you came to school with dark circles under your eyes, eyes that no longer lit up when he entered the room. you looked like a ghost in your own body.

taesan barely noticed the shift. he was too busy convincing himself he didn’t care. until the day you stopped showing up.

at first it was just one day. you must have been sick, he convinced himself as he settled into his seat ignoring the joyful greetings of your classmates.

but one day turned into days.

days turned into weeks.

no messages. no calls. silence.

until he finally found the note.

the note you placed in his locker, folded neatly with his name written in your handwriting—before he had ruined you. 

he didn’t even realize his hands were trembling until he opened the note and read it.

taesan,

i’m sorry i wasn’t what you needed.

i thought if i tried hard enough, if i loved you enough, i could be. but i know now that i was never meant to be her. and i don’t want to be anymore.

i’m tired.

you told me once i was cute. that i was your girlfriend. you kissed me and made me feel like i mattered. but it was never real, was it? i don’t hate you. i think a part of me never could. but i hate who i’ve become around you.

so i’m leaving. not just school, but all of it. everything that’s made me feel small i hope one day you find her again. maybe she’ll be enough for you, because i never was.

goodbye, y/n

he read it once. then twice. the words swimming in his mind.

he laughed. a hollow, disbelieving laugh that got stuck in his throat.

then he crumpled it in his fist and pressed it to his lips, as if somehow he could still taste you there.

it all hit him like a punch—a punch that created the same bruise that ached incessantly that very day he asked you to be his girlfriend.

—

he missed you.

he was finally able to admit it. after days of convincing himself he didn’t care, that it was your fault, that he hated you.

he missed you.

not the fake version of you. not the replacement. not the obedient shell of a girl he had forced you to be.

no, he missed the girl who found him broken and still tried to fix him. the girl who lit his cigarettes with shaking hands. the girl who loved him when he didn’t deserve it.

but it was too late.

you were gone.

and you weren’t coming back.

and for the first time since his ex left, taesan cried.

not because someone broke his heart.

but because this time, he was the one who broke someone else’s.

[autisticadvocacy]

Section 504 is an important law that protects disabled people. Texas v. Becerra is a court case where people are asking the court to get rid of Section 504, which would hurt a lot of people. You can read about it and learn how to help with this plain language explainer: https://dredf.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/01/Plain-Language-Explainer_Texas-v-Becerra.pdf

[anim-ttrpgs]

Hi it's me again. I'm hyperfixating on Eureka a little bit and have started creating a living doll investigator — particularly, of the clockwork variety — and of course I'm overthinking things.

My general vision is of a clockwork automaton dating back to the time of Ada Lovelace and Charles Babbage. At that time, there wasn't really any way to convert an optical signal into a mechanical one, so my character would logically be blind, barring later modifications. That's very easy to represent, but it's left me with a couple questions regarding disability and prosthetics in Eureka.

First, would a service animal function as a prosthetic/aid, thus reducing the penalty by 1 or 2? And if so, would it be priced as a trained animal (2-5 WP depending on the animal, though realistically it's like 2-3 since I don't think service horses are a thing) or would it carry an additional cost?

Second, how do grievous injuries and prosthetics work with a living doll? Is it generally assumed that a replacement body part will become integrated (I.e. they can return to full functionality between adventures, not just to life; and if my investigator received a set of camera tubes for its 100th birthday they'd just be a part of it for all intents and purposes), or would they use the same prosthesis rules as mundane investigators?

The living doll rules have been a little bit neglected since I first wrote them, but that’s something that’s going to be fixed when we finally get there in our edit-through of the rulebook.

First of all, while it’s true there was no technology to convert optical signals to mechanical ones in that time, there was also no technology to create a mechanical being with human consciousness, it *does* state in the rules I’m pretty sure that your living doll PC does not *necessarily* need eyes to see, a mouth to talk, ears to hear, etc., so having the doll be blind because of technological limitations of the time is possible and fine but not required by the rules.

As for a seeing eye dog, yes that would count as a trained animal and basically also a prosthetic, for rules purposes, at the same time.

Thirdly, yeah it is generally assumed that living dolls can be repaired good as new as long as somebody has the right technology and engineering skills to do so, but this is something we will probably be expanding on and clarifying as we go over this section in editing.

[five-thousand-loaves-of-bread]

Hi! am working on big resource library of writing by nonspeaking & nonverbal people , ( some stuff by speaking people who know us deeply or disabled people who have similar but not same experiences that important to understand our lives but I am mostly centeirng us). is sorted by topic - communication methods is one , relationships & emotions & trauma is another , sensory & motor & cognitive & language process & body experiences is another , ableism is another section , terminology section , section on race culture language ect.

1 ) is it ok if I include some of your posts on our library? is mostly so far writing by nonspeaking spellers & supported typers but really want include more diverse range experience.

2)if yes , do you have any specific posts you want linked? or recomendations for posts of other people.

3) do you prefer links to your tumblr , instagram or other social media?

thanks!!!

ough this made me so excite!!. would love talk more w u abt this!!! would love see

1) yes, absolutely!

2) none on top of head. tag “#loaf screm” maybe helpful for this. need go through them n sort them some point anyway tho so can talk in DM abt it

3) tumblr have everything. but also been thinking long time about (re)create website blog on wordpress (or sth else. WP is only thing know abt) for list more formal writings, since this tumblr is mess. plus if try look tumblr link without account can get weird funky lock you out.

TL;DR yes! can link tumblr + future more put together blog. will look thru my posts n you also feel free look thru, n then tell me which ones u wanna link n so can prioritize post those on (wordpress?) blog :)

edit

oh some good ones

[technofeudalism]

Automattic, the company that owns WordPress.com, is required to remove a controversial login checkbox from WordPress.org and let WP Engine back into its ecosystem after a judge granted WP Engine a preliminary injunction in its ongoing lawsuit.  In addition to removing the checkbox—which requires users to denounce WP Engine before proceeding—the preliminary injunction orders that Automattic is enjoined from “blocking, disabling, or interfering with WP Engine’s and/or its employees’, users’, customers’, or partners’ access to wordpress.org” or “interfering with WP Engine’s control over, or access to, plugins or extensions (and their respective directory listings) hosted on wordpress.org that were developed, published, or maintained by WP Engine,” the order states. In the immediate aftermath of the decision, Automattic founder and CEO Matt Mullenweg asked for his account to be deleted from the Post Status Slack, which is a popular community for businesses and people who work on WordPress’s open-source tools. 

“It's hard to imagine wanting to continue to working on WordPress after this,” he wrote in that Slack, according to a screenshot viewed by 404 Media. “I'm sick and disgusted to be legally compelled to provide free labor to an organization as parasitic and exploitive as WP Engine. I hope you all get what you and WP Engine wanted.” His username on that Slack has been changed to “gone 💀” Mullenweg began to publicly denounce WP Engine in September, calling the web hosting platform a “cancer” to the larger Wordpress open-source project and accusing it of improperly using the WordPress brand. He’s “at war” with WP Engine, in his own words.  In October, Mullenweg added a required checkbox at login for WordPres.org, forcing users to agree that they are not affiliated with WP Engine. The checkbox asked users to confirm, “I am not affiliated with WP Engine in any way, financially or otherwise.” The checkbox was still present and required on the WordPress.org login page as of Wednesday morning. Automattic and Mullenweg have 72 hours from the order to take it down, according to the judge’s order.  WP Engine sent a cease and desist demanding that he “stop making and retract false, harmful and disparaging statements against WP Engine,” the platform posted on X.  Automattic sent back its own cease and desist, saying, “Your unauthorized use of our Client’s intellectual property has enabled WP Engine to compete with our Client unfairly, and has led to unjust enrichment and undue profits.” WP Engine filed a lawsuit against Automattic and Mullenweg, accusing them of extortion and abuse of power. In October, Mullenweg announced that he’d given Automattic employees a buyout package, and 159 employees, or roughly 8.4 percent of staff, took the offer. “I feel much lighter,” he wrote. But shortly after, he reportedly complained that the company was now “very short staffed.”   All of this has created an environment of chaos and fear within Automattic and in the wider WordPress open-source community.  Within 72 hours of the order, Automattic and Mullenweg are also required to remove the “purported” list of WP Engine customers contained in the ‘domains.csv’ file linked to Automattic’s website wordpressenginetracker.com, which Automattic launched in November and tracks sites that have left WP Engine. It’s also required to restore WP Engine’s access to WordPress.org, including reactivating and restoring all WP Engine employee login credentials to wordpress.org resources and “disable any technological blocking of WPEngine’s and Related Entities’ access to wordpress.org that occurred on or around September 25, 2024, including IP address blocking or other blocking mechanisms.” The judge also ordered Mullenweg to restore WP Engine’s access to its Advanced Custom Fields (“ACF”) plugin directory, which its team said was “unilaterally and forcibly taken away from its creator without consent” and called it a “new precedent” in betrayal of community access. “We are grateful that the court has granted our motion for a preliminary injunction,” a spokesperson for WP Engine told 404 Media. “The order will bring back much-needed stability to the WordPress ecosystem. WP Engine is focused on serving our partners and customers and working with the community to find ways to ensure a vigorous, and thriving WordPress community.” A spokesperson for Automattic told 404 Media: “Today’s ruling is a preliminary order designed to maintain the status quo. It was made without the benefit of discovery, our motion to dismiss, or the counterclaims we will be filing against WP Engine shortly. We look forward to prevailing at trial as we continue to protect the open source ecosystem during full-fact discovery and a full review of the merits.” 

[olderthannetfic]

https://www.tumblr.com/olderthannetfic/745427797079621632/so-ffn-was-my-only-mistress-for-years-but-then-i

I’m the anon that went on Wattpad for the first time, and then went “No.”

So I lowered my standards a little, and actually found a few more good fics on ao3, (my true love). Yea!

One the comments mentioned how most of the good fics on WP were just stolen from the original author. That reminded me of this smut I was reading on ao3: one day, the author took it down because she was tired of people reposting it to goodreads or something.

Thing is, she did let her readers know that she’ll be reposting the story on Wattpad. Now it was some top tier smut, in my opinion. But there’s other great smut on ao3 and I didn’t want to make an WP account for one story. So I never got to reread it again.

My question: is a story on WP less likely to be stolen than it is on ao3? I feel like it’s easier to steal stuff on WP, since on ao3, you can lock your stories.

--

WP has that shitty feature where you can't copy and paste text...

Except we all know that's easy as hell to disable, so all it actually does is annoy your fans if they want to quote a good line while reccing the fic elsewhere.

[disabled-systems]

in order for a physical disability to totally vary between alters there must be an issue in the brain: an alter not having access to some area (in this case in the visual cortex) for whatever reason.

so the line between physically and mentally disabled is blurry here.

Also here's a more recent case of dynamic blindness in DID from 2015: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2015/11/24/the-blind-woman-who-switched-personalities-and-could-suddenly-see/

Screenshot because I'm an anticapitalist anarchist:

The part of the article at the bottom proves the point that I made in my original post.

“…blindness wasn’t caused by brain damage, her original diagnosis. [The blindness) was instead… brain directive, a psychological problem”

A psychological problem, hence not physical, hence not a physical disability.

There is no blurriness about what is physical and mental. Mental disorders can have physical symptoms, however that doesn’t necessarily make one physically disabled. In this case, her blindness was likely some form of psychosis.

If you’re going to send me sources, at least read them first. While you are on the topic of reading, please direct yourself to our DNI and read that closer.

-Ran (they/dae)

[autisticadvocacy]

Section 504 is an important law that protects disabled people. Texas v. Becerra is a court case where people are asking the court to get rid of Section 504, which would hurt a lot of people. You can read about it and learn how to help with this plain language explainer: https://dredf.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/01/Plain-Language-Explainer_Texas-v-Becerra.pdf

[anim-ttrpgs]

Eureka: Investigative Urban Fantasy December Patreon Update

We have a few new Traits and many new Snoops to show our $5+ patreon subscribers in this update, as well as some improvements to disability aid mechanics and Travel Tick mechanics.

If you want to get your hands on the most up-to-date version of the Eureka rulebook, as well as adventure modules, and Eureka short stories, you can sign up to our patreon for $5 or more. If you don't want to sign up to a monthly subscription, you can buy the beta on itchio for a one-time purchase (or free)!

Full changelog below!

CHANGE LOG 

Copy-editing Progress: Thoroughly copy-edited up to p. 302. Half-ass copy-edited up to p. 322.

WHOLE BOOK

CHAPTER 1 

Better clarified Unconsciousness. 

Better clarified the penalty negation of Grievous Wounds, gave guidelines for what aid may negate what Grievous Wounds, and made it so that these aids can stack to a penalty negation of up to 4.

Edited and simplified the travel time math when using Ticks.

CHAPTER 2

New Traits: The Truth Comes Out, Poser

Buffed Believer Trait

Nerfed I’m Okay, You’re Okay Trait

Made vampires and characters with the Arithmomaniac Trait immune to the “Click” Woo Roll effect

Added Crutches to Item List

More art has been added

CHAPTER 3

Added a Compromise Armor attack that is also a Movement and can only be done starting from a Grab

More art has been added

CHAPTER 8 

Made it so fairies have to make a reflexes roll to be able to spirit away people with extremely brief contact. 

Better clarified some other things about Spiriting Away and “voluntary” skin-to-skin contact.

Added that a Potion of Healing can also cure non-chronic disease. 

Added that more potions than just the curse potions can be made curative by adding an extra Table 3 ingredient, and that curative potions can be bought with WP just like other potions. 

Clarified that gorgons can’t eat rocks.

Clarified that advanced curses can override each other.

Changed Monsters Eating Monsters section to Monsters vs Monsters and made it a more generalized section about all kinds of edge cases that might come up when monsters interact with each other. The section is kind of disorganized right now but will be cleaned up in copy-editing. 

Clarified that all wolfmen have a human form as one of their three forms.

Redid the hunting tables and added the tables for the Bar/Nightclub, Gay Bar/Nightclub, and Gaming/Hobby Store. They are not fully complete but they are at least functional at this time. 

Vampires now have a chance to start partially phasing through objects when they are at 0 Composure.

Changed the standard Stealth bonus vampires have at max Composure from +3 to +2.

Adjusted the mechanics for how to permanently “kill” a vampire. 

More art has been added

[ash-rigby]

Where do you write your stories before you post them? I've been looking for a good place to write that's more reliable than the notes apps on phones(I recently lost a collective 5 years of writing because my phone just. bricked. and nobody could/would fix it)

Aw, that sucks! Sorry to hear that. I do my writing exclusively on the computer because I'm way more proficient at typing on a physical keyboard that I am on a phone. As for where, I usually grab whatever free downloadable word-processing software I can find. I've been using WPS Office for a while and it's been working quite well for me. It did unfortunately roll out some AI features so I've been thinking about switching soon (my current WIP is on it so I'll finish that up first before jumping ship). But it doesn't force you to use those features (I don't) and most of them seem harmless to me if you want to check it out. It's probably going to get harder to find ones that don't incorporate AI features so the best we can hope for are ones where you can disable or at least ignore them 🙄

If anyone else has any suggestions for anon (and me tbh), please reply and let them know!

[meridien-moonquills]

Transfiguration Class and The Education Reformation

In Chapter 19: Transfiguration Class and The Education Reformation, Vianka shines in Transfiguration, impressing Professor Weasley by flawlessly transforming objects, earning points for Slytherin while Sebastian struggles with a mouse-tailed glass. However, the biggest surprise comes when Headmaster Black announces a three-day school renovation, attributing it to Vianka and Sebastian’s letter to the Ministry, advocating for inclusive education—particularly Braille technology for visually impaired students like Ominis. Initially overwhelmed, Ominis lashes out, mistaking their efforts as pity, storming off in frustration. When Vianka and Sebastian find him crying in a hidden corridor, Ominis expresses his deep-seated fears of being left behind, doubting his worth. In an emotional outburst, Vianka fiercely defends the cause, revealing that her activism was never about pity, but about fixing a broken system—not just for Ominis, but for countless disabled children deprived of equal opportunities. Her powerful words shake Ominis to the core, and in an intimate moment of shared vulnerability, the trio embrace each other, crying together, reaffirming their friendship and mutual respect.

read full at my WP: The Gaunt Scorching Solace: Year 5 - Part I: Chapter 19 - Transfiguration Class and The Education Reformation - Wattpad